The Not-So-Secret, Secret MQ Script

For those of us who work with IBM products, we all know the power of the Information Center, or better known as the Info Center. At a client in lovely Tampa, Florida, myself and Infrastructure Practice Director, AJ Aronoff, were tasked with installing WebSphere MQ v7 and WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition v7.0.2 onto a SUSE Enterprise Linux v11 system.

Now for those who have not installed WebSphere MQ on Linux and Unix systems, certain kernel parameters pertaining to semaphores and shared memory must be set above a certain minimal level. If these are not set, MQ may not operate correctly, which on a production system, only spells disaster. The WebSphere MQ Info Center has a “Quick Beginnings for Linux” section, which walks users through pre-installation tasks that need to be completed. Naturally, there is a section about setting the kernel parameters.

This section tells users to run the command “ipcs –l”, which displays the kernel parameters and their current settings, and provides an example of the minimal settings that MQ Server requires. The “ipcs –l” command will display the parameters in the format shown below:

One would think this format would allow an admin to check the parameter settings that MQ requires, make the changes, and move onto the install. The problem is that the Info Center page doesn’t provide this format. It provides the requirement like so:

Now examining these two formats for long enough, you can determine some of the possible correlations. But others, such as the kernel.sem setting, can be interpreted in many ways, as some of the values could be set for multiple parameters. Research provides more hints about the other settings, such as their short name, but no solid evidence for the kernel.sem parameter. There is, however, an IBM support page devoted purely to this little problem, but also doesn’t provide a concrete translation of the kernel.sem parameter. This page would probably be ignored by an amateur user, as the title states “Unix IPC resources” instead of ‘kernel parameters’ and ‘Linux’, but by looking back at the “Quick Beginnings” page, one notices the first sentence reads “System V IPC resources”. IBM hid our now not-so-secret script, mqconfig, on this page, as long as you don’t scroll right past it. The script reads kernel and software information about the system you are running it on, compares them to the IBM standards for MQ, and prints out if the system passes or fails each of the necessary parameters.

Once the failed settings have been changed, by copying the proper settings into the sysctl.conf file, and the script is run again, the output looks like this:

So for those of you other than AJ and myself who will be installing MQ on Linux or Unix, save yourself some time and a headache, and use this handy script. It can be found here: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=171&context=SSFKSJ&dc=DB520&dc=DB560&uid=swg21271236&loc=en_US&cs=UTF-8&lang=en&rss=ct171websphere

Patrick Brady is a Consultant at Prolifics based out of New York City. He has 3 years of consulting experience based around the WebSphere family of products, focusing on the administration side of customer implementations. He specializes in High Availability solutions for WebSphere MQ and Message Broker.

City of Largo, FL Wins With Panther Again

The City of Largos’ Recreation Department received rave reviews from users when they went live in mid August 2010. The Recreation application, which was built with Panther5.20/Oracle/Linux, is an accounting, management and tracking system, allowing the department employees to manage their daily duties in an effective way.

For the past 12 years, the city has utilized Prolifics’ legacy tools to build applications for their Police and Recreation Department, starting with JAM7 on SCO. With the release of Panther 5.0 for Linux several years ago, the city migrated most of their applications off their SCO platform. A reason for staying with Panther was its portability; i.e. ability to run on most platforms and to connect to heterogeneous databases with minimal changes.

In recent months, the city’s development team has been thrilled at enhancements made to the Panther Linux product, which include support for anti-aliased fonts, image and text support for tab cards and enhancements to tooltips.

The city’s next project is to web-enable the Recreation app, allowing citizens to register for classes being offered by the department.

According to their Developer/Administrator, “... I cannot over emphasize the effect that the upgraded Panther features have had with both the Recreation Department and City as a whole. We've been able to provide tools with a modern look and feel and in many cases, better than what we could buy at comparative costs.”

Sample screen shots from the Recreation Application






To see the customer's take on this solution, read Dave Richards' entry about Panther on the City of Largo Work Blog

Amrith Kaur-Maldonado, first joined Prolifics as a Consultant and then moved into the Prolifics Education Dept as a JAM/Panther trainer. She has experience in conducting WebSphere Developer Training at IBM training facilities. Amrith then transitioned back into the Technical Support Team 7 years ago and she now managers the Support Team.

TAM ESSO in the wild: A look at ISO-NE's implementation

Christopher Ehrsam, Senior Security Consultant

I recently was involved in a unique implementation of IBM Tivoli Access Manager for Enterprise Single Sign On (TAM ESSO), working with ISO-NE, a major utility company, towards increased security and monitoring performance. Operating in a 24/7 environment, ISO machines must be highly available and employees monitor the health of the power grids in control room using a number of shared workstations. The company is required to track which users log into each workstation and must lock machines that were not being worked on. Doing so complies with Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) government standards and enables system notifications for user activity on any workstation. The new system integrates the existing building badges and unique user IDs making two- factor authentication possible.

