Monday, October 18, 2010

Stubborn Publisher Cache

So you have been working on BEA Publisher and you face that issue, which I think everyone faces with Publisher……the dreaded Caching of content. It is evil my friends. Evil because, Publisher has the habit of caching content and displaying this content. While this is good on some occasions because it helps in faster page load, however, when you are working on some portlet and want to immediately see the effects of your change, this same boon becomes your bane.
Recently I was working on this and found out some tips which can provide relief from the caching content of Publisher.

This is a 2 step process:

Step1: The easiest way is turn off caching in the Publisher WebService.



In the HTTP Configuration page of your Publisher Web Service, look for the Gateway Caching section present at the top of the page. Make both the Minimum Cache Time and Maximum Cache Time as ZERO seconds. Don’t forget to un-check the check box for Suppress errors where possible, so that it is blank.
Click on Finish and your Publisher portlets will no longer show cached content. However do take note, that you should keep a record of you Min and Max Cache Times and restore them once your work is completed, otherwise you are gonna hear a lot of complaining that portlets are taking a long long time to load in the page.


Step 2:
While the Step 1 above works every time, there is one other thing which you can do to make absolutely certain that no cached content remains anywhere. This step needs access to the server on which BEA Publisher 6.5 is installed.
The steps to perform are as follows:
~ Log into the server where BEA Publisher is installed
~ Stop the Publisher service running on that system
~ Search for the folder named localhost in the ptcs installation directory. Normally it will be found like D://BEA/alui/ptcs/6.5/container/work/jboss.web
~ Delete the whole local host folder
~ Restart the Publisher web service once again (The localhost folder will be re-created once again)



Monday, August 2, 2010

Oracle WCI Webinars for Download

Oracle has started recording thier Webinars and even allowing for some of their webinars related to Oracle WCI Portal to be downloaded now.

The Oracle WebCenter Interaction support team will post links to new webinars in this article as they develop them. These can be accessed from the below URL:

https://support.oracle.com/CSP/main/article?cmd=show&type=NOT&doctype=ANNOUNCEMENT&id=1114631.1

That Thing Called Search

Search not working. Phone ringing incessantly. Severity 1 and 2 tickets being raised by Service Center @ speed of light. Damn!! This Search had to fail on a Friday Night.
Phew!!! All of us ALUI/WCI/Plumtree Portal Administrators must have faced this issue one or the other time. After a recent such outage with Search I decided to write down some common remedies for Search.
As usual, I do not vouch for these, but I have seen them work in our portal environment. Please use your brains and do not just follow everything mentioned here cause I am a lazy blogger and might have missed some points.

Search Rebuild Using Search Service Manager:
Under Select Utility Choose Search Service Manager

In the Next Repair Date, Choose a date in the past. Suppose today is August 4,2010 then choose a date from last week.
This causes the Search Update Agent to perform an index repair (or, in this case, rebuild) the next time it is run. Once you have selected an older date click on Finish.

No go ahead and run the Search Update job. Normally there are 3 search update jobs. Please unscheduled the other 2 search update jobs and run just one of the jobs. You will see that the job runs in Repair Mode. Once the job completes successfully, it would have repaired your index and your problems should be resolved.

The Database Method:
My boss tells me I am the most irresponsible person, when I tell him to perform this step. But let me tell you, responsible or not…..this works always….without fail. Let me explain the scenario when this works.
Suppose you have 10 folders and 100 documents in your portal and for some God forsaken reason you are seeing only 96 of those 100 documents. No matter what you do, the other 4 documents do not come up in search. Now is the time to step into the DB server and try restoring order into this portal by rectifying the issue.
Go ahead and browse through the tables of your portal and find two tables “PTSEARCHSTATUS and PTCARDSTATUS” Change the status columns of PTSEARCHSTATUS table to 1 while the PTCARDSTATUS takes a value of 4
Now go ahead and simply run your Search Update job. Voilla!!! All 100 documents will be searchable.

