Integrating WebSphere Portal 8 With IBM Connections Using Connections Portlets - Part 3

This article is the third and last part of the article which explains details of integrating websphere portal with connections using web app integrator portlet and connections portlets. In the first two parts we saw details of integrating portal with connections using web app integrator portlet.This part explains details of integrating WebSphere Portal with connections using IBM connections portlet.

IBM CONNECTIONS PORTLETS
The IBM Connections Portlets for WebSphere Portal delivers the IBM Connections rich set of social software services for use within a WebSphere Portal environment. WebSphere Portal users can integrate the Activities, Blogs, Bookmarks, Communities, Forums, Profiles, and Wiki applications of Connections along with a Tag Cloud portlet for quick filtering in composite applications. The approach here is to display the Connections in a portlet in portal page.

These portlets are part of the collection of portlets that are available on the Solutions Catalog on IBM Greenhouse and can be downloaded from the following location. Here I used portal version 8 and IBM Connections 3.0.1.

https://greenhouse.lotus.com

After unzipping the downloaded IC3011_Portlets_20121211.zip, you can see that there are two folders available, IC3011_Portlets and IC3011_Portlets_refresh.IC3011_Portlets_refresh is used to integrate with portal 8.This has a PAA file SNPortlets.PAA which has all the connection portlets bundled into it. Once we install this PAA file we can access connections in portal environment.

CONFIGURING AND INSTALLING CONNECTIONS PORTLETS
To install, deploy and configure the connections portlets we need the following steps.


1.  Import a certificate to support SSL
Log into the WebSphere® Application Server Integrated Solutions Console.

Navigate to Security -> SSL certificate and key management -> Key stores and certificates.

Add the certificates to the appropriate trust store as configured in SSL Configurations. To view the SSL configuration and determine the appropriate trust store, navigate to: Security -> SSL certificate and key management -> SSL configurations -> NodeDefaultSSLSettings -> ['Trust Store Name']

For example, in a standalone deployment you navigate to NodeDefaultTrustStore -> Signer certificates for adding certificates. If NodeDefaultSSL Settings points to 'CellDefaultTrustStore', you add a certificate to 'CellDefaultTrustStore'.
Click Retrieve from port. Enter the host and SSL port used by your Connections server.
Click Retrieve signer information and Save.

2.  Run the Following Config Tasks
ConfigEngine install-paa -DPAALocation=C:\WebSphere\wp_profile\paa\SNPortlets.paa -DWasPassword= [was-admin-pwd] -DPortalAdminPwd=[portal-admin-pwd]

ConfigEngine deploy-paa -DappName=SNPortlets -DWasPassword=[was-admin-pwd]  -DPortalAdminPwd=[portal-admin-pwd]

ConfigEngine configure-SNPortlets -DWasPassword=password -DPortalAdminPwd=password

You can configure more parameters by logging into  admin console and add values in WPConnectionsIntegration Service as in step 4.

3.  Changes in Themes
Add the following two modules to your theme profile by editing the corresponding json file. These json files are in your profiles folder of theme. If you are using default theme profile, edit profiles\profile_deferred.json. If you are using a custom profile, add the modules to that profile.

wp_liveobject_framework, dijit_form_17

4.  Configuring WAS admin Console 
Log into the WebSphere Application Server Integrated Solutions Console. Navigate to Resources -> Resource Environment -> Resource Environment Providers.
Set the following five parameters in the custom property, WPConnectionsIntegrationService (create the property if it’s not already there)

blogsHomepageHandle, conversion, tagSearchType, emailSetting and globalBaseURL, the base URL to the Connections server
Configure Authentication

For this article, I used basic authentication instead of SSO as its simple and the setup is common for all environments. SSO setup varies in each environment depending on your access gateway.

Set the authenticationMethod property to basicAuth in the file, lcaccelerator.properties, located at (<wp_profile_root>\installedApps\<cell name>\PA_WPF.ear\snor.pf.portlets.war\WEB-INF\lcaccelerator\properties\ lcaccelerator.properties)

When using basic authentication for the portlets, every user must type in their personal credentials manually in the personalize mode of the portlets or shared credentials can be supplied from the Credential Vault.