As we were planning this project, we knew how significant time would be with ISO. Summer is considered a “high risk season” in this industry because of the increased utility usage during these months and the company’s infrastructure must be prepared to handle the activity. We realized the importance of preparing the company’s infrastructure as quickly and efficiently as possible. Prolifics focused this implementation around ISO’s specific security and monitoring desires, which puts them at an advantage with the badge reader and centralized auditing capabilities.

For those of you who are interested in hearing more, I will be speaking at Prolifics’ TAM ESSO live Webinar on September 15 to discuss the solution’s implementation and success. The webinar will include a demonstration showing how TAM ESSO can increase enterprise security, provide application access tracking, and increase your ROI.

Christopher Ehrsam is a Senior Security Consultant with Prolifics. Chris has been in the Identity Management field for over 10 years, getting his experience working with the Tivoli product family at IBM.

Integrating with Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com (aka Salesforce) is the most commonly used cloud-based Software as a Service platform for Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Recently, we have been involved with a lot of customers who are planning to start migrating to or have made a strategic decision to use Salesforce to manage their customer contacts, track sales orders, streamline their sales processes, etc. In fact, Prolifics itself is a Salesforce customer.

Our own experiences, and those with our customers who use Salesforce, have given us an in-depth understanding of what it takes to ensure that this CRM solution is made universally available within the enterprise – to business processes that require customer information or to portal applications that mash up customer information with data from other systems. This blog entry details three patterns that we have commonly used when integrating with Salesforce and that we believe can be reused – entirely at the design level and to a good extent at the implementation level.

1. Enterprise CRM Services – Every enterprise has defined standards when it comes to their enterprise services and data formats. The reusable enterprise services are exposed via the ESB and all the end applications use these enterprise services to communicate with end systems so that the ESB can provide the common functionality and the governance needed when performing system integration. Using this same concept when working with Salesforce allows enterprises to centralize the Salesforce integration at the ESB layer (the ESB communicates with Salesforce using SOAP/HTTP web services), do transformation, security, etc. at one common place and provide clients – processes, portals or mashups, etc. – with the consistent enterprise-wide data representation to which they are accustomed. The enterprise services provide the generic CRM interface to the clients, so that if the CRM system has to be changed, the hundreds of clients that use the CRM system in the enterprise do not have to change. The IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus is commonly used for implementing this pattern.

2. Publish CRM Data – Another common requirement is to ensure that CRM data is passed from Salesforce to back end systems based upon changes that happen within Salesforce to this information. The ESB provides a service (SOAP/HTTP web service) that gets invoked by Salesforce (with all the relevant information from Salesforce) when data of interest changes in Salesforce. This data is then transformed and passed to the back end systems. The benefits of this approach include a centralized service definition on the ESB, transformation of data, centralized security management, supporting legacy applications that are not web service enabled [but still need CRM data], etc. The IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus or IBM WebSphere Message Broker is commonly used for implementing this pattern. [Note: the reverse flow from end systems to Salesforce is handled similarly, instead of being invoked by Salesforce; the ESB invokes a service on Salesforce.]

3. Bulk Load of CRM data – It is very typical for customers to need the ability to bulk load customer data from their existing homegrown systems into Salesforce. These kinds of requirements are also common when mergers and acquisitions happen and new customer data needs to be loaded. During the bulk load of CRM data, there may also be a need to cleanse the information before loading it into Salesforce. The IBM InfoSphere DataStage, IBM InfoSphere QualityStage, and the IBM InfoSphere Information Server Pack for Salesforce.com together support this pattern that involves the definition of ETL jobs that extract data from different sources, cleanse, map the data to Salesforce format, and load it into Salesforce.

I want to conclude by saying that we at Prolifics believe in “eating our own dog food.” Prolifics has a production implementation of IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus that was built using the pattern described above (Publish CRM Data) that enables the data we have in our Salesforce instance to be published to IBM’s Global Partner Portal based on Siebel.

In my next set of blog entries, I will focus on couple of related topics:

• IBM’s acquisition of Cast Iron Systems and how the solution supports these patterns of integrating with Salesforce


• A set of assets that we are currently working on at Prolifics to help customers jump start their own Salesforce integration initiatives.

