WPS Portal project

Are mashups the new portals and gadgets the new portlets?

2009-06-25T12:43:00.000-07:00

I think this article is of interest : Are mashups the new portals and gadgets the new portlets?

Basically the author presents some new ways of delivering "portlet like" use-experience, and how new web 2.0 technologies (like Ajax, or gadgets) can allow you to "build" a portlet containers by including your piece of information into any kind of page runtime (HTML, PHP, etc).

Even if, from a technical point of view, I do not think that portal software will dissapear, because I do think that portal provides much more features than a simple portlet rendering zone (like security management on Portlets), it is interesting to notice the new possibilites of web 2.0 technologies.

Also I can confirm that deploying a portal into a large company is really a challenge ! But I think that even if such project has a cost, and is of course technically and functionaly complexe to implement, this is clearly the best strategy if one want to reduce costs in the long term...

Some tuning consideration for WCM v6.1

2009-04-16T05:18:00.000-07:00

As we are currently trying to optimize our WCM custom development for v6.1, I would like to share with you the best practices that has been applied so far and which leads to really good performances improvements.

1/ WCM response time improvement

1.a/ Menu "tuning":

- Here the standard best practices should be applied (I will not detail that here) and this give good improvements.

- One thing that should be noticed is that the "Results per page" parameter should be carefully setted to the proper value in v6. This is a difference compare to WCM v5: in version 5, we did create a lots of menu without worrying about this parameter (some of the Menu "Results per page" parameter is set to 10.000 items !...I know this is not a best practice) and the impact on performance does not seems to be really important...but now in v6 it does matter because the impact on performance is very important for this option.

- For menu, the sorting option are also very important (please note that in v6 you can set the first sorting option only, like "Publish date", and then set the other 2 option to "None" to avoid duplicating the sorting treatments).

- Also for Menu, we did set the "Maximum pages to include" and "Pages to read ahead" parameter to value 1 (default is 10). This modification does improve performance. However, please note that there might be some security limitation, as per the wiki:

"For unsecure sites (where content is accessed anonymously or always accessed by the same user, eg. Administrator), set ‘Maximum pages to include’ and ‘Pages to read ahead’ to 1"

For more info about menu, see: Menu components

Other tuning recommendation for Menu can be found here: tuning-for-web-content-management

---------------------
1.b/ Use workspace.login() and logout() method even for short WCM treatment:

Firstly go to:
Web Content Management API Best Practices

and read the section regarding WCM "long running applications": the recommendation is to do the login and logout around "each" set of WCM API call. We did it in our case for the JSP Component launched by our WCM Local Rendering Portlet and this really maximixe performance !!! (even this is not a long running treatment, because the Portlet rendering time is around 100 ms).

After discussing with the support my understanding is that login/logouts commands are involved in the management of the JCR workspace object. The JCR workspace object should be considered as a set of data (set of JCR node). So it is something like a database pool connection and/or a resultset (set of data returned by the database), and the login command role is to force the "binding" or "loading" of the JCR workspace in memory.

---------------------
1.c/ Tuning rendering operation:

In our JSP Component (launched by our WCM Local Rendering Portlet) we used to launch the rendering as follows in v5:

rc.setRenderedContent(content, sitearea)

Instead in v6, it is recommended to use this instruction:

rc.setRenderedContent(String)

The string represents the path of the content and can be obtained by using workspace.getPathById(DocumentId id, boolean maintainCase, boolean
decodeURL). The id can be retrieved from content.getId().

This also really improve performance on the rendering side.

==========================================

2/ Problem that has not be solved so far:

One of the main problem which is still not solved in our case, is the management of the WCM categories:

In version 6, we have identified that retrieving categories assigned on a content items is a very slow operation: the following method takes around 2s to retrieve a list of 40 categories ID assigned to the content object:

DocumentId[] catIds = content.getCategoryIds();

We have applied CF9, but this does not solve the performance problem...
We have open a PMR for that...will let you know if we do any progress regarding this issue.

---------------------
Hope this will help.

Sun Microsystems and Liferay initiative

2009-03-18T03:20:00.000-07:00

Some news about open-source portal.

Keywords: Portal, Liferay, Sun, GlassFish, Web 2.0, Collaboration tool

Sun Microsystems and Liferay Launch Initiative to Develop Next-Generation Web Technologies

How to count WCM content items in v6 JCR database ?

2009-03-15T12:33:00.000-07:00

As we did have big performances issues in portal v5 due to the high number of WCM content items in our database, we have decided to continue monitoring this count also in v6.
Of course the new JCR design in v6, the WCM software is now supposed to support about 500.000 content entries....but anyway I think it is still a good idea to monitor the volume of data you have in your system (this could be useful to report that to your management, and/or just to prevent reaching the limit).

Now, in v6 counting and analyzing the number of items is little bit more complex than in v5, mainly because the JCR database design is really different compare to a standard SQL schema design.

Actually, the v5 database request for counting the total number of content items are quite similar:
- Old request (in v5):
select count(*) from AJPE where COMPONENT_TYPE='AJPE_CONTENTS'
- New request (in v6.x):
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM JCR.EV_ENTRY WHERE ITEMCLASS=1762875877

But the problem is that in JCR database, there is no simple 1 to 1 correspondancy between the WCM content items and the number of entries in db...
In v5, when creating a new content or deleting it, you can see that the count is simply increased (+1) or decreased (-1) accordingly, whatever the status of the content.

Now in v6 JCR model, here is the behaviour of the system:

Let's assume at start you have:
select count(ITEMID) from JCR.EV_ENTRY -> 39004
select count(ITEMID) from JCR.EV_ENTRY where ITEMCLASS=1762875877 -> 27818

I will give you more details in the next section below, but basically:
- select count(ITEMID) from JCR.EV_ENTRY : this request gives you the total number of WCM objects in the db (could be content, but also design elements).
- select count(ITEMID) from JCR.EV_ENTRY where ITEMCLASS=1762875877 : give you only the WCM content items (like news, etc), assuming in your db "1762875877" also corresponds to the content item object type.

After creating 1 Published content, you will see that the count is increased by "+2":
select count(ITEMID) from JCR.EV_ENTRY -> 39006
select count(ITEMID) from JCR.EV_ENTRY where ITEMCLASS=1762875877 -> 27820

After creating 1 new Draft content, you will see that the count is increased only by "+1":
select count(ITEMID) from JCR.EV_ENTRY -> 39007
select count(ITEMID) from JCR.EV_ENTRY where ITEMCLASS=1762875877 -> 27821

Also, please note that deleting content does not affect the above count values.

All these results clearly show that:
- 1 WCM content item can correspond to several JCR nodes,
- Deleting a WCM content will not necessarily decrease the database count (as content is probably not deleted physically, but its status might only be updated).

To validate this last hypothesis (regarding delete management), I did the following tests:

Get the total number of content items:
db2 => SELECT COUNT(*) FROM JCR.EV_ENTRY WHERE ITEMCLASS=1762875877
-----------
27818

Get the distinct 'ITEMTYPE' values that exist in the db:
db2 => SELECT DISTINCT ITEMTYPE FROM JCR.EV_ENTRY
ITEMTYPE
--------
D
L
P

Then check the corresponding content items count, depending on the 'ITEMTYPE':
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM JCR.EV_ENTRY WHERE ITEMCLASS=1762875877 AND ITEMTYPE='D'
=> 566
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM JCR.EV_ENTRY WHERE ITEMCLASS=1762875877 AND ITEMTYPE='L'
=> 0
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM JCR.EV_ENTRY WHERE ITEMCLASS=1762875877 AND ITEMTYPE='P'
=> 27252

Now we can see that the count of ITEMTYPE='P' and ITEMTYPE='D' is equal to the total 27818 of content items.

An obvious assumption is that 'D' corresponds to DRAFT contents, and 'P' to PUBLISHED content. These results match the status of our contents in our db : we have about 500 draft content items, and about 13.500 published content items (remind that a published item = 2 entries in JCR.EV_ENTRY table).

So basically, to evaluate the count of WCM content items, I think the following equation makes sense:
[SELECT COUNT(*) FROM JCR.EV_ENTRY WHERE ITEMCLASS=1762875877 AND ITEMTYPE='D'] + 0,5*[SELECT COUNT(*) FROM JCR.EV_ENTRY WHERE ITEMCLASS=1762875877 AND ITEMTYPE='P']

Note: I have no idea for the moment of what could be the meaning of ITEMTYPE='L' ? (if 'P' is published, and 'D' is draft, then it could correspond to EXPIRED status, but this count does not match our number of expired content....).

Hope this will help you to better understand the structure of the WCM JCR database. Also please find below the detail of the database requests I made to understand the model.

==========================
To connect to the JCR database, you first have to get the following values (in our case, we are using DB2):
# DbType: The type of database to be used for WebSphere Portal JCR domain
jcr.DbType=db2
jcr.DbName=jcrdbe6
jcr.DbSchema=jcr

v6.x PORTAL DATABASES configuration file can be found here:
/portal/WebSphere/wp_profile/ConfigEngine/
properties/wkplc_comp.properties

The table JCR.EV_ENTRY contains the reference to all the content items.

db2 => DESCRIBE TABLE JCR.EV_ENTRY
Column Type Type
name schema name Length Scale Nulls
------------------------------ --------- ------------------ -------- ----- ------
IGID SYSIBM CHARACTER 64 0 No
ITEMID SYSIBM CHARACTER 64 0 No
ITEMCLASS SYSIBM INTEGER 4 0 Yes
ITEMTYPE SYSIBM CHARACTER 1 0 No
STATE SYSIBM BIGINT 8 0 Yes
DELETED SYSIBM CHARACTER 1 0 Yes
PARENTID SYSIBM CHARACTER 64 0 Yes
TSTAMP SYSIBM TIMESTAMP 10 0 Yes

The table JCR.EV_TYPES gives you the list of WCM object types:

SELECT TYPENAME FROM JCR.EV_TYPES
com.ibm.workplace.wcm.services.library.Library
com.aptrix.pluto.site.Site
com.aptrix.pluto.site.SiteArea
com.aptrix.pluto.presentation.Template
com.aptrix.pluto.workflow.stages.WorkflowStage
com.aptrix.pluto.workflow.Workflow
com.aptrix.pluto.workflow.actions.PublishAction
com.aptrix.pluto.content.Content
com.aptrix.pluto.taxonomy.Taxonomy
com.aptrix.pluto.taxonomy.Category
com.aptrix.pluto.content.link.ContentLink
com.aptrix.pluto.presentation.Style
com.aptrix.pluto.workflow.actions.ExpireAction
com.aptrix.pluto.cmpnt.FileResourceCmpnt
com.aptrix.pluto.cmpnt.ImageResourceCmpnt
com.aptrix.pluto.cmpnt.MenuCmpnt
com.aptrix.pluto.cmpnt.HTMLCmpnt
com.aptrix.pluto.cmpnt.NavigatorCmpnt
com.aptrix.pluto.cmpnt.JSPCmpnt

The first field of the JCR.EV_TYPES tables is the object type ID than can be used to identify content in the JCR.EV_ENTRY table. Based on the list below, the value 1762875877 corresponds to the ITEMCLASS column in the JCR.EV_ENTRY table.