If you are planning to use SSO environment, please refer IBM connections wiki from the following location. It has details for various types of SSO environment.

www-10.lotus.com/ldd/lcwiki.nsf

5.  Stop and Restart Portal Server

TESTING IN PORTAL
Once all the configurations are done you can login to the portal. You will see the IBM connections tab with the pages profiles, blogs, forums etc as in the below image. In the edit mode, select Personalize option and enter the username and password in the portlet as below and save it.

You need to enter the username and password in only one portlet and its transmitted to all other portlets. Logout of the portal and login once again and you can see all the connection portlets are displayed with the corresponding connection content. Profiles portlet is displayed in the image below.

This completes the integration of WebSphere Portal and Connections. To learn more about Prolifics, visit www.prolifics.com.

Sanju Varghese, a Senior Consultant for Prolifics, is an experienced Portal and JEE Architect. He was with IBM Global services for six years delivering WebSphere Portal based solutions to its major customers and is certified in Java,IBM WebSphere Portal and BPM . He has performed different IT roles ranging from being an Architect, Consultant, Technical lead and Software developer for several large projects .Currently his main focus area is integrating Portal with Collaboration software. Besides specializing in IBM technologies he likes reading, traveling, watching and playing cricket. He holds a Bachelors Degree in Computer Engineering from Pune University, India.

Integrating WebSphere Portal 8 With IBM Connections Using Web App Integrator - Part 2

This article is the second part of the article which explains details of integrating IBM WebSphere Portal with connections using web app integrator portlet and connections portlets. In the first part we saw an introduction of web app integrator portlet and installed a web app integrator portlet in the portal server and tested successfully. This part explains the steps needed to connect the installed web app integrator portlet with IBM Connections.

CONFIGURING PORTAL FOR INTEGRATION
From portal side we need to do two steps as we did in the first part for testing the WAI portlet.

• Create a URL page in the portal using the New URL button, with unique name and set the URL value in the page property, in advanced section->HTML, set URL of the connections server.
• Enter the unique name in the web app integrator portlet to generate the script.

 

CONFIGURING CONNECTIONS

We need to add the generated script in the header.jsp in connections server.If you search for header.jsp in connections you will see multiple header.jsp files in source directories and all are identical. 

We need to create a header.jsp in the customization directory. Customization directory is mentioned during installation. On Microsoft Windows, if you accepted the defaults during installation, the customization path is C:\Program Files\IBM\LotusConnections\data\shared\customization. This can be found in Websphere admin console of connections server. Customization directory is stored as the value of the websphere environment variable, CONNECTIONS_CUSTOMIZATION_PATH.

1. Create a directory called "templates" at <customizationDir>\common\nav\.
2. Copy the header.jsp file from any of the application source directory to the new templates directory. For example, copy the header file from <WAS_home>\Activities.ear\oawebui.war.\nav\templates.
3. Copy the script generated from the WAI portlet in the header.jsp
4. Restart the connections server.

Another websphere environment variable, CONNECTIONS_CUSTOMIZATION_DEBUG can be found in the admin console as well. Set the value of this variable to true and then we should not need to restart connections server for jsp changes.

TESTING INTEGRATION 

If you have properly configured till this point, then you can go back to portal. Navigate to the URL page you created, here Connections Integration page, you should see the connections inside the portal. 

We have completed the integration of WebSphere Portal and Connections. I used Portal 8 and IBM Connections 3.01 for this article.You should be able to use it for other versions as well with minimal or no changes.

This article explains the basic integration techniques between portal and connections.For an excellent user experience and to make a seamless transition from application page to application page you should work with a theme developer to place additional theme modules.This will enhance the smooth transition between product pages and produce the desired user experience.

In the next part, Part 3, we will see how to integrate IBM WebSphere Portal and Connections using the Connections portlets.

Sanju Varghese, a Senior Consultant for Prolifics, is an experienced Portal and JEE Architect. He was with IBM Global services for six years delivering WebSphere Portal based solutions to its major customers and is certified in Java,IBM WebSphere Portal and BPM . He has performed different IT roles ranging from being an Architect, Consultant, Technical lead and Software developer for several large projects .Currently his main focus area is integrating Portal with Collaboration software. Besides specializing in IBM technologies he likes reading, traveling, watching and playing cricket. He holds a Bachelors Degree in Computer Engineering from Pune University, India.