Oracle has started a very good thing of recording their free webinars and allowing others to go through them and even download them for later reference.
Recently they conducted a webinar on Search. Please find below the URL for your reference:
The Search Webinar can be downloaded for viewing here:
https://oracleaw.webex.com/oracleaw/lsr.php?AT=dw&SP=MC&rID=56494767&rKey=99a5997008e7d549

Friday, June 11, 2010

ALUI Log File Locations






















































Component Logs
ALUI Portal $PT_HOME/ptlogging/logs/portal/*.spy
Automation $PT_HOME/ptlogging/logs/portal/automationserverwrapper.log
Document Repository $PT_HOME/ptdr/6.1/logs/drLogs.txt $PT_HOME/ptdr/6.1/logs/wrapper.log
Search $PT_HOME/ptsearchserver/6.1/adminui/logs/wrapper.log $PT_HOME/ptsearchserver/6.1/[$SearchNode]/logs/logfile-trace-yyyy-mm-dd $PT_HOME/ptsearchserver/6.1/[$SearchNode]/logs/logfile-event-yyyy-mm-dd
Publisher $PT_HOME/ptcs/6.4/logs/service.log $PT_HOME/ptcs/6.4/logs/container.log $PT_HOME/ptcs/6.4/logs/boot.log
Collaboration $PT_HOME/ptcollab/4.2/logs/collaboration_log.yyyy-mm-dd.txt $PT_HOME/ptcollab/4.2/settings/logs/collaboration.log $PT_HOME/ptcollab/4.2/settings/config/wrapper.log
Notification $PT_HOME/ptnotification/4.2/settings/logs/notification.log $PT_HOME/ptnotification/4.2/settings/logs/wrapper.log
Analytics $PT_HOME/ptanalytics/2.1/logs/analyticsui.log $PT_HOME/ptanalytics/2.1/logs/asmanagerui.log $PT_HOME/ptanalytics/2.1/logs/configurator.log
Studio $PT_HOME/ptstudio/2.2/logs/wrapper.log $PT_HOME/ptstudio/2.2/logs/ptstudio_log.yyyy-mm-dd.txt

Thursday, April 29, 2010

******* Adieu *******

Hmmm!!!!!

Writing a farewell mail is a tough job you know. At least for first timers like me. Sadly Google miserably fails to help!! Well I just kept staring at my monitor wondering how all the 4.5 years have passed like a flash. I never thought this day would also come. But here it is……

Still remember my first day vividly, I came here as a boot camper, wide eyed with a starlit gaze and scared about the corporate world. Employee ID – 53280 that’s what I was branded. Life on Earth became Heaven on Earth for me when I received my first paycheck here. Honestly the first think I did was take out the whole salary from the ATM machine and stare at it the whole night. I didn’t know how to spend so much money (pun intended, my salary was not much). :)

IPL season 3 has just ended and today I stand Not Out after completing my half century in Birlasoft. Yes, I have completed 52 months in Birlasoft. I started off as an MCA trainee, today as I look back I have treaded a long and arduous path.

Frankly, it is difficult for me to end this relationship with Birlasoft. Today, I am what I am because of Birlasoft.

I gained some of my best buddies here.
I gained the love of my life and now my wife here.
I gained the best mentors here.
I gained the best team members here.
I gained all my knowledge here.

Thanks are in order for a lot of people who have made an indelible impression on my life @ Birlasoft. Starting with Abhishek Gupta and Mandip Vats who selected me from Campus. The journey wouldn't have been possible without the great support from all my Managers / Mentors, R. Srikanth, Samrat Choudhury, Augustine Sunand and Ashutosh Goyal who had the trust and faith on me that I could achieve and deliver beyond their expectations.

I can probably write another 2000 words on my experiences with Birlasoft. Don’t worry guys n gals, I won’t bore you with it. I would reserve it for my blog. But they say, Duniya Gol Hai……kya pata kab …..kaha….kaunse mod par hum dobara milenge…….. :)

Until then wish all of you all the very best for all your endeavors, be it personal or professional. :) :)

I will share my new mobile number as soon as I get it. I can always be reached on srinammisra@gmail.com

Some News

Long time no see...... Well there's some news from my end..... I have finally decided to call it quits at Birlasoft. I had been associated with Birlasoft for 4.5 long looong loooooong years. It was a mixed bag for me......I had some very good as well as some unfortunate experiences over there.....Well the experiences will make the content of another blog post......but sometime later.....