SELECT * FROM JCR.EV_TYPES
473104548 com.ibm.workplace.wcm.services.library.Library
298371183 com.aptrix.pluto.site.Site
-161464932 com.aptrix.pluto.site.SiteArea
1494027823 com.aptrix.pluto.presentation.Template
-325197706 com.aptrix.pluto.workflow.stages.WorkflowStage
540603119 com.aptrix.pluto.workflow.Workflow
1448064964 com.aptrix.pluto.workflow.actions.PublishAction
176287587 com.aptrix.pluto.content.Content
-1290676433 com.aptrix.pluto.taxonomy.Taxonomy
-977641252 com.aptrix.pluto.taxonomy.Category
-965915661 com.aptrix.pluto.content.link.ContentLink
629030940 com.aptrix.pluto.presentation.Style
-1363088202 com.aptrix.pluto.workflow.actions.ExpireAction
858827521 com.aptrix.pluto.cmpnt.FileResourceCmpnt
-1535525020 com.aptrix.pluto.cmpnt.ImageResourceCmpnt
-1598427284 com.aptrix.pluto.cmpnt.MenuCmpnt
-1110739776 com.aptrix.pluto.cmpnt.HTMLCmpnt
538485974 com.aptrix.pluto.cmpnt.NavigatorCmpnt
1671285158 com.aptrix.pluto.cmpnt.JSPCmpnt

New blog about Alfresco and Share

2009-03-12T14:19:00.000-07:00

I just would like to let you know that I have created this new blog about Alfresco DM and the Share collaboration tool. For more info see

The role of Alfresco is growing more and more each day in our company, and it is becoming popular very quickly (I would say even more quickly than the underlying infrastructure :-)
So it's time to start a new blog dedicated to this solution.

And as we have connected Alfresco with our Portal (through a custom JSR 168 Portlet), I will continue to post news about this integration here in this blog.

How to copy WCM v6.x JCR database ?

2009-03-12T09:11:00.000-07:00

As we have a big WCM content repository (more than 18.000 content items now) we have tried to write a procedure in order to be able to quickly copy an existing v6.x WCM database and to restore it on a target portal system.

This experience was interesting, and I discover that the process is quite different than the one we used in WCM v5.x.Basically, in v5.x, we simply had to do a backup/restore of the (DB2) database, then delete WCM index on the target, and after restarting the portal, everything was working fine...but now with v6.x JCR database format it's a little bit more complex...

The problem is that v6 Portal (or WCM ?) system creates dynamically JCR table view (and tables ?) at startup. Moreover, it seems that standard
database backup process (to copy database) does not copy this tables and tables views. I have no idea of why exactly, but this problem is described
at leat on z/OS (See : Workspace Validation utility to verify JCR Workspace database views are in sync for DB2 on z/OS).

So after restoring WCM database copy, and starting the portal, we had the following errors in the logs:
Caused by: com.ibm.content.exception.ServiceException: javax.jcr.RepositoryException: DB2 SQL error: SQLCODE: -204, SQLSTATE: 42704, SQLERRMC:
JCR.ICMSTJCRL00001Thread 430447016 : lException: DB2 SQL error: SQLCODE: -204, SQLSTATE: 42704, SQLERRMC: JCR.ICMSTJCRL00001

Basically, this means that the table "JCR.ICMSTJCRL00001" was missing on the target portal...

After checking the list of existing tables on the target portal, and compare it with the source, I have seen that a lots of tables were missing on
v6.x.On the target portal, the following kind of tables was not available:
ICMSTJCRN00001, ICMSTJCRN00002, ICMSTJCRN00003, ICMSTJCRN0000x, etc
ICMSTJCRL00001, ICMSTJCRL00002, ICMSTJCRL00003, ICMSTJCRL0000x, etc

Running the command "db2 list tables for schema jcr" reported about 2988 records tables in the v6 source, and only 875 record(s) in the v6 target.
We have asked the DBA why this table was not copied by the DB2 backup/copy process ? (but I have no reply so far, he is still doing some tests).

So I have tried to fix it by myself :-)
Here is the solution I found (please note that this solution might NOT be supported by IBM, I still have to open a PMR to confirm it is):

Based on the previous article (see), I add the option:

jcr.workspace.view.validation=FIX

in the "/portal/WebSphere/wp_profile/PortalServer/jcr/lib/
com/ibm/icm/icm.properties" config file (I first tried with value "REPORT"), and then restart the portal.
(please not that our portal is running on AIX, not z/OS, but this option seems to work anyway)...

In the log file I have seen that the portal (WCM ?) was creating table views at startup:
[3/12/09 11:40:46:915 CET] 00000019 WorkspaceUtil I com.ibm.icm.da.portable.data.WorkspaceUtils validate Workspace Validation is starting. [3/12/09 11:40:47:439 CET] 00000019 WorkspaceUtil W com.ibm.icm.da.portable.data.WorkspaceUtils validate Workspace Validation has discovered the
following Database View(s) are missing. Please run the Validation utility with the FIX option to recreate: ICMSTJCRN00548 ICMSTJCRL00548
ICMSTJCRLR00548 ICMSTJCRLV00548 [3/12/09 11:40:47:452 CET] 00000019 WorkspaceUtil W com.ibm.icm.da.portable.data.WorkspaceUtils validate Workspace Validation has discovered the
following Database View(s) are missing. Please run the Validation utility with the FIX option to recreate: ICMSTJCRN00538 ICMSTJCRL00538
ICMSTJCRLR00538 ICMSTJCRLV00538

And after startup, I was able to see that all the missing tables (JCR.ICMSTJCRL00001, ICMSTJCRL00002, ICMSTJCRL00003, and also ICMSTJCRLV00001, etc,
etc) has been created.
The command "db2 list tables for schema jcr" now report a similar number of tables on the target v6 portal.

Now, I can see that WCM Content library is available in the portal admin interface, and that WCM Portlet rendering is working fine.

However, just a "minor" issue: after starting the portal I had a lots of "JURU" or "indexing" traces in the logs: I think it's because the JCR text search indexer was trying to rebuild WCM data index.
So I did set this option to false, to stop this process (and restart the portal):

jcr.textsearch.enabled=false(in /portal/WebSphere/wp_profile/PortalServer/jcr/lib/
com/ibm/icm/icm.properties)

That's all. Hope this will help you....If some of you also did try a similar process to copy WCM v6 database, do not hesitate to give your feedback.

------------------------
Also, for more information about this topic:

See this IBM article : Java Content Repository (JCR) information and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for IBM Web Content Management (WCM)

See also this post on Vivek Agarwal's Blog, who had a quite similar issue on Quickr : Resolved an exception stacktrace related to Quickr/WebSphere Portal search tables

Testing of Alfresco SHARE Labs 3d version

2009-02-19T13:01:00.000-08:00

I'm currently testing the latest community version of Share (Labs 3d).

It has been really improved compared to previous version...one example is that now the Calendar is fully working. Also site members management has been significantly improved. This version seems really more stable and finalized.

I think this version is user-friendly enough to be opened to end-users and let them create their site (team space) without any help.

Main features are:
- User Dashboard,
- Document library (based on Alfresco Document Management repository),
- Blog,
- Forum,
- Wiki (quite simple for the moment),
- Calendar,
- Links (bookmarks management),

New site creation is very easy and quick.

So my global feeling about this new version is very good.
I'm now waiting for Enterprise version 3.1 (based on Community 3d version) to be able to test it in our company (scheduled for february 2009).....

IBM Licenses Ephox EditLive! for IBM WCM EOM agreement

2009-02-08T07:57:00.000-08:00

IBM has signed an OEM agreement with Ephox to license EditLive! for IBM WCM. This agreement means all
IBM Lotus Web Content Management customers will now have access to the
best HTML editor on the market, fully integrated into their WCM platform.

Source: http://blog.ephox.com/weblog/2009/01/announcement-ibm-licenses-editlive-for-ibm-lotus-web-content-management.html

I think this is a good news for all WCM users. We did evaluate Ephox RTE a few month ago and it provides a lot of very really usefuls features...but the cost was quite important at the time.

So now I think we will consider using this RTE in our project asap.

New JSR-286 rendering portlets for Lotus Web Content Management

2009-02-08T07:38:00.000-08:00

FYI, the JSR 286 version of the WCM Rendering Portlet is now available for download from the Portlet Catalog.

====================
IBM annoucement:
The IBM® Lotus® Web Content Management Rendering Portlet provided with this package is a solution which updates and improves how the rendering of Web content is performed in IBM WebSphere® Portal. While the existing Web Content Viewer portlet (referred to in the WebSphere Portal documentation as a "rendering portlet") has evolved throughout several versions to implement sophisticated Web content rendering functions, it is still based on the deprecated IBM Portlet API. By contrast, the new JSR 286 Web Content Viewer has been entirely redeveloped based on the Java™ Portlet Specification 2.0 (JSR 286). In addition to the benefits afforded by JSR 286, the JSR 286 Web Content Viewer in this package also enables other features for Web content management, such as a new Web content portal page type and support for the standard search seedlist 1.0 format.

====================

For more information:IBM Lotus Web Content Management Rendering Portlet JSR 286

I did not test this Portlet so far, so I cannot give you any feedback for the moment...but if some of you already tested it your results and feedback are of interest for me...

I think we will test it asap, because I would like to get the following info:
- This new release means that the WCM Portlet delivered with 6.1.x WPS version is still based on the deprecated IBM Portlet API...So will this new release update the current existing Portlet clones we have created so far...(I don't think so, but would like to make sure).
- What about the WCM remote rendering Portlet (is it included in the same package) ?
- Does this new release support the CSA (Client Side Aggregation)...? (I know that previous 6.x release of the WCM Portlet does not support CSA, so this would be a major improvement).

Will let you know about our tests...

WebSphere Portal configuration : where are config and log files in v6.x ?

2009-02-07T05:14:00.001-08:00

A lot's of things have changed in WebSphere Portal v6.0 and even more in 6.1.
Sometimes I spend a few minutes looking for a configuration file that has been moved to another folder and/or renamed....For those like me who are a little bit lost, here is a list of common v6.x config. files you need to work with frequently, and their correspondancy with v5.x

Basically, all the Portal and WCM config. files are now moved to : "/portal/WebSphere/wp_profile".

v6 logs file for WPS + WCM:
Now you will find most of the traces in:
/portal/WebSphere/wp_profile/logs/WebSphere_Portal/SystemOut.log

In v5, the corresponding files are :
[PortalServer root]/log/SystemOut.log
+
[PortalServer root]/log/wps_yyyy.mm.dd-hh.mm.ss.log
+
[PortalServer root]/wcm/shared/app/config/aptrixjpe.properties and connect.cfg
)

Please note that by default there are no more specific WCM log (like connect.log). Now WCM log traces output is located in SystemOut.log. (However, it is probably possible to configure the trace management system in WAS console to clearly separate WPS and WCM logs, as it was before in v5).

---------

WCM v6.x Config file (replace previous v5 aptrixjpe.properties and connect.cfg):
/portal/WebSphere/wp_profile/PortalServer/wcm/shared/app/config/
wcmservices/WCMConfigService.properties

---------

See the current fix level of the WPS application:
/portal/WebSphere/wp_profile/PortalServer/log/VersionInfo.log

---------

VMM LDAP configuration and mapping (if security is enabled):
/portal/WebSphere/wp_profile/ConfigEngine/properties/wkplc.properties

(equivalent to v5 file : [PortalServer root]/wmm/wmmLDAPServerAttributes.xml)

---------

v6.x PORTAL DATABASES configuration:
/portal/WebSphere/wp_profile/ConfigEngine/
properties/wkplc_comp.properties

---------

Hope this will help you....

