Have questions? Start here to find answers to commonly asked
questions related to the IBM® WebSphere® Portal Server &
Lotus® Web Content Management AMI.
What portal and Web solutions does Lotus offer on Amazon Web Services (AWS)?
IBM has three core portal and Web content management offerings available on AWS.
WebSphere Portal Server and Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition
Developer AMI: A no charge Amazon Machine
Image (AMI) that can be used for development purposes, proof of
concepts, testing, training and sales demonstrations.
Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition AMI: A paid for stand alone
Web content management solution for building brilliant internet/extranet/intranet Web
sites, in production.
WebSphere Portal Server and Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition
AMI: A paid for combination of two products from IBM capable of delivering a complete
portal that can aggregate multiple software solutions, including Web content, to deliver a single exceptional Web experience, in production.
All offerings provide out of the box example sites and the ability to create new sites easily. These sample sites can easily be adapted and extended to meet a customers needs allowing you to be up and running quickly.
What does IBM WebSphere Portal Server and Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition AMI help me with?
WebSphere Portal Server and Lotus Web Content Management lets you combine
personalized powerful Web sites with your own business applications and external
Web services to deliver an exceptional Web experience for end users.
This combination of products provides a platform for you to build these exceptional Web
experiences faster.
IBM WebSphere Portal Server V6.1 is an enterprise portal solution with the complete
portal services necessary to deliver a single point of personalized interaction with applications, content, business processes, and people. The unified user experience can help you improve overall productivity and customer satisfaction.
Key capabilities include:
Core portal services that aggregate applications and content and deliver them a role-based applications.
New Web 2.0 features enhance performance and ease-of-use situational mashup development, including client side aggregation support, REST services, and support for contextual live text tagging.
Search services that index and search portal content and files so users can easily find critical information.
Personalization rules engine that enables users to see specific content and navigation based on their role.
Security services that provide single sign-on and granular access control to all portlet and portal resources.
Access to hundreds of portlets from IBM and IBM business partners to access applications, databases, e-mail systems, and more. These portlets are either included with the package or available for download from the WebSphere Portal Business Solutions Catalog. This includes but is not limited to WebClipping, RSS, Domino Web Access, Microsoft Exchange portlets, bookmarks, IBM Portlet for Google Gadgets, content feeds, Lotus Connections Multi-Service portlet, and many others.
Application templating allows composite portal applications to be deployed to different communities, who can then modify aspects of the application to suit their specific needs.
New Site Wizard tool enables administrators or business users to create and manage independent virtual portal sites quickly and easily, without programming, by selecting a site template, an initial look and feel and other options.
New Theme Customizer tool enables business users to easily define selections that control Web site layout, navigation structure, branding and more.
IBM Lotus Web Content Management V6.1 enables companies to rapidly build next generation Web sites based on Web 2.0 technologies with new enhancements that can be used throughout the entire content lifecycle. Improvements in authoring, management, and delivery enable companies to interact with their customers, partners, and employees in new ways.
Web portals allow partners, employees and customers to choose their user experience, with personalized applications based on role, context, actions, location, preferences and team collaboration needs. IBM WebSphere Portal software provides a composite application or business mashup framework and the advanced tooling needed to build flexible, SOA-based solutions, as well as the unmatched scalability required by any size organization.
WebSphere Portal software delivers these business benefits while getting you started with Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) goals. SOA implementations leverage open standards to represent IT and LOB assets as standards-based services independent of the platforms they operate on, and they use an architectural style that supports integrating your business as linked, repeatable business tasks, or services. WebSphere Portal software helps you create and maintain these services as portlets, which are grouped and presented to users as composite applications that are delivered in the context of a given role or task to be executed. The end result can be that tasks are executed more efficiently, because IT can deploy customized composite applications quickly and businesses can use existing assets to support changing business requirements.
WebSphere Portal brings together a range of leading-edge technologies designed to give you a flexible, open, extensible framework to build successful business-to-employee (B2E), business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) portals. By providing industry-leading portal solutions for your on demand business, IBM helps you improve employee productivity, cut costs and strengthen relationships with your customers and trading partners.
When do I purchase the Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition AMI versus the
combined AMI, IBM WebSphere Portal Server and Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition AMI ?
If you need a standalone intranet/extranet/internet with no additional aggregation of external applications, then the stand alone Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition AMI will suffice.
If you need to aggregate external services, data, and add your own portlets then you
need the portal server license also and need to purchase IBM WebSphere Portal Server
and Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition AMI.
What is the difference between the code between the Lotus Web Content Management
Standard Edition AMI versus the combo AMI, IBM WebSphere Portal Server and Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition AMI ?
With the Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition AMI you are restricted to the
Web content management capabilities only. You are not allowed to use the additional
portal capabilities. With IBM WebSphere Portal Server and Lotus Web Content Management
Standard Edition AMI you can use both the portal and Web content management features. Read the license information for complete details.