Charting Capability in Portal using WEF V8 and DOJO APIs

Charting capability in Portal using Web Experience Factory (WEF) V8 and DOJO APIs This article will show you how to create Charts in WEF V8 using DOJO Charting API to develop custom charts using other than commercial APIs like Fusion Charts or Highcharts JS APIs. So I started building a sample chart demo in WEF V8 using DOJO APIs which shipped with WEF designer.

I followed following steps to create sample Dojo chart in WEF V8:

1. Created an empty model called dojochart_view.model in one of existing WEF project.

2. Added Page builder as first builder.

• Inside the page1 code, added two separate div, one for loading chart component and other for the chart legend.

• Also, at the top of the page1 html, added two separate span one for loading the DOJO css and other for loading the DOJO JS code.

3. I added a "Client JavaScript" as second builder and selected dojo.js api shipped with WEF V8 designer, path as /factory/dojo/dojo/dojo.js.

4. Then I added Style Sheet as third builder and selected the claro theme as below.

5. I added another "Client JavaScript" builder to add the basic code to load the DOJO charts. In this JS I load the charting DOJO require apis and sample data to display the chart. To develop this, I referred one of the samples Dojo chart example from http://dojotoolkit.org/documentation/tutorials/1.8/charting/ code.

5. Finally added Action List builder to add the main function to load the page1 and saved the model. I could have made page1 as main to avoid this builder.

6. I ran this model in the browser and DOJO charts appear as below -

Conclusion:
This is one of the quick ways to develop chart in any WEF Portal application using DOJO APIs and customer experience can be enhanced. Using DOJO charting APIs developers can create dynamic, unique, and functional charts from different sets of data. Also DOJO Charts provide multiple theme and different types of charting support.

To connect with me, follow me on Twitter: @vishwanathsinha

Vish Sinha, a Senior Consultant for Prolifics, is an experienced Portal and JEE Architect. He specializes in providing Enterprise SOA solutions with different IBM WebSphere stacks and portal solutions. Currently his main focus area is leveraging Web Experience Factory in providing Portal solution to customers. He has played different IT roles ranging from being an Architect, Technology Consultant, Technical lead and Software engineer for several large projects. Vish has done an excellent job in implementing solutions across verticals like Finance, Insurance, Telecom, Retail, and Healthcare for several of Fortune 1000 customers. Vish has a Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering.

IBM Connect Session Summary - BP 407 Portal at the Speed of Light: Techniques for IBM Worklight Integration

I recently presented a session at Connect 2013 with Handly Cameron titled: Portal at the Speed of Light: Techniques for IBM Worklight Integration. This session focused on discussing various techniques for integrating IBM WebSphere Portal with IBM Worklight. IBM unveiled Portal 8.0.0.1 and a new feature pack for Web Experience Factory, which took mobile landscape to a different level. In Portal, we have responsive themes Out of the Box with CTC4 templates and in Web Experience Factory we have a Camera builder that integrates with Worklight. Our techniques discussed during the session were inline with these new developments in the Portal space.

Let us take a step back and look at what we discussed during the session. We started off with a quick introduction to Multichannel Applications and Worklight. We then discussed various questions that current IT decision makers have in mind before zeroing in on an approach. And then, we presented our five techniques namely:

• Standalone Portal – Responsive Web Design
• Standalone Worklight
• Using Portal to host application pages
• Personalized Content driven by WCM
• Integration with Backend Systems

Finally, we concluded with a Reference Architecture and list of things to keep in mind while selecting an approach.

The message that was conveyed through out the session was loud and clear. Portal could be used Standalone to cater to multichannel devices; Same applies to IBM Worklight. Each of them has their own place depending on the business requirements. The other three approaches talk about inter-play between Portal, WCM and other Backend systems with Worklight. We explained scenarios and presented code snippets where such integration would make sense. Most of the questions at the end were focused on this topic.

To summarize - If anyone is heavily invested in WebSphere Portal, then migrating to 8.0.0.1 and employing Responsive Design helps tremendously in targeting multi-channel devices seamlessly. Responsive Themes are available Out of the Box and personalized content could be created to target users more closely. In addition to that, IBM entitlement provides 2 additional licenses for Worklight if the application talks directly to Portal. This would be a nice way to use that entitlement to create mobile applications from Portal targeting multichannel devices. Alternatively, if WebSphere Portal is not in the mix, IBM Worklight could present a promising solution standalone delivering enterprise capabilities across devices.