Alfresco DM and Share application installation modes

2009-01-03T05:41:00.000-08:00

Today I have tested the new Alfresco Enterprise version (3.0 SP1) as well as the embedded Share application.

Firstly, my feeling is that this version is much more stable than previous 3.0 release (there were a lot of look&feel bug, especially with IE).

I've done a few tests only regarding the collaborative features (like blog, etc) because I wanted mainly to test the distinct installation options (local or remote) between Alfresco DM and Share.

That's a key feature for us, because we want to share the documents between our collaboration solution and our DM solution, but we would like also to have a clearly decoupled architecture to ease configuration/maintenance, but also give us the ability to better manage scalability.

I can say that it is very easy to set-up the 3 main architecture implementations mode. You have basically 3 possibility ; you can install:
1/ Alfresco DM and Share on the same Tomcat server (this is the default option). In this case both web application will run in the same JVM.

2/ Alfresco DM and Share can be installed on 2 separate Tomcat java application servers (on the same machine).

3/ Or you can install share on a distinct machine and connect it to the remote DM repository. It is as simple as modifying a configuration file, because Share as been designed to be installed remotely.

With the third option (the one we will probably choose in our compagny), Share is loosely coupled with the DM, and the communication is managed only through http based on the Alfresco web scripts (REST style implementation).
These 2 separate servers installation mode allows to completely separate the collaborative and the DM solution. This improve the scalability of the global architecture, but you can still share the documents.
Indeed, if you create a new Site in Share, then it will appears automatically as a space in Alfresco DM:
Company Home > Sites > MyShareSite > documentLibrary > rootfolderOfMyShareSite

So the documentLibrary module of Share is directly exposed as an Alfresco node, and you can browse it's content as any other space.

One limitation however in this release...It seems that documents that are uploaded in a Share site can be edited only from Share (and not from Alfresco DM application). It is clearly mentionned in Alfresco because the following message is displayed in the Alfresco web UI:
"This space is managed by Alfresco Share. Please use the Alfresco Share application to work with content within this space and any sub-spaces." However, I was able to lock and unlock Share documents from the Alfresco web UI, so editing seems to works even if the warning message is displayed...will have to do more tests.

So far tests are quite positive...so we will probably quickly do a proof of concepts with a few users to test if the new Share application can be used as a production service.

Is Alfresco share a light Quickr/Portal solution ?

2008-12-30T08:46:00.001-08:00

A few weeks ago Alfresco presented us their new Share plateform. Basically, Share is a solution for collaboration which includes features like document management, team spaces, web content management, calendar, wiki, blog, rich profile, etc.

You can find a feature list here.

As a portal architect I was quite surprised to see that the technical concepts and design of the Share solution is very similar to a portal software design, and that it can be compared in some extend to the IBM Quickr product.
Even if Share does not rely on concepts such as JSR Portlet or Portlet container, I think it is interesting to compare these 2 approaches and their similarities:

First, creating a new Share Site (team space) is very similar to creating a new team Place in Quickr. In Quickr this leads to the creation of a Composite Application instance (set of pages with predefined portlets like PDM, wiki based on ILWWCM, tasks, etc). In Alfresco a 'Site' object is instantiated (it contains also a set of 'pages' with features like document library, calendar, tasks, etc).

In alfresco you can manage the ACL at the team space level (Site), and you can assign a friendly-url to access the space directly. In Quickr you can manage role applied on the composite app. instance, and I think you can also set an url mapping to access the place.

In both product, there is a concept of page, and you can manage the layout with columns and lines to organize components in page.

Page components in Quickr corresponds to Portlet (business components). Alfresco Share rendering elements are based on Dashlet. In both case the Portlet or Dashlet is reponsible for the rendering (data can be extracted from the local repository, but you can also consume feeds or web services, or even connect to a remote back-end).

The concept of customizable Theme & Skinks is quite the same in both products: because the look & feel is based on .jsp files you can easily change the layout if you have some web developper skills in your team.

Finally, I think that Share is based on principles which are very similar to portal concepts.
This is probably because Alfresco is trying to propose an alternative to solutions like IBM Quickr or MS Sharepoint....

My feeling is that Share can be considered as a 'Quickr light' solution. It is probably still not as much powerful as a Quickr Websphere portal based architecture....however it should be much easier to install and manage....My assumption is also that Share is probably much more scalable than Quickr J2EE version.
I think that we will test Share in the next weeks, and compare it with Quickr....so I will keep you up to date on this blog about our conclusions.

Migrating from Portal Document Manager (PDM) to Quickr Document Libraries

2008-12-30T08:30:00.000-08:00

I've found this article on the Websphere Portal wiki : Migrating from Portal Document Manager (PDM) to Quickr Document Libraries

There is nothing really new, but this is a good synthesis for those who need to migrate their PDM data to Quickr, and also that needs to integrate Quickr with WebSphere Portal.

Alfresco releases first CMIS implementation

2008-12-01T13:00:00.000-08:00

This post on John Newton's blog (CTO of Alfresco) about the CMIS standard is of interest for everyone who is dealing with document and web content management systems:

For those who are not aware of CMIS, it stands for Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) and it "promises to become the SQL for Content Management".

No doubt that it has a big potential...the futur will tell us if this will be a revolution or not.

Alfresco releases first CMIS implementation

My feeling is that it will quickly become a widely adopted standard, like SQL or REST...

Migrating from PDM to Alfresco

2008-11-08T01:53:00.000-08:00

Migrating from PDM to Alfresco

As PDM will not exist in WPS 6.1, we are currently migrating all our PDM Libraries to Alfresco document management system.

Basically, our approach is to create a root space in Alfresco for each PDM library, and to replace the standard PDM authoring Portlet by our (custom) Alfresco Portlet.

I would like to describe briefly here how we plan to do the migration and the main challenges we are currently facing:

A/ Extracting data from PDM:

First you should know that extracting document from PDM is not that easy:

A.1/ You have to install the 'PDM export tool' (specific fix required to be installed on WPS).

(Note: you might experience some trouble to configure this tool, especially if you use LDAP security....try to use LDAP 'dn' for admin account user login in this case, and make sure the lower/smaller case for login is correct).

A.2/ The role of the PDM export tools is to export all Libraries data (folders, files, security, etc) on the filesystem: you can choose between 2 modes:
- File mode will export everything into a single big XML file.
- Folder mode will export a tree structure of several distinct file nodes corresponding to the PDM folders and files.
In both case the structure will look like a JCR like nodes tree.
If you have large amount of data, then the Folder mode is probably most appropriate because it will output a lots of single file nodes rather than a big one (please not that there is no option to export one library at a time, but only all libraries existing on the portal server).
In our case we have 24 GB of data and export runned during approx. 10 hours, but the task was successful.

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B/ Readind PDM data:

Then you will have to be able to read and browse this XML JCR tree (files are 64 bits encoded) to get data before doing the import in the target server.

To do that we will have chosen to work with an IT partner which is specialist of this type of document migration.

Some of them provide packaged connector (between pdm and afresco), other provide custom batch script....depending on your budget and your need each approach has pros and cons.

Obviously, benefits of connectors are that they can usually plug-in directly on the pdm data source, so that you do not have to export your PDM data (which is a long process). As a result you can re-run the synchronisation more than one time if needed.
Batch scripts (which read the xml extracted data) have more constraints because you might need to re-do the extract, but could also be less expensive.

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C/ Import data in Alfresco:

To do the import in Alfresco one could use either the API, or the existing WebService (or even the Alfresco option for archive bulk upload).
What is the most difficult during the import is to make sure one will not loose any meta-data (e.g retrieving the same last modification time than the initial document seems feasible, but then in Alfresco I think we will have to create a custom fields to store the initial value).
Also, we will have to think about how to do the mapping between the PDM security and the corresponding role in Alfresco...

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D/ Replace IBM PDM portlet:

Finally we will have to replace all the IBM PDM portlet by the Alfresco portlet. We will do that manually.

We had to identify all our IBM PDM portlet to be able to create the corresponding new instances of the Alfresco Portlet. To do that we 'simply' used a xmlaccess export file containing all PDM Portlet of our website, and then we used ant/xsl treatments to get an excel list which is more human readable.
Basically, the xls file should contain all PDM libraries, and for each Library all associated Portlets (including Portlet ACL, PDM default folder, etc).
Corresponding Alfresco Portlet will be created manually.

------------------

We will start the real data migration in a few weeks, so I will try to share with you the next steps in a future posting.

See other blog entries

Alfresco Share : the new MS Sharepoint (and Quickr) killer ?

2008-10-19T13:14:00.000-07:00

Last week I attend the Alfresco European Community conference in Munich Germany. There were some really exciting news about the Alfresco solution, and especially the sharepoint protocole for the Alfresco document management product, and also the new Alfresco SHARE collaborative solution.

I'm not familiar with Microsoft Sharepoint, but my understanding is that the Alfresco Share software is clearly provided as an alternative for the microsoft product.
SHARE offers most of the features that are now included in collaboration product (Tasks list, Calendar, Document management, blog, wiki, forum, etc). The Share platform uses of course the powerful Document Management options of the Alfresco repository (Share can be installed on top of Alfresco DM, or on a separate application server and connected remotely to the repository).

The share server runs Dashlet components (which are very similar to Portlets), and it is possible to extend the Share features by adding new custom Dashlets.

Moreover, Alfresco has now implemented the MS Sharepoint protocole and the Alfresco server can now be exposed a standard Sharepoint server. That means that it is considered as a standard Sharepoint server from the MS Office client (e.g in Word, you can connect to the Alfresco solution and manage the checkin-checkout on a document, exactly as if you were speaking to a Sharepoint server).
For the moment, all the sharepoint protocole is not implemented: for instance, there is still no way to connect Alfresco with the Outlook client...but I'm sure Alfresco will provide such feature very soon.

The goal of Share is to easily create and manage Sites (which are similar to small web site dedicated to a specific Project management). With a few clicks you can set-up a new Site and invite users to work on a new project.

So with the Share software, Alfresco now offers a collaborative solution, as well as a strong document management repository. It is clearly an alternative for MS Sharepoint customers.
I'm also sure that Share is also a big challenger for IBM Lotus Quickr :-)

Merging Websphere Portal and Quickr ?

2008-10-19T12:32:00.000-07:00

According to IBM, there are still no plan to merge the WebSphere Portal and the Quickr product into a single software solution.
Moreover, most people say that they will remain two distinct softwares, because one main technical limitation is of course that a single JVM can hardly support both runtime.
So the roadmap is likely to manage these 2 solutions separately, but provide various facilities and option to implement a seamless integration for end-users.

For instance, integration can be based on REST services exposed by Quickr (and at the portal level, the RSS Portlet can be used).
Also the new webapp integrator tool seems to be a good way to "merge" the navigation of portal and quickr.
There are also some WP Portlet that can show the list of space the portal user is member of (simple link to access the remote Quickr server).

I found this article which describe how to integrate WCM (portal side) with Quickr:

Photo Book for IBM Lotus Quickr services for WebSphere Portal

The proposed approach is to consume the Quickr REST service from the WCM API, and to store link to Quickr data into WCM content.

