Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
Portal is your friend
(Portal for Yellow Zealots)
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
Just let me introduce myself
I began working with Domino/Notes 4.5 in 1998
In 2001 I added DB2 to the arsenal
In 2002 begun working around Websphere (3.5)
In 2003 I was asked to recover a portal customer.
They bought portal but nobody was able to install.
So I begun to study (Portal 4.1 on Linux =
nightmare)
After learning it (the bloody way) I understood and
began to praise
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
Zealots ? No, not really
I wanted to be provocative
But nobody is Zealot here. Maybe somebody just had
bad times with Portal
That was a reality in its early days and while IBM was
learning itself about portal
Do you remember Websphere Collaboration Services
R.I.P.
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
Agenda
Do you get what Websphere Portal is ?
Any portal can do this !!!
But can it do this ?
Where's my Domino server (& Notes Client) ?
Quick start - A portal strategy in 10 minutes !!!
Take away, anything good for me ?
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
The full screen application
A single task
A single context even if you need more
information
The focus is on the task/data not the user work
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
Multiple apps on one screen
We tried FRAMESET
We tried IFRAMES
But those where a FAKE solution !!!
We had No access control
We had No flexibility in building our pages
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
Somebody introduced portals
Portal with a common user experience
Consistent themes
Consistent administration
Portlet = an app that runs in a rectangle
its relative of servlets, but with more context
Who's using me ?
Where am I ?
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
So what ?
No more FRAMES !!!
The portal aggregates the portlets for you in a
page that has consistent Look&Feel
The portal has ACLs, the user access is controlled
More security !!!
Reuse is a must, portlets are building blocks
More flexibility !!!
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
Is this the end ?
NO !!! There's a lot more
Search services
Document services
Content management services I he
ard
y
“ple ou sayi
n
Rapid development ase
stop g:
”
It's
n ot
Virtual portals the
case
Client/offline integration
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
Websphere portal can do this
Organizes applications and content in a portal tree.
Has a strong security model (Access control everywhere)
Runs portlets (local and remote)
Has web content management
Has a document store facility (PDM is JCR based) (Changing in 6.1)
Offers wiring on the web (the notes 8.0 wiring in CAs was born here)
Has out of the box portlets for a number of situations
Allows for themes and portlet skins
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
The portal model (the tree)
The model is the “Tree” of the portal
Pages: have a name, portlet content and children
Labels: have a name, contains children
URLs: (links) to internal or external areas
Portal pages can be linked using URLs
eg. http://my.portal.it/wps/portal/<pagename>/<subpagename>
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
The security model
Role based, maps LDAP users to resources
Applies to the Model, to Portlets and Resources in
general
Mimics what you know in Domino/Notes
Administrator, Security Administrator, Delegator,
Manager, Editor, Privileged User, User
More roles allow better granularity
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
Portal runs portlets (would you say it ?)
Supports
IBM Portlet API (deprecated)
JSR168 Portlet API
JSR286 Portlet API (when Portal 6.1 is out)
Google Widgets as Portlets (now)
Also supports WSRP 1.0 (in portal 6.0) and WSRP 2.0
(in portal 6.1)
Will support iWidgets (in portal 6.1)
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
What can a portlet do ?
Render content in multiple markups (HTML, CHTML,
WML, others you define)
Be configured for the whole portal
Be personalized for a single user or a single instance
of it
Communicate with other portlets (see Wiring)
Use the portal API
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
WCM = Web Content Management
Originally from Aptrix, now ILWWCM / Portal WCM
User oriented environment, development mostly
without java coding
Template based (authoring & publishing templates)
Integrated to personalization “dynamic content where
it makes sense”
You get it as part of some portal editions.
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
Portal Document Manager
Since long time Webshpere Portal included document
management & libraries.
Today's Quickr connector is child of Portal Document Manager
Plugin
PDM allows for folders & access control
document editing with productivity components on the web.
Portal 6.1 will somehow change, nothing has been shown/made
official, expect integration with Quickr. (Just a guess, more
to be announced soon, I expect)
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
Wiring information on the glass
It's the communication bus for Portlets
Since Portal 4.x it was Click-to-Action
Now it's wiring, simplified to be used in JSR
Notes Client got wiring with 8.0
Portlets expose their information and allow users to
link by wiring (editing portal page properties).
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
Themes and skins
Themes defines the overall look of pages/portal
Copy and customize out of the box themes
Use JSP + Portal Model API
Skins decorate portlets
You can have more skins on the same page
You get “portal looking the way you need”
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
Websphere portal can do this TOO !!!
