BEA WebLogic Portal 10 Product Overview

WLP Product Presentation

BEA WebLogic Portal 10Product Overview
Name of PresenterTitle of PresenterDate

Agenda
Business ConsiderationsBEA WebLogic Portal OverviewCustomers and PartnersSummary

The Portal as User Interface Paradigm

Greater Benefits SEA
Service
Agility
Efficiency

Application ViewFrozen Enterprise Assets
ERP
Inefficient, costly, and impacts customer service

User View
ERP
DB
CRM
Improves efficiency, service, and agility

Delivering value for all audiences
Increase customer serviceImprove customer loyalty and retention Decrease costs to serve
Increase productivity and responsivenessImprove strategic advantageDecrease operational costs
Drive efficiencies in supply chainIncrease mindshare with partners Decrease costs to fulfill
Customers
Employees
Partners

Delivering value for all audiences
Business to business customer service portal for mechanics in over 370 airlinesEnterprise portal rationalization of 30 different customized departmental web apps with transition from web apps to portal
Employee HR portal accessible via kiosks. Manager Self-service portal for manager tasksExpected annual cost savings of $2M with increased automation, reduced staffing, and paperless processes
Global full-service booking system for more than 70,000 travel agencies and airline sales offices Rationalization of three systems to single portal infrastructure that supports 26 languagesLowered IT costs and improved service
Personalized portal access to 35 commercial banking servicesGrew number of users by 95% and revenue through CEO portal by 54% in a year75% increase in products per customer over 3 yrs
Customers
Employees
Partners

Customer Perspective
We completed GEM Connect in 60% less time and at 8% of the cost to develop the first portal Denise Fishel, Toshiba American Business SystemsOur customers love the portal. The ability to find out so much real-time information at their fingertips, any time they want it, provides high value.Frank Luka, Lufthansa TechnikMoving from the Web applications approach to a portal approach has enabled us to build a framework that can be reused across the business.- Mauro Ronzano, San Paolo

So What is Required of a Portal?
Audience focus increases service and loyaltyGive users get what they need and when they need itSatisfy the users who have direct connection to the business goalUnified infrastructure drives efficiencySimplifies building composite portals that deliver maximum business benefitBroad solution capabilities that enable rationalization of many sitesAdaptability improves business agilityA flexible infrastructure supports incremental and disruptive changeNimble processes facilitate new deployments and incremental portal change
Improving, service, efficiency and agility

Agenda

BEA WebLogic Enterprise Platform
Application ServerBEA WebLogic Server
JVM BEA JRockit
Integrated Development EnvironmentEclipseBEA Workshop for WebLogic
Process Integration
BEA WebLogic Integration
Blended App FrameworksBeehive, Spring

BEA WebLogic Portal
Portal Business Services
Portal Lifecycle Management
Unified Portal Framework
Enterprise Resources
Deployment Infrastructure
Process

BEA Confidential. | *
Connects people to business services with custom, service-oriented, enterprise portals that are easy to build and manage
BEA WebLogic Portal
Development Framework
Intelligent Administration
Enterprise Architecture
Presentation Services
Federation Fabric
Content
Search
Collaboration
Interaction Management
Enterprise Integration
Commerce Services
Mobility Services
Real-time Collaboration
Presentation Level Integration
Extensions
.NET Integration
Portal Analytics
Common Services

Federation Fabric
Content
Search
Collaboration
Commerce Services
Mobility Services
Extensions
.NET Integration
Portal Analytics
Common Services
Lowers total cost of ownership by providing an industrial strength foundation for enterprise portals

Enterprise Portal Architecture
A flexible, scalable, and manageable portal foundation for department portals, the public face of the enterprise, or a network of portals
Need
Build portals that can grow with the enterprise and adapt to business changes while providing lower total cost of ownership
Benefit
Flexible DeploymentEnterprise Web Services Unified Security ModelIndustrial Strength FoundationFramework and Runtime ModelExtensible Control ArchitectureStandards LeadershipBEA WebLogic Server
Features
Portal Application Resources

Address diverse user interface, navigation, and client requirements
Need
Increase customer satisfaction by delivering portals with user interface tailored to any constituency
Benefit
Desktops, Shells, Layouts and LAFsChromosomes, GenesInter-Portlet CommunicationMulti-Level NavigationWeb 2.0 UI with AjaxInternationalizationBEA WebLogic Mobility ServerAdmin Portal Branding
Features
Skeleton
Portal Web Application (1n)
Portal (1n)
J2EE Application (1n)
Shell
Theme (Optional)
Book (0n)
Page (0n)
Book
Desktop (1n)
Look and Feel
Skin
Chromosome(0..n)
Menu (Optional)
Theme (Optional)
Placeholder (1n)
Portlet (0n)
Book (0n)
Theme (Optional)
Chromosome(0..n)
State Buttons
Mode Buttons
Skin
Skeleton
Chromosome(0..n)
Content
JSP, Java PageFlow, JSF Remote, URL
Titlebar (Optional)
Mode Buttons
State Buttons
Chromosome(0..n)
Layout

Federated Portals
Standards-based distributed portals

Federation: More than WSRP
Web Services
WS Controls
WS - specs
WSRP 1.0
SAML
JSR 168, Struts, Page Flows, JSP, JSF
Remote Inter-Portlet Communication
Cache & Streaming
Federation
2001
Management & Monitoring
Service Discovery & Resolution
Customization Interceptors
Portlet Group Federation
2006
User Profile Propagation
Consumer Entitlements
WSRP 2.0
Web App Subscription

Portlet Publishing to Web Apps

Federation Fabric
Easier methodology for incremental portal changes and greater enterprise speed and agility
Need
Distribute portals across the enterprise to improve IT efficiency and deliver the benefits of a service oriented architecture
Benefit
Pervasive Portlet SupportBook, Page, Portlet FederationWebLogic Server ProducerVersioning, Single URL AccessProducer/Consumer InterceptorsRemote Inter-portlet CommunicationSAML for Single Sign-onWSRP 1.0, 2.0 complianceALSB, ALSR Integration
Features

Federation and SOA
Consumer
Producers
WSRP+
WSRP+
WSRP+
AquaLogic Service Bus
Cache SPI

Leverage standards-based integration, reuse existing content and applications, and a consistent view of customer information
Need
Reduce portal integration costs, leverage existing technology assets, and interact consistently with users across all portals
Benefit
Unified User ProfileWeb IntegrationWebLogic Single Sign-onWeb ServicesALDSP IntegrationALBPM IntegrationContent Integration
Features

Federation Fabric
Content
Search
Collaboration
Commerce Services
Mobility Services
Extensions
.NET Integration
Portal Analytics
Common Services
Accelerates the delivery of business solutions by reducing the time to build, deploy, and manage portals

A portal that works the way you do

Unified Eclipse development of Java, portal, Web, and service-oriented applications
Need
Faster time-to-market with reduced time to develop portals and reuse of resources across portals
Benefit
Design and Configure ModelEclipse 3.2 foundationConverged DevelopmentJava Page FlowCollaborative DevelopmentPortal and Portal Service DesignersPortlet WizardJSR 168 Import/Export wizard
Features

Simplify portal assembly, deployment, and management
Need
Quickly adapt portals to business changes and reduce IT backlog with participation by the business
Benefit
Fast Portal AssemblyDelegated AdministrationShared J2EE LibrariesPortal Upgrade WizardsRole-Based EntitlementsPortal Propagation ToolsExtensible Admin FrameworkBusiness Level Tools
Features

Portal Propagation
Source Portal
Destination
1. Export SRC & DEST Inventory
3. Apply changes to DEST
2. Compare and Mergeincludes content changes

Federation Fabric
Content
Search
Collaboration
Commerce Services
Mobility Services
Extensions
.NET Integration
Portal Analytics
Common Services
Modular services to fit business requirements

Content Management
Create and manage content and content structure in a portal repository or access existing content systems
Need
Deploy portals when an enterprise content management system is not needed and centrally integrate with content in multiple repositories
Benefit
Out-of-the-box RepositoriesVirtual Content Repository JSR 170Content Presenter PortletContent Type ManagementContributor and Manager ToolsContent Integration, Content EventsFederated Content AccessCustomized WorkflowWebDAV and WYSIWYG Editing
Features
CustomRepositories
Admin Tools
Workspace
Targeted Delivery
Search
MS Office
UI Templates
JSR 170Repositories
3rd PartyRepositories