Also, for those how think about running their WP Portlet directly on the Quickr server, you should know that even if your Portlet should run without any modification (assuming it is a JSR 168 Portlet), you will probably have to customize your Portlet code to transform it as a Quickr Business Component.
Basically, a Quickr Business Component is a Portlet which implements some Quickr java interfaces to manage the life cycle of the component and to ensure it will plug properly into the template application model of Quickr. For instance, by implementing these interfaces, you will ensure that the ACL applied on the composite application will be propagated also on all components (Portlets) included in the application.

Limit with number of content items in WCM v5.x ? (Part 2)

2008-10-09T13:15:00.000-07:00

Part 1

As you might know, I was in berlin for the WP conference and I got clear and also official informations about the wcm limit. I would like to share these info so that everybody could have the same background info:

- According to IBM, there is clearly a scalability issue with WCM v5,- Technically it is due to a limitation in the management of wcm indexes (which are partially stored in memory),
- The limit is not 'hardcoded' but deeply depends on the hardware configuration (especially memory),
- The limit which is observed usually for v5 is about 50.000 (but some customers have created more than that),
- If the limit is reached the impact is different depending on the server type:
- rendering server perf degrade slowly with the increasing number of items,
- however authoring server perf degradation is usually quicker and significant.

Note: even if some customer can manage more than 50.000 issues (sometimes up to 80.000 ?) that does not mean that your system will be able to support the same volume. It just shows that it is technically possible to do, but not that the system is still fully usable or offers acceptable performances.Also depending of the hardware configuration limit can vary significantly.

The only workaround solution in v5 seems to be to split of the authoring database in 2 parts (to reduce the number of items managed in each repository). FYI, we will work with the IBM support on this Authoring split scenario (please note that feasibility still has to be validated). But this should be considered as a plan B only as this would be a quite big effort for us to set-up (3 authoring server are required basically). So I hope the workaround solution will be provided by the support as a fix (assuming management of indexes could be improved in the application).

Websphere Portal conference Berlin 2008 / WP 6.1 feedback

2008-10-09T12:41:00.000-07:00

This week I was in the WP conference in Berlin. Of course there are a lots of news I would like to share, but as I do not have the time yet, I just would like to share my overall feedback about the new 6.1 portal release.

First I would like to thank all IBMers I had the opportunity to met there, as they provided very valuable info and help me a lot. I really think that success of portal projects, as any highly technical and complexe project, mainly depends on people and competencies involved. So it is always very important to have the good resource or info at the right time. WP conference is a good way to gather such infos.

What about 6.1 ? Well to summarize I would say that:
- This is now a mature release (from the java standard implementation point of view),
- It is more open than ever (REST, new API, etc),
- Some really good new features (especially Client Side Aggregation),
- The roadmap of some features is not 'consistent' (or some bug/limitations exists),
- Migration effort from previous release 5.x is still very high.

------

Let me detail these topics:

>> Software design maturity:
- WCM data are now moved to JCR repository (the WCM has been completely re-designed),
- JSR 286 seems to be already implemented and supported (at least the major features like portlet cooperation).

All of these will allow customers to build custom solution on stable standards and without worrying about future migration, at least for a while.

---------

>> Plateform openess:
- A lots of portal features are now exposed through REST (atom) Web Services (or even new API). For instance you can access to the portal navigation (pages list) as a feed, or get the profil/membership of a user,
- Even WCM does offers REST facilities to manage content (CRUD operations are supported on content and sitearea).
- For some part of the code (e.g the WCM multi-language assets), IBM is also thinking about an open-source approach...

I'm sure this openess will really give the opportunity to extend existing features or to build new ones easily....that is clearly a good evolution.

----------

>> Cool new features:
- For me the major one is clearly CSA 'Client Side Aggregation' (assuming it is working well, this will clearly be a real improvement for navigation user-experience and page response time),
- Another good evolution is Remember me cookie (allow to identify the user without prompting for authentication, and so provide the ability to personalize some infos).
- WCM inline editing (6.0 feature).

These are at least the 3 main features we will surely integrate in our portal....but only once the 'as is' migration to 6.1 will be completed....

--------

>> Roadmap inconsistency, limitations:
- PDM does not exists in 6.1 anymore, but scripts to perform migration to 'Quickr PDM' will be provided only for Q1 2009 (reminder : end of support for v5 was sept 2008),
- Under IE, the CSA does not work for the WCM Rendering portlet (this is a bug that should be fixed soon),
- The role 'identified' (remember me cookie) is not implemented in WCM 6.1 (should be only in next version 7).

Well, I would just say that roadmap could have been better aligned....I know it is easy to say, but more difficult to do...

---------

>> Migration effort: you know my opinion about that. Even if migration scripts are supposed to be improved in 6.1 (and also better tested than for 6.0), the principle of side-by-side installation is still the same...this is still a MAJOR effort for customers to migrate to 6.1....

---------

In conclusion:
- 6.1 release is a major evolution (especially regarding the WCM software new technical design),
- Some evolutions are really an improvement for customer (but of course it depends on your project needs),
- Finally, I let you decide either or not the cost of migration is justified compare to these new benefits ;-)

Limit with number of content items in WCM v5.x ?

2008-10-02T12:57:00.000-07:00

As we currently experience crash of our portal production cluster, we have been in contact with IBM support. Of course, as we are still on v5.x, one of the first recommendation of the support was to migrate asap to v6.

But another feedback was that our crash issues (high cpu et frequent gc cycle) might also be due to some limit in the number of content items in WCM v5.x...
Indeed, our current total count of items is about 40.000, and some interlocutor at the support told us that some performances issues could be experienced with such a volume of data (either 40 or 50.000 items).
This was of course a very bad news for us, and a major risk for our portal...

On the other side, IBM tech sales expert told us that there is actually no pre-defined limit at the application level...however, as the WCM system stores a lot of data in memory (as caches, indexes, etc) the limit is the one of the hardware system: it is mainly the JVM memory that is the first bottleneck, but it could be also the CPU or the disk I/O...

So yes I think we can consider that there is a limit due to the design of the WCM application, even if this limit depends on the memory and hardware components.

The symptoms (if you think you might experience such problem) is supposed to be a slow degradation of system performances...So you will not see a sudden crash, but rather a chronic performance issue.

Another interesting information: IBM also told us that a few of their customers have been able to create and use WCM databases with more than 50.000 items (even 80.000 ?). So it is possible...

By the way, we still didn't found the cause of our portal crashes (but it is probably due to another problem than a system limit).
Another comment: since approx 2 month, our WCM authoring system is becoming more and more slow...IBM support is investigating and currently check if the problem is not related to WCM indexes....I hope we are not reaching the indexes limit :-)

Websphere Portal v6.1 News (Sept 2008)

2008-09-25T01:40:00.000-07:00

To be honest I didn't have the time to read these ressources about v6.1 new features or migration path, but I'm sure some of them will be helpful for all of you which are "trying to determine whether to upgrade to WebSphere Portal V6.1 but want to better understand the benefits and migration considerations":

New WebSphere Portal Reviewer's Guide now available!

Are you wondering what Web 2.0 features, open standards and related technologies are supported by the latest WebSphere Portal release? If so, the new WebSphere Portal Version 6.1 Reviewers Guide is the document you've been waiting for! Created to provide an overview of new features and functions, and the business value such features and functions provide, the Reviewer's Guide includes more than fifty pages of information accompanied by numerous illustrations and screen captures. Whether you're looking for the latest information about WebSphere Portal, Version 6.1, IBM accelerators, WebSphere Portal-based industry solutions, related technologies and services, or IBM Business Partner solutions, the new Reviewer’s Guide can help.

Download the new Reviewer's Guide (PDF, 8 MB)

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Webcast: IBM WebSphere Portal V6.1 Web 2.0 capabilities (for developers)

In this recorded presentation, find out what is "under the hood" in the new WebSphere Portal V6.1 release and learn how cool new Web 2.0 features complement enterprise portal applications.

Listen to this webcast

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IBM WebSphere Portal Developers Talk to You, an interactive discussion (for developers)

During an open-mike session, IBM WebSphere Portal product experts and market thought leaders provide insight into the recently released IBM WebSphere Portal V6.1 release and its Web 2.0 capabilities.

Listen to this webcast

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ISSL ExpertBriefing: Upgrading to WebSphere Portal V6.1

Are you trying to determine whether to upgrade to WebSphere Portal V6.1 but want to better understand the benefits and migration considerations? Listen to the ISSL ExpertBriefing podcast on WebSphere Portal V6.1 upgrades to hear solution architects from IBM Software Services for Lotus (ISSL) discuss the benefits of using version 6.1 and what to take into consideration when planning a portal deployment or migration project.

Listen to the ISSL ExpertBriefing on WebSphere Portal 6.1 upgrades

Replicating a portal between Europe and Asia

2008-09-23T12:29:00.000-07:00

We currently are working on new project to set-up a replica of our European portal instance in Asia. This is not a common portal deployment project, so I would like to share this challenge with you, and see if some of you could have implemented a similar architecture...

In our case, this duplication of instances is required mainly because of bandwith limitations: our intranet users in Asia experience very bed response time when connecting to the "remote" European portal (network latency is the main issue).
Using local proxy was not an option because in our context it is hard to ensure that every Asian user can use a proxy. Moreover, we have several dynamic webapplication integrated to the portal (and these application are not easily cacheable).

So we have decided to install a replica (mirror) in Asia with its own local database and LDAP.

This architecture will require to replicate 3 kinds of data:
- LDAP data (using the standard LDAP replication mechanism),
- WCM Content (using the WCM standard syndication),
- Websphere portal pages: in this case we will do a custom development (based on xmlaccess) to synchronize page from both portal.

We plan to implement a master/master data flow to give the opportunity for our authors to create content locally (to ensure better performances).

Installation of the Asia instance is currently under way, so I will keep posting on the subject in the next weeks.

For the moment, the bigger issue we are experiencing is due to the size of our WCM repository. As it is bigger than 10 GB, we have to initialize the remote WCM database using a dump file (and then enable the syndication). However, for the moment, our local tests are not working; after importing the dump on the subscriber server, enabling syndication cause the subsciber server to crash...we are currently working with the support to try to fix this problem.

Migration path for Portal 6.0.x to 6.1 ?

2008-08-22T09:36:00.000-07:00

I was looking for information about what could be the effort to migrate from 5.1 to 6.1, compared to doing a two step approach (5.1 to 6.0.x, pause, 6.0.x to 6.1).

Actually, the second approach is for the moment not supported:

"Migration to IBM® WebSphere® Portal version 6.1 is being delivered in two phases. The first phase, available today, is migration from version 5.1 to 6.1. Migration from version 6.0 to 6.1, and of the Document Manager content, will be available in the near future."

"Full support for migration from WebSphere Portal version 6.0.1.x to 6.1 is not immediately available and will be provided pending final approval and release by IBM Quality Engineering. Instructions for migrating from version 6.0.1.x are therefore subject to change and will be revised as needed. For updated announcements regarding migration from WebSphere Portal version 6.0.1.x, check the page Migration Central for WebSphere Portal and Web Content Management."

More information here

To get some more information about the effort , I have also posted the question on the 6.1 forum: see

Looking for information to migrate from WP v5 to v6 ?

