Administering

Image for this section Use the administration tools provided with the portal to perform a variety of day-to-day administration tasks. There are two methods for editing portal setup: using the administration portlets or the XML configuration interface. The administration portlets are a convenient way to make real-time updates to the portal's configuration, while the XML configuration interface is well suited to more advanced administration, including batch processing of updates.

Portal administration tools
Learn about the different tools that you can use to administer your portal.
Starting and stopping servers, deployment managers, and node agents
There are various installation and configuration tasks that require you to start and stop IBM® WebSphere® Application Server and the IBM WebSphere Portal application servers, deployment managers, and node agents. If you are not familiar with how to start and stop these servers, deployment managers, or node agents, you can refer to this file for the necessary steps.
Updating user ID and passwords
IBM WebSphere Portal and IBM WebSphere Application Server use some accounts from the registry (for example, the LDAP server) including administrative and bind IDs for authenticated access to databases and LDAP severs respectively, as well as the WebSphere Portal and WebSphere Application Server administrative IDs. Often this means that the account passwords are stored in the WebSphere Portal and WebSphere Application Server bootstraps configuration files, which allows the authentication process to work.
Users and groups
IBM WebSphere Portal offers you centralized administration of users and user groups, allowing you to better define users and manage user access rights. Users can register and manage their own account information, or an administrator can provision and manage users. Group memberships can be used to give the required permissions to access an object or perform a request.
Using the Solution Installer
You can use the Solution Installer to install, uninstall, and update solutions or applications to an IBM WebSphere Portal server instance. The Solution Installer uses the Portal Application Archive (PAA) format as the standard format for application distribution.
Managing portlets, portlet applications, and iWidgets
You must perform some preparatory tasks before you make your portlets, portlet applications, or iWidgets available to your users by putting them on portal pages. This includes installing, deploying, and configuring portlets, applications, and iWidgets.
Managing pages
Manage Pages allows you to create, edit, activate, order, and delete pages as well as external Web pages and labels. Available tasks depend on which item is selected. Each page can contain multiple pages. All pages on which you have the User or greater role are displayed in a navigation menu. You must expand pages to access nested pages. The options that you see are dependent upon your access level.
Managing theme capabilities
You can administer the theme module framework. This includes deploying resources that can be cached, configuring capability filters, and disabling the automatic prerequisite loading feature.
Managing community pages
Community associations associate a portal page with a community in IBM Connections.
Managing your cluster
After installing and configuring your clustered environment, you will need to manage the different parts of your cluster to ensure a highly available production environment.
Portal Search
Use Portal Search to facilitate indexing content sources and searching for information. You can administer search services, search collections, and search scopes, as well as enhance the search experience of your portal site with the portal search portlets.
Managing your site
Earlier versions of WebSphere Portal provided the Resource Manager portlet for performing site management. With Version 8.0 of WebSphere Portal and Web Content Manager, this site management functionality has been replaced by the new functionality for managing pages.
Tagging and rating
Get an overview of the administrative tasks related to tagging and rating.
Using WebDAV with WebSphere Portal
WebSphere Portal provides a Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) implementation that individual services can use by plugging into. WebDAV is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol that allows you to collaborate on editing and managing files on remote Web servers. Caching Proxy supports WebDAV methods used by Microsoft Exchange Server, and user-defined (customized) methods. These methods are hard coded and managed by the Enable and Disable directives. Administrators can also use the corresponding method-mask defined in the PROTECT directive to authorize the use of these methods.
Virtual portals
View information on how you can scope your WebSphere Portal to have multiple virtual portals.
Language support
To reach as many users as possible, WebSphere Portal supports different languages for different locations. For instance, a large, international corporation might address users in different countries or regions through multilingual Web sites. In this context the portal can concurrently serve portal views to large numbers of users, each in the user's preferred language.
Using WSRP services
IBM WebSphere Portal supports the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) standard. By using this standard, portals can provide portlets, applications, and content as WSRP services, and other portals can integrate the WSRP services as remote portlets for their users.
Browser behavior and scenarios
Browser behavior for the back button, bookmarks and history affect user interaction and cause unexpected results.
Administering managed pages
You can perform advanced administration tasks for managed pages, such as generating URLs for projects or working with projects by using scripts.
Administering syndication
Learn how to administer syndication relationships.