Search
Easy-to-use tools to search across multiple repositories containing content
Need
Increase employee productivity and customer satisfaction with easy access to information
Benefit
Federated SearchSecure Search ResultsHTTP, ODBC, File System SearchNatural Language QueriesDocument Similarity SearchProximity ControlsRelevance RankingHierarchical Tagging
Features

Collaboration
Simplify building and managing portals for groups of users. Access to enterprise email. Simplified building of team collaboration workspaces
Need
Increase customer, partner, and employee productivity, interaction and increase portal adoption
Benefit
Community FrameworkMembership, Roles, InvitationsCommunity ContextUser Created CommunitiesCommunity TemplatesGroupSpace TemplateDomino, Exchange Server Integration*Domino, Exchange PIM Integration
Features

GroupSpace Features / Capabilities
Common Tools Message CenterClipboardNew Project WizardUser Mgmt Tools

Extensible via Portal Framework
Collaborate Recent ItemsDiscussion ForumsGroup Notes
Communicate

WebMailContactsAnnouncements
Schedule

CalendarIssuesTasksShared and Personal
Resources

Document LibraryCM BrowserRSS
Search

By Type (Issues, RSS, Documents, etc.)Global Search
Communities Customize

New communityCustom pages and contents

Personalize and customize portals and deliver targeted content using online and offline information
Need
Improve the visitor experience, increase adoption and loyalty and achieve business goals with visitors interactions
Benefit
Role and Rule-based PersonalizationEvent and Behavior TrackingReal-time EvaluationCampaign ManagementTest and Control DeliveryEnd User CustomizationCustom Events
Features
User Experience
Achieve Goals
Customization

Agenda

SanPaolo - Italy
BEA WebLogic Portal application rationalization foundation for a new portal-based infrastructure. Management dashboard for financial data management, budgeting and incentives; and two sales information and decision portals for retail and corporate banking for sales productivity. Subscription-based automatic information process Exception based work process for prioritization
Converge a variety of business critical Web apps for consolidated view of data, customer, and product.Improve customer service, reduce costs, enhance employee productivity
Opportunities & Challenges
Reduced costs and increased developer productivity through infrastructure standardization and reuseEasy access to business data resulted in enhanced customer service and employee productivity.Complete return on investment anticipated within a few months of the project's completion.
Solution Powered by BEA
Results
Customer Viewpoint
The portal approach provides significant added value. Moving from the Web-applications approach to a portal approach has enabled us to build a framework that can be reused across the business moving forward.- Mauro Ronzano, Application Management division

Cablecom GmBH Switzerland
Customer self service portal deployed in 2 monthsProcess portal streamlines customer relocationMature IT architecture reorganized to SOA designBEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform integration
74% cable TV marketshare.After years of rapid growth, needed to streamline its costly customer administration. Improve customer service
The effective connection between the self-care portal and Cablecoms backend systems is saving resources and eliminating sources of error. Savings of approximately 3.8 million Swiss Francs (approx. 4.8 million USD) per year due to 250 fewer telephone calls per day
Solution Powered by BEA
Results
Customer Viewpoint
The BEA Portal solution was profitable for us in many respects: In terms of our clients, by accelerating front- and backend processes and due to the rapid and exact implementation by a fast ROI even at the end of the first year. - Lars Klger, Business Leader of the Online-Portal Project

LSG Sky Chefs
Personal Assistance Link (PAL) portal built on WebLogic Portal accessible via kiosks. Manager Self-service portal for manager tasksFrom paper to portal - Provides payroll and tax, personal profile update, benefits, life changes, and benefits enrollmentIntegrates with Lawson HR, MyCigna insurance and MoneySmart 401k, credit union banking, and SAP
Worlds largest provide of in-flight servicesManual HR data entry too inefficient and costly to service US 12,000 employees10,000 without access to computers
Deployed in 90 days with 3-4 developersExpected annual cost savings of $2M with increased automation, reduced staffing needs, and paperless processesOpen enrollment time reduced in half
Solution Powered by WLP
Results
BEAs proven track record, industry leadership, and unsurpassed clustering capability gave us compete confidence that the portal would work, all day, everyday. A highly visible and strategic project such as PAL is no place to take chances or expose the company to unreasonable risk. Jay Primavera, Director of HR operations and technology , US & UK
Customer Viewpoint

Over 1800 Portal Customers
Financial Services
Telco
Manufacturing
Government

Over 1800 Portal Customers
Healthcare
Retail
Transportation
Media

Strong Partner Ecosystem
Search, IntelligentInteraction
ContentManagement
Reporting,Analytics, BI
Collaboration
Commerce
Security
ContentSyndication
Wireless,Off-line
Legacy/Application Integration
Management

Agenda

BEA WebLogic Portal

Questions?

BEA WebLogic Portal 10.0 Product Overview Presentation Version: 1.0 - Dan Tortorici 5/10/07 First release

This is a product overview summary presentation for WebLogic Portal. This presentation is appropriate for mixed audiences looking for a high level overview of portal capabilities. This presentation covers all the major functional areas of WebLogic Portal:

Unified Portal FrameworkEnterprise Portal ArchitecturePresentation ServicesFederation FabricEnterprise Integration

Portal Lifecycle ManagementDevelopment FrameworkIntelligent Administration

Portal Business ServicesContent ManagementSearchInteraction ManagementCollaboration

Main Points: To gain consensus on what the meeting will cover.

Questions: 1. Does this make sense? Is there anything in particular that you want to be sure we cover?

Script:In our time today Id like to begin with a discussion of some of the business challenges facing companies today and the impact of deploying portals. Then well take a look at the capabilities of WebLogic Portal, a few customer case studies, an overview of partners, and then well wrap up with a summary.
Main Points: When people hear portal they think a type of user interface or primary online site

Questions: None

Script:So what is a portal, and what does it mean to build it with portal infrastructure? This is the Microsoft MSN portal it looks like what has become known as a portal interface - multiple pages with navigation at the top, sections of the page with different content, but it is not built with portal infrastructure its a custom built application.

[click] This is also a portal the BEA Support portal. This is built with portal software BEA WebLogic Portal. So it seems you can build what looks like a portal with or without portal software. Whats the difference?
Main Points: Establish that portal infrastructure is far more than UI

Questions: None

Script:The reason has to do with the fact that portal infrastructure is more than just a style of user interface and a way to interact with applications it provides common services to simplify application delivery. It simplifies building applications by delivering a common set of reusable, integrated services that enable building custom applications tailored to many application audiences. For these reasons, portal infrastructure provides benefits that improve service levels, IT efficiency, and business agility (SEA).

Although the UI is the most recognizable feature, Portal infrastructure is more than just a style of user interface and a way to interact with an applications
Main Points: Establish the challenges inherent with application silos

Questions:Do you have portals that follow this approach? Across what functional areas?What challenges do you see?

Script:One of the challenges many portal customers face is that of existing rigid infrastructure where the primary view of application functionality across divisions is from the enterprise application perspective. These silos tend to stand alone, and trrough acqusition, over time, replicate making the situration worse.

From a user perspective this requires many different application interfaces, logins, and user confusion. Too much to manage at an user level which in turn tends to be costly, inefficient, and a negative impact on service whether the customer is an employee or external purchaser.

Main Points: The solution is to focus on the needs of the audience

Questions: None

Script:An alternative which is better suited to improving productivity and increasing self service adoption is to architect with a user focus rather than application. By consolidating access to the content, applications, and processes relevant to the user all in one portal view we simplify the users tasks and provide audience value.

Main Points: This approach applies to all types of portal audiences.

Questions: None

Script:and this approach has value for all types of portal audiences.Satisfying customer service expectation is critical to customer loyalty and retention. By delivering outstanding online self-service many companies have found that they can dramatically decrease their customer service costs.

For employees, improving service translates to better employee productivity and responsiveness increasing business agility. This can help provide strategic advantage as well as decrease internal costs.