Rajiv Ramachandran first joined Prolifics as a Consultant, and is currently the Practice Director for Enterprise Integration. He has 11 years experience in the IT field — 3 of those years at IBM working as a developer at its Object Technology Group and its Component Technology Competency Center in Bangalore. He was then an Architect implementing IBM WebSphere Solutions at Fireman’s Fund Insurance. Currently, he specializes in SOA and IBM’s SOA-related technologies and products. An author at the IBM developerWorks community, Rajiv has been a presenter at IMPACT and IBM's WebSphere Services Technical Conference.

Mobile Portal – Creating A Simple Mobile Portlet - Part III

Samuel Sharaf, Solution Director, West Coast

Part 3 of this blog series takes you through series of steps to demonstrate the creation, development and deployment of a simple Mobile Portlet using Rational Application Developer. While working on this blog I found out that this could be a long one with all the images/screenshots. So this first entry just focuses on pre requisites, creating a Mobile Portlet project and exploring the project artifacts.

Before you get started, please download and install the following software images on your machine:

1. Rational Application Developer 7.5.1
2. WebSphere Portal 6.1.x
3. Mobile Portal Toolkit 6.1

Step – 1 Create a new Project
Start Rational application developer, hereafter called RAD, you can use either an existing workspace, or create a new workspace.

Create a new Portlet Project and name it MobilePortlet, set runtime to WebSphere Portal 6.1. Set the Portlet Type to JSR 286. Set the Portlet type to Mobile Portlet and click Next.

Once the project is created, the workspace looks like the figure below:

Note that a new Portlet has been created in the com.ibm.mobileportlet package in the Java Resource:src directory. Lets review the WebContent folder, the key folders under that directory are:

1. _MobilePortlet and mcs-policies
2. Within _MobilePortlet there are two folders called html and xdime. These two folders contain JSP files with the same names (MobilePortletView.jsp)

Note that if the request comes from the web browser, the MobilePortletView.jsp under the html folder gets rendered; however, if the request is from the mobile device MobilePortletView.jsp under the xdime folder gets rendered.

The mcs-policies will hold the device-dependent aspects of the mobile portal e.g. policies for various layouts, themes, components and assets etc. A sample layout file has been created by RAD.

In the next part of this blog series, we will start creating the code artifacts.

Stay tuned…

Samuel Sharaf is a Solution Director at Prolifics on the West coast with real world customer expertise with Portal implementations, Dashboard, Forms and Content Management. Sam also has expertise with migrating applications from non-IBM platforms to IBM WebSphere Application and Portal Servers.

2010 Portal Excellence Conference

Samuel Sharaf, Solution Director, West Coast

This year the IBM Portal Excellence conference was held in Hilton Chicago. I was there with one of our key clients (American Express Corporate Travel) to co-present on the solution Prolifics developed. For those of you who are familiar with the IBM world, there is a conference every year for each of the five main brands. For me, this one was nearest and dearest to my heart as I have been involved with IBM Portal technology for several years.

So let’s go over some of the key highlights of the conference…

• Portal and LWCM 7.0 will be officially released around mid September time frame this year
• IBM acquired Coremetrics (http://www-01.ibm.com/software/websphere/announcement061510.html)
  The plan is to integrate Coremetrics with the WebSphere platform and exposed the web metrics through out of box Portlets so that organizations can make intelligent business decisions.
• Project NorthStar was announced, which reflects IBM’s vision and multi-year roadmap for how organizations can create next-generation online experiences. (http://www-01.ibm.com/software/info/northstar/)
  

Since I am intimately involved on daily basis interacting with the clients, the announcement of Portal 7.0 coming out soon was big news. Besides supporting JSR 286 and Web 2.0, Lotus Web Content Management will finally be fully integrated with the WebSphere Portal and will take advantage of Web 2.0 features for authoring and presentation templates. Also, the integration of Coremetrics with the WebSphere platform and the ability for the companies using Portal internally/externally to perform web trending will be huge.

I might sound biased; however, my presentation with American Express was received very well by the attendees. The session was full and we had lot of live interaction via Q&A with the attendees. The presentation was divided into two main parts. Chris, from American Express, talked about the business case and how the solution brought overall value to their business, while I focused on how the Prolifics team helped designed the overall solution and implement it. What drew attendee’s interest was the fact that the solution is scalable to millions of end users and has been rolled out in 22 different languages; and people in all 5 continents are actively using it to book their travel. If you are interested in learning more about the solution we developed for American Express Corporate Travel, our marketing department has done a great job in providing an overview. (http://www.prolifics.com/travel-portal.htm)

Overall I found the conference very informative and hey – where else could you meet the co-author of JSR 168 and JSR 286 (Stefan Hepper) and some key IBM architects one on one?

Samuel Sharaf is a Solution Director at Prolifics on the West coast with real world customer expertise with Portal implementations, Dashboard, Forms and Content Management. Sam also has expertise with migrating applications from non-IBM platforms to IBM WebSphere Application and Portal Servers.

