Part 1: Get on the Express way
March 2003
Team Lead Nicholas Chase gives a brief overview of the project and what you can expect out of the series. He also explains why the team's first stop was IBM WebSphere® Portal Express.

Part 2: Create the project plan
March 2003
Nicholas Chase describes how the planning process determines priorities and shape the project plan. Whether things will turn out exactly the way the team thinks they will is another story; the first rule of Web development, in the team's experience, is that a site is never quite what you thought it would be when you started out.

Part 3: Choose a business pattern
March 2003
Nicholas Chase examines some of the common situations described by IBM Patterns for e-business and explains how you might take advantage of the various cases, some providing application architecture and even sample code to help get a project started. In this article, the team puts the experience of others to work, and applies it to their own project while focusing on Collaboration, Access Integration, and WebSphere Portal patterns.

Part 4: Secure your WebSphere Portal - Express server
March 2003
Tom Syroid, Project System Administrator, addresses the first step in setting up a server that will be accessible from the Internet: making sure it's secure. He explains the issues that need to be considered before WebSphere Portal is installed, covering topics such as physical security, network security, operating system security, application security, user management, and file permissions.

Part 5: Install WebSphere Portal Express
March 2003
Nicholas Chase brings you a tutorial that lists the necessary hardware and software prerequisites for installing WebSphere Portal Express, explains the information necessary for a quick install, and describes how that process should work. It also looks at some of the additional information necessary for a standard install.

Part 6: Get started with WebSphere Portal Express
April 2003
This tutorial is for developers and administrators who want to get familiar with WebSphere Portal in general, and WebSphere Portal Express in particular. It explains basic concepts such as portlet use and administration, user administration, and the basics of creating portal pages.

Part 7: Customize pages with WebSphere Portal Express
April 2003
This tutorial for administrators guides you through the process of customizing the layout of a page under WebSphere Portal Express. Tom, the MetroSphere project system administrator, rolls up his sleeves and learns how to customize a portal page by adding a custom Message of the Day portlet, plus two portlets supplied with the installation: Reminder and Today at IBM developerWorks.

Part 8: Move to WebSphere Portal Enable
April 2003
Nicholas Chase chronicles the differences between WebSphere Portal Express and the newly released WebSphere Portal Enable V4.2, and describes the steps the team took to create the first part of the main MetroSphere portal.

Part 9: Install and secure Red Hat Linux
May 2003
Tom Syroid shows you how to install and secure a Red Hat Linux® 8.0 server in preparation for installing WebSphere Portal Enable.

Part 10: Install WebSphere Portal Server 4.2 on Red Hat Linux: DB2 and IDS
May 2003
Tom Syroid details the procedures necessary to install IBM WebSphere Portal Enable, Version 4.2, on Red Hat Linux. Because this topic is complex, we've split the information into two parts. This tutorial covers the installation of DB2 and IBM Directory Server (IDS).

Part 11: Install WebSphere Portal Server 4.2 on Red Hat Linux: WebSphere Application Server and Portal Server
May 2003
Tom Syroid outlines the installation of DB2, WebSphere Application Server, and WebSphere Portal Server in this tutorial.

Part 12: Hands-on intro to JSP technology: Create a community weblog
May 2003
Nick Chase gives you the background and details you need to develop a JSP application. Follow along as he develops a new weblogging application.

Part 13: Install an existing portlet
June 2003
Nick Chase obtains a prewritten portlet application for request tracking and installs it on the portal.

Part 14: Create a new theme
June 2003
Nick Chase shows you how to develop themes -- which provide the look and feel for a group of Web pages -- and skins -- which provide the look and feel for portlets. Topics covered include creating a new template theme, installing the new theme, adding WebSphere Portal functionality to the theme, accessing language-dependent text, creating URLs within WebSphere Portal, and creating and installing new skins.

Part 15: Make tag libraries available throughout the portal
July 2003
Adding functionality such as JSP tag libraries to a portlet application is easy: simply include the appropriate files when creating the WAR file. But what if you need to use that tag library outside the portlet application? This tip follows the addition of the blogutil tag library to the MetroSphere portal's registration page.

Part 16: Secure version management with CVS
August 2003
Learn how to transform the open-source version control utility CVS into a secure application in this tutorial from the MetroSphere project's system administrators.

Part 17: A cost-effective backup solution for MetroSphere
August 2003
Tom Syroid outlines the backup strategy the MetroSphere team implemented. He details the hardware configuration, operating system (configuration, partition layout), and software solution chosen. While some of the pieces discussed are solution-specific, the methods and implementation can easily be extrapolated to a variety of scenarios and needs.

Part 18: Three ways to link to a specific page
August 2003
WebSphere Portal Server makes it easy to automatically generate links to entire pages and groups of pages, but what if you just want to link to one specific page, such as an "about us" page? This tip looks at three ways of pointing directly at a piece of content.

Part 19: Create a new administrator
September 2003
Nick Chase shows you how to add a user to the WebSphere Portal wpsadmins group, and how to create a class of administrators with limited power.

Part 20: Create portlets: Implement and deploy the MetroSphere blogging system
October, 2003
Nick Chase expands the community weblog application using portlets and JavaServer Pages, including links and forms within the portlets.

Part 21: Create custom user attributes
October 2003
Before you can personalize a portal, you have to know what the user wants. Learn how to create custom user attributes so you can get this information and then see how to use them from within a portlet.

Part 22: Set topics -- custom attributes and user sessions
October 2003
Now you've got custom user attributes, what do you do with them? Nick Chase shows you how you can use that custom attribute, along with session information, to let users choose between showing all topics and showing only their preferred topics.

Part 23: Send messages between portlets
October 2003
Nick Chase describes the process for sending messages between portlets and recording the information in the PortletSession object.

Part 24: Give the user control -- the ultimate portal theme
October 2003
Learn how to let portal users create their own themes without incurring unacceptable security risks.

Part 25: Concrete portlets and using persistent data
December 2003
Associate persistent data with portlets, whether that data represents settings such as database usernames and passwords or user-specific customization choices.

Part 26: Control the user's view of the portal
January 2004
Learn the ins and outs of portal page customization, from basing pages on other pages, to requiring portlets to be present or in a particular location, to limiting the portlets that a user can place on a page.