For partners, portals enable increasing supply chain efficiency by streamlining processes and interactions. They also help to increase mindshare by delivering the type of service that makes partners more willing to do business with you, and lastly, through self service and streamlined processes you can decrease your costs to fulfill orders.

Service, efficiency, and business agility with benefits for all types of portal audiences.
Main Points: Simple customer proof points for benefits across audiences

Questions: None

Script:Here are a few examples of how customers have achieved portal benefits across the organization.Wells delivered 35 services to commercial customers through the portal which lead to dramatic user adoption and revenue increase within the year. Over 3 years they saw the ability to cross sell increase by 75%

LSG Sky Chefs deployed an internal HR portal that saved the company $2M per year by increasing productivity and efficiently

Amadeus simplified their infrastructure by rationalizing many sites which lowered their costs and improved service in the balance as well

Main Points: Reinforce from the customer perspective, portal benefits

Questions: None

Script:And the words of 3 additional customers on the benefits that portal infrastructure has given them that also point to increased efficiency, improved service, and improved business agility.
Main Points: Set context for delivering the WLP portal solution

Questions: None

Script:So to deliver these benefits what is required? Its all about audience focus, a unified infrastructure, and adaptability.Tools that enable an audience focus gives groups of users what they need, when they need it simplifying the work of users that are looking to more simply achieve business goals.

A unified infrastructure is needed as it simplifies bringing all kinds of applications and resources together in composite portals the provide the most in business benefits. A unified infrastructure with broad capabilities also simplifies IT operations by providing whats needed to rationalize many existing internal sites.

Lastly, Flexibility and the ability to adapt the portal infrastructure is important as it provides the foundation for improving business agility. To succeed it must support not only continual incremental improvements but also disruptive business change.
Main Points: Transition to the ideal solution for meeting these challenges and focusing on the audience

Questions: None

Script:Given an idea of whats required, Lets continue with an overview of WebLogic Portal.
Main Points: WebLogic Portal and the WebLogic Enterprise Platform provide an integrated environment

Questions: None

Script:WebLogic Portal is part of the unified WebLogic Enterprise Platform and leverages WebLogic Integration for process integration and is built on the proven WebLogic Server. Development across the platform is unified with the simplified development model provided by BEA Workshop for WebLogic, with its integrated development environment that makes it easy for any developer to build, test, and deploy portals that take advantage of external systems and business processes with the BEA WebLogic Enterprise Platform.

Main Points: To position the WebLogic Portal functional marketecture of a unified framework, lifecycle management, business services, and portal extensions.

Questions: None

Script:Given the requirements we previously discussed lets take a high level look at what portal infrastructure needs to incorporate. It needs to connect to enterprise resources like databases, enterprise apps, and legacy applications. It also needs to be deployed in a way suitable for the enterprise and it needs to provide access to all types of portal visitors through a variety of devices. but you also need a process that maps to the application lifecycle of the organization to develop, deploy, and manage portals. ... And a set of services that enable addressing the unique needs of different portal audiences WebLogic Portal delivers these capabilities with a unified portal framework, portal lifecycle management, and portal business services. to address a broader set of business challenges, WebLogic Portal also includes a set of portal extensions

BEA Confidential
*
Main Points: BEA WebLogic Portal connects people to business services with custom, service-oriented, enterprise portals that are easy to build and manage

Questions: None

Script:BEA WebLogic Portal makes it easier to connect people to business services with an enterprise portal that simplifies the production and management of custom service oriented portals. WebLogic Portal simplifies, personalizes, and lowers the cost of customer, partner and employee access to information, applications and business processes by leveraging a Unified Portal Framework, simplified Portal Lifecycle Management, and modular pre-integrated Portal Business Services and Portal Extensions
BEA Confidential
*
Main Points: The unified portal framework helps to lower total cost of ownership by providing and industrial strength foundation for enterprise portals.

Questions: None

Script:Lets start at the bottom and address some of the capabilities provided by the unified portal framework. This set of capabilities helps to lower total cost of ownership by providing an industrial strength foundation for enterprise portals.

Main Points: The enterprise portal architecture provides both industrial strength and market leading flexibilityThe enterprise portal architecture lowers costs for both initial deployment and management

Questions: What type of portals do you deploy? Internal B2E, customer facing, partner collaboration?How many portals do you have today, how many do you believe you will deploy in the next 2 years?

Script:The unified portal framework includes an enterprise portal architecture that is designed to be a flexible, scalable, and manageable portal foundation. It is designed to accommodate a variety of enterprise portal needs whether it is for a department portal, a massively large customer portal, or a network of portals distributed across the enterprise.

The graphic on the left shows how portals can be deployed to meet your security requirements.A single server or cluster can contain multiple portals that can share resources. Or, portals can be isolated so that resources are isolated for enhanced security. For example, if you need to develop a number of separate portals for your partners and dont want to share resources like pages and portlets, you can deploy them so they have access to only the resources associated with that portal. And you can deploy it cost effectively on minimal hardware and software. This enables you to deliver portals that can grow with the enterprise and be adaptable to unanticipated business changes. It also enables them to be managed cost effectively yielding lower total cost of ownership. This enterprise portal architecture takes full advantage of WebLogic Server giving you industrial strength reliability and scalability.

One important aspect of this is the Federated Portal Architecture that enables you to build Federated Portals, based on technology available in the WSRP standard. Federated portals enable you to efficiently share portal resources and minimize deployment complexity as you can publish portlets to make them available to other portals, and subscribe to remote portlets so that you maximize reuse.

WebLogic Portal also takes advantage of a unified security model. It provides end-to-end security across the entire WebLogic Platform provided by WebLogic Server.Standards drive costs down and mitigate risk in every industry. In the auto industry, safety standards made seat belts and airbags affordable. When it comes to portals standards are equally important. BEA leads in the development and implementation of portal standards. BEA is a contributing member and leader of a number of standards groups that help to define portal interfaces.

Background Info: New in WLP10MySQL version 5 support - WebLogic Portal includes support for installing using MySQL 5, a leading open-source databaseSupport for IE 7 - WebLogic Portal includes support for Internet Explorer 7 In order of importance, the following areas are certified for IE7: OOTB Portal look and feels, Administration tools (or just select pieces of them focusing on business user tools like CM and Portal Framework), Groupspace, and the collaboration portlets

Additional Details:Clustering, Caching, Pooling - WebLogic Portal supports your applications with a broad range of scalability features so your applications can grow with your business requirements. It also removes any single point of failover for reliability.Enterprise Portal Architecture - Simplifies enterprise portal deployments by providing centralized administration and a flexible deployment architecture that can cost-effectively accommodate multiple enterprise portals.Extensible control architecture - Pre-packaged portal functionality that can be extended using the WebLogic Workshop integrated development environment. This provides maximum reusability of portal functionality provided by WebLogic Portal and functionality that is customer modified. Flexible deployment architecture - Gives you the ability to restrict the scope of J2EE portal resources to one J2EE WebApp that may contain one or more portals. This can also be deployed with other WebApps to the same portal infrastructure providing the flexibility to accommodate any enterprise portal deployment requirements. J2EE resources can also be easily shared across multiple portals and can be deployed as a self-contained unit since a Web Application can support multiple portals.Framework and Runtime development model - A unified WebLogic Workshop development model which provides both a development environment and a runtime. The runtime helps the developer by managing the portal infrastructure so that the developer can focus on the portal application rather than the infrastructure.JSR 168 Support - WLP provides the ability to create and use portlets that comply with the JSR 168 Java portlet standard that can run in any portal framework that supports JSR 168.Multiple authentication providers - WLP implements the Security Service Provider Interface in WebLogic Server. This JAAS implementaiton enables customers to utilize multiple providers for user authentication including leading SSO vendors and RDBMS and NT security models. As part of this implementation, the SSPI can pass 3rd apps the subject and exchange credentials.Parallel portlet rendering - Speeds complex page display by retrieving all portlets at the same time using parallel portlet threads with timeouts. Support for AJAX asynchronous rendering also improves performance.AJAX asynchronous support - WebLogic Portal also includes support for AJAX so that richer portal interfaces can be built that include updates to page sections independent of a whole page refresh.Portal Independent Portlets - A portal application built using the portal framework is composed of a selection of application windows, or portlets, that provide access to content, applications, or business processes. Portlets are portal independent and can be reused in any number of portals.Portal Network Architecture - WLP simplifies enterprise portal deployments by providing centralized administration, a multiple deployment architecture, and decentralized administration.Standards Support - WLP leads the market with standards implementation. WebLogic Portal includes support for all WebLogic Server supported standards and also supports portlet standard JSR 168 and is influenced by the emerging JSR 170 content management standard.Standards-Based EJB architecture - The BEA WebLogic Portal is integrate with the leading industry security, management, development tools and other platform technologies not limiting your business to a single vendor or technology. The standards-based architecture has the largest J2EE developer, administrator, and consulting community ensuring that you have access to the right people and resoureces when you need them.Standards-Based EJB architecture, hot deployment - The WebLogic Portal is built on a standards-based EJB architecture that allows for hot deployment for accomodating changing application requirements.Failover - BEA WebLogic Portal enables the administrator, working with AquaLogic Service Bus, to specify both a primary and secondary source for the portlet where automatically the portal will look if a portlet is unavailable. Pluggable distributed caching - WLP includes the ability to use existing distributed cache systems like Tangasol.Portlet instance sharing and portal app cache - WebLogic Portal includes the ability to share a portlet instance across users which will cache the first time it is rendered and will be available from the cache for all subsequent requests from any user.Unified Security Model - BEA WebLogic Portal relies on the J2EE security functionality provided by BEA WebLogic Server. This Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS) based implementation provides a common and unified security structure for developing applications and portals. It easily enables access to only the content (through search) and resources (through entitlements) for which the user is qualified.