Currently I am going to enjoy this sabbatical away from work with some cooking.......reading.....travelling.....

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Recommended Portal Server Reboot Order

I work in a project where we also have control over the servers. Each time patches are installed or for some godforsaken reason if the portal environment shows signs of breathing its last.......What do we do ?......

Voila!!! Restart the servers so that we delete all connection pools and have an environment as good as new. In medical parlance....restarting the servers is like giving CPR to a dying person....
Oh!! By the way, recently I had seen a man performing CPR on a monkey that was eloctrucuted infront of our office.
Coming back to the CPR procedure.....I mean the server reboot order, Oracle WCI/BEA ALUI/Plumtree has a specific order to it which unfortunately is not present in any of the Admin guides available. Thats the reason I decided to document it for your benifit.

Shutdown
  1. Portal server
  2. Other component servers
  3. Database server

Startup
  1. Database server
  2. Other component servers
  3. Portal ServerPortal servers depend on the database server being up.
It is required that the database server is up first and shut down last.

My personal experience with portals says that, one should shut down the main portal server first but refrain the temptation of restarting it first. The main portal server should be started up the last with the other component servers being turned on before that.

Monday, March 22, 2010

What is Quiesce ?

What in God's name is Quiesce???No, Quiesce doesn't mean the same user online can't do anything or a new user can't access the SharePoint site.
I have collated the following information and hopefully this will help you to understand how Quiesce works.
Quiescing comes into the limelight especially where long running sessions are required. Not all features in your portal environment are affected when you Quiesce your farm. There are two primary features that make use of Quiescing: Microsoft Office InfoPath Forms Services (IPFS) and Microsoft Office Excel Services. Many other features and operations do not need to use Quisecing because they do not have long running sessions where users enter data over multiple server requests without having to save information. For instance, when editing an item in a SharePoint list, SharePoint handles that in a single transaction to the database, storing the information, so no Quiescing needed here.
However, in IPFS, a form filling session may require several communications with a server as the form posts back for server-side data processing for operations such as view switching. Data from the session is usually not saved until the very end when a user submits or saves the form that he or she is filling. Voila!!! Quiescing comes into the picture here.
If an administrator takes the farm offline while some users were already filling it out, the users would lose all of the data they have been trying to input so far in their session and you would be recieving lot of HATE MAIL in your inbox for doing this ;-)
Therefore, if an administrator is going to bring the farm offline, in order to preserve their customer data, they would make a plan of action and first quiesce the farm. This prevents new requests from coming in to start filling out new forms, but it allows existing form filling sessions to continue. When the sessions are all completed, or when an administrator-specified time elapses, the farm enters the quiesced state where no new requests are accepted. The farm can then be safely taken offline at this point without causing any data loss for users and lets be fair, you gave a fair deal of time for end users to fill in thier data in thier forms.
Hope this was helpful.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Trivia Quiz

Identify and tell what is the significance of this temple in the great Indian Politics.

Recuperating Lost Collab Documents

Seldom does everything work out fine in life. It might so happen that one fine day you wake up and you find that some how something screwed up and some of your collab projects have done a dissapearing act. And for some reasons which sometimes even the mighty Oracle analysts is not able to find, the documents in the collab projects have been lost. How to restore them back to the working environment?

Solution:

The deleted files can be restored back to the production environment by using the migration utility of Plumtree.