2008-08-22T09:16:00.000-07:00

This ressource seems to aggregate most of the information related to migration:
Migration Central for WebSphere Portal and Web Content Management

"Resource collection of links and information designed to help you plan, test, troubleshoot and implement an effective Migration from a previous release of IBM® WebSphere® Portal and Workplace Web Content Management™ to a later release."

More news about the replacement of PDM (migration to quickr)

2008-08-22T08:33:00.000-07:00

Still about the replacement of the PDM tool in portal v6.1, the strategy of IBM is now clearer, as stated in the infocenter 6.1:

Document Manager is not available in WebSphere Portal Version 6.1 and is effectively replaced with a stand-alone IBM Lotus® Quickr server that is integrated with your WebSphere Portal environment.
see

For general guidance, refer to Migrating documents from Portal Document Manager to Quickr Document Libraries.

As explicitely mentionned by IBM, moving PDM to Quickr requires to :

1. Install Lotus Quickr Services for WebSphere Portal separately from WebSphere Portal.(on another server).

2. Use the Document Library template that is included in Lotus Quickr Services for WebSphere Portal.
After the Lotus Quickr server is installed, delete all other templates other than the Document Library template from the server.
This is important because the IBM WebSphere Portal license does not entitle you to use other templates on the Lotus Quickr server.

3. Establish single sign-on (SSO) capability between the Lotus Quickr server and the WebSphere Portal server.

4. Move the document from PDM (using the future tools provided by IBM ?)("Details on the migration tool, its availability, and documentation will be announced as they become available.")

So basically, you will need to setup a Quickr application on a remote server, and use SSO between WPS and Quickr.
It seems also that the Quickr server should be used only for "Document Management" purpose...

For me this architecture is a very heavy solution ! This need to manage a dedicated portal server (for Quickr), which we all know is
costly to install and exploit, simply for having the PDM feature...

Also, another bad news for those who have used the heavy coupling between their WCM tool and PDM:

"If you are storing documents in WebSphere Portal Document Manager from previous releases and integrate Web Content Management, be aware that while you can store files and content outside of Web Content Management – for example, in Lotus Quickr – and link back to Web Content Management, this technique does not provide complete integration. A future release of Web Content Management will support full-scale integration with Lotus Quickr.

It's clear that IBM's strategy was to first release the v6.1 of portal, and then only will finalize the subject of the PDM replacement.

Good luck for those (like us) who have used PDM is the past and that now will need to find replacement solution...For us it's Alfresco.
Basically instead of using Quickr for remote document management system, we will use Alfresco (WPS custom Portlet + Alfresco WebService).
One of the benefits of this architecture (compared to the one based on Quickr) is that Alfresco is running on a simple Tomcat server, and is really simple to install and manage.

Other post on the same subject:
Good news for PDM users (IBM will help to migrate to WCM or Quickr)

PDM is dead

DB2 tuning for WCM JCR v6 database

2008-08-06T00:39:00.000-07:00

We are still in the WPS/WCM migration study process (from v5.1.0.4 to v6.0.1.3) and we experience a lots of problems due to the WCM data migration. We have a quite large WCM database (approx 10 Go), and as for today we have 2 big problems with the migration:

- WCM data migration takes 13 days to complete !
- After the import on the target v6 is completed, the portal serveris very slow (very bad response time caused by WCM).

We are currently re-starting the migration from scratch because these performances issues might be due to a problem in the DB2 collation configuration (see). The information provided in the infocenter is simply not correct and can lead to bad performances problems when installing the WCM JCR database....

I will do a specific and detail blog post to share our problem with everyone later on, but while searching for DB2 performances issues, I found these 2 articles which are very useful:

The first one is a very good synthesis of the main tuning tips and tricks (on WPS, WCM, LDAP, http server) that has been published so far on the subject (this is the better synthesis I have found so far, and it is very useful because there are so much distinct tuning guide on these topics and it is really hard to have a good overview of all required tuning actions):

Checklist for optimum performance of WCM 6.0 and 6.1

The second one is especially dedicated to WCM JCR database tuning for DB2 (there are a lot of tuning task that are presented here that I never seen before, but the author seems to be very knowledgeable):

IBM WebSphere Portal Web Content Manager and DB2 Tuning Guide.pdf (DeveloperWorks)

Hope this will help...

A new IBM WebSphere Portal wiki is now available

2008-08-05T09:45:00.000-07:00

Announced by IBM: IBM WebSphere Portal wiki

In the WebSphere Portal wiki you'll find development examples for WebSphere Portal, road maps for technical education, a deployment scenario for IBM Business Process Accelerator, and technical content pages. Coming soon are deployment scenarios for WebSphere Portal, IBM WebSphere Portal Express, and IBM Lotus Web Content Management!

Portal stress test

2008-07-14T01:45:00.000-07:00

Some people asked me to share my experience about portal stress-testing.
I have done only a few stress test campains (on WPS v5), but here are the some of the main things that you should consider to properly design and conducts your tests:

1/ Estimate the load:
First, try to estimate the load that your portal will have to support. What is very important is the number of concurent users (users which will be working simultaneously), and the corresponding number of hit per seconds (transactions) that will be performed by this audience. You should think about the load at pic hour (i.e during the period of the day when user's activity will be the most important), to size the stress test architecture and especially the number of load injectors you will need.

2/ Define the use_cases:
You have to think about the way users will use your site and how they will navigate between pages (both in anonymous and authenticated mode). My advice is don't take too much time on this phase: define the 4 or 6 main scenarios only (because the more scenario you define, the more the scripting effort will be important). Moreover, it is always difficult to know in advance what will be the real behavior of users on your site.
To identify the use-cases, you can identify the most useful features of your portal: for instance (in an enterprise intranet context) most of the time people are using the directory search, or looking at the stock quote, or using the search engine...so you should focus on these features when specifying the use-cases.

Moreover, if you suspect some Portlets not to be perfectly implemented, and you know that they will have to support a big load, then you can define simple stress test use-case dedicated to these components.

Finally, you will also have to define the ramp up period, that is the way you will have to inject the load (i.e the growing number of users that you want to simulate during a period of time). There are several way to define the ramp up (you should refer to other articles on the web for more informations).

3/ Define the user's profile:
If you have implemented personalization (based on user attributes) or used embedded UserGroups membership for security, you should consider defining a user testing population with distinct profiles (because personalization treatments can affect server performances).

4/ Choose the testing tool:
Depending on your needs, you will have to choose a tool between editor's or open-source solutions. I think open-source solution (like openSTA, or JMeter) can address most of the project needs.
But you will have to make sure that the tool will be able to support the load you want to simulate (hardware could be a limitation, if you need a lot of injectors). Also, you will have to check that the testing tool is able to adapt its script to your portal context (the format of the portal URL might be difficult to analyze, or you might have developed a custom theme with javascript or DHTML which might not be compatible with the way the testing tool works).

5/ Planning
Launching a stress-test phase should be considered as a small project within the project (don't under-estimate the time it will take). You will have to specify test use-cases, develop test scripting, install the testing solution injectors, run the test and finally analyze the results, and most likely you will have to do some tuning.You can plan for 2 month approx for the full load testing phase (1 month for the specification and script dev phase, and 1 month for the test itself, and analysis). The tuning phase duration might of course vary...

In term of ressources: you will need 1 developer which is familiar with the scripting development + 1 developer which is able to modify and optimize the code.
In most cases, you will also need to monitor database and LDAP response under load, and possibly do the tuning actions to improve performances of these components. So a LDAP or DBA will likely be needed, as well as a portal architect (as I said, this should be considered as a small project within the project).

6/ Test a stable version
If you have to modify the portal theme (HTML code) during the optimization phase, be aware that this might impact your testing script (most of the time scripts use the HTML DOM to find a resource in the code, like the URL it has to follows in the scenario ; so one HTML code update can break your scripts). If possible, modify only 1 component at a time (otherwhise you will not be able to know what component modification was responsible for improvement or degradation of performances).

7/ Stress-test analysis
Stress-test result analysis might be difficult, especially if you discover several problems with the same use-case. A good way to find what is wrong is to isolate each component (e.g Portlet) independently and to do a specific test. By example, if you suspect a bug in the theme, then do a test with an empty portal page (without portlet).

8/ Tuning phase
For the tuning phase, my advice is to work with specialist of each component (Database, LDAP, code developer, portal architect). You will save a lot of time if you have the proper expert at the right time. Especially with WPS v6, lots of JCR components (like WCM) rely on the database (so DB administration will likely be required for index creation, etc).
Once again, try to modify only 1 parameter at a time (to clearly identify the result of the optimization).

Finally, if you use caching, consider using a caching strategy at "the highest level" (i.e the web server, or caching HTML output of your Portlet in memory), because this will lead to better performances improvements.

Hope this will help, wish you good luck for your stress test :-)

Good news for PDM users (IBM will help to migrate to WCM or Quickr):

2008-07-04T08:21:00.001-07:00

To follow one of my previous post PDM is dead, here is a good news for PDM users:
Even if in WPS v6.1 IBM will not support the PDM tool anymore, IBM plan to provide migration tool to help people to migrate their documents either to WCM or PDM:

Here is what is stated in this recent presentation from Stefan Liesche (IBM):

We (IBM) plan to help customers with PDM data:

– A migration utility will be made available on Passport approximately 90 days from
eGA of Portal 6.1

– We are considering two scenarios
– Migration from PDM to Quickr
– Migration from PDM to WCM (for customers who use PDM to populate WCM)

We are evaluating new integration options between WCM and Quickr in a future WCM release.
Consider each customer situation and engage product management as needed to determine the right time to make the move.

Documentation of the changes will happen in real time on the Portal 6.1 Wiki – Initial round of doc will be released with 6.1

For more details : see

IBM WPS Portal 6.1 GA is available

2008-07-03T00:20:00.000-07:00

You can review download instruction from here

WebSphere Portal 6.1.0.0 detailed system requirements

Link to WebSphere Portal V6.1 Quick Start Guide

How to slim down a WPS portal development server

2008-07-02T12:00:00.000-07:00

During a training session one attendee asked the trainer if there is a list of IBM Portlet that could be uninstalled to improve performances of a WPS development server (to reduce memory consumption and speed up portal restart).
The trainer was not able to answer but I remembered an IBM Portal conference where the speaker provided us such a list (Walter Haenel / Lotusphere 2008):

These Portles can be deinstalled if not used, without any impact to the system.
No system functions nor configuration actions depend on the availability.

com.ibm.wps.portlets.frequentusers.FrequentUsers
com.ibm.wps.portlets.welcome
com.ibm.wps.portlets.xslt
com.ibm.portlets.cpp.calendar
com.ibm.portlets.cpp.mail
com.ibm.wps.portlets.inotes2.WpsiNotes2Portlet
LotusDocViewer.50d4aea48f06001714ddae8d9778c9f0
com.ibm.wps.portlets.domdoc.WpsDomDocPortlet
com.ibm.wps.portlets.notes.LotusNotesMVCPortlet
com.ibm.wps.portlets.quickplace.WpsQPController
LotusMyTeamWorkplaces.50d4aea48f06001714ddae8d9778c9f0
lotus.web.conferencing
PortletApp_com.ibm.wps.portlets.sametime.WIHPortlet
com.ibm.wps.portlets.mylist.MyListPortlet
com.ibm.wps.portlets.reminder
com.ibm.wps.portlet.Newsgroup_1:1
1308807024
com.ibm.wps.banner
com.ibm.portlets.exchange3
com.ibm.portlets.exchange2003
com.ibm.wps.portlets.worldclock
com.ibm.wps.quicklinks
com.ibm.wps.servletinvoker
com.ibm.wps.JSPServer
com.ibm.wps.fileserver
1331917905
com.ibm.wps.csv
com.screamingmedia.openportlet.wps.WPSPortlet.release.Dazzle3
com.ibm.wps.portlets.stlist.StListPortletController

Note : in our case, an error occured when trying to uninstall the following Portlet "com.ibm.wps.portlets.stlist.StListPortletController" (problem with database constraint). So it
has not been uninstalled.