To access our presentation from IBM Connect, please click here: Portal at the Speed of Light: Techniques for IBM Worklight Integration.

As an IBM Champion for IBM Collaboration Solutions, I was also interviewed on my work with Worklight, Portal and Mobile. To watch the interview, click here or below.


Find out more about Prolifics' week at IBM Connect here: Prolifics @ IBM Connect.
To learn more about Prolifics, please visit www.prolifics.com.

If you would like to talk about this presentation in depth, please connect with me in one of the following ways!
Twitter: @LaksSundar
LinkedIn: Laks Sundararajan
Email: Laks Sundararajan

Laks Sundararajan is a Solution Architect at Prolifics, an IBM Champion for Collaboration Solutions and a key member of highly specialized team working on IBM WebSphere Portal, Content Management and Collaboration technologies. He has led implementations of many global projects using IBM WebSphere Portal and has extensive background in design and development of enterprise portals. He specializes in providing Enterprise SOA solutions leveraging WebSphere Portal, Content Management and Tivoli. He holds a Masters in Information Technology from Carnegie Mellon University and a Graduate Degree in Engineering from BITS, Pilani.

Prolifics Thought Leaders Named IBM Champions in 2013!

The IBM Champion program recognizes innovative thought leaders in the technical community. An IBM Champion is an IT professional, business leader, developer, or educator who influences and mentors others to help them make best use of IBM software, solutions, and services.

Meet Prolifics' 2013 IBM Champions!
Prolifics is proud to announce that 15 of our thought leaders have been recognized as IBM Champions for 2013. Prolifics has long demonstrated technology leadership through deep skills, a proven methodology, and high customer marks. Our technical staff has consistently developed innovative and creative solutions for Prolifics' clients and has dedicated themselves to rigorous and ongoing training - raising the bar and bringing thought leadership to the entire industry. Many of Prolifics' Champions selected by IBM have been published in several trade journals and often speak at conferences. Additionally, their custom-solutions implemented for customers worldwide have been honored with several awards.



Congratulations to all of our IBM Champions!

Handly Cameron - ICS
Laks Sundararajan - ICS
Alex Ivkin - Security
Dan Kern - Tivoli
Greg Hodgkinson - Rational
AJ Aronoff - WebSphere
Steve Fraser - WebSphere
Leland Irwin - WebSphere
Eric Markowitz - WebSphere
Vladimir Serebryany - WebSphere
Ashraf Souleiman - WebSphere
Prithvi Srinivasan - WebSphere
Neha Dhawale - WebSphere
Arup Datta - WebSphere
Rajiv Ramachandran - WebSphere

To learn more about our IBM Champions, visit: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/champion/
For more information about Prolifics, visit: www.prolifics.com

Building Social Media Toolbars on WebSphere Portal 8

The Business Case
Social Media Toolbars are a popular user interface pattern for many websites today. Providing links to your social media channels helps promote your brand, connects users to your social venues, and can aid both the user and the site owner in communicating information through additional channels and formats. This article discusses an approach to building social media toolbars that can be re-used in your WebSphere Portal 8 themes. You can optionally allow business stakeholders some ability to manage the social media links including; changing the order of links within the toolbar or activating and deactivating individual media links. This solution may also allow you to leverage the features of Portal security and personalization to allow for advanced targeting scenarios.

In the simplest implementation you might implement the html markup for the social media toolbar directly in your theme html or a dynamic content spot using a JSP file. The hard coded solution is extremely simple and may be acceptable if you have no need to for any of the following: - You have no need to share the links across themes. - You don’t need any personalization capabilities or security authorization. - You are comfortable with a development and deployment cycle to manage the links.

However there is an alternative approach that is nearly as simple to implement and allows much greater flexibility and re-use. We want to store the social media bar links in our portal page taxonomy under a hidden page label. When we do this, we can then preserve the same links across themes and allow the theme to read and display the social media links.

The Implementation
First let’s setup some basic custom theme helper code.

In the dynamic content of a your custom theme locate the file includePortalTaglibs.jspf and add the JSTL core taglib.

Next, we want to be able to locate all external links under our hidden portal label. To do this we are going to use a custom uniquename for our label so we can find this label using the Navigation Model SPI. In order to get the navigation node for the uniquename we create a helper function in the helper.jspf called “getNodeByUniqueName”.