Main Points: Presentation Services provide the ability to deliver portals that meet any style requirements.

Questions: None

Script:Presentation services provide the ability to tailor a portals look and feel to whatever requirements are needed by a particular portal audience. Need portlets to look different or just have their boundaries disappear within the portal page? Look and Feel skeletons make it easy to change the shape of portlets. Need just one portlet, or a page to look different? This is where themes come in which are only applied to the components that you want to look different. Chromosomes and genes make it easy to dynamically adapt the portals appearance automatically. Interportlet communication simplifies coordinating the interaction of a group of portlets so that when you click on a customer name, another portlet will update with their orders. Unlimited levels of navigation provide ultimate flexibility for creating custom sites. New in this release is Ajax support for a Web 2.0 interface that enables different portal components to dynamically update without a full page refresh. Full internationalization support enables portals to be delivered in any language.

Background Info: Desktop - A desktop is is an audience specific view of portal components. It contains the portal header, footer, and body. The body contains the bulk of the portal content: books, pages, portlets, and look and feel elements. A portal can support one or more desktops. After a portal administrator sets entitlements on the desktop and makes it ready for public consumption, the desktop is the view of the portal accessed by end users. From there, users may configure their own views through customization of the desktop. Think of a desktop as a user view of a Web site or a portal, exposing a different set of information or tools based on user context. For example, each department in an organization (Human Resources, Accounting, Legal, Sales) can define a portal desktop containing its own portlets, navigation, and look and feel, yet these desktops are all supported by a single portal definition.

Book - A Book is a component that provides high-level content organization and navigation. Books contains pages or other books, providing a mechanism for hierarchical nesting of pages and content. Books are identified by a control such as a tab set.

Page - Pages contain the portlets that display the actual portal content. Pages can also contain books and other pages. Pages are identified by a control such as a tab set.

Portlet - Portlets are the windows that surface your applications, information, and business processes.

A desktop's appearance is determined by the Look and Feel. A look and feel definition contains two major elements: skins and skeletons.

Skins - Skins provide the overall colors, graphics, and styles used by all components in a desktop interface. Skins are collections of graphics and cascading style sheets (CSS) that allow changes to be made to the look and feel of a portal without modifying the portal components directly. References to images and styles are made in the skin rather than being hard coded into the portal definition. The look and feel file provides a path to the skin directory to be used. Themes are subsets of skins that you can apply to books, pages, and portlets, providing a way of using a different set of styles for individual desktop components.

Skeletons - The look and feel file also provides a path to the skeleton directory to be used. Every type of component, from a desktop to a portlet's title bar, has an associated JSP file, called a skeleton file, that renders it. Some skeleton files are simple, others are more complex. For example, each desktop uses a skeleton file called shell.jsp that simply provides the opening and closing tags to render the desktop. A portlet title bar, on the other hand, has a skeleton file called titlebar.jsp that is more complex. It contains Java calls to various windowing methods in the API, references the button graphics to use on the title bar, and determines the placement of title bar elements with an HTML table definition.After the logic in the skeleton servlets executes for a look and feel, components are rendered hierarchically into a single HTML instance that is the user view of the desktop.

Administrators and users can select from a list of available look and feel definitions, which changes the appearance, and sometimes the behavior, of a user's view of a desktop. For example, the header of one look and feel can contain a static graphic, while the header of another look and feel can contain a campaign that targets a user with personalized content from a content repository.

New in WLP10Web 2.0 User Interface - The entire BEA WebLogic Portal user desktop can be enabled to update dynamically via AJAX so that when changing pages only the book contents are updated, or when portlets change only the changing portlet is updated. AJAX support includes full support for interportlet communication.LAF Thumbnails - The WLP LAF editor enables developers to specify a LAF thumbnail image that will be visible in admin and user tools where selecting a LAF is an option.Administration Portal Branding - BEA WebLogic Portal enables web app extensions to the administration tools so that administration portal branding can be changed to suit a particular audience.
Main Points: Federation is about the use of WSRP in an enterprise class wayQuestions: None

Script:Another key capability that WLP provides is portal federation which enables a network of portals to share portal resources. The portals, or WLS web apps at the bottom are portlet producers which essentially provide portlets accessible across web services, to a consumer portal which you see at the top. So the portlets outlined in the consumer portal are actually running in the producers below.

This simplifies deployment for the enterprise as now the portal that is the public face of the company can be a lightweight portal with new services added more easily. It decreases time to market and portlet building a distributed exercise with many benefits. This is all essentially SOA with the addition of user interface provided by the portlet display code. The cornerstone of portal federation is the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) standard. BEA WebLogic Portal has delivered a leading implementation of portal federation for a number of releases.

Main Points: Federation is about the use of WSRP in an enterprise class wayQuestions: None

Script:Lets look at where WSRP fits into the greater concept of portal federation. The first step was industry agreement on a series of web services standards back in the 2001 timeframe. Then the WSRP standard effort emerged in the same year. In the 8.1 release of WebLogic Portal, we added a number of capabilities that made WSRP more practical to use. SAML for single sign on, federation of all portlet types like JSR168, Struts, JSP, and Pageflow portlets. The ability for portlets to communicate across consumer and producer boundaries was added as interportlet communication.

In the WLP 9.2 release we added additional capabilties as a result of talking with many large WLP customers who saw great potential for federation. User profile propagation enables passing user information so that portlet content can be personalized. Customization interceptors enable performing the personalization or making other modifications like rewriting of URLs to a local cache before the portlet is rendered. Consumer entitlements guarantee that the portal manager who adds portlets can only access the ones he is entitled to. All these capabilities are part of providing first class remote portlet support where remote portlets are just as capable as local portlets. Why would you want anything less?

WLP also includes a set of features that provide the enterprise class usability, robustness, and reliability that SOA and portal federation requires. Customers frequently tell us that they dont imagine using federation for one portlet here, and another there. Rather it is groups of portlets, tied together that need to be simply federated. WLP includes Portlet group federation that enables federating a page of portlets, or a book of pages as easily as one portlet. Cache and streaming capabilities deliver performance levels consistent with enterprise requirements. As we discussed earlier, portal federation is essentially SOA so integration with services infrastructure software is key. WLP is integrated with AquaLogic Service Registry to provide service discovery and resolution and management and monitoring is provided with integration with AquaLogic Service Bus enabling service level expectations to be met while addressing failover and bandwidth challenges.