From my experience, to improve performances, you can also perform the following tasks:

- Set the WCM option to "Subscriber-only" (connect.cfg for pre-v6 version, and WCMConfigService.properties for v6), parameter deployment.subscriberOnly=true.

For more details see : Understanding syndication in IBM Workplace Web Content Management

- Disable the JCR text search (which rebuild jcr indexes automatically) : set the jcr.textsearch.enabled=false (WebSphere\PortalServer\jcr\lib\com\ibm\icm\icm.properties).

Please note that I'm not sure of the exact role of this process, but I think it can be disabled on a development server.
For more details: see

- Reduce as much as possible the volume of WCM content (in v5, the rebuild of WCM indexes during server restart could take a very long time !)

- Another best practice for WCM is to run the clean-up tools (especially the Member fixer tool). See v6 infocenter for more details

IBM Portal News Newsletter / announced WPS 6.1 GA for June 30 2008

2008-06-27T02:36:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to share with you this IBM newsletter which is dedicated to Websphere Portal (and related products).
Usually this newsletter provides many usefull informations. In the latest post, 1 important thing has been announced:
IBM will release the WPS 6.1 GA on June 30...

Latest online newsletter:
IBM Portal News Newsletter : June 2008 Edition

To subscribe:
Subscribe to IBM Portal News

Moving to WCM v6 API

2008-06-25T13:07:00.000-07:00

I'm sure this document will be of interest for you guys which are trying to upgrade your WCM custom development from v5 to v6:
Moving to WCM v6 API (by Richard Gorzela)

Please note that this article is (c) IBM. As you will see the quality of this doc is really good.

If I try to summarize the changes in the API, I would say that:
- The API has not really changed and there is only a few enhancements...
- There are 2 main modifications:
1/ First the way you manage the relation between Content and SiteArea object, and especially the way you Save Content.
2/ The second is the that the "Live" access method is now deprecated (Calls to 'Live' access methods have the same effect as the 'Read' access method calls, so any 'live' access related methods are now deprecated).

I think that the 'Live' right has been suppressed in v6 because the WCM repository is now based on the same JCR repository as the Portal, and both security system (WPS and WC) are now fully aligned. So the old WCM "Live" access does not exist anymore: Read is default, and there are of course the 'Write' and 'Delete' ACL (which can be mapped respectively to 'User', 'Editor', and 'Administrator' from the Portal point of view).

___________________
© Copyright International Business Machines Corporation 2007*. All rights reserved.
Information in this article is not promised or guaranteed to be correct, current, or complete, and this article may contain technical inaccuracies or typographical errors. IBM assumes no responsibility (and expressly disclaims responsibility) for updating this article to keep information current or to ensure the accuracy or completeness of any posted information. Accordingly, you should confirm the accuracy and completeness of all posted information before making any decision related to any services, products, or other matters described herein.

Ready for migration !

2008-06-06T13:41:00.001-07:00

Next week we will start the migration of our intranet portal from WPS v5.1.0.4 to version 6.x.
This give me the opportunity to share our migration methodology with you.

Finally, we decided not to wait for the v6.1 GA release for 2 main reasons:
- First we still don't have any fixed date for the 6.1 version (last info I had from IBM was that we could expect it for mid-june this year, but the date is approaching and no news about the release..)
- Secondly, there is always a risk to start a migration with a brand new software version.

As we have made a lot of custom developments on v5.x (approx. 1300 m.d.), we choosed to first try to compile and test our code on a more stable release. We will start doing our test using v6.0.1.3 (which is recommended by IBM as a primary step before 6.1 migration).
Even if we mainly have used public API for our custom development (i.e WCM or WPS) our approach will be to first try to "move" our code to simply make it work on the v6 plateform, to see if everything is compatible. Depending on the tests results we will then have a better idea of the effort needed to upgrade to v6.

Of course we will also study the cost of infrastructure migration. In our case, as we have about 13 WPS servers to upgrade (including a production cluster), this will represent an important workload.

After this first pre-study phase, we will see if v6.1 has been released and we will also evaluate its stability...Depending on the stability of 6.1 at this time we will decide wether to continue the study process with 6.0.1.3 or the new v6.1.

Then the next phase will be to study the v6.0.x and 6.1 new features and if we could replace some custom home-made features by the new built-in options. I hope this will be technically feasible (and functionally acceptable for our end-users) to migrate some custom parts of the code, because all these developments currently require a quite big maintenance effort.

Once the code migration will be finalized, we will likely start a stress-test migration (as if we were deploying a new software version). Once again, I hope that the caching strategy we have implemented on v5.x (mainly on WCM layer) will still be effective...because I don't want to spend my life time tuning the portal application once again !

After stress-test phase will be completed, we will do the pre-production server migration, and finally the production server will be switched to the new version. We will plan this last step very carefully because we will have to reduce as much as possible (or avoid) any interruption of service. Unfortunately, I think that our content author will have to create content twice (both in v5 and in v6) during a few days, because the server migration process takes a long time...

Then, after the production switch, we also have planned for a critical debug (and tuning) phase...even with intensive stress-test, the behavior of a web site is still "unpredictable" when opened to real end-users.

Well, if you are trying to figure out how much time this migration project will take...I would say between 7 and 12 month. The timeline will depends on 2 main factors: the first one is obvious : the number of ressources which will be assigned to the project. The second important criteria is what percentage of the custom code will we try to migrate to the standard ?

The story will continue in a next post...I'm sure I will have lots of things to say about this migration...

Some others WPS bloggers

2008-06-03T12:59:00.001-07:00

If you are looking for other WPS resources, here are 3 others blogs dedicated to WPS.I just had a quick look at this sites, but it seems these guys know what means portal deployment :-)

Vivek Agarwal's Blog

WebSphere Portal in Action (Joey Bernal)

WebSphere Portal Blog (Colin MacLeod)

WebSphere Help, Tips & Tricks

PDM is dead...long life to alfresco !

2008-06-01T06:30:00.001-07:00

As an architect, I always appreciate software solutions which are "open" and which can easily integrate with the information system of the enterprise. Alfresco is definetely one of those solutions.
Alfresco has been selected as our "basic" document management tool. In fact, it offers a lots of features out-of-the- box, and it can be almost considered as an "advanced" software...But some of the most important criterias for our choice was not only the document management capacities, but also all the integration capacities...

In term of connexion, Alfresco offers the following various protocol : CIFS, webDav, FTP, and WebService (please note that almost every features are exposed through WS).
So for the portal side we have created a custom Portlet based on the Alfresco standard WS.(the only issue was that the Alfresco WS client is based on JDK 1.5, and WPS portal 5.x uses JDK 1.4...but downgrading the client is not really difficult).
Morevover, it can very easily synchronized with a LDAP. We have made some improvements on the standard "user-provisioning" synchronization scripts, mainly to support embedded UserGroup, and allow for recursivity when doing the User lookup. Once again, doing this modification was quite simple, as the product is designed for openness and configurability. So we are now managing our UserGroup through our group LDAP, and we can control and align ACL of our portal (also based on LDAP), with the rights applied on Alfresco spaces and documents.

Using the CIFS protocol (or even webDAV), users can create "network drive" in the windows explorer, and work with Alfresco as they were using a simple windows file system.(there is also a web UI to manage documents, but for the moment it is not completely user-friendly, and end-users usually prefer working in a "windows like" environment).
In our case, the CIFS security is based on NTLM, and the web UI is protected by our company web SSO (CAS). All these options can be enabled simply by editing the Alfresco configuration files.
And finally, you we use the FTP connexion (or CIFS) to upload quickly a large amount of documents in the Alfresco repository.
For all these reasons, Alfresco is a solution that can be deployed very easily in any enterprise information system.

To prepare the WPS V6.1 migration we have started migrating the content of all our PDM in Alfresco. So for us even if PDM is dead, we now have a much better and scalable solution to replace it...long life to Alfresco !

PDM is dead

2008-05-28T13:06:00.000-07:00

Were you aware that in WPS 6.1 there is no more PDM ?

Here is what is mentioned in the infocenter:

---------
"Document Manager is not available in WebSphere Portal Version 6.1. Before migrating any data, you need to replace Web content that was previously stored as a document in a document library. For more information, see the Document migration topic in the Migrating Web Content section of this information center."
---------
see this link for more details

Personaly, even after attending to the WPS conference (last year), and also to lotusphere (this year), I had never
heard about this information...this is crazy ! For customer which are doing an intensive usage of PDM in v5.x to store documents, this is
a bad surprise...
Technically, I completely understand the choice of IBM to migrate the web content storage in JCR 170 repository and to centralize
the web content management and the document management in one single tool (WCM).
However, I think the way this new is announced and the fact that IBM do not really propose solution to automatically migrate
document from PDM 5.x to WCM 6.1 is not really acceptable...

Anyway, before studing the migration from WPS v5 to v6.1 we already had plan to stop using PDM...mainly because the design
of this tool is too simple and not really appropriate for a large scale usage (it is not really user-friendly, it is not an
open solution, and so on)....So this news is only one more argument for us to move faster to another document management
software.
We are currently studing Alfresco, which is a much more open and scalable solution, so PDM can die...this is not a problem
anymore for us...

Ressources about next IBM WebSphere Portal 6.1 Beta release:

2008-05-06T13:50:00.000-07:00

Did you know these 2 ressources related to the WPS 6.1 are already available ?

The 6.1 Infocenter is not fully completed, but there are already some useful informations:
IBM WebSphere Portal 6.1 Express infocenter

This forum is dedicated to the 6.1 next release. Some IBM experts are frequently responding to questions:
IBM WebSphere Portal 6.1 Beta Forum

Hope this will help.

Usefull links for migrating from WPS 5.x to V6.x

2008-04-17T01:33:00.000-07:00

We are currently preparing the migration of our intranet portal from WPS version 5.1.0.4 to version 6.1.
This is a major operation, which requires a lot of work and competencies. To help for migration, here is a list of useful links I would like to share with you. I will try to update it with new links. If you know other ressources, don't hesitate
to add comments...

WCM Migration:
IBM Workplace Web Content Management V2.x to V6.x Migration Guide
IBM Workplace Web Content Management V2.x to V6.x Migration Guide

WCM Migration Tips (article from WCM Wiki):
WCM Migration Tips

WCM V6 Best Practices:
Best practices for using IBM Workplace Web Content Management V6
Best practices for using IBM Workplace Web Content Management V6

WCM V6 Tuning
IBM Web Content Management V6.0 Tuning Guide Document
IBM Web Content Management V6.0 Tuning Guide Document

What's New in WPS V6:
What's new in WebSphere Portal Version 6?
What's new in WebSphere Portal Version 6?