I noticed that other items are mentioned in the license information, like IBM Tivoli Directory Server and Portlet Factory Designer, however it’s not on the AMI. Am I entitled to use it?
The AMI was tailored for usage on AWS, therefore a number of items are not included on
the AMI. You are only entitled to use what’s provided in the AMI and are not entitled
to anything else.
What are typical types of portal and Web content management solutions that work well on AWS and what types don’t?
As AWS is a Cloud based offering, connectivity to backend or “in house” systems cannot
be guaranteed. Therefore, portal and Web content management solutions that are wholly
contained in EC2 should work well. Some examples include:
Self-contained Web sites built with the Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition AMI (e.g. yourcompany.com) or your intranet/extranet solution.
Aggregation on EC2: Portal solutions accessing/aggregating 3rd party
applications that are hosted on EC2. For example, you may have your own warehousing or document management solution on EC2, this can be integrated as a portlet, widget, feed or Web service as part of an intranet/extranet/internet solution built with WebSphere Portal Server.
Aggregating robust Web services: Portal solutions that aggregate robust internet feeds and services like Google Gadgets and external RSS feeds (e.g. CNN.com). The solutions’ operations will be reliant on both the uptime of these external services as well as the bandwidth between those services and the EC2 servers. If the overall uptime and performance of the services is acceptable then this solution could work well in EC2.
Some systems are less-suited to an EC2-based portal solution and careful consideration and testing should be taken when considering EC2 to deploy such a solutions. Some examples include:
Aggregating applications outside of EC2: If your portal solution requires a highly available, high performance connectivity to backend services located outside the AWS environment (e.g. in house) then the overall performance and uptime could be at risk. In this situation it is probably worth looking at other solutions where bandwidth, performance and uptime can be better controlled/guaranteed.
Integration with external corporate user directories(e.g. LDAP): This is similar to the need to aggregate external applications, but user directory access is a global requirement across the entire portal, raising the importance of a reliable, secure and fast connection between EC2 and the external registry. This capability is not provided by default in the AMI, but several VPN-based solutions are documented in the AWS forums.
How does the WebSphere Portal Server and Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition AMI offerings differ from the way IBM traditionally sells these offerings?
The offering on AWS differs from IBM’s traditional purchasing model in a number of ways:
Pricing – IBM traditionally sells this software on a per user and processor value unit basis. For AWS this software is offered on the standard AWS pricing model based on per hour usage.
You are only entitled to use what software is provided on the AMI and nothing more.
Operating system and underlying infrastructure – the portal and Web content management software, if purchased traditionally, can be installed on a number of hardware and software platforms and works with a number of database servers. In the AWS environment the hardware, operating system and database server is fixed in the AMI and cannot be changed.
Are WebSphere Portal Server and Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition restricted any way?
Yes, read the AWS Customer Agreement and relevant license information for complete details.
Some key restrictions to be aware of include: IBM Lotus Web Content Management, Standard Edition – an entry level offering for small
to medium-sized businesses that has a limited license of 8 virtual cores maximum.
Review the conversion table from Processor Value Units (PVUs) to Amazon Machine Instances to “virtual cores”.
You can mix and match machine instances depending on your requirements. Some examples include:
1 x Authoring server on a Large instance (2 virtual cores) and 1 x Extra
large Instance for the rendering/live server (4 virtual cores) = total 5 virtual cores.
1 x Authoring/Live server combined on High-CPU Extra Large Instance (8 virtual
cores).
1 x Authoring server on a Large instance (2 virtual cores), 1x Staging server on a Large Instance (2 virtual cores) and 1 x Extra large Instance (4 virtual cores) for the rendering/live server = total 8 virtual cores.
You can NOT combine a solution that has more than 8 virtual cores; for example, an authoring server on a Large Instance (2 virtual cores) and 1 x High-CPU Extra Large Instance for a rendering/live server (8 virtual cores). This would be 9 virtual cores, which is not allowed.
In addition to the above server restrictions, only 20 content publishers in total are
allowed across the 8 virtual cores, and a single server for hosting the live site (no clustering). There is no mixing allowed with any other Lotus Web Content Management licenses. As such, this offering is NOT available for Portal Enable or Extend customers (who receive restricted enterprise-level license entitlements with their purchase).
Is the unrestricted Lotus Web Content Management available as an AMI (that does not have Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition restrictions)?
At this time the unrestricted version is not available. Contact IBM for further
information.
Do you have a list of Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition customers?
There are many customers. Read some of the case studies.
Are other WebSphere portal and accelerators available on AWS as AMIs today?
No.
If a WebSphere Portal and/or Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition customer is under current maintenance, do they get AWS AMIs for free?