Add the import statements highlighted below in the file named “helper.jspf”:

Next, we’ll use a JSP Init method to perform the JNDI lookup of the navigation model home. We also declare the instance members for “navModelHome” and “ctx”.

To complete our helper code we implement our helper method in the JSP static block.

Now we have a helper method to return a NavigationNode for a given uniquename string. Keep in mind this method may throw runtime exceptions in certain scenarios. Later for our case we want to invoke this method in a way that catches any additional exceptions beyond the checked ModelException. Users of this helper method should also check for a null return value.

Next we need a new dynamic content JSP page to render our social media bar.

The code listing is given below:

The above code listing deserves some explanation. In the declarations at the top we include our helper and common tag library includes.

Next we look for two parameters. The first is the uniquename of social media label from Portal - Manage Pages portlet that contains our external links and metadata. The second is an optional parameter for a separator markup we optionally may place between groupings of items in our social media bar. When possible you should try to achieve this using CSS instead of the separator markup parameter.

In the next section we call our helper function “getNodeByUniqueName” in order to get the NavigationNode to iterate over. We conditionally process the lookup of children under the navigation node if the social node is not empty.

We initialize a category variable to track changing from one grouping of social links to the next. This is our indicator to output the separator markup.

Next, we use the Portal EL Beans to get the metadata for each external URL managed by the portal:

• link.css.classname
• link.category
• “Page Icon” property

With this we conditionally output the separator markup, and finally we output a link using the CSS class name from the page properties.

The image icon URL is optional and changes the content of the anchor tag. Depending on how you wish to implement the social media icons. You can use CSS for the anchor tag alone to render the images. If you provide the icon URL the tag is used. Using CSS only may be preferable as you can use glyphicons.

Now that we have a JSP to render our social media toolbar, we can place this into the static resource(s) of our theme as a dynamic content spot. You can register the dynamic content spot as a theme resource environment provider property per – “Creating a dynamic content spot”. For the purpose of this article we’ll simply use the resolver URI directly.

The code listing below shows adding the social media bar dynamic spot to the “theme_en.html” file:

Note the protocol and URI resolves to our JSP in the anchor with relation attribute of “dynamic-content.” We also give the uniquename parameter in the query string.

This is total code needed to implement the solution aside from site specific css.

Portal Page Management
We need to create our Portal Label and add some links. To do this; navigate Portal Administration and select Manage Pages.

Navigate to Content Root > Hidden Pages. Create a new Label under Hidden Pages.

Enter “Social Media Links” under the title, and give the label the same uniquename you used when creating the dynamic content spot.

Next, add a new URL under the Social Media Links label

In this example, I used an image for Page Icon property. If you wish to set page parameters for link.category or link.css.className you must first click Ok to Save the URL. You then return to edit the URL and can modify the page metadata. An example of this appears below:

The screen capture below shows a representative URL’s Page Parameters being set.

Repeat the URL creation process for each link you wish to show in the toolbar.

The Rendered Output
The social links created in Page Management will now be presented in the theme(s) that render the social media bar dynamic content spot.

Conclusion:
This is one possible solution to building social media bars in WebSphere Portal 8 Themes. The solution allows a Portal administrator or business user to create new toolbar items (excluding the supporting CSS or images.) The same user can activate and deactivate a link. The links in the toolbar can be reordered. The links could be different for authenticated users based on a user’s identity by using “assign permissions” or by using personalization rule mappings. Most importantly the link data is decoupled from a particular theme and its presentation of the links.

Tim Reilly is a Technology Manager with Prolifics. He has led the implementation of many global projects using IBM WebSphere Portal and has extensive background in design and development of enterprise portals. He specializes in providing Enterprise Java and Portal solutions leveraging WebSphere Portal, Content Management, Tivoli and 3rd party integrations. He has over 10 years of experience with Websphere Portal and is a former Apache Software Foundation committer.

Creating the Intranet “Classifieds” Feature using IBM WCM 8 – Part 3

In this blog series on WCM Based “Classifieds” intranet solution, we covered the Site Area, Authoring and Presentation Templates, HTML & Menu Components, Categories, Authoring Tools Component so far. In this final part of the blog we will look at the Workflow and Permissions and finally Creating the Page and Portlet.