WPS V5.x to V6.x migration:
IBM WebSphere Portal V6: Best Practices for Migrating from V5.1
IBM WebSphere Portal V6: Best Practices for Migrating from V5.1

WPS Best Practices:
WebSphere Portal Version 6 Enterprise Scale Deployment Best Practices
WebSphere Portal Version 6 Enterprise Scale Deployment Best Practices

WPS development:
Developing themes and skins in IBM® WebSphere® Portal 6.0.X
Developing themes and skins in IBM® WebSphere® Portal 6.0.X

Software as a service

2008-04-06T09:59:00.000-07:00

Today I just would like to highlight a very interesting source of information: TV4IT

Basically, it's a "web TV" which provides interviews of technical expert on various subjects. But my favorite ressource are the "weekly report" of Cyril Dhénin. These report are called "revue du Net du dimanche matin".
Yes, it's in french...sorry for english reader.

Each sunday, Cyril publish a short video about subjects similar to : SaaS (Software as a service), Google services, Microsoft, Java, Cloud computing, Web 2.0, etc.

This video about Saas (Software as a Service) is particularly interesting:
revue-du-net du 2008-01-27

It's about the way company will use IT ressources and software in the future. One possibility is that company will not manage software by themself anymore, but instead will use external remote services provider and consume these services. This will help enterprise focusing on their own business and competencies...
I think this future could happen very soon. These kind of service provider already exists (Google, Amazon, S3, etc). With their big datacenter these actors now have the power to provide data through the web to many users. Moreover, with networks coming more and more fast, and technologies like virtualization, there are no more technical limitations to build such large scale services.

The SaaS trend is interesting for us, because in our company that's basically what we are trying to build. Of course the scale is smaller, but the technical approach is similar: our team is working at the Group level (DSI), trying to provide centralized services (like portal, document management, search services) for other entities of our company.
The goal is of course to provide mutualized and shared services, more reliable, and to reduce costs. By providing these services to business entities, we are trying to help them focusing on their job, and not to worry about hosting or softwares installation...So the Group DSI is now acting as a software service provider, for internal needs.

Of course this is a challenging approach and we are facing some issues (for instance with datacenter and hosting)...Deploying software on a large scale is more difficult than deploying a solution for a small entity...But this is only the beginning, and our services will become more and more reliable with the time.

In our case, these plateform of services are managed internally, and for internal use only. This is mainly for privacy reasons, but simply also because these external services providers do not really offer such services for the moment...I don't know if company will really use external services providers in the next years ? But it's probably only a question of time....

Integrating Quickr with IBM WebSphere Portal

2008-02-26T13:43:00.000-08:00

If the subject of the Quickr / WPS integration is of interest for you, here is an article on the IBM Quickr wiki, which proposes a very simple and light solution:
Integrating Quickr with IBM WebSphere Portal

Basically, the approach is based on the new tool 'Web Application Integrator for IBM WebSphere Portal" which gives the ability to include some part of the portal navigation in any web application (like Quickr).
So integration is achieved by "injecting" Portal navigation markup into Lotus Quickr at render time, leveraging the new V6 portal capability (WPS is now able to expose its navigation through REST WebServices).

I did not test this solution, but it seems quite simple (and a simple solution is often a good solution).
Assuming you have choosen to deploy WPS and Quickr on 2 separate servers (mainly for performance reason...) this kind of approach could probably ensures a seamless integration for your end-users...

If some of you did test this tool, please feel free to give your feedback...

Quickr and ECM integration

2008-02-24T12:09:00.000-08:00

In one of my last post about Quickr (Quickr and ECM relationship), I was mentioning how an Enterprise could include Quickr in its own Document Management (ECM) strategy, and how both tools could be used together. It's important because companies have to leverage their existing ECM solution (like Documentum, FileNet, LiveLink, Alfresco, etc), and also to provide tools to improve collaboration between peoples.

My point of view was that Quickr should be used as a "front end solutions" (to manage "draft" documents or working copy), compare to the existing ECM which could play the role of a more reliable back-end for storing or archiving "Corporate documents".
On the Quickr wiki, there is now an example of how to use the Quickr Document Services to publish content between Quickr and Documentum: Quickr and Documentum

The solution has been implemented by Infosys. This movie briefly describes how the solution works from a functional point of view: see

This integration approach between Quickr and Documentum clearly illustrates what could be the role of each tool: the Collaboration tool is made to initialize the "draft" (or version V0) of a more official document that has to finally be
approved by the boss. The first version of the document is created in Quickr, where a team of colleagues collaborate on the first n versions of the document. Once the document is finalized, it is simply "moved" in Documentum, where the boss can validate it.

As described in this article: "The integration of collaboration platforms such as IBM® Lotus® QuickrTM with any ECM solution, faces numerous challenges. These include leveraging the existing centralized ECM system and driving the collaboration via Lotus Quickr, presenting a unified user interface for Lotus Quickr and the ECM system, having seamless content management processes across both systems and managing documents between the two."

The example that is presented on the Quickr wiki seems to describe a very basic approach: the document is simply moved from Quickr to Documentum. Then Quickr probably only keeps a "link" to the document (only the main META-DATA and a reference link to the ECM repository) in its own database.
After the move operation, the document reference is still available from Quickr, but it is physically stored in Documentum.
So in this example, the Quickr repository is clearly separated from the ECM repository. The document is first stored in the Quickr storage (JCR 170 database, for WPS implementation) and an explicit user action is required to move it to the ECM database.

The problem is that people will probably not do the effort of moving documents from one repository to another...So documents will remains in the Collaborative tool database...forever.
Moreover, end-users will probably not understand what is the difference between the Collaborative and the ECM repository, and why and when they have to use each solution separately.
A better approach (both for IT team and end-users) would be to have the ability to replace the Quickr Document repository to plug it directly on their own ECM solution database. But this is probably a bigger challenge...
I will try to investiguate to see if it is really feasible, or if a more pragmatic approach must be used...but this will be the purpose of a next post.

Quickr components definition

2008-02-24T10:30:00.000-08:00

This WE, I spent some times to browse and read the Quickr Wiki.
There are a lot of useful information to start understanding this new product. However, it is sometimes difficult to understand the meaning of each technical term, and the role of each component. So I have tried to define in this post, some of the main concepts on which Quickr is built.

What is the Quickr Content Service layer ?

Basically, the Content Service is the interface which exposes features for manipulating content in Lotus Quickr.
The Content Service provides diverse set of clients and programming models (such as REST- or SOAP-based protocols) to manage the Quickr data.
Using this layer, you can launch action to create, manage, update, search, query, and delete Lotus Quickr content, simply by lauching a web service call (with the proper input parameters).

As a result, with a basic Client (like a browser) you can launch an http request (formatted as a REST URL), to trigger an operation in the Quickr Content Repository (ex: WPS Portal JCR 170 Database). For instance, using a simple REST request, you can create a new "folder" in Quickr, or you can delete a document.

An other type of Client can be a Quickr Connector (see definition below). For instance, a Connector installed on the MS Outlook Client can interact with the Content Service layer to publish a mail attachment in Quickr.

What is the difference between the Content Service definition and implementation ?

Lotus Quickr uses a services oriented architecture to access content. Quickr defines a set of open services, that makes it possible to access content remotely for manipulating content in Lotus Quickr.

The Content Service stays on top of a repository (or a back-end) which can be implemented using different kind of technologies (Java, Domino, etc).

Whatever the type of the repository, the Quickr Content Service layer should present a unified user interface.
So the Service definition is the common way to define this interface, and the features that are exposed.
The Service implementation is built on the concrete "back-end side", and corresponds to the core of the features and methods which run within the back-end application and interact with the back-end data model.

Currently, only 2 Services implementation have been provided by IBM: the first is Lotus Quickr Services for Lotus Domino and the other one is for WebSphere Portal.
When using the Websphere Portal implementation, the Quickr repository relies on the WPS JCR 170 Database, and the Quickr API use the java portal runtime to execute.

What is a Quickr Connector ?
A Quickr Connector can be considered as a Client plug-in, which is designed to interact with the Quickr Content Services layer.

For instance, the Microsoft Exchange connector should be installed on the end-user computer, in the Microsoft Outlook Client.

Using this connector, the user will be able to see the list of his/her Quickr Places (directly from the Outlook window), and the user will be able to publish or retrieve mail attachment documents directly in the Quickr repository.

The list of Lotus Quickr Connectors (provided with the Content Integrator tool), at publication time is as follows:

• IBM Lotus Notes/Domino
• Microsoft SharePoint (supports WSS 2003/2007, SPS 2003, and MOSS)
• IBM Lotus Quickr services for Lotus Domino
• Microsoft Exchange
• IBM Lotus QuickPlace
• IBM Lotus Domino.Doc

Portal pages syndication

2008-02-16T05:01:00.000-08:00

I still continue to send my "message in the bottle" on the ideajam forum. There is also a place dedicated to WebSphere Portal, so I proposed this idea about portal pages "syndication": see

In our company, we are using WPS version 5.x and the existing tool - to export pages from one authoring server to the live environment - are really limited !
Using release builder is simply not an option for us, because it is not able to manage only the new pages creation or update. For any company that has a big intranet site, it is not really possible to built a release by analyzing the full page list of the entire site...it is probably feasible for small site, but this is not our case.

Moreover (a bigger problem), most of other portal administrator I have talked to, think that release builder is not really reliable, and it cannot be used as a basis for an automatic export/import process. This issue was also explicitely mention in one presentation in the 2007 WebSphere Conference (Munich): "do not use r-b without verifying the content of the xml file...because it might contain additional delete operation which are not wanted....". So basically, it is simply not usable to build an industrialized a process.

So we decided to build our own "transport process" mechanism, based on the xml-access tool, and custom XSL and ANT script...This works fine, but this require to fully understand the complexity of the xml page structure, so be carefull if you are thinking to develop a similar solution. The most difficult issue is to manage properly the delete operation on the source server and to propagate them to the target server...another problem is to avoid loosing the User Portlet preferences on the target server....so it can be tricky depending on what are your need.
In addition, we now provide a user interface (Portlet) to allow the end-user to select which part of the site he want to export, and to launch the process manually whenever he want.
If some of you are interested about such a tool, I can post more information about it.

Also, note that in the WPS V6.1 release, IBM will provide a new web interface (Portlet) called "Site Management" which will provide a similar feature for end-user. But it is still limited: by example, the user must specify the unique name of the page he wants to export, and also the location where to insert the page in the target site structure...No doubt IBM will improve this feature in the next release, but this is a quite good start for people which don't want to develop their own solution.
Just to finish on this topic, I think that the "Site Management" solution will use an RSS based mechanism to publish the pages on the target environment. This producer / consumer pair is similar to the syndicator/subscriber principle in WCM. I think using RSS (or any xml over http mechanism) is a good approach, and I hope IBM will be able provide more user-friendly and flexible tool in the futur....that's what our user want !

