Chris Lockhart

The world of WebSphere Portal Administration and configuration can be full of tedium and frustration. If you've ever manually constructed trees of portal places and pages, complete with containers and rows and portlets, you may have initially been quite satisfied with yourself. But the satisfaction may have turned rapidly into complete frustration when the portlet you painstakingly set permissions failed to appear when and where you expected it to! Is it an inheritance problem? Is my portlet activated? Will I meet the deadline for duplicating all of this in both QA and Production? Luckily, WebSphere Portal ships with several useful tools for automating configuration and repetitive administrative tasks. One of the most useful and quickest to understand is XMLAccess. No... (more)

Your Guide to Portal Clustering in WebSphere Portal Server 5.1

Some things in WebSphere PortalServer work well and are well documented. Other things are well documented and work well in theory. Still other things have okay documentation and will work well when all of the WebSphere stars are aligned. Depending on your implementation, Portal Clustering can fit into all three categories. De-Mystification Given the broad range of configurations open to an... (more)

WebSphere Portal Server 5.1 Your Guide to Clustering

There are some things with WebSphere PortalServer that work well and are well documented. There are other things that are well-documented and work well in theory. There are still other things that have okay documentation and will work well when all of the WebSphere stars are aligned. Depending on your implementation, Portal Clustering can fit into all three categories. De-Mystification Gi... (more)

The Portal Scripting Interface

One of the great advantages of the WebSphere software platform is that it's been built with a great deal of flexibility. A product simply wouldn't bear the WebSphere name if there weren't several different ways to do things. WebSphere Portal Server is no exception. With the release of version 5.1 IBM has added another way to administer the configuration of the Portal. This is sure to del... (more)

XMLAccess 101 Part 2: The Blank Portal

As a WebSphere AppServer or PortalServer administrator, your world can be a constant learning curve as new applications come along that utilize different aspects of the IBM middleware platforms. You may, for example, have mastered the art of deploying portal configurations using full or partial portal exports. This is convenient and easy to do. However, it may not give you the flexibilit... (more)