Administration portlets overview

Portal User Interface

The following sections describe the portlets that are provided for customizing the user interface for WebSphere Portal.

Manage Pages

With the Manage Pages portlet, you can export page configurations in XML, create, edit, activate, order, and delete pages and external web pages and labels. Available tasks depend on which item is selected.

Themes and Skins

With the Themes and Skins portlet, you can install, edit, and delete themes and install, and edit skins. You can also select a default theme and skin by using this portlet. See the Themes and Skins portlet help for specific instructions on these tasks.

Theme Customizer

You can change the appearance and behavior of a theme. You can select colors, fonts, graphics, turn areas of the page on and off, and adjust the settings for areas of the page such as the navigation.

Portlet Management

The following sections describe the portlets that are provided for working with portlets, web modules, and applications.

Web Modules

With the Manage Web Modules portlet, you can install new portlets from either a web service or a WAR file. Or manage existing portlets, or view a list of portlet applications for a web module. A web module is a WAR file that contains portlet applications.

Applications

With the Manage Applications portlet, you can enable a portlet application as a web service or to manage existing portlet applications. It displays a list of all web modules and associated portlet applications that are installed on WebSphere Portal. You can view and change portlet application settings from this portlet. Tasks include renaming and deleting portlet applications, and modifying configuration parameters. See the Manage Applications portlet help for steps to do these and related tasks.

Portlets

With the Manage Portlets portlet, you can view or manage existing portlets, or enable portlets as web services. It displays a list of all installed portlets. You can view and change portlet settings with Manage Portlets. Tasks include renaming and deleting portlets, and adding, modifying, or deleting portlet configuration parameters. See the Manage Portlets help for steps to do these and related tasks.

Web Services

With the portlet,Web Service Configuration you can set up your portal for using web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) by configuring WSRP Producers on the Consumer side. For more information, see the topics about Using WSRP services.

You cannot use the web Service Configuration portlet for the following:

• Provide web services that make your portlets available to other systems such as remote web services. To provide web services as a Producer, use the Manage Portlets portlet.
• Use web services that integrate web services that are provided by a Producer as remote portlets. To use web services as a Consumer, use the Manage Web Modules portlet.

Web Clipping

With the Web Clipping Editor portlet, you can identify and extract specific portions of a document for display in a portlet. You can choose to display an entire document by referencing a URL or tag only a key section.

Portal Access

Users and Groups

With the Users and Groups portlet, you can search for, edit, and delete existing users and groups. You can also create new users and groups and modify group membership.

Resource Permissions

With the Resource Permissions portlet, you can set access roles. You can assign access roles to associate users and groups with resources to determine the level of interaction a user can have with a resource.

User and Group Permissions

With the User and Group Permissions portlet, you can easily assign, view, and modify the roles and permissions that users and groups have on various resources. For more information, see the User and Group Permissions portlet help.

Credential Vault

With the Credential Vault, you can do tasks specific to vault management. You can add or manage vault segments and vault slots.

Resource Policies

With the Resources Policies, you can view and manage policies for efficient administration of resources. Policies apply rule-based expressions of business logic that control the user's experience with resources when specific conditions exist. From the Resource Policies portlet, you can view the list of policy types for resources. For a policy type, you can edit the policy settings, import, and export policy definition files, and assign access to users who need to work with the policy type. You can edit a policy type and refine it by creating one or more subpolicies. The policy editor makes it easy to select, create, and edit policy rules that consist of simple conditional statements.

Portal Settings

Global Settings

You can use the Global Settings portlet to define what the user sees, including the default language and the Find link. The default language that is specified in Global Settings applies to all users when the language preference specified in their browser is not supported. For example, if the portal is configured to support English, German, and Spanish, with English as the default language in Global Settings, a user whose browser language preference is set to Italian would see English because Italian is not supported in this case. A user can also select a preferred language when they register.

Global Settings also determines what users see when they return to the portal. For example, you can choose to display the most recently visited page rather than a default page. You can allow users themselves to choose what they see when they log on, or if they see the default page or the most recently visited page. You can also determine a URL for the Find link. For more information about Find link, see Setting the search engine that opens when users select Find.

Note: The Global Settings portlet does not work in portal cluster configurations.

URL Mapping

With the URL Mapping portlet, you can create easily readable URLs and map them to pages. You can publish these URLs externally and by that make them available to your users.