Workflow and Permissions

• Workflow
• The following workflow is used to manage the item lifecycle. By default, the item enters the first stage “WS_DraftMktpl”; it has a scheduled move action which moves the item to next stage in 1 min. The next stage contains the Publish action and publishes the item on the live site.

• We could also use an approval process for each kind of item by inserting one more stage between the Draft and Publish stages for approval. Approver rights can be assigned to a group or person in the Approval stage, ensuring all content is approved manually by a group/person before it gets published.

• Permissions
• In order to enable users to post, edit and delete items on the live site, we configured the following permissions.
• Page and Content Viewer Portlet– Map “User” role “All Authenticated Users”
• Demo_Lib – Map “Contributor” role to “All Authenticated Users”
• Demo_Lib\Content – Map “Editor” role to “All Authenticated Users”

First, you need to assign all authenticated users access to pages and the portlet, which render the content. Next, you want to assign permissions for Demo_Lib(you content library) and Demo_Lib\Content in order to provide edit, delete and create functions to end users.

All these permissions are set using Portal Administration Console.

Creating the Page and Portlet
Page - Here we create a Portal Page anywhere in the Portal page hierarchy and make sure end users have appropriate permissions to access that page.

Portlet - Place a Web Content Viewer (JSR 286) portlet on the above page. Edit the portlet and add the below settings.

• Select the HTML component that renders the Marketplace view. This is a convenient feature in WCM 8 where we can directly render components instead of placing them on Content Items first.
• Next, select the three authoring templates to act as input when you click the button “Post Item,” providing users with an option to select one of these to add as the new item.

Conclusion
In short, the solution is useful for building a classifieds-like site within your intranet or Internet site using Portal and WCM 8. This article only gives the general idea and concepts that can be used to build such a solution, but you can tweak it in numerous way to meet your specific requirements. Essentially, the main enabler of this solution is the use of the Authoring Tools component and the appropriate permissions to provide that component to end-users.

In the example we used in this blog series all the three items can be created using a single button that gives users a choice to pick an authoring template. This was our client requirement; you may divide your site into different sections based on different item types and have a different button for each item type. So, based on your requirements, you can choose an appropriate option to select authoring templates within the Authoring Tools component.

Manmeet Gill is a Senior Consultant at Prolifics, an IBM Bravo Award Winner and a key member of specialized teams working on IBM WebSphere Portal, Content Management, IBM Forms and Collaboration technologies. He is certified in IBM WebSphere Portal and IBM Web Content Manager and has over 8 years of IT experience. Besides specializing in IBM technologies he is a double black snowboarder, an advanced windsurfer and a superbike enthusiast. He holds a Bachelors Degree in Engineering from MSR Institute of technology, Bangalore.

Creating the Intranet “Classifieds” Feature using IBM WCM 8 – Part 2

In this blog series on WCM Based “Classifieds” intranet solution, we covered the Site Area, Authoring and Presentation Templates so far. In this blog we will look at the HTML & Menu Components, Categories, Authoring Tools Component, Workflow and Permissions and finally Creating the Page and Portlet.

HTML and Menu Components:

• Menu Components
• To list the three types of content items under respective sections of the rendered Marketplace, we use three menu components: menu_MktplcVehicles, menu_MktplcElectronic, and menu_MktplcOther. Each of these menu components pulls content based on the category that distinguishes each type of content. Each menu also contains the HTML markup to render the list of respective items.

• HTML Component
• This component is the main presentation component of Marketplace. The above three categories are put together using a jquery tab construct, and the markup for that resides in an html component called html_Marketplace. This html component is the top level component that is configured in the “Web Content Viewer(JSR 286) portlet”, and it calls the three menu components to render each tab view.

Rendered View of Marketplace:

Categories:
We use three categories under the Taxonomy - WCM/Marketplace - Vehicles, Electronics and Others - to categorize the three kinds of content items.

Authoring Tools Component:
This is the most important aspect of the whole solution. This is how “create” and “edit” features are exposed to the end users. An authoring tools component allows users with appropriate permissions to create new items, edit items, delete items or approve items inline on the live site. That means the users don’t need to access the authoring UI to author content.

We use two authoring tools components as part of our solution:
a) atcomp_ItemPost: This component allows users to create new items and is rendered as a button. The way we use this component is quite interesting, as we configured the component to use the Authoring templates defined in the rendering portlet. In the rendering portlet we add our three authoring templates. Refer to “Pages and Portlet section” for portlet configuration.