No . However an existing WebSphere Portal and Lotus Web Content Management Standard
Edition customer may decide to deploy their existing products on AWS. See PVUs required for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud for more details.
How do I size my AWS infrastructure requirements?
As a general rule with AWS you can choose from a number of AMI instance types.
For the WebSphere Portal Server and Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition AMI and Web Content Management Standard Edition AMI the following instance types are applicable:
For single user development purposes you may use a Standard: Small Instance.
For test, production/live purposes you can use one of the following instance
types:
Standard instances: Large and Extra Large
High-CPU Instances: High-CPU Medium Instance and High-CPU Extra Large Instance
The gating factor is the restriction on Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition AMI.
To determine which Amazon EC2 Instance Type is applicable you will need to perform a sizing exercise to determine the CPU and the amount of RAM required to service your desired performance load. This will need to be matched with a relative Amazon EC2 Instance Type.
At this point of time IBM has not released a sizing tool specifically for Lotus Web Content Management and WebSphere Portal server on AWS.
Can I cluster my portal and Web content management AMIs for performance/load balancing?
No. Neither Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition nor the AMI combining Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition and WebSphere Portal Server can be clustered for performance/load balancing. If you have questions regarding this restriction, contact Adam Ginsburg.
Can I have a fail over scenario with Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition AMI and/or WebSphere Portal Server and Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition AMI on AWS?
With Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition AMI available for AWS, content can
only be served from one single Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition AMI
server at a time (review the AWS Customer Agreement and license information for a full set of requirements/ restrictions that apply to Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition)
There are two options to provide fail over:
Generally when you set up these AMI instances on AWS you choose AWS's Elastic Block Storage (EBS ) as the storage option. EBS provides a persistent store. In the event your live AWS instance fails you can start a new instance and reuse the existing EBS storage to bring your server up as it was at the time of failure. You site will be down from the time it fails to the time the new AMI starts and you reconfigure the AMI. This will be a number of minutes and dependent on your specific instance’s configuration.
You can create two instances (duplicates) of the AMI you are deploying with a single
shared database (on a separate AMI). You would have server A and B running simultaneously.
To adhere to the license, you would need to direct 100% of your traffic to one server (eg Server A) with 0 (zero) % of traffic going to the other server (Server B). If Server A fails you could switch over to Server B,. Your site down time will be determined by the solution you deploy for fail over and can be minimized to a second or two using a router that has knowledge of primary and backup server configurations. For example, you can use the PrimaryServers and BackupServers configuration options in the HTTP Server plugin configuration (plugin-cfg.xml file). Note in this scenario you will need to pay AWS for both servers, as they are both up and running at the same time. If you are using the paid AMI and not your own software running on AWS, you will be charged as if you are using both machines simultaneously. If you own the software, you can deploy the second copy at no extra charge (i.e you do not use the paid AMI, you create your own AMI with the software you own).
For a load-balanced solution where both servers are running, sharing traffic and serving content, you will need to purchase from IBM directly a solution that includes Lotus Web Content Management, the full edition, not Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition.
If the restrictions imposed by Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition in both AMIs do not suite my needs, are there AMIs with a fully unrestricted version of Lotus Web Content Management?
There is no unrestricted (full) version of Lotus Web Content Management currently available for purchase on a pay-as-you-go model from AWS. You can purchase the full version of Lotus Web Content Management from IBM in a number of different offerings, including:
These full versions can be installed on AWS, using AWS as hosted infrastructure.
Does the Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition AMI or the WebSphere Portal and Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition AMI include Ephox rich text editor at no charge?
The AMIs do not include the Ephox editor. You can purchase this separately from Ephox.
What demonstration resources are available?
There are a number of demos available online for Lotus Web Content Management and WebSphere Portal:
How do I access my portal AMI from my Web browser?
You must access your Portal AMI instance using its public DNS server name, which can be
obtained from the properties of the instance. See the ec2-describe-instances command for more information. By default, WebSphere Portal and Web Content Management are listening on port 10040, so they can be accessed using a URL in the format:
http://<ec2-public-server-name>:10040/wps/portal
Where <ec2-public-server-name> is the fully qualified public DNS server name.
The AMI instance comes preconfigured with an HTTP Server, which once started using the apachectl command (/opt/IBM/HTTPServer/bin/apachectl start), will allow for WebSphere Portal to be accessed over port 80:
http://<ec2-public-server-name>/wps/portal
Additionally, the WebSphere Application Server administration console which manages the WebSphere Portal and Web Content Management instance can be accessed using a similar URL on port 10027:
http://<ec2-public-server-name>:10027/ibm/console
Can I have my corporate LDAP / User Directory used with WebSphere Portal and Lotus Web Content Management?
WebSphere Portal and Lotus Web Content Management provides a basic user directory out of the box. There are a few key options and considerations to take into account.