New ideajam about WCM

2008-02-09T09:34:00.000-08:00

I found this new opportunity to share information about the WCM product, and to propose evolutions for the product:
ideajam Lotus WCM

I posted a proposition about adding multi-language as a core feature of WCM....just in case :-)
see

With great power comes great responsibility

2008-01-24T10:14:00.000-08:00

That's a very cool title isn't it ? ;-) We were in the Island of adventure Disney park yesterday at LotuSphere, so I buy a lot of spiderman t-shirt....
But I think this sentence is also relevant for Quickr....Let my explain why. With its deep integration with MS windows explorer, and especially with the mail client, Quickr will probably becomes the 'killer app' in the next few years. Maybe this will not be Quickr (but another editor solution), but anyway this thinking is true for all this new generation of collaborative tools.
Using the mail client connectors, you are now able to directly send a link to a document stored in a Quickr repository, rather than attaching the document in the mail message...When attaching the document to the mail, Quickr connector will automatically ask you if you want to include it in the message, or if you want to store it into Quickr and then just send a link referencing this document....That's a great feature !
But my point is that now Quickr becomes part of the desktop office, and it should have the SAME availability and reliability than your mailing system ! Let me explain that in another way: if Quickr crash (for any reason) it will be completely impossible for your employees to retrieve any documents (assuming they now store everything in your new very cool tool)....
So this is not anymore a 'simple' web application project (with wiki, blogs, etc) but it is part of your information system and of your office tools. So when deploying such a solution, you should carefully study all the impact and especially define the size of the administration team and the support team appropriately (to provide the same level of service than expected for solution like your mail system).

With great power comes great responsibility....:-)

Quickr and ECM relationship

2008-01-23T06:46:00.000-08:00

Today I would like to talk about the relationship between Quickr and the Enterprise Content Management.
As one of the Quickr product manager said (Jelan Heidelberg / Conference about the Collaborative Document Management): "Quickr is not an ECM. Quickr is made to manage the daily work, help team collaboration". I really aggree with this point of view: you can use Quickr to work on draft version of a document, and collaborate with several people to build the final release of the document...but once your document is finalized, you probably want/should store this version is a more stable and reliable document repository.
Also talked with one of the lead developer of Quickr about this document storage strategy: he said the current version of the Product can store document either in a Domino database, or in the portal JCR 170 repository. He told me a customer has already implemented a custom feature to archive final version of Quickr document in an external ECM (namely Documentum). And as the Quickr API and model is very open, he said it is feasible to have the same approach to archive document in any other ECM.

[Basically, to give you an technical overview of how this work, the document will be phisically moved to the ECM repository and Quickr will keep only some of the document META-DATA and a reference to the ECM repository in its own database.]

And during one of the Greg Melahn conference (about the future of the product and how IBM plan to extend it), IBM will provide support for 2 new ECM for the end of year 2008: FileNet and IBM Content Manager. Also, he said that IBM (and IT services partners) will continue to provide more and more new ECM solution support in the next releases.

More about the Quickr product

2008-01-22T06:50:00.000-08:00

Don't have the time to speak about all things that are covered here in LotuSphere, so I choose to focus on Quickr:
> First, there are now more technical solution to 'integrate' this product with the WPS portal. For instance using a new tool called 'webappintegrator' you now can insert the portal banner into a remote web app (like Quickr) to offer a consistent look and feel to the end-user. Of course this is only a light integration, and Quickr will have to run on a separate server, but it will be seamless for the user.
Also, I really prefer to run Quickr on a remote server, just to make sure it will be not impact the portal runtime. Whenever possible I try to build our front intranet portal as a read 'only' tool (to ensure stability, and good performances), and Quickr is of course a typical read-WRITE application. So separation is a good thing, assuming this will be seamless for end-user.
> Quickr also offers some very useful connectors for Notes mail client or Symphony office, and MS Office. Basically, it allows you to work directly from your mail client (or windows explorer) and to drag and drop files directly from these tool...This is a great feature. Unfortunately, there is no connector for Exchange for the moment (but should be delivered in 8.1). Having an Exchange connector is a major requirement for us, so I think we should wait and study this next version....
> My last point is a major concern: document storage management. In the current version of Quickr, documents are stored in the local (JCR 170) repository of Quickr (I think this can be considered as a similar approach as storing document locally in the portal DB, like we do in the previous PDM tool).
IBM will also offers integration facility to store document in other JCR repository. But for the moment, I think only FileNet and IBM Content Manager will be supported....I said it's a major concern because in our company we use another solution (like LiveLink or Alfresco), and storing our documents in the Quickr repository is simply not an option, just because we don't have a good vision so far on the roadmap of this solution :-)
Even if Quickr is used currently internally by IBM (most of IBM people we meet here told us that they store now all their documents in Quickr library), I still think this can not be a long term strategy for Corporate documents...but OK, for working copy, it's probably a good way to store documents.

There is a dedicated session tomorrow about Quickr and the document management strategy....so I will give you some news as soon as I can about this topic.

First day in LotuSphere 2008

2008-01-20T13:24:00.000-08:00

First day in LotuSphere 2008,
Most of the conferences are dedicated to Domino 8 and only a few to the WPS portal....There are also a lot of presentation about Lotus Quickr and Sametime which we are really interesting.
About Quickr, we now get a clearer view of what the integration options are with the WPS tool. Basically, most of the Quickr features (especially document Library views) are exposed through
RSS Feed. So it is possible to use a simple RSS Portlet at the portal level to display a list of documents links provided by Quickr. RSS is a simple but easy way to expose data coming from Quickr,
and there is also a lot of features which are exposed through Web Services (mainly REST WS). My feeling is that IBM do not want to introduce an heavy coupling between this 2 solutions, but rather
choose to provide standard and easy solution to expose/consume Quickr data. I think that's because Quickr is a quite new product, with a roadmap which can change very quickly in the next years:
so coupling it tightly with the portal is probably not a good solution.
About Quickr performances, we don't get any information for the moment....but there are some conferences about advanced architecture and performances, so I will try to get more information about this
topic (it's important because with previous J2EE version, namely workplace, we had experienced a lot of performances issues).

About WCM multi-local site approach

2008-01-12T01:40:00.000-08:00

IBM has recently published a very interesting article about how to manage multi-language in WCM (IBM Workplace Web Content Management) and to build multi-local sites : multi-local site

As far as I understand the proposed approach (for the moment) is to provide a sample framework to help customer building their own multi-language strategy, rather than implementing a these features in the product core...probably, because there is not a single way to implement multi-language...That's also my point of view. As this framework is based on the WCM public API, customer can easily customize it to match their specific needs.

I wanted to get more information about the roadmap of this multi-language framework, so I asked some questions to David De Vos. So in this post, I just want to share some of these info.

I asked him if IBM has any plan to include this multi-local framework in a next release of the WCM product (as a "core features"), or will IBM continue to provide it as a separated sample ?
As you might remember (see previous post), we (in my company) also have developped our own framework to support multi-language. It is also based on the WCM public API. So we could choose to replace our framework with the IBM one (to implement a solution more aligned with the IBM solution), but this code migration will require a lot of efforts....So, I'm trying to identify the pros & cons to justify this operation (and using a "core feature" could be a good argument for migrating).

So here is basically what David told me:
--------------
The plan is to start to replace some of the components in the new multi-local framework sample code with WCM core function (that is either the same or better) and that over releases most of the stuff in the whitepaper (it could be everything but IBM would never to commit to that) will become core to some degree...

Using this new multi-local framework will provide the following benefits:
* Allow customers to share custom code developed from it with the community,
* Provide customers with more features (assuming customers custom solution doesn't already do everything the sample code does)
* Allow you to remove parts of the same code with core function once it becomes available, thus leaving you with less code to maintain.
--------------

Another of my question was : regarding the roadmap, could IBM confirms that most of the framework should be merged as core feature in release 6.1 (for Q3 2008) ?
--------------
David explains that:
This new framework merge is an ongoing line item that is unlikely to be complete by 6.1.. David said that he can't provide any more concrete details than that as they aren't simply available for the moment...
--------------

I think that whatever custom approach you could have already implemented in your company, this new multi-local framework for WCM should be studied carefully, because some of the provided features are really interesting...I have to work on these subject in the next month, so I will try to give you more details about this new approach.

About WCM rendering performances

2008-01-05T08:44:00.001-08:00

We launched our intranet early 2007 in production....What a big effort ! It is always what I say after each portal project deployment. As for today, my experience is that even a "small" portal project requires at least 6 month before going live in production. But planning is not the subject of this post.

When I joined the project, the team was facing a lot of performances issues. The first reason is that people didn't really take care about response time constraint when doing custom developments...It is often the same problem: development team must deliver new features quickly and people are not always ready to invest time (and money) to design a robust solution, with a good caching strategy.
However, thinking about how to design and implement a cache should be studied carefully for every project which should run under heavy load.
So before going live, we spent a lot of development effort on each components: theme, WCM Portlet, and back-end Portlet. The biggest issue was how to optimize the WCM Rendering Portlet response time (because our site is mostly composed by WCM Portlet for the moment).
We, in my company have implemented a custom WCM/WPS java framework, mainly to implement the multi-language capability in WCM. Because of this custom layer, most of the standard WCM caches was not appropriate in our context. Indeed, WCM does not support multi-language, so neither does the WCM cache....
We now have created several type of caches, for several kind of WCM Objects, all based on the WAS dynacache. Dynacache is a good way to cache object, and it is really simple to use.
One of the most powerfull cache we have developed is working as follows: through a custom JSP component, we are able to retrieve the full HTML output of the Portlet and to set it in cache. Next rendering phase are really optimized because there no request to the WCM repository at all (only a lookup in the dynacache).
We also tried to directly cache the WCM content object into our own cache...but this is simply something to avoid because WCM object are associated with the workspace which was initially used to retrieve them from database. So except if you only use public WCM content (visible by every user), which could be the case for internet web site, this approach should not be selected.
For the moment, most of our caches have been enabled for the public area of our site (for anonymous user). In this case, the caching strategy is simple because we do not have to worry about content security (and cache key are really simple). If you implement your own cache, you should carefully think about security access for object which are stored into cache.
We now have really good response time for our public pages. But now, more and more people are connected to the intranet, and they clearly see that response time are not so good after authentication (the HTML output caching is not enabled)...It is hard to understand from the end-user point of view.
So our next challenge is to think about how to cache WCM content, for the authenticated user. One of the biggest problem in this case is how to share cache entries for people which share the same profile. In our context, it is hard to mutualize cache entries, because peoples belongs to distinct UserGroups, and it is difficult to identify generic profiles.
I think other option will be to use Ajax. As we always use WCM JSP component to perform the WCM Portlet rendering, that is technically possible. However, I'm wondering if using Ajax on every WCM Porlet will not generate some side-effect (especially if several Ajax servlet tries to access to the WCM repository at the same time)....I will try to give some update about this problem in a next post.

Welcome message

2008-01-05T05:18:00.001-08:00

Hello,

This blog is officialy open ! I created it to help people sharing information about WebSphere Portal project...big subject isn't it.
We (in my company) have deployed this solution to build our corporate intranet...
It's a quite large web site whith about 10.000 unique users per day, coming from all over the world, and from several business units.
We have implemented a full multi-linguism portal, based on the WCM tool (but with a lot of custom developments....). For this first release we also use the PDM (document management) and the embedded search system (portal search engine).
Deploying a portal project requires to manage and understand a lot of distinct tools and technologies. It's a hard but also very exciting work for an architect !
In this blog I will try to share some information about the difficulties and the successes we experience on this project. This blog is intended for architects, project managers and developers who deals with portal and especially the WPS plate-form.
So now please feel free to participate !