Search
Virtual Portals
Composite applications / Templates
XMLAccess (DXL the portal way)
Rapid development with Portlet Factory
Expeditor integration, the portal comes away with you.
Dynamic personalization
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
Portal search
Search is modular
Can search inside pages & portlets titles
Can search in web content (WCM)
Launch external searches
Federated with addon products (OmniFind)
SPI interface is available for extensibility
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
The credential vault
A “security” service
A secure place for user's credential for other systems
Access is granted trough API
You can have named slots that can be private for a user or
shared for all the users
Data is encrypted and controlled by the portal for you in
the portal database
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
Virtual portals
You setup one, you get many
When you install the portal you can create many “virtual-
portals”
Indipendent / delegated administrators, portal tree and
access url ( ... /wps/portal/<virtualportalname> )
Marketing wants one ? No problem !!!
HR wants one ? No problem !!!
Repeat as you like ... No problem !!!
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
Composite applications/templates
Think domino templates
Design, set roles, add pages, add portlets
Create applications from a template
Assign users to roles
Give them control over the “instance”
Beware: Portal applications doesn't support “refresh
design”
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
XMLAccess (Portal has its DXL)
We all learned Domino can describe apps as DXL
Portal has a similar facility “XMLAccess”
Useful to export from development, bring to customer
Great for building portal assets that you can re-use
Or even create assets using XML, then load into portal.
You can use it for pages, portlet deployment,
personalization rules, themes, skins, whatever....
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
Websphere Portlet factory
Don't code portlets, build them
Building portlets in J2EE is both time consuming and
BOOOOORING. Also most applications are just to
show data coming from external systems.
Portlet factory helps. It's a CASE/RAD tool that
offers a new way for building portlets
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
WPF - Builders
Portlet factory uses builders
A builder is a specialized “wizard” that can do
something for you.
eg. Run a query, Create a webpage, Add a button, React to a button click
Any task is “abstracted” into a builder that you add to
a model (the application definition)
A builder is better than a wizard since you can change
& change & change the settings you provided
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
WPF - A Portlet Factory Model
The model is your application or part of it
You add builders to a model.
The PF magic runs your builders trough the generator
and you get a working application that's ready for
testing.
Simple ah ?
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
WPF - What happens really ?
You create a model
You add UI and logic using builders
PF runs builders in sequence and generates the real
source code (that you CANNOT modify directly)
This simplifies maintenance a lot !!! You may not even
need to write a single line of code.
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
WPF - Is this too simple ?
WPF includes > +150 builders
To create web UI (also with Ajax)
To access data (SQL/Domino/WS/SOAP/Rest)
To use J2EE artifacts (EJB)
To get the portal context (customization, security)
To be extendible (build new builders)
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
WPF - How do I test and Deploy ?
WPF includes Was CE for local testing
Can also deploy directly to a running portal
(5.x, 6.0)
Portlets built with Portlet Factory can also
run in the Notes 8.0.1+/Expeditor 6.1+
client. Yes ... a portlet in your client
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
WPF - When do I use Portlet Factory ?
When you need to incorporate external data quickly
When the application is mostly for “reading” data with
some data entry
When you don't know J2EE/Portlet APIs
When you want to be productive quickly
When a builder is available to do the work you need
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
How do I learn Portlet Factory ?
Portlet factory it's not complex, it's different from
anything you used before
The “build-cycle” is different from that of a “coded”
application
You need to practice before getting results
Start with the great RedBook on WPF
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
Where's my domino server ?
“Ok,
so this is portal”
How does Domino fit in ?
How do I bring domino data to portal ?
How do I link my applications to the portal ?
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
Domino View/Document portlets
You get portlet for displaying domino data in portal
Add the portlet to the page
Pick your view
Customize how you want columns to look like (sort, name
as sametime links, hide columns etc),
Specify wher to open documents (new window or viewer
portlet)
Allow for creation of new documents
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
Domino Mail/DWA Integration
A portlet for integrating DWA Mail
Select the mailbox manually or use LDAP attributes for
discovery
Limit to a specific feature or allow full functionality (mail,
notes, address book)
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
Use domino with WPF
We love Portlet Factory
Portlet factory loves domino
You've specialized builders to get view data or change
documents
You can also invoke Webservices produced with domino
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
Use Web Application Integrator and Domino
Draws a portal around your application, if you can't get it
into portal
Available in Portal 6.0 & 6.1
Easy as cutting & pasting some JS
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
Sametime & Quickr
Sametime contacts list, manages your contact list on the
web, right in the portal
Sametime links integration, any name is “alive” with IM
status
My Places uses a Quickr servlet to bring “your places” into
portal along with full text search. All in a portlet, all in
context
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
Get ready for iWidgets
It's a Javascript/Web specification for building
fragments applications that can be mashed up
Soon after portal 6.1 a new portlet should be ready to host
iWidgets
It was said at LotusSphere that a new iWidget design
component is coming to designer in 8.5 or just later
1+1>2
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
A portal strategy in 10 minutes
10 Rules to make your portal a success
Some extra to avoid failures
To Rembember: Partners & Domino users have free
entitlements to Portal licenses, start with those,
then grow.