1. Restore the backup of the production portal and collab database for that particular date in the "Recovery" environment as well as also the "PTDR" folder. "PTDR" folder is actually the repository for all the collab documents.
2. Configure the Portal in the "Recovery" environment for the restored portal and the collab database.
3. Once steps 1 and 2 is completed, Test the portal to be functioning similar to the Production environment since all the related files and database have been restored.
4. Using the migration utility of the Plumtree portal, select the Projects which have lost their files and opt for the "export "option.
Once you initiate the migration utility, what it does is it creates an export file which can be imported to any other portal environment.
5. On successful execution of Step 4, Log into the migration utility of the Target (Production in this case) portal environment and select the "Import" option. That will import the collab project details back to the target environment.
6. As a crosscheck measure, log into the target portal and check the collab project for the lost files. If they are present then everything is in order. If not then need to proceed further to Step 7.
7. This step can be carried out after completion of step 1 and 2. Query the Collab database in these tables [CSFOLDERS][CSFILES][CSFILEHISTORY] to figure out the deleted files based on the inputs from the user/business as to what all files or projects have been affected.
On querying the tables, detailed information about the Projects and their corresponding documents can be obtained such as which is the Parent folder for the Project and also the different versions of the document.
8. Based on the information procured on step 7 with reference to the lost files, open windows explorer and access the "PTDR\ documents\PTCollab\Active" from the recovery environment and copy the

Note: People please do take full backups of "PTDR" folder (D:/Plumtree/ptdr) from the environment wherein the documents have been deleted along with a complete backup of the SQL database for the Collab server ("Collabdb" – from the source environment).

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Trivia Quiz


Identify the person who made an iconic contribution to the Desi Television history!

Friday, March 5, 2010

ALUI Publisher Diagnostic Page

Personally I hate Publisher and I am looking forward to work on Stelliant and do pray its better and easier than Publisher.

I am sure most of you must have felt the need of some sort of diagnostic page where you can get to diagnose the problems facing your ALUI Publisher. I know all of us use the "Publisher Administrator” portlet but there are some rare occasions when Publisher Administrator is not accessible. Now what do you do? SLA time is creeping upon you and you need to get it resolved ASAP.

Well worry not, ALUI does have a way out for all of us.

Aqualogic Publisher’s diagnostic page can be accessed through the “Publisher Administrator” portlet, or you can go directly to its URL: http://publisherservername:7087/ptcs/console/index.jsp.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Trivia Quiz


It is rumored that this article was written by M.O Mathai, who was the political advisor to a former prime minister, although it was never printed. To quote from this article , “SHE has Cleopatra’s nose, Pauline Bonaparte’s eyes and the breasts of Venus. SHE has hair on her limbs which have to be shaven frequently. Physically and mentally sHE is more of a male than a female. I would call her a manly woman”. Who is this woman?

Trivia Quiz

Whose visiting card is this ?

Sunday, February 21, 2010

COMPARISON OF LIFERAY VS ALFRESCO

Here, I have another comparison report for all of you. This time I have taken up two open source portals and done the comparison. The market is flooded with open source portals these days. Some of them are fancy while others provide the bare minimum to be called a portal. But I must say, some of the open source portals can really give the major portals like MOSS and WCI a run for their money.

Introduction:

There are several popular open source JSR 168 compliant portals available. At present there are many free and commercial implementations of portlet containers in the market, what server to choose from and develop on depends on one’s priorities and requirements. This is a comparison study between two of the highly revered portal solutions, namely Liferay and Alfresco. Both of them are useful and there are several successful implementations of both these portals.

Differences:

After analyzing both the portals, the major differences as well as similarities between both these Open Source portal solutions were collated and are represented in a tabular format below.

LIFERAY

ALFRESCO

1

Liferay truly is a portal solution having a very strong & active community behind it and an impressive clientele to prove its credentials.

Alfresco though having everything in a portal, truly is an Enterprise Content Management Software which also has an equally powerful & vigorous community supporting it and an imposing set of customers using the software. This is again, the most admired ECMS solution available in today’s open source market.

2

It is highly scalable & this has been the main driver that helped it to be adopted in a variety of business verticals.

Scalability is not easy as far as Alfresco is considered in the area of portal implementation.