IBM Mashup Center

Niral Jhaveri, User Experience Practice Manager

The Web 2.0 world has evolved, and has evolved considerably. It’s no longer about getting data from the universe of information -- but collaborating, publishing, sharing and deriving business intelligence from the data. The landscape of information now consists of smaller fragments of relevant data commonly known as mashups.

So when a bank searches its database for a customer, it no longer expects to get the name of the customer. But instead expects to get back a data grid of all the accounts linked to the customer, a pie chart showing all the different asset holdings (equities, loans etc), a Google map showing the address of the customer and any relevant alerts on the customer account. And that’s not it -- all the information should be seen on a single unified page! Think it’s difficult? With IBM® Mashup Center, you can access the components that you need to create Web 2.0 mashup and application solutions.

What is a Mashup?
Mashups are situational applications which aggregate disparate data. Mashups add a lot of value by associating data elements that are relevant for the users.

With Mashup Center, you can

• Create situational apps which are reusable assets
• Facilitate rapid development of dynamic web applications (widgets)
• Create feeds from numerable data sources
• Empower business users to create and share mashup applications, widgets, feeds, and services
• Provide business intelligence by associating the data elements.
  

The Architecture



Key Components

Catalog: The catalog is a repository. All feed, feed mashup, and widget information is kept in the catalog.

Widget: A widget is a miniature application that is embedded within an HTML page. With a widget, dynamic content is displayed on the page.

Feed: A feed contains XML data. RSS, Atom and XML feeds are available on the Internet. An example of an RSS feed is the top news stories from Yahoo!, available at http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/topstories. Feeds in MashupHub can be created using different data sources and then accessed via a URL.

Page: A page is a collection of widgets and other HTML markup that can be displayed in a Web browser. A page can be a mashup application or a regular Web page.

Why should your business use Mashup Center?

Mashup Center is a great tool for rapid assembly of dynamic web applications. The Mashup pages provide a lightweight web solution that combine application and information to solve many different business needs. Around the inter-web there is a fair amount of interest in mashups and many perceive it as better medium.

Mashups provide a user interface to data from variable sources (or feeds) like Web services, enterprise databases, spreadsheets, even BI warehouses like Cognos. Portability is a valuable add-on provided by Mashup Center. Development and product teams can build mashup pages/widgets and easily expose it to any intranet, internet or enterprise portals (even to Microsoft Share point).

With IBM Mashup Center business stakeholders get the freedom to assemble applications that cater to their requirements. Business users can combine, transform and reuse the mashups to create visualizations and provide real-time collaboration.

Mashup wiring enables you to collaborate data for a more unique, dynamic interface. So let’s say for example, a map widget can be wired to several feeds like real estate listing, company address, customer listing, hotels and restaurants. You can also wire the customer listing to its stock prices, relevant market news for the customer etc. You get the idea. Wiring widgets is extremely intuitive and easy to use.

Mashups and WebSphere Portal
Mashups are usually meant for creating applications which are developed in a very short time to target a very specific business problem. It is generally recommended to develop mashups when flexibility and time-to-develop applications is more important than governance and traditional development model provided by WebSphere Portal.

Pre built widgets (like graphs, reports, Google Gadgets) make Mashups more suitable for visualization and aggregation of data from different data sources on a single screen. However for a more transactional based enterprise system, WebSphere Portal is much better suited.

Style of development for portlets and mashups is also different. Widgets can be developed using different tools and have a relatively small and a generic code base. Feeds can be developed visually or by writing native SQL. Developing portlets require a more structured model by incorporating one or more design patterns and/or frameworks (Struts, JSF etc).

WebSphere Portal provides a much broader set of features like Virtual Portal, SSO, Content Management, Collaboration, advanced security model on Pages, Portlets and resources, Portal search, impersonation. These set of features are key differentiators between the WebSphere Portal and Mashup Center.

Mashup applications can run along side or within the portal framework, it all depends on the solution designed. WebSphere Portal 6.1.5 provides the ability to render Mashup Pages and widgets within the portal container. At the same time, Mashup Center can render any Portal page by providing the appropriate URL for that page.

An Example of a Customer Dashboard Mashup

Niral Jhaveri was most recently a Senior Consultant at Prolifics and has extensive expertise in the IBM Lotus, WebSphere and Rational family of products. He has played a key role at several strategic clients by providing technical leadership. Niral has an extensive background in the design and development of IBM WebSphere Portal, SOA and Web 2.0 applications with a proven track record of consulting and architecting solutions for several industry verticals like Finance, Retail, Insurance and Technology.