Since there is more than one authoring template in rendering portlet configuration, invoking this control displays a list of authoring templates to choose from (see below).

An inline interface displays the authoring template to create new content once the template is selected (see below).

b) atcomp_ItemEditDelete: This component allows users to edit or delete an item. In the Marketplace listing page, each item has an edit and delete option next to it if it was created by the current logged in user. Essentially, only the creator of the content item can edit or delete the content item. This can be setup by assigning a “Manager” role to “[Creators]” group in the Published workflow stage.

So far in this blog series focused on a WCM Based “Classifieds” intranet solution, we have covered the Site Area, Authoring and Presentation Templates, HTML & Menu Components, Categories, Authoring Tools Component. In the next and final part of this series, we will look at the Workflow and Permissions and finally creating the Page and Portlet.

Manmeet Gill is a Senior Consultant at Prolifics, an IBM Bravo Award Winner and a key member of specialized teams working on IBM WebSphere Portal, Content Management, IBM Forms and Collaboration technologies. He is certified in IBM WebSphere Portal and IBM Web Content Manager and has over 8 years of IT experience. Besides specializing in IBM technologies he is a double black snowboarder, an advanced windsurfer and a superbike enthusiast. He holds a Bachelors Degree in Engineering from MSR Institute of technology, Bangalore.

Creating the Intranet “Classifieds” Feature using IBM WCM 8 – Part 1

A feature that most organizations can provide as a benefit to their associates using their intranet is by implementing a company classified ads feature. This concept is by no means new, and some of us can reminisce of the physical cork bulletin board prominently displayed in a break room or around the office walls. A human resources department may choose to champion the intranet version of this concept as a "soft benefit" to employees or associates. For the associates there is a convenience of posting ads within the organization as opposed to posting out in public forums such as Craig's List. The associate is transacting with a more 'trusted' party. Many times an item can be exchanged at their work location.

Organizations that leverage IBM Web Content Manager and WebSphere Portal for their intranet site can quickly and easily build and deploy such a feature. We recently developed and deployed a large intranet redesign using WebSphere Portal with WCM version 8. This 3-part blog series provides an overview of the design and implementation of this classified ads feature. With the tools provided by IBM WCM and WebSphere Portal, a robust classifieds system can be created. We use a workflow to provide governance, WCM authoring templates for structured content capture and inline authoring tools to place content creation in context and in the hands of end users.

We called the classifieds feature “Marketplace”; it consists of three kinds of items (using three different authoring templates) that can be posted by users. The items are submitted by the users from the live site using the inline Authoring Tools component. The submitted items are sent to a workflow that has a scheduled move action to push it to the next stage where it gets published. Once published, the items appear live on Marketplace.

Users also have the option to edit their own items again using the Authoring Tools component on the live site. The changed items are sent to the same workflow and appear on Marketplace after they have moved to the published stage.

The actual library artifacts cannot be included in this article as those are client assets, but we have included snippets and concepts wherever applicable. The idea is to share the concepts and the solution approach so anyone needing a similar setup can use this as a starting point.

This blog is broken down into a 3-part series covering various assets that will need to be created as part of the overall solution followed by a conclusion section.

In this first part we will look at the Site Areas, Authoring & Presentation templates required for this solution.

The Site Areas:
We use a single Site Area to store all Marketplace content items. Create a Site Area; in our example, we use DEMO_Lib\Marketplace.

We use categories in Authoring templates to distinguish between different types of content items posted by users.

The Authoring Templates:
We use three authoring templates to post three different kinds of content items. These are exposed to end users through the Authoring Tools component. In our example, we use the following authoring templates:
i. Post New Vehicle
ii. Post New Electronic
iii. Post Other The “Post New Vehicle” template has the elements listed below. This is requirement specific and could contain any number and type of elements.

The “Post New Vehicle” template has the elements listed below. This is requirement specific and could contain any number and type of elements.

Attach a category to content by specifying a category in the “Default Content Properties->Profile” section of the authoring template. Each authoring template will have a different category that will be used to differentiate between various content items.

Finally, the workflow is attached to the content items created by authoring templates; simply select a pre-defined workflow in “Default Content Properties->Workflow” section.

The Presentation Templates:
We do not directly use the presentation templates to render individual items; using HTML and menu components, the listing page meets the rendering requirements. However, a presentation template for each type of content item maybe useful if search is to be supported.