3

Every portal must have Content Management capabilities. Liferay’s document and content management capabilities are not that good in comparison with other portal solutions

Alfresco has been fantastic as an Enterprise Document and Content Management solution. The framework’s architecture, functionality and extensibility makes it really the best choice for an enterprise business.

4

Liferay is JSR 168 compliant

Alfresco is also JSR 168 compliant

5

WebDAV stands for Web Based Distributed Authoring & Versioning. It is a set of extensions to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that allows computer-users to edit and manage files collaboratively on remote World Wide Web servers. Liferay supports WebDAV

Alfresco can also be setup to implement the WebDAV feature.

6

Very good web user interface

Web interface is not at all suitable for business users.

7

Supports Single Sign On

Supports Single Sign On

8

Standard LDAP providers

Standard LDAP providers

9

Collaborative Document Management System is very good in Liferay

Collaborative Document Management System is available in Alfresco but not to the extent as if available in Liferay

10

Liferay supports WEB 2.0 and has launched Liferay Social Office which offers features such as Wikis, Blogs, Document Libraries, Calendar, Sites, Message Boards, Activities

Alfresco also supports WEB 2.0 and has launched Alfresco Share offering almost similar features like Document Library, Sites, Wikis, Blogs, Activities, SharePoint protocol support etc

11

Liferay is a non-empty portal and comes with 60 odd portlets available for free

Alfresco is also non-empty and comes with portlets and templates for free.

12

Latest Edition is Liferay Portal 5.2

Latest Editon is Alfresco Community Edition 3.2r

13

Liferay is a true J2EE application, relying on numerous patterns, EJBs and built on top of the Struts platform.

Alfresco uses best-of-breed Open Source technologies such as Spring, Hibernate, Lucene,

14

Liferay supports Google Analytics.

Alfresco supports Google Analytics.

15

Support Open Office Documents but not so well

Alfresco is very tightly integrated with Open Office and supports Open Office standards very well.

16

Liferay is the Leading Open Source Portal for the Enterprise

Alfresco is more known as the Leading Open Content Management System for the Enterprise


Conclusion:

After this comprehensive study on both these open source portals it is time now to share the results.

We can conclude that Liferay is the winner over here by far in the free license portal world. This has been concluded purely on the basis of Liferay being a complete portal and provides all the functionalities that are provided by the more expensive enterprise portal vendors like Oracle and Microsoft. However there are still some miles separating Liferay from its more expensive licensed portals.

Alfresco on the other hand though a portal in its own right is now evolving into more of an ECMS (Enterprise Content Management System) solution. Alfresco is founded on the technologies of Documentum which is the worldwide leader in CMS and has recently been declared one of the best in Open Source Content Management world.



Saturday, February 20, 2010

COMPARISON OF ORACLE WCI VS MICROSOFT SHAREPOINT

Recently I had been given the task of performing a comparison study between MOSS and Oracle WCI. I havequiet good hands on experience in Oracle WCI or BEA ALUI but some limited experience on MOSS. However since it was something that needed to be done, I decided to undertake this study and prepare a comparison study between MOSS and Oracle WCI.

Like every intelligent Computer Literate guy, I had tried to google out a document which narrated something remotely resembling a comparison between these two portals but I didn't get anything. So I decided that I should upload this in my blog so that others could take advantage of this. However I am an ignorant fool so you should not trust me and I wouldn't want you to take any decisions based on this post.

Introduction:

There are several portals available now which can be customized as per user requirements. In this study we will be looking into an overall comparison between two of the market leaders in the portal space. This study is done on the portals on offer by the two market leaders, Oracle and Microsoft.

The two portals in contention are:

  • Oracle WebCenter Interaction 11g
  • Microsoft Sharepoint 2007
There has been a deliberate attempt at not taking up Microsoft 2010 for this study because it is still in its Beta phase and Microsoft has mentioned explicitly they are still fixing bugs in the product currently.



Differences:


After analyzing both the portals, we collated the major differences as well as similarities between both these portal solutions which are represented in a tabular format below.



