I and a few other folks from Phurnace attended the Portal Excellence Conference in San Diego this week. Some quick thoughts from the show:
Insurance and Banking seemed to be the biggest verticals represented at the show.
There were quite a few folks there that weren’t current Portal customers, but were considering migrating from another platform to WebSphere Portal. The most common reason they gave was nervousness about all the recent consolidation in the Portal space (i.e., Oracle acquiring BEA, OpenText acquiring Vignette, etc.)
More talk about WCM (IBM Web Content Management) than in prior years. WCM seems to be catching on with the WAS Portal customer space.
IBM is an excellent host at these events. Thanks guys! We had a good time.
We are gearing up for a great show next week at the IBM Portal Excellence Conference in San Diego. If you are headed to the show, please stop by our session on Monday from 4:30 - 5:30PM PT in the Marina 5 Ballroom and/or visit us at Booth 13.
Also, we put together a quick video of the Greatest Moments in Software History. Have a look!
Phurnace just released some new and powerful features for the management of IBM WebSphere and WebSphere Portals. In the Portal area, our product, Phurnace Deliver, can manage the auto-deployment and on-going configuration management for all of the pieces of a Portal instance (portlets, themes, skins, content, etc.) and the understandings of the interdependencies between them. This makes changing and managing Portals substantially easier than it is without Phurnace.
Brand new capabilities include a “roll-back in time” feature that allows Portal administrators to fully archive points in time and roll-back (on-demand) to a previous known state. It can fully archive all objects needed to deploy an IBM WebSphere Portal application including binaries (wars, skins, themes, etc.) and the associated configuration information.
This is a life saver for Portal administrators that have consistently complained to us that there is no concept of “state” for their portals. We hear again and again from prospects that xmlaccess alone simply doesn’t cut it to manage the constantly changing objects and configurations of their Portals.
Other cool new capabilities include more robust management and deployment of virtual Portals and a graphical representation of relationships between WebSphere objects (such as references and containment of those elements).
I thought I would provide a step by step instruction on setting up IBM WebSphere Portal 6.0. This is how we do it here at Phurnace. I thought many of you could benefit from our example.
Create Linux Virtual Image
The first step is to create a virtual image to work with. For purposes of this example, we will create an image called "wp60source". This linux image will have a static ip.
Create the Image
cd /opt/Virtual\ Machines
Make a directory for your virtual machine. We call ours wp60source in this example
mkdir wp60source
For linux, copy the contents of the rhel4Base image to your VM's directory
cp -rf rhel4Base/* wp60source
Login to phurnacedev03 with the VMWare Console
Add the virtual machine to the list
Go to File->Open.
Select Browse...
Double click "wp60source".
Select the .vmx file contained within that folder
Configure the Virtual Machine Settings
Edit Virtual Machine Settings
Bump Memory to 2G
Add 4 GB Virtual Disk
Click Add, Select virtual disk and accept defaults
Configure the Virtual Machine
Startup the Virtual Machine
When prompted about the Network Configuration, press any key
Remove Configuration
Add Configuration. These are my example settings , use your own IP address.
IP 10.1.1.158
NetMask 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway 10.1.1.1
Nameserver 10.1.1.48
When designing your own custom WebSphere Portal themes and skins, after initially creating them in the Portal Admin Console and in the file system of your WebSphere Application Server, it is important to update your WebSphere Portal EAR file with your new themes and skins. Otherwise, your new themes and skins can be overwritten or deleted whenever the WebSphere Portal EAR is updated. So, what do we need to do to add our shiny new custom themes and skins to the WebSphere Portal EAR file? Unfortunately, this involves a little bit of scripting with wsadmin and EARExpander. This is all documented in the IBM online help. If you don't want to do this manually every time, you end up with a shell script for Linux or Cygwin (or similar DOS batch file) that looks something like this to update a new skin called qaThinSkin and a new theme called qaIBM:
This can be quite tedious and error-prone (and subsequently, costly) if you are constantly tweaking your skins and themes and need to move them from QA to production. This is where Phurnace WebSphere Portal Deliver can help. After you have initially created your custom skin and theme, Deliver can snapshot your WebSphere Portal configuration. Then we can use the Portal Configuration Packager Wizard to pare down the configuration to just the custom skin and theme.
Then copy your custom theme and skin to your Deliver client, keeping the same directory structure as they would be under the wps.war directory on your WebSphere Application Server:
Next we add the local directory for our themes and skins to the Deliver server profile, in the Portal tab.
Now we can make updates to the JSPs or GIFs on our Deliver client and then do a Portal Install to the WebSphere Portal application server to see the updates. You can even use our Portal Copy feature to transfer your custom themes and skins from your QA environment to your production environment. With no more time spent scripting, you can actually use your time for more important things like designing your custom skins and themes, and let Phurnace WebSphere Portal Deliver do all the deployment work for you.