When using Portal search to search WCM content, the respective presentation template is used to render the content item. So, since search did not need to be supported, no presentation templates were needed in our example.

As a part of this WCM Based “Classifieds” intranet solution, we covered the Site Area, Authoring and Presentation Templates so far. In the remaining two parts of this blog series, we will look at the HTML & Menu Components, Categories, Authoring Tools Component, Workflow and Permissions and finally creating the Page and Portlet. In the meantime, feel free to email me with any questions or comments you may have and visit www.prolifics.com for more information about Prolifics' WCM solutions.

Manmeet Gill is a Senior Consultant at Prolifics, an IBM Bravo Award Winner and a key member of specialized teams working on IBM WebSphere Portal, Content Management, IBM Forms and Collaboration technologies. He is certified in IBM WebSphere Portal and IBM Web Content Manager and has over 8 years of IT experience. Besides specializing in IBM technologies he is a double black snowboarder, an advanced windsurfer and a superbike enthusiast. He holds a Bachelors Degree in Engineering from MSR Institute of technology, Bangalore.

Prolifics Mobile and Portal Demos at IBM Connect

Attending IBM Connect? Prolifics will be showcasing demos of IBM Worklight, IBM WebSphere Portal, IBM Web Content Manager, IBM Connections and more! Get a preview into these demos by visiting our YouTube page for IBM Connect.


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Interested in scheduling a one-on-one session with a Prolifics expert to walk through these demos? Email solutions@prolifics.com today to schedule a session at IBM Connect!

To learn more about Prolifics at IBM Connect, visit: www.prolifics.com/connect-2013.htm

Portal at the Speed of Light: Techniques for Worklight integration at IBM Connect

IBM Connect 2013 is now less than two weeks away! This is my eighth visit to the conference, but the first time as a full session speaker. Along with my colleague and fellow IBM Champion, Laks Sundararajan, I will be presenting on Wednesday morning about techniques for using IBM WebSphere Portal and IBM Worklight together to build mobile applications.

Here is our agenda:

IBM Worklight Portal
Servers Diagram

• The need for multi-channel applications
• A quick overview of Worklight
• When to use just use Portal or Worklight by themselves
• How to build hybrid apps using Portal and Worklight together
• Use WCM to let your business authors drive application content
• Leveraging Cast Iron and WebSphere MQ
• Best Practices Speed Round

Our goal is to help you understand options for designing a mobile application integrated with your existing web and back end systems. We will show you the system architecture, a few live demos, and provide some tips on how to implement the solution for yourself.

You can visit the IBM Connect conference site to connect with us and add the session to your schedule: http://www.socialbizonline.com

Session Details:
Title: BP407: Portal at the Speed of Light: Techniques for IBM Worklight Integration
Date & Time: Jan 30, 10:00am - 11:00am
Location: Dolphin S. Hem III
Abstract: In this session, you'll learn techniques for extending your IBM Websphere Portal to mobile applications across iOS and Android devices. Experts from our User Experience team will demonstrate how to easily build IBM Worklight applications that integrate with personalization and web content features provided by Portal. You'll see how to use tools such as IBM Web Experience Factory and IBM Web Content Manager and how to leverage capabilities such as Portlet Services and mobile themes to develop a mobile application running on IBM Worklight in both online and offline modes. At the end of this session, you will be ready to take advantage of the IBM Worklight entitlement provided by IBM to take your Portal to the mobile world!

Prolifics is a Bronze Sponsor at IBM Connect 2013 and will be showcasing our solutions and offerings at Booth #C18-19. To see what else Prolifics has planned for the conference, please visit: www.prolifics.com/connect-2013.htm.

If you would like to meet me at Connect or set up a one-on-one workshop session with a Prolifics subject matter expert, please reach out in one of the following ways:
Tweet @Handly
Tweet @Prolifics
Email solutions@prolifics.com

Handly Cameron is an IBM Champion and a Technology Manager leading Mobile and Social solutions at Prolifics. He has 20 years of experience in enterprise collaboration and application development and loves to help companies leverage social and collaboration technologies to drive business value. Handly is the leader of the Atlanta WebSphere Users Group, recently finished 5 years as the president of Agile Atlanta, and holds 25+ industry technical certifications. He blogs at http://handly.org and is on Twitter as @Handly.