Oracle WCI

Microsoft Sharepoint

1

WebCenter Interaction comes from the stable of Oracle. In its earlier avatars, it belonged to BEA and known as BEA Aqualogic User Interaction. Prior to this it belonged to Plumtree Inc and had been christened as PLUMTREE Portal

Sharepoint comes from the world’s largest software maker, Microsoft. The current Sharepoint we have is built on top of this WSS.

2

WCI provides support for multiple database vendors and databases, namely Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle as well as IBM DB2

Sharepoint supports just one database and it is Microsoft SQL Server

3

WCI is split between databases and file system storage

Sharepoint is completely a database driven solution

4

Comes only in 32 bit version

Ships in both 32 bit as well as 64 bit versions

5

WCI does not yet works with Windows Server 2008

Sharepoint works on both Windows Server 2003 as well as 2008

6

WCI works well with both Java as well as .NET technologies

SharePoint makes sense for customers with a heavy investment in Microsoft technology (Server, .Net Framework, SQL Server, and Office)

7

Oracle’s app server of choice since the BEA acquisition is Weblogic Server. Although it also supports other app servers including IIS

Microsoft’s app server is but obviously IIS.

8

WCI is coupled with Microsoft Office

Sharepoint is very tightly coupled and integrated with Microsoft Office, Exchange, Biztalk Server.

9

WCI development is very tightly coupled with Oracle JDeveloper which enables creation of compliant portlets easily.

Sharepoint development can be done using Sharepoint Designer and Microsoft Visual Studio

10

WCI supports JSR 168 as well as WSRP 2.0 standard for portlet development

SharePoint is a .NET-based Portal Framework it does not support JSR-168. SharePoint supports the WSRP 2.0 (Web Services for Remote Portlets).

11

WCI supports the capability to hot deploy any JSR 168 compliant portlet

Sharepoint does not support hot deployment of JSR 168 compliant portlets

12

WebDAV stands for Web Based Distributed Authoring & Versioning. It is a set of extensions to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that allows computer-users to edit and manage files collaboratively on remote World Wide Web servers. WCI supports WebDAV

MOSS also supports WebDAV

13

Very good Ajax-based web user interface.

Web interface is very user friendly. Ajax-based user interface (UI), along with a new rich text editor.

14

Supports Single Sign On

Supports Single Sign On

15

Standard LDAP providers

Standard LDAP providers

16

Collaborative Document Management System is very good in WCI with Oracle pitching forward with its Oracle UCM (Universal Content Management) in the latest version of WCI

Collaborative Document Management System is also available in Microsoft Sharepoint

17

Oracle WCI supports WEB 2.0 technologies

Sharepoint too supports WEB 2.0 technologies

18

Latest Edition is Liferay Portal Oracle WCI 11g

Latest Editon is Microsoft Sharepoint 2007. The 2010 version is slated for a late April release.

19

Documentation of WCI is a little hard to get since WCI has evolved as mentioned earlier from BEA ALUI and Plumtree.

This is however improving with Oracle now picking up the pace for documentation

Documentation is plentiful and easily accessible at your fingertips.

20

WCI has support for only sequential Workflow.

Sharepoint provides very robust support for both sequential as well as state workflows



Conclusion:




While a comprehensive comparison has been made above, it would not be possible to exactly put your fingers on one of these two portal solutions and declare a winner.

Both the portals in discussion, Oracle WCI and Microsoft Sharepoint are the best in the business and have their own list of impressive clientele.

Both of them have dedicated roadmaps stating their way forward and Microsoft as well as Oracle has promised they will continue investing in portal technologies in the future.

The future of portals as can be seen today belongs to Enterprise 2.0, mashups and shared APIs and both Oracle WCI as well as Microsoft Sharepoint have this in their portal offerings.

The thing which can be suggested is:

Oracle WCI is a much better offering if an organization wants to take advantage of Java or has already invested heavily in other products from the stable of Oracle.

Microsoft Sharepoint makes a better business sense if you have an already heavy investment in Microsoft technology (Server, .Net Framework, SQL Server, and Office)