Additionally, WLP provides the ability to federation portlets to non-portal applications with portlet publishing. We will talk more about this in a minute. Also now, with the latest release of WLP10, BEA supports the latest version of the WSRP standard, version 2.0. All these features in green and blue are areas of WLP innovation and are provided only by WebLogic Portal.

Main Points: Portlet publishing to Web apps is a WLP unique strength and simplifies the transition from Web apps to portal.

Questions: None

Script:Lets explore a bit more this idea of portlet publisher to Web applications. As we discussed earlier it can be a challenge to transition to portal when your web apps are working reasonably well and you dont want to create additional risk. Portlet publishing helps address this challenge. It accelerates the delivery of portal infrastructure benefits and increases the return on exiting portal investments. In the portal you see here on the left the red outline highlights a portlet for customer location information. We can, using portlet publishing to easily embed this portlet into an existing Web application. You can see on the right the same portlet available in a web application. How does this help us transition to portal infrastructure?

It enables using portal infrastructure sooner. For new services that are needed in the web application begin developing them in the portal and publishing them to the web applications in which they are needed. Minimal disruption to the web app, minimal risk, and you are beginning to benefit from portal infrastructure. Over time, as new services are added via the portal, the percentage of native services in the Web application becomes less. At some point, the Web app will need a major refresh this is the tipping point, the time to rewrite the remaining Web app code in the portal and use the portal for application delivery to users. The rewrite is minimized and risk mitigated with this simplified path from Web applications to portal infrastructure.

Main Points: WLP provides a complete pragmatic implementation of Federation today

Questions: None

Script:WebLogic Portal includes comprehensive tooling for portal federation. In the lower left you see the WebLogic Workshop interface for consuming a remote page or book. and a Workshop portlet wizard that simplifies consuming remote portlets. Additionally, the same capabilities are available in the browser-based portal admin tools. The last image on the right shows a remote portlet available to be used within the portal.

Background Info: New in WLP10WSRP 2.0 Support - WebLogic Portal includes support for basic WSRP 2.0 features including maintaining WSRP 1.0 Interoperability, implementation of the new WSDL format for WSRP 2.0, basic WSRP 2.0 Producer/Consumer Support, support for WSRP 2.0 Import/Export. Remote book/page IDE support - WebLogic Portal provides in Workshop, wizards for selecting a remote book or page published via WSRP using the same producer specification methods as portlets.

Additional Details:Pervasive portlet federation - BEA WebLogic Portal provides the ability to make all types of portlets created in the WebLogic Portal environment federated. This includes, JSP Pageflow, Struts, JSR168, and JSF portlets.Page/Book/Portlet Federation - Simplify management of large number of portlet and also allows for 2 or more portlets to be group together. For example, a List and Detail portlet can be federated in a single page. WebLogic Server ProducerPortlet versioning - BEA WebLogic Portal provides the ability to replace the current version of a remote portlet so that users are not inconvenienced.Producer Interceptors - BEA WebLogic Portal federated support enables pre and post render developer access through Interceptors so that upon a request from the consumer the portlet can be personalized to the portlet consumer in question.Consumer Interceptors - BEA WebLogic Portal also provides development access to the pre and post render of the portlet from the portlet consumer side. This enables portlet consumers to tailor the portlet to the requirements of the portlet consumer. Producer and Consumer IPC - BEA WebLogic Portal supports interportlet communication between portlet producers and consumers. All portlet technologies are supported: JSP, JSF, PageFlows, Struts, and 168.SSO flexibility - BEA WebLogic Portal federated support enables better enterprise fit in that it will enable authentication with any other systems by using the security token of other systems.WSRP 2.0 Support - BEA WebLogic Portal supports a number of the technologies in the WSRP 2.0 standard (Interportlet communication, SAML for single sign-on) and innovates in areas that the standards have yet to address. These innovations are then aggressively leveraged to the standards efforts with the intent of providing more value. In addition WLP continues to provide backward compatibility with earlier versions of the WSRP specification.AquaLogic Service Bus interoperability - Interoperability with BEA AquaLogic technology provides the ability to report on registration requests, traffic statistics, as well as SLA critical statistics like message response time, usage metrics, and admin alerts. It will also allow for custom transformations to take place within messages during traffic across portals.ALSB, ALSR Integration Portlet Publishing - Provides support for rendering Portlets outside of a Portal framework and makes it possible to develop new services on a portal and then easily integrate the portlet services into the existing web application. Over time, with new services developed for the web app via the portal, you will lesson the final rewrite that will occur when transitioning to just using the portal. This can then be timed to occur when the web app needs a major technology refresh.

Optimized Federation - WebLogic Portal provides highly optimized support for federation with caching on both consumer and producer sides, Local optimizations for co-hosted services, IPC between Consumers and Producers, Generic transport from Consumers to Producers, Per portlet time outs, Per portlet enablement, Full producer and consumer cluster support, Flexible error handling mechanism, Parallel processing of remote portlets, and streaming of large files and markupDynamic provisioning - BEA WebLogic Portal, working with AquaLogic Service Bus, provides the ability to dynamically provision portlets from one publisher servier to another based on load. It can also limit the number of consumers to a published portlet.Web application publishers - The Federation Libraries with the BEA WebLogic Portal provides the ability to create portlets that are published from a web application instead of a portal. This can be done with any IDE. Since portal business services (interaction management, content, search, collaboration, commerce) are not needed in these portlets it provides a low cost way to publish portlet functionality Federation app upgrade - BEA WebLogic Workshop provides the ability to upgrade existing web applications to federated status where individual portlets can be published.Admin - Monitor tool - BEA WebLogic Portal provides a portal monitor tool in WebLogic Workshop that will monitor messages between the portlet consumer and producer. Single URL for portlet selection and registration - BEA WebLogic Portal provides the ability to indicate via a URL, a portlet that can be subscribed to by a consumer portal. End users can pass portlet URL references in email to faciliate interaction. Remote portlet list - BEA WebLogic Portal provides a list of remote portlets that can be searched to locate applicable portlets. AquaLogic Service Bus interoperability - Interoperability with BEA AquaLogic technology provides the ability to report on registration requests, traffic statistics, aswell as SLA critical statistics like message response time, usage metrics, and admin alerts. It will also allow for custom transformations to take place within messages during traffic across portals.
Main Points: Reinforce that Federation IS SOA and integrates well with services infrastructure

Questions: None

Script:This slide shows the interaction of WLP in an SOA environment with both AquaLogic Service Registry and AquaLogic Service Bus. As you can see by the lower arrow that connects consumers with producers these SOA components are optional. However, they do provide critical management, monitoring, and enable you to reliably set service level expectations.
Main Points: WebLogic Portals enterprise integration capabilities provide many options for delivering process, data, and content to the portal.

Questions: None

Script:The unified portal framework also includes enterprise integration functionality that leverages standards-based integration for web services and interoperability with AquaLogic Data Services Platform. It also can provide a consistent view of customer information for consistent interaction with users across all portals with a unified user profile. Existing web applications can be reused and leveraged in portals by taking advantage of Web Integration. Integration with AquaLogic Business Process Management enables portals that simplify enterprise processes. Process initiation, and status monitoring are all available and portlets can provide data required for process input.

A key feature for integrating visitor and customer information is the Unified User Profile. The Unified User Profile is a process that retrieves attributes from multiple data sources (even LDAP-compliant directory services) to create a comprehensive profile for a user enabling the delivery of highly personalized content and services.For example, a user may create a profile with an attribute that indicates interest in hockey. Using the rules engine, the administrator may set up a rule that says if a user is interested in Hockey and they live in San Jose, deliver content to that user when they log in, that tells them about Sharks tickets. Using the UUP, data can be retrieved from multiple data sources (user profile tells us the user like Hockey, customer database tells us the user lives in San Jose) to be used with this rule, resulting in rich personalized content delivered to the user.

WebLogic Portal using BEA Workshop for WebLogic makes it easy to create web services as well as use web services defined externally and integrate these into portlets. So even if your web services originate in Microsoft .NET you can leverage them to provide user services in WebLogic Portal.