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
#1 Evaluate the value you get
What do I gain using integrated information with portal ?
Can this make a difference to my business ?
Look back in your customer's history
Any project that grow out of control just to publish some
information ?
How much did it cost, was it flexible ?
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
#2 Infrastructure check
The portal is not “just another” application
It needs LDAP, check Domino/AD/Other are used consistently
You need an RDBMS, Portal includes DB2 entitlements. Check with
the customer. Do they already have an RDBMS practice ? They can
use SQL Server or Oracle if they prefer.
Publishing to the web ? Keep security in mind !!!
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
#3 Remove the barriers
Users need an easy to access environment
IT need a secure environment
Deploy consistent SSO, use LTPA !!!
Portal 6.1 brings SPNEGO = SSO with Windows domains in the
browser
You can already do that if needed (using WAS 6.1)
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
#4 Who's the user
Whatever you build you're doing it for a user
Identify him
Learn his habits
Understand what he wants
Understand that he's working and may not be enjoing it
Define profiles or “persona” types
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
#5 Study their tools
Users have a work to do
Understand their tools
Imagine “adding” integration to their tools, what changes
for them ? Is it worth an investment ?
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
#6 Start with a success
Get the customer happy, quickly
Start with something easy but with immediate return
eg.
Directory lookup
Customer data lookup (maybe using WPF)
Link all the company applications in one place
Embed webmail
Provide secure access over the web (HTTPS)
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
#7 Add content management
Allow anybody to share their knowledge
If you have WCM deploy it with basic assets (page /
content)
Allow times to create their “sites” and have others find
shared information trough search
Use taxonomies to re-organize content and show it in a
rational way
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
#8 Bring more value in
After the first success it's natural to look for more (the
customer wants more)
Continue with small pieces
Start thinking “re-use” and wiring
As you grow you can create new stuff just by connecting
dots (portlets)
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
#9 Iterate
Now you've learned
Re-iterate
For every business need identify the kind of “process” that
address the need
Add more building blocks and wire them together
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
#10 Sell the vison, not the product
Selling the product is the best way to get a pile of
CDRoms on the customer's desk
Portal is nothing but a vision of how you integrate the
company information in a unified flow
There's no better way to own the customer than owning
the bus for the company's information. It gives you an
advantage over application developers/owners.
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
#11 Never learn at your customer expense...
I said 10 rules... but ... the golden one
... it's always a bad idea
Portal is complex and it's impact can be “high”
First you learn, then you sell, then everybody is
happy.
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
What to take away
Is Portal a useless elephant on my
server ?
Please repeat “NO, absolutely not”
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
What to take away
Portal has some features by itself (like
web content management)
BUT
It's primary mission is to be the glue for
the organization's information and
processes
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
What to take away
What you get
Comprehensive access control
Flexible navigation model
Portlet runtime
Information/application wiring service
Theming facility
Content management
Great domino integration
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
What to take away
What you get
RAD development environment (WPF)
Easy application integration (WAI)
Role based web applications (CA/Templates)
Search capabilities for your content
....
A lot else I've not told you about
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
Is Portal really so good ?
I'm not the only one saying it
Others are
Customers who got it right
Customers who got it right
Customers who got it right
Websphere Portal has been in the top-right quadrant
of gartner for a long time
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
Websphere Portal has
been around for some
time and is a mature
product
A few invested in
learning it
Don't be late, start
today and get the
advantage in your
workplace.
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
Questions ???
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
Thank you
Thank you for your attention
Looking to hear back from you
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
Thanks to
ILUG for providing this great opportunity
Dominopoint.it friends (Italian's LUG)
Lotus Symphony, for being so good to use
IBM for creating Portal
Thanks NOT to
IBM for making Yellow guys run away from portal
(WCS, WSE, Portal does Domino etc...)
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)

Portal is your friend (Portal for Yellow Zealots)
Resources
http://www.ibm.com/websphere/developer
http://redbooks.ibm.com
The Websphere Portlet Factory Redbook
http://www.vistalli.it
Daniele Vistalli (daniele@vistalli.it / www.vistalli.it)