Custom Unique Names

WebSphere Portal uses object IDs to identify resources unambiguously even between different portals. They consist of an extended alphanumeric string that might be difficult to remember. With the Custom Unique Names portlet, you can assign unique names to resources. You can select names that are easy to read and remember. These custom unique names make identification of resources easier than the object IDs assigned by WebSphere Portal, for example when porting resources from one portal to another.

Supported Markups

With the Supported Markups portlet, you can determine which markups are recognized. You can add, edit, activate or deactivate, and delete a markup. The installation default is HTML. See the Supported Markups portlet help for detailed instructions.

Note: Leave the default HTML markup enabled. Removing or changing the HTML markup causes access problems. If the default HTML markup is disabled, use the XML configuration interface to re-enable the HTML markup.

Supported Clients

With Supported Clients, you can determine what types of devices and web browsers can access the portal. You can add, edit, order, or delete clients. If you need to test a portlet with a device simulator, you might need to add the user agent string of the device simulator to the portal client list. Consult the documentation included with the device simulator to determine the user agent strings the simulator supports and add these strings by using the Supported Clients administration portlet. See the Supported Clients portlet help for detailed steps on working with clients.

Import XML

With the Import XML portlet, you can import an XML file. For example, from a staging server you can export pages and portlets into XML by using the XML export on Manage Pages. And then use the Import XML portlet to import the configuration to a production server.

Portal Content

Web Content Libraries

Add, edit, copy, and delete web content libraries to better manage your web content. You can also specify access control settings for the library itself and the types of content it contains.

Syndicators

Create, edit, and delete syndicators that are used to replicate content between Web Content Manager environments. Syndicators identify the libraries that are available for replication by subscribers. You can define which libraries are available for syndication and change the order that libraries are syndicated.

Subscribers

Create, edit, and delete subscribers that are used to replicate content between Web Content Manager environments. Subscribers are associated with a syndicator and receive updates from all libraries that are specified by the syndicator.

Search Administration

Manage Search

With the Manage Search portlet, you can create and manage search services, search collections, and search scopes. Searchable resources include various document types, for example HTML and text documents. WebSphere Portal sites can also be indexed and searched. Refer to the Manage Search portlet help for detailed instructions about working with search.

Portal Analysis

Frequent Users

The Frequent Users portlet shows how many users logged in for the past 90 days.

Enable Tracing

With the Enable Tracing portlet, you can enable or disable the tracing logs. See the Enable Tracing portlet help for detailed instructions on working with logs.

You dynamically enable or disable trace logging for individual classes and entire packages with the Enable Tracing portlet without restarting WebSphere Portal. In a WebSphere Portal cluster, the portlet lists and changes the currently running trace loggers on only one individual server (not the entire cluster). To dynamically change the trace specification for the entire cluster, you must use the Enable Tracing portlet on each individual server (horizontal or vertical cluster member).

Manage Virtual Portals

Manage Virtual Portals

With the Virtual Portal Manager portlet you can create, list, modify, and delete virtual portals. When you create a virtual portal, it is filled with the initial default content for virtual portals. For more information about how to work with Virtual Portal Manager, see the portlet help.

Other portlets that are useful for administration

There are other portlets not accessible from Administration that are also useful in administering WebSphere Portal.

Site Map

WebSphere Portal provides the Site Map portlet. It serves two purposes:

• You can use the Site Map portlet to navigate the site. It displays a list of the pages and portlets. You can access this portlet by logging in to the portal, clicking Search Center, then clicking the Site Map tab
• The Site Map portlet enables external search crawlers to collect pages more efficiently.

Properties

With the portlet,Properties you can modify properties on pages and portlets. You can access this portlet when you create a new page, editing an existing page, or from the Manage pages administration portlet.

Note: Current® limitations for the Properties portlet include:

• The list of shareable pages that are displayed by the Properties portlet is limited to those pages that the user can go to. As a result, a user might not be able to create explicitly derived pages from some shareable pages.
• A user must have at least Editor privileges on a page to be able to edit the properties on that page. Privileged users are not able to edit a page's properties or edit personalization rules because Personalization rules are part of a page's properties.

Administrator self-help pages and portlets

There are two pages with portlets that provide more help information for using the administration features. These portlets are included in the default portal installation, but are not deployed. To deploy the pages and portlets, see the following topic in this Information Center: Deploying the administration self-help pages and portlets.