Background Info:Composite processing - QuickClip or URL portlet - Provides the ability to reuse existing web application functionality or content in the portal. It also provides composite capability where data from multiple web applications can be processed and delivered to the portal.Content Integration - Provides the ability to integrate with third party content management systems. A Service Provider Interface (SPI) that is influenced by the JSR 170 standard in development provides a standard mechanism to integrate content systems.Simplified Self-Service - By integrating operational support systems such as trouble ticket and user password management into the BEA WL Portal application users can service more of their own support needs directly and reduce load on support desk personnel.Web Services to .NET - Web services can be used to integrate the portal with any .NET functionality that is accessible via web services.Unified User Profile (UUP) - Provides a unified view of customer attributes that reside in distributed systems. This is used to integrate external data sources of customer information with online and LDAP based profile data. This provides a unified view of the customers attributes and the ability to market more effectively using all relevant customer information.Web Service Client and Builder - WebLogic Workshop gives developers a productive, visual development environment to model an application and its interactions with clients and external resources using familiar concepts such as methods, controls, and properties. After visually designing the portal, developers simply add the business logic necessary for events in standard Java. Rather than learning object-oriented design and the J2EE APIs, WebLogic Workshop developers write code to handle events, set properties, and visually monitor interactions. Includes Two-way code editing for graphical and text synchronization, an integrated debugger, project management, code completion, and syntax highlighting. WLP Producer Federation - WebLogic Portal enables web applications running on WLS to be enables as WSRP producers. This service-enables them and provides a means to aggregate them in one portal.WebLogic Single Sign-On - Single sign-on within all WebLogic applications and Integration with LDAP directory servers maximizes your directory investments and fits into your existing enterprise architecture.WLP Multiple Authentication Providers - The Portal framework provides the ability to work with multiple authentication providers and can surface these in the portal administration tools which enable building entitlements from them.ALBPM portlet integration - WebLogic Portal can incorporate business process viewing and approval using JSR168 portlets provided with ALBPM. Single sign-on integration enables seamless interaction with processes and portal functions.
BEA Confidential
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Main Points: WebLogic Portal accelerates the delivery of business solutions by reducing the time to build, deploy, and manage portals.

Questions: None

Script:As weve just discussed, its important to have the right foundation for portals, but its also important to be able to tailor portal building, deployment, and management to your organizations best practices so that you can reduce the time to build, deploy, and manage portals. Portal lifecycle management provides the flexibility to accomplish this. Lets begin with the portal lifecycle.

Main Points: Portal Lifecycle Management encompasses all organizations within the portal lifecycle and provides tools for both IT and the line of business. The lifecycle provides the flexibility to adapt to your organization rather than force you to adapt to the product.

Questions: Develop portals or assemble them what is your preference?How do you manage portal best practices?

Script:One of the key benefits that WLP provides is the flexibility to embrace all necessary enterprise constituents in the portal building and management process. We talk about this as Portal Lifecycle Management. The portal development and management lifecycle process provides flexibility for both IT and the line of business with portal development, assembly, and decentralized management and provides optional hand-offs or transition points from architect, to developer, to portal manager within IT and the business.

Optional Script Details:ArchitectThe IT organization architects best practices, corporate look-and-feel, and incorporates business logic provided by traditional J2EE developers using WebLogic Workshop and traditional J2EE tools. These resources are then encapsulated in Eclipse Facets and J2EE Shared Libraries. For example, functionality that is commonly required for internal portals, like portlets that display information from enterprise systems, can be included in one Facet or shared library while self service capabilities for customers might reside in another.

DevelopBusiness application developers then start with these templates, adding books, pages, and portlet functionality. This might include a base set of visitor campaigns, or connecting to business processes and web services which are easily available in WebLogic Workshop. Workshop controls, which encapsulate business logic, can be easily used within the portal. Working with user interface designers, they refine what portal resources like pages and portlets look like within the best practices given by IT architects. Business application developers produce portal templates that can be used to assemble a number of portals.

Assemble and DeployPortal managers, in the business units or within IT, use browser-based tools to assemble and configure portals from resources in the portal templates provided by business application developers. They assemble sets of pages called books, pages, portlets, and select the look-and-feel within the guidelines of best practices provided to them.

ManageDifferent management roles can be delegated to groups of portal managers using delegated administration. For example, a content contributor role can be defined that only allows changes to a specific content set - a marketing contributor that can only add, delete, and modify marketing content. Lastly, visitors can manage their own portal pages, creating new ones and adding the specific content and functionality they need that has been made available by the portal managers.

Main Points: Portal Lifecycle Management includes a unified development framework that simplifies developing portals.

Questions: 1. What tools are you using to build portals today?

Script:Portal Lifecycle Management includes a visual development framework with WebLogic Portal Extensions for WebLogic Workshop. It unifies development by converging development for portals, web services, business processes, and web applications.

It enables you to develop portals in less time because you can focus your development on business logic instead of portal infrastructure.

Background Info: New in WLP10Support for Eclipse 3.2: Workshop for WebLogic now uses Eclipse 3.2 (upgrade from Eclipse 3.1) and also supports installing the Workshop plug-ins into and existing Eclipse 3.2 environment. Spring Core and Spring MVC support - BEA WebLogic Portal includes complete Spring Core and MVC support for Spring 1.2 and 2.0 enabling existing code to be used within portals by using a JSR 168 portlet wrapper.Advanced Java Server Faces integration - BEA WebLogic Portal supports Java Server Faces including the Sun reference and MyFaces implementations enabling JSF portlets to raise and handle events with other portlets and pages. It also includes full integration between JSF portlets and WLPs native interportlet communication capabilities.JSR168 Import/Export Wizard: Workshop for WebLogic provides tooling for the importing and exporting JSR168 portlets simplifying the use of standards based portlets.Improved validation and error checking: Workshop for WebLogic provides improved validation and error checking for portal assets, catching common errors earlier in the portal lifecycle. The IDE now warns users that their event handler is incomplete, and identifies incomplete portlets via a unique icon and an Eclipse error message. A

Additional Details: Collaborative development environment - The WebLogic Workshop development environment provides a single environment that is compatible with both portal application and J2EE expert developers.Design and configure model - WebLogic Portal Provides portal building tools for both the application developer and the business user. It employs a design and configure development model with portal resource design in WebLogic Workshop and portal assembly and configuration by browser-based portal tools. Java PageFlow - Provide a way to easily specify the flow between different JSPpages and how those pages connect to back-end resources. PageFlows incorporate the Model-View-Controller design methodology and are provide the ability to create Struts portlets.Portal Admin Tools - The portal administration tools allow a user to modify the site navigation, make changes to site content, and configure the site behavior without downtime.Loosely-coupled portal applications - Separate the portal application developed from the portal framework. This reduces the time to develop portals by giving application developers the ability to focus on business logic rather than portal infrastructure. It also provides for lower total-cost-of-ownership with easier maintenance and upgrade of the portal framework.Integrated development and administration tools - All of the tools necessary to develop a portal application are provided by WebLogic Workshop and the Administration Portal.Portal and Portlet wizards - The portal tools in WebLogic Workshop provide graphical editors for all common portal development tasks. A portlet wizard supports building portlets from JSR168 Java assets, web services, Java PageFlows, Java Server Faces (JSF), web URLs, Struts assets, and WSRP remote portlets. Portal UI Controls - Provide pre-packaged portal functionality that can be extended to add or change functionality. Includes controls for Login, Registration, Events, and User, Group and Role functions.Workshop on Eclipse - BEA Workshop for WebLogic is now based on Eclipse and includes all the ease of use that Workshop is known for along with the richness of the Eclipse plug in environmentEcliplse Facets - Provide the ability to easily add, via checkbox, code assets to a new or existing project. Extremely useful for ISV code distribution as well.Visual programming environment - WebLogic Workshop gives developers a productive, visual development environment to model a portal and its interactions with clients and external resources using familiar concepts such as methods, controls, and properties. After visually designing the portal, developers simply add the business logic necessary for events in standard Java. Rather than learning object-oriented design and the J2EE APIs, WebLogic Workshop developers write code to handle events, set properties, and visually monitor interactions. It includes two-way code editing for graphical and text synchronization, an integrated debugger, project management, code completion, and syntax highlighting.
Main Points: Intelligent administration simplifies portal assembly, deployment and management.

