|
Home > Archive > WebSphere Portal Server > March 2007 > Please respond: Portal Usage At Your Corp.?
You are viewing an archived Text-only version of the thread.
To view this thread in it's original format and/or if you want to reply to
this thread please [click here]
| Author |
Please respond: Portal Usage At Your Corp.?
|
|
| Athar Shiraz 2007-02-24, 7:17 pm |
| This forum seems to be rather slow. Our corporation has had a really tough time adopting portals - we still have not got one although attempts were made since Websphere Portal 4.5.
Initially we had help from some IBM consultants who made some mockups but it never took root. I dont know why but there was a lot of resistance to consultants and perhaps because they were the only programmers working on portal (and other reasons I am una
ware of). Right now I miss those guys because we definitely could use some help.
Then we were trained ( a few of us ) but no product was put forward. Then 10 of us from various depts were trained in bowstreet factory for portals - some of these guys were PHDs and we still got nowhere since only 3 of the 10-12 people ended up working w
ith bowstreet portlet factory. Our first attempt to bring portals to the intranet lasted 6 hours when the website crashed due to performance reasons.
So, what is your story : success and failures.
| |
|
| The only way your portal programme will take off is for the senior management in the business to want it to support business strategy (e.g. re-engineering the corporate intranet or delivering customer facing services). If that business buy-in is not there
and a 2-3 year programme of capability delivery is not defined, plus an enterprise portal architecture, then trying to drive it from the bottom up will not work. You may have some minor successes, but not a real big one.
The other way to go is to deliver a small scale business solution through portal (e.g. HR Services) and develop that to firm up the technology usage, skills, experience etc. From there you can showcase that to the wider business to generate buy in.
Either way, it takes time, money and commitment. Find a stakeholder who has all those things and really believes in it.
| |
| Athar Shiraz 2007-03-01, 1:18 pm |
| Our CIO is pretty gungho about it but most of the managers and supervisors are now reluctant and wary of WPS.
The problem is they are not doing incremental work but want everything to transition with a bang... (entire intranet portal).
I will look into your suggestions. Any more experiences?
| |
|
| Your situation is very similar to mine. Our portal project was presented (over my objections) as the magic bullet to solve all our problems. Of course it failed.
Now we are having some measure of success because the portal is out of the spotlight and treated as infrastructure with one or two "killer apps" deployed through the portal.
| |
|
| See this article i think it can help.
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerwor...col_bernal.html
Our company deployed portal express 5.0.2 two years ago and now we are in a migration process to version 6.0. The sponsor of the project was the Marketing people.
The goal, in the first time was to make an intranet portal (news, communications, etc). But now the portal need to align with the business. We are creating dash boards and portalizing some business applications.
With the point of view of the marketing people the portal project is a sucess.
| |
| George Daswani 2007-03-22, 1:25 am |
| WEBSPHERE PORTAL can be summed down to one word "PAIN".
We wrote a customer facing support site using WebSphere Portal 5.1.01. We
used it to interface data with SAP R/3 and various other datasources (for
things like Order History, and etc).
Basically, we ran into a couple of problems primary with the Development
Tools (RAD 6 is beyond buggy), and the required infrastructure is overly
complex.
To begin with, let's talk about RAD 6 <-- the tool is a resource hog and is
extremely buggy. We were banging our heads just trying to work with the
tool, it made our desktops crawl (all of us upgraded to 2 gigs of RAM).
Something is definitely wrong when a tool requires 4 to 8 hours just to
install itself (RAD and UTE).
Even now we are still running into issues - after installing the latest
updates (to both RAD 6 and updating the UTE to 5.1.04) our development
environments broke. Page labels shows, but no portlets  I wonder how
many PMR's I have to file before this is fixed (I'm already dreading the
re-install).
The second biggest problem we ran ito was due to overly complex systems
landscape required to support this technology. We have 11 servers dedicated
to supporting this platform. 3 of them are development servers (one is a
playground, and the other two are actual dev servers linked to the
deployment path). We also have a QA1 and QA2 clusters (4 boxes), along with
our PRD cluster (2 boxes), and finally - two additional servers acting as
LDAP / NDs. Why so many QA servers? Try deploying using xmlaccess and
release builder and see what happens you run into xmlaccess errors.
Couple of notable problems that affected us in production.
1) Memory Leak - we are using JTDS to access MsSQL server which fakes XA
transactions. So when the portal server is restarted, it tries to rollback
the unfinished transactions in its log, runs into an error (invalid XA id
from the driver) and keeps on queing up. End result, our portal servers
kept crashing every two weeks due to this memory leak. We basically have to
make sure we delete the
$WAS_HOME\tranlog\WebSphere_Portal\trans
action\partnerlog\{log1 and log2}
along with $WAS_HOME\tranlog\WebSphere_Portal\trans
action\tranlog\{log1 and
log} during every restart.
note: WAS has an enable2Phase=false datasource custom property which might
fix this problem for us (hopefully, that flag converts the datasource into
"local transaction" only mode, and not enlist it as an XA datasource.
So why not use the new XA drivers from MS? The portal was only validated
to work with the old Microsoft SQL server JDBC driver (which everyone knows
is a buggy / pos).
2) User Page Customizations problems <-- make sure you install the FIX
packs, or the customization fixes available from IBM. I can pretty much
gaurantee that your users will run into page customization / page editting
usings without those fixes from a 5.1.0.1 install.
In regards to our project, after much pain and long hours, we were able to
deploy (early last year) - and it was generally well received.
Some of the things we've built to support our project..
1) Wrote a custom TAI (Trust Association Interceptor) to make it work with
our home brew Web Single Sign On System.
2) Wrote an Environment Resource Provider for R/3 access (Wrapper to SAP's
JCo) which allowed us to talk to R/3 (We retrieve JCO connections through
JNDI - similar to JDBC datasources). Our admins, through custom properties
are able to set pool size, passwords and etc. JCA is supposed to be the
recommended way for working with backend EIS systems - but the last time we
checked, SAP's JCA resource adapter can't be used outside of their products
(SAP J2EE Server and Portal). This mechanism works pretty well and we're
able to access R/3 RFC's through this well documented interface (SAP JCo).
3) Made sure we integrated a caching solution early in our data access
designs (Tangosol Coherence) primarily for performance and to save our
backend systems / databases due to death from a thousand cuts. This
generally works well for portal implementations as data access patterns are
primarily read only.
If anybody needs some more detailed docs in regards to deploying to a tiered
environment (dev->qa->staging), let me know and i'll dig up some of our
procedure docs.
That enough for now - this thread just reminded me of how much pain we had
to go through :]
G
"Athar Shiraz" <arthur.orange@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1143244990.1172357805982.JavaMail.wassrvr@ltsgwas009.sby.ibm.com...
> This forum seems to be rather slow. Our corporation has had a really tough
> time adopting portals - we still have not got one although attempts were
> made since Websphere Portal 4.5.
>
> Initially we had help from some IBM consultants who made some mockups but
> it never took root. I dont know why but there was a lot of resistance to
> consultants and perhaps because they were the only programmers working on
> portal (and other reasons I am unaware of). Right now I miss those guys
> because we definitely could use some help.
>
> Then we were trained ( a few of us ) but no product was put forward. Then
> 10 of us from various depts were trained in bowstreet factory for
> portals - some of these guys were PHDs and we still got nowhere since only
> 3 of the 10-12 people ended up working with bowstreet portlet factory. Our
> first attempt to bring portals to the intranet lasted 6 hours when the
> website crashed due to performance reasons.
>
> So, what is your story : success and failures.
>
|
|
|
|
|