As AWS is a cloud based offering, it’s not recommended to integrate your corporate user directory in real time, as this would otherwise give a significant impact to performance and reliability, especially as the link between AWS and your remote office is reliant on the Internet, which cannot guarantee bandwidth and up time.
So there are two core options to consider:
Use the out of the box user directory and import your user data using XMLAccess. You will need to code/script the mapping between your user directory (eg LDAP) and the one provided with the product. Review product documentation for details.
Use a 3rd party supported LDAP server hosted on EC2, therefore reducing the impact of internet bandwith and reliability by linking to an in house user directory. For a list of supported user directories, consult the online document for WebSphere Portal and Lotus Web Content Management.
With what user should I log into portal and the WebSphere Application Server administration console?
The AMI instance comes with a default non-root user account, virtuser, that is used for accessing portal and the admin console. During the boot sequence of the AMI instance, you will be asked to set the password for this user.
How do I access the UNIX console of my AMI instance?
The AMI instance is preconfigured to allow you to access the UNIX console using a secure shell (SSH) and the private key you had to generate and specify at the time the instance was created. This allows you to open a secure console without having to know the root password of the instance. The boot sequence of the instance will present a set of YaST panels once you do log in to take you through license agreements and localization of the image, including changing the password for the root and virtuser user accounts.
If I suspect something is going wrong with my Portal AMI, how do I begin to debug the problem?
If you suspect it is a problem with WebSphere Portal or Web Content Manager, refer to the troubleshooting section of the Information Center.
We also recommend using the AWS forums to see if your problem has already been discussed with others, and to solicit the help of the AWS user community in solving your problem.
How do I monitor the Portal AMI to ensure I am not running out of capacity?
You use traditional UNIX tools to determine if the instance has enough memory and disk capacity. For WebSphere Portal, since it is a Java-based product, you should also employ traditional Java monitoring mechanisms, such as monitoring garbage collection activity using the verbosegc JVM option.
Are site analytics capabilities included in WebSphere Portal for Version 6.1 releases?
Yes. WebSphere Portal, Version 6.1 creates standards based access logfiles in NCSA combined log format that capture activity of WebSphere Portal installation and run-time operations. These standard log files can be used with Web site usage reporting tools of customers’ choice to generate custom reports analyzing the activity of WebSphere Portal installation and use operations. Technical documentation outlining use case scenarios and example reports prepared with information recorded to the WebSphere Portal log records will be provided as additional guidance for customers and partners.
Additional materials are available on the IBM developerWorks WebSphere Portal zone.
The Technical Journal article, Using portal analytics with open-source reporting tools describes how you can derive reports and analytics information based on the data provided by the instrumentation in WebSphere Portal V5.1x and WebSphere Portal V6.
Are there Web site analytics technologies available from IBM Business Partners supporting analysis of WebSphere Portal activity and application usage patterns?
Yes. IBM Business Partners have developed add-on solutions to extend WebSphere Portal application activity and application use pattern analysis and reporting. IBM Business Partners providing extended Web analytics solutions for WebSphere Portal include Coremetrics Surfaid, Computer Associates/Wily Technology, Inc. and others. Additional information on these and other IBM Partner solutions for WebSphere Portal solutions can be obtained from the IBM WebSphere Portal Business Solutions Catalog.
Other approaches can be used to leverage the capability of analytics engines with WebSphere portal applications. An example is integration with Google Analytics. Google Analytics is free of charge via a Google Account ID. (If required, tailored services packages for Analytics can be purchased from one of Google's partners.) To integrate Google Analytics with WebSphere portal the following is required:
Create a management portlet that allows the assignment of Google Analytics accounts to
different virtual portals (or a single Google Analytics account to the entire Portal etc).
When rendering pages in portal, insert the Google Analytics JavaScript code along with the
correct analytics account ID into the page. From within the management portlet the administrator can open the Google Analytics Web site to view reports etc.
What development frameworks are supported by WebSphere Portal?
From a development perspective, WebSphere Portal will continue to support Struts and JSF. There are too many extended frameworks available, in different versions, for IBM to test for compatibility (Cocoon, IceFaces, Facelets, MyFaces Spring, Wicket etc). However, WebSphere Portal Version 6.1 and higher releases supports all JSR 168-based and JSR 286-based frameworks that use that standard.
Applications using other frameworks should be evaluated and verified to determine that they are compliant with the JSR 168 implementation, like testing them on the JSR 168 Reference Implementation Pluto at Apache.
WebSphere Portal also enables you to implement the popular AJAX programming pattern. You can use AJAX enabled builders in WebSphere Portlet Factory, libraries in Rational Application Developer or you can implement AJAX yourself.
Where do I find more information on WebSphere Portal Server and Lotus Web Content Management?