Questions: What type of backlog do you experience with regard to implementing business required changes?How long does it take to make a routine change?

Script:Portal Lifecycle Management includes Intelligent Administration capabilities that simplify portal assembly and deployment. The image on the left shows assembling a new portal based on an existing portal template. Role-based entitlements can dynamically give visitors access to the information they need. Delegated administration enables distributed management across the enterprise. In each area of portal management you can delegate task responsibility. On the right are the properties that can define a campaign manager visitor role and in the last image you can see that only the campaign tools are available to someone who is a member of that role.

Background Info: New in WLP10Extensible Admin Portal: The developer can now add new modules to the administration tools (examples: new main menu sections, pages, portlets) The developer can also copy and modify the entire administration portal application in sections; tying them into existing end user Portals with IPCZero Downtime Support: WebLogic Portal supports certain scenarios in which WLP can leverage Side by Side deployment to enable zero-downtime deployment of new versions of Portal applications. Multi-version upgrade: WebLogic Portal 10 enables customers to upgrade from 8.1 SP4 or later to WLP10 in the same manners they upgrade from 8.1 SP4 or later to Portal 9.2. Admin portal rebranding: WebLogic Portal allows developers to easily modify, extend, and reuse the administrative web tools. Customers can re-brand the Admin Portal. This includes changing images and skin (style) elements.Primary and secondary LDAP support: WebLogic Portal provides the ability to specify multiple DAPPropertyManagers that point to different LDAP repositories that contain the same user information enabling one to be designated as 'primary' and another as 'secondary', such that if 'primary' is unavailable, then the authentication request will roll to the 'secondary'. AL Analytics for WLP support: WebLogic Portal provides support for a new software product, AL Analytics for WLP, which will give business users the ability to report and display recorded performance and availability metrics. Portal analytics can be used by the business to tell what the most popular portlets are, determine which groups of users are accessing the Portal and when, and tell what types of content access and searches are being performed on a site.

Additional Details:These capabilities enable you to delegate assembly and management of portals to the line of business so that they can quickly adapt to business changes. Intelligent administration also gives you the ability to automatically provide resources without IT intervention so that you can reduce IT backlog and provide visitors with portal resources as soon as they are needed.

Role-based entitlements enable dynamic and granular control over what content and applications that users see. They can apply to entire portal views known as desktops, the look and feel of the portal, or portlets, pages, or sets of pages called books.

Role-based entitlements add a level of business-logic to standard entitlements. Most portal products permission users to see or not see portlets or portal pages based on who the user is: the user is either entitled to see a portal page or portlet or not and that designation is static and cannot change without manual administration. In fact, most J2EE entitlement implementations are static.

Role-based entitlements are dynamic. For example, an administrator can write an entitlement that says, Show the Avitek Resource Availability portlet if the user belongs to the Director segment. The Portlet will be accessible or not accessible based on the users status when they enter the site. This enables dynamically showing changes when a user changes their profile or performs an action, such as registration.

Business Analyst Tools - Portal management tools are web-based, can be delegated, and restricted by the use of dynamic role-based entitlements. This provides customized views of the tools for each constituency. Portal manager tools enable rapid assembly and configuration of new portals.Entitlements at the task level - WLP provides the ability to entitle at the task level so that different functionality within portlets can be provided to different audiences. Extensible Management Portlets - Portal administration tools can be extended with additional modular management portlets for third party and custom role-based management functionality. Multi-level delegated administration, skins, Books, pages, portlets - Delegated administration distributes portal administration among multiple groups and end users. If given permission, the end users customization options provide the ability to create a more effective environment for them as customers (partners, employees) and will effectively save time and reduce costs. One of these options available to the end user is to change the look and feel of the site with regard to layout, and via 'skins' to colors and fonts. They can also create personal pages and portlets. Upgrade wizards - Upgrade wizards provide the ability to upgrade the portal domain (from 6.1, 7.0, 8.1) and WebLogic Portal 8.1.4, and above portal applications. A step by step process provides review of files needing changes and files remaining the same. Propagation / Maintenance Mode Weblogic Portal provides built-in propagation support, with much of the process being fully automated. Information is extracted from the source and destination systems and compared by a portal-aware differencing engine. The majority of discrepancies between the source and destination are resolved automatically based on user-configurable policies. An Eclipse-based GUI provides the ability to review the merged inventory, and selectively include or exclude selected changes. To facilitate propagation, WLP also provides the ability to place the source and destination systems in maintenance mode for the duration of the propagation process, gracefully inhibiting the use of admin features and functions that might introduce inconsistencies in propagated data or content.Deployment Plans Deployment plans provide a standards-based mechanism for overriding configuration information contained in application-level deployment descriptors. WLS provides a console-based deployment plan editor, making it easy for administrators to examine / modify environment-specific configuration information as part of the deployment process, facilitating the rapid movement of applications between dev, staging, and production environments.Multi-stage portal propagation - A multi-stage propagation process includes entry into maintenance mode, configuration, inventory export, asset comparison, plan creation, propagation, and exit from quiescence. Propagation wizards and preview capability - WebLogic Portal provides wizards that simplify the propagation process and that also provide for preview of all changes that will be made during the propagation process. Propagation scripting - The propagation tool provides an Ant interface that exposes tasks for all of the steps in the propagation process, including exporting source and destination inventories, comparing and merging source and destination inventories, and applying changes to the destination system.Shared J2EE Libraries - Shared J2EE Libraries provide a mechanism for packaging and deploying assets utilized by portal applications. Shared libraries are essentially archive files that can be separately deployed, independently versioned, included by reference, and shared across multiple applications. Shared libraries reduce the cost and complexity of developing, maintaining, and operating portal applications by segregating customer-created files from out-of-the-box Portal assets, enabling BEAs ability to deliver Portal as a set of independently versioned, separately deployable components, and reducing the complexity of patching, enhancing, and extending Portal code. Shared lbraries also provide 3rd party providers with a convenient way to package and ship easy-to-consume, portal-ready components.Administration Tools Framework - The Administration Tools Framework provides the ability to modify, extend, and re-use the web-based tools in WebLogic Portal 9.2. This framework is implemented as Beehive controls and pageflow, with an emphasis on easier-to-use APIs. All of the tools are packaged as Library Modules and may be customized using Webapp Extensions, which allows users to more readily develop tools that best meet their needs.Zero Downtime Support - WebLogic Portal supports certain scenarios in which WLP can leverage Side by Side deployment to enable zero-downtime deployment of new versions of Portal applications. AL Analytics for WLP support - WebLogic Portal provides support for a new software product, AL Analytics for WLP, which will give business users the ability to report and display recorded performance and availability metrics. Portal analytics can be used by the business to tell what the most popular portlets are, determine which groups of users are accessing the Portal and when, and tell what types of content access and searches are being performed on a site.Multi-version upgrade - WebLogic Portal 10 enables customers to upgrade from 8.1 SP4 or later to WLP10 in the same manners they upgrade from 8.1 SP4 or later to Portal 9.2. Improved Propagation UI Enhancements - Usability of the inventory view in the offline propagation tool has been improved and a Change Type column has been added to indicate what will happen with particular items. Only Content Items which can be changed have the click box and identifiers of are now easier to understand as they use the labels, not IDs, when possible Does Not Contain, operator for roles - An additional operator called "Does Not Contain" is available to the Edit Roles Expression user interface providing the end user administrator more flexibility and will help simplify the construction of role expressions for certain cases where there are a large number of values for a given property and only a few of them cause an exclusion for an entitlement rule.Primary and secondary LDAP support - WebLogic Portal provides the ability to specify multiple DAPPropertyManagers that point to different LDAP repositories that contain the same user information enabling one to be designated as 'primary' and another as 'secondary', such that if 'primary' is unavailable, then the authentication request will roll to the 'secondary'.

Main Points: Portal propagation simplifies portal change management

Questions: None

Script:Another important aspect of Intelligent Administration how portal change management is handled. WebLogic Portal includes portal propagation tools that detail the inventory of source and destination portals then compare and merge the results giving you full visibility to what will change upon completion then with your initiation, will apply the changes to the destination.The propagation tools also have a command line interface which enables you to develop scripts to automatically propagate changes without manual intervention.

