Bypassing SSO while logging into portal

A nifty trick I found out.....Okies...I am not an expert...so probably everyone knows about it but still there might be someone out there who might not know this....

This ones dedicated to all Portal Administrator's .......Remember the times when you have to work on VPN which has SSO enabled in it...as a result when you login into the VPN....the same credentials are automatically used for logging into the portal......thereby removing the intermediate step of entering login credentials for accessing the portal.

Here's a nifty trick I learned yesterday which will bypass this SSO and force you to enter your login credentials....Just type in space=Login at the end of your .pt URL... (The L of Login should be in upper case)
For example the normal URL for accessing my sandbox is http://mavericks/portal/server.pt
Just append at the end so that the URL looks like http://mavericks/portal/server.pt?space=Login

This is especially useful when you are testing out some changes in the portal using a different login but the damn SSO...automatically logs using your account as soon as you type in the URL. This nifty trick should work fine in these situations....

Njoy!!!!!!

Customizing Default WCI Error Messages

Hi there...long time no see......No i wasn't busy...just plain simple lazy as usual :)

Recently, i thought of doing some experimentaion on the custom error messages coming on our 10gR3 portal. Some of the error message pop ups which come up are pretty bare and give you absolutely nothing. So in order to make things interesting....we decided to make ammends to some of the default error messages.

All of the values are stored in XML files and can be changed pretty easily. The location of the default error messages is as follows:

*******************************************
Drive:\bea\alui\ptportal\10.3.0\i18n\en
*******************************************

We did some neat things here, unfortunately the funny ones were discarded.
Sigh!!! So much for some fun ;-)

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.

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)