In the next panel we need to give the customized Service Viewer portlet an intuitive name and description. This is what the end user will see within the catalog so make sure it’s easy to identify the purpose of this portlet. You can select from a list of images for the thumbnail and description to pretty up the portlet.  I have tried to figure out how to upload a custom thumbnail image of our “BSM Dashboard” but there doesn’t appear to be an easy, straight forward way to do this. At this point we can assign the customized portlet to one or more catalogs. Select the ‘Online Sales Catalog’ and click ‘Add’ to select that catalog.

Just as in the catalog creation process we can establish various levels of role based control at the portlet or widget level. Below is a summary of the various access control levels and what each allows in the portlet or widget context.

•       User: Roles with User access have view access to the configured portlet, when it is subsequently added to a page.

•       Privileged: User Roles with privileged user access, have view access and such users can personalize their own experience of a portlet through the Edit options icon in the portlet taskbar. Personalizing a portlet does not affect the experience of other users of the portlet.

•       Editor: Roles with Editor access can subsequently edit shared settings for a portlet through the Edit options icon in the taskbar. When an editor modifies shared settings, it affects other portlet user settings for that portlet. Also, roles with Editor access can subsequently edit the portlet's general settings in the Portlet Wizard. Editor access (unlike manager access) does not provide access to portlet-specific customization pages or to the security settings page in the Portlet Wizard.

•       Manager: Roles with Manager access can subsequently modify any aspect of the portlet in the Edit Portlet Wizard. As the creator of the custom portlet you are given Manager access by default.

•       Note: The access control settings are not observed when using the administrative portlets under the Settings node. Users with access to these pages and portlets will be able to create, edit, and delete all custom pages, portlets, and views. For example, if a user has no access to "Page Two", but has access to Pages, that user can edit all of the properties of "Page Two" and change access control settings. Keep this in mind when granting access to the Settings portlets for a role.

•       If a user is assigned to multiple roles, the user acquires the highest access level between these roles for a resource. For example, if a user belongs to the manager role with "Privileged User" access to a portlet and also belongs to the communications role with no access to the portlet, then the user has "Privileged User" access to the portlet.

For the purposes of this demo I’m leaving things as is in the access control and role area.

The next three steps are the actual customization of the TBSM Service Viewer portlet itself. Enter a title for the portlet and click ‘Next’ to continue.

In the next step we’ll set the starting instance for this portlet. What this means is one use of this portlet is to show the traditional structure model and setting the starting instance would be the starting point for what would be displayed. When a custom canvas has been created and anchored to an instance, we want to select that instance as the starting instance. By default, with a custom canvas associated with the instance it will automatically be shown in this service viewer portlet.

Navigate the service tree and select the Online Sales Application. Verify that it’s set as the starting instance and click on ‘Next’ to continue.

In the final step we simply need to uncheck the three boxes so the standard menu bars are not shown in the portlet. We want to have maximum real estate for this portlet to show the dashboard content and nothing else.

The final panel allows for the review the basic portlet customizations. Click on ‘Finish’ to complete configuration of the customized portlet.

The completed customized Online Application Dashboard portlet is now available in the ‘Portlets’ panel. You may need to use the filter box to find the new portlet.

The next steps will be to create a hierarchy of folders that will be used to organized new pages used in our BSM Solution. This folder hierarchy and actual pages shows up in the task list panel on the left hand side of the display. I strongly recommend creating lots of folders that can be used to allow pages to be easily found and launched on-demand. Navigate to the ‘Settings’ task area within the task list and click on the ‘Pages’ task link. Within the ‘Pages’ panel, click on the ‘New Folder’ icon to begin creating our folder structure.

For our demo purposes we’ll create a similar folder structure resembling the structure model we created. The first folder will be one representing “My Company”. I want this folder to appear at the very top of the task list so a quick trick to get it there is to click on the ‘Location’ button and launch the ‘Folder Location’ panel. On this panel, hit the ‘Move to Folder’ button and ‘OK’ to start the folder movement process.

Next, make sure the top level ‘console’ folder is selected and hit the ‘OK’ button. In the next panel, verify that ‘My Company’ is at the top of the list and hit the ‘OK’ button.  In the final panel review the configuration options and hit the ‘Save’ button. What we’ve essentially done here is avoided having to hit the ‘Up’ button twenty times or so to move the folder to the top. Note the useful configuration option to hide the folder from the task list.

 

 

 

 

Continue creating a folder hierarchy that will represent the desired organizational structure “My Company” --> “Online Sales LoB” --> “Online Application”.

 

 

After all of the folders have been created we’ll create the new page. Click on the ‘New Page’ button to begin the process. Give the new page an intuitive name and use the ‘Location’ button to select the destination folder for the new page. We have two choices for new page layouts as either ‘Classic’ and the new ‘Freeform’ layouts. The ‘Classic’ option presents you with the rigid column and row based layout similar to a typical newspaper style layout. Introduced with TIP 2.2 is the new ‘Freeform’ option which we also refer to as the “messy desktop” layout option. What this means is that when using this layout option you can simply drag and drop portlets and widgets anywhere on the page. You can also stack them on top of one another using this layout option. This technique will be used extensively to create “BSM Dashboards” in the future versions of TBSM. After configuring the basic page properties click on the ‘OK’  button to move to the next page creation tasks.