Background Info: New in WLP10Improved Propagation UI Enhancements: Usability of the inventory view in the offline propagation tool has been improved and a Change Type column has been added to indicate what will happen with particular items. Only Content Items which can be changed have the click box and identifiers of are now easier to understand as they use the labels, not IDs, when possible WSRP propagation support: The propagation tools now support exporting and importing portlet preferences associated with federated portlets fron one environment to another using the WLP Propagation tools.

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Main Points: Portal Business Services enable the rapid delivery of custom portals and mitigate risk by providing modular pre-integrated functionality

Questions: None

Script:Now that weve looked at the unified framework that supports enterprise portals and the lifecycle that simplifies building and managing portals lets take a look at Portal Business Services. They enable the rapid delivery of custom portals and mitigate risk by providing modular pre-integrated functionality. Deploy the services you need today with confidence that the services you need tomorrow are pre-integrated.

Main Points: Content management simplifies building portals and managing content repositories.

Questions: Do you have a content management system? How many?How many do you use for portal content? Do you use multiple content systems within the same portal? Do you want to?

Script:Portal Business Services includes content management with which you can create and manage portal content and content repositories. It includes check-in/check-out, versioning, approval of content, and the ability to incorporate custom approval workflows. It also provides the ability to aggregate access to multiple content systems by providing a virtual repository and the ability to define custom content types.Content management enables you to deploy a portal when an enterprise content management system is not required. It gives you the ability to manage multiple content systems and provide dynamic access to the content in all content systems.

Background Info: New in WLP10Content Presenter PortletBEA WebLogic Portal includes a content display portlet called the content presenter that is a wizard based business user tool to select content for display within a portlet. The portlet can be configured to display a content item, a folder full of content, the result of a content selector query, or the result of a keyword search.Content Selectors support content stateContent selectors are able to select content that is in a state other then published enabling applications to be built to providing the ability to preview new content on the page for certain groups of users, before it is published to the larger audience.WebDAV attribute supportBEA WebLogic Portal provides the ability for content posted into the CM repository via WebDAV to capture the properties of a document automatically on submit. For example, WebDAV will allow now automatically capture the author property of a word document when it is submitted into the CM system, and store that property as meta-data.Embedded Content ImagesBEA WebLogic Portal enables inserting an image from the CM repository into the WYWIWYG editor including images that have not yet been published. This will allow for a customer process that requires that only management can approve the final document with the image inserted instead of approving them separately. Long text string supportWebLogic Portal provides support for long text strings a means to larger text strings without having to resort to binary objects. Content Node OrderingThe WebLogic Portal content tools will store and display content nodes in an order which can be rearranged by the user and will be persisted in thatorder. This allows the administrator to determine the contentnode order which makes the most sense for their users (ratherthan in the order in which the nodes were created).Multi-value List OrderingThe WebLogic Portal content tools stores and displays multi-valued property values in the order they are entered. This allows a list of values to be provided in an order that makes the most sense for the content type. For example, a content type representing the address would typically display the street address before the city, and the city before the state.Multiple content selector characteristicsThe WebLogic Portal content tools for building content rules enable specifying multiple characteristic criteria like user is from a certain city, combined with a certain zip code.Content Summary Edit ButtonThe WebLogic Portal content tools now include a Edit button at the content summary page that enables directly editing of the content in the WYSIWYG editor.Image PreviewThe WebLogic Portal content tools provide image preview in the content summary page showing a reduced size image enabling users to quickly see the image associated with the content name.

Additional Detail:Portal Content Repository - WLP includes an out of the box content repository that can be used to create and store your portal content. This includes library services, which is custom workflow, versioning and check-in/check-out. If you wish to tie in a third party content repository at a later time, all data can be combined in the Virtual Content Repository with federated search and the other content tools, like content selectors and placeholders. Manage virtual repositories, support for JSR 170 - Provides the ability to manage and access multiple content repositories. You can create, read, update, and delete content in any of the repositories. It also includes the ability to manage repository hierarchies or schemas. These content repository capabilities support the JSR 170 standard.Content Presenter Portlet - BEA WebLogic Portal includes a content display portlet called the content presenter that is a wizard based business user tool to select content for display within a portlet. The portlet can be configured to display a content item, a folder full of content, the result of a content selector query, or the result of a keyword search.Content type management - Provides repository schema and taxonomy management for both the portal content repository and virtual content repositories.Content Contributor & manager tools - Portal content management includes user tools for content creators including a WYSISYG editor, custom workflow and library services, which will enable content contributors to create and manage their content easily.Content Integration - A Service Provider Interface (SPI) that complies with the JSR 170 standard provides a standard mechanism to integrate content systems. Provides the ability to integrate with third party content management systems into our virtual content repository. This content is then accessible by our federated search capability, content selectors and placeholders for use in the portal.Content events - Content events for configuring a repository, and content create, delete, and update enable notification and subsequent action based on these content changesFederated Access - Provides developers with a unified API to search multiple repositories (BEA repository, and 3rd party repositories) with a single search string. Custom Workflow - The ability to customize the workflow to better match customers' business processes. These can be associated with a specific content node, or can associated with types. Workflows can be inherited from parents. The customer just has to upload and associate the XML file.WebDAV - Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning standard. Enables the access, creation, and updating of content through any WebDAV-enabled tool, like Microsoft tools. For example, you can create content in Word and then drag and drop content via Microsoft Explorer into the Virtual Content Repository. WYSIWYG (Rich-text) editor - Enables content contributors to create and edit content right within the admin tools, without having to download the content. They will also find this tool very intuitive, since it is very much a Microsoft-like UI.Enhanced Content Cache - Provides both a global search cache and caching at the repository level for enhanced dynamic content performance. Schema Management - Provides repository schema or hierarchy management for both the portal content repository and virtual content repositories.Check in/ Check out - BEA WebLogic Portal provides content management with check-in and check-out capabilities that locks a file for further editing while it is checked out.Content Versioning - WebLogic Portal's content management capabilities enables versioning of content so one version can be separate from another. If necessary an older version of content can be made live replacing the current version.Content Approval - The content approval capabilities of WebLogic Portal provide the ability to promote content from an unapproved state to approved which makes it available on the site.Type Inheritance - Enables the content modeler to create a parent/child relationship with types. This means that any property definitions that are set at the parent level will be inherited down to the child level, thus reducing the hierarchy set up time significantly. However, if needed, you can always override the property settings at the child level if they are not applicable.Nested Types - Enables the content modeler to include full type definitions within other types. An example would be to create the type "address" and then reuse address twice within the definition of a person - work and home. This also fits in with type inheritance, as nested types can be inherited.JSR 170 - JSR170 (finalized in May 2005), allows customers to connect any JSR170-compliant repository to BEA's VCR without implementing the SPI. This allows for interoperability and flexibility to change the CM system as the customers' needs change. There is a growing list of CM vendors who will be supporting JSR170. However, if a customer wants to use a non-JSR170 repository, Day Software will be selling connectors to permit customers to do so. We will be supporting levels 1 and 2 of the JSR170 spec (this is read and write capabilities, but not the optional features). Templates - Gives users the ability to relate presentation attributes with content resources. They can register a JSP template for a given web application and content type, thus facilitating presentation code re-use and creating corporate standards.Link Properties - Enables customers to relate one content node to another. This can be bidirectional (who links to me and who do I link to?). It can be across repositories and can be a single item or you can link to multiple items. This feature will be used extensively in GroupSpace to associate a discussion topic with a document and a meeting, for example.Full Text Search - Via an improved integration with Autonomy. Asynchronous indexing process. Searchable properties can be user-defined through Autonomy tools.XML Import/Export - Supported via Propagation tooling, this provides the ability to easily import or export content.
Main Points: Enterprise search improves information visibility for portal visitors.

Questions: 1. Do you have a specific search vendor that you have standardized on?

Script:It provides full text searching across different virtual repositories of data and can search

BEA WebLogic Portal 10 Product Overview

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