Quickr 8.5 Portlets for Portal 6.1.5

The new Quickr 8.5 portlets for Websphere Portal version 6.1.5 have been released and is available via the solutions catalog on the Lotus Greenhouse.

It is very straight forward to set up, download and install the portlet and stick it on a page.
Configure the Places Catalog portlet and give it your

placeCenterServerURL – i.e http://your server name:port
favoritesServiceURL – i.e http://your server name:port/favourites

edit the authentication mode to use SSO or forms
1. Single-Sign-On, which is the recommend method. In order to use this method, Single-Sign-On must be pre-configured between the WebSphere Portal and the Lotus Quickr servers.
2. Form-based login. If Single-sign-On is not possible, the portlet allows the end-user to login to the remote Lotus Quickr server with user name & password. These credentiales are stored securely by the portlet for later use.

When using the portlet in the authenticated mode, a single post-installation step is required:

Using the Integrated Solutions Console (Websphere administrative console), find the “PA_Place_Center” enterprise application, and map the security role “All authenticated users” to all authenticated users.

restart and away you go ..

the only issue I have found with the SSO method of auth is that although my SSO is configured correctly between the portal and quickr servers and the portlet works I see these errors in the log :

[01/07/10 08:33:17:250 BST] 00000067 LTPAServerObj E SECJ0373E: Cannot create credential for the userdue to failed validation of the LTPA token. The exception is com.ibm.ws.security.registry.UnsupportedEntryTypeException: not USER or GROUP

[01/07/10 08:33:17:281 BST] 000000a5 LTPAServerObj E SECJ0374E: The accessID in the token contains the wrong type. It should be either user or group. The exception is com.ibm.ws.security.registry.UnsupportedEntryTypeException: not USER or GROUP

a google search finds an entry going back to WAS 6 for error SECJ0373E

SECJ0374E: The accessID in the token contains the wrong type. It should be either user or group. The exception is {0}.
Explanation This exception is unexpected. The cause is not immediately known.

ahh .. nice then 🙂 But it is working and is on our proof on concept / integration environment box, so we can start testing it in anger now ..

Big props to Mr Dave Hay (IBM Legend) for tipping me off that it is available. I will get some screen shots up on the dilftechnical website asap

Quickr 8.5 J2EE Beta

Finally got my hands on a very very very Late copy of the Quickr 8.5 beta for WebSphere Portal

Pros

  • I am impressed it comes with support for oracle now straight out of the box, so no mucking about with transfering DB’s
  • It is using the one UI so it will be easy to “skin”
  • It has support for windows 2008 64bit which is always a plus in my book as I have to use my sowftware on windows VMs
  • It runs on portal 6.1.5 and is patched for was 6.1.0.29 out the box too so no worried about having to patch it as soon as you have installed

Cons
So far I have found some niggly bugs which are driving me nuts

You no longer change the portal / was / quickr admin account in the properties file you run a command to swtich them .. no problem normally EXCEPT if you have spaces in your DN’s. The script fails with an error.

I found a technote Wp-change-portal-admin-user task fails if spaces in distinguished name this applies to Portal 6.1 and is a unix/linux/solaris issue (so I am assuming a 64 bit os problem) as this is certainly the case with my windows 2008 64bit. The solution to the problem is to create a properties file and pass the peram into the command line which theoretically should work for windows – alas although it does read the properties file instead of failing as it can’t read the full dn, it now fails as it doesn’t like the quotes around the DN.

Once I have run this and it fails it breaks the quickr instance!! Although I can log in all the permissions on the places get screwed – so I can see my places but none of the content .. same goes for the admin account. Luckily having all my systems on VM’s I can just roll back the snapshot and re run the secure task .. not ideal but better than having to rebuild it from scratch.

So far I haven’t found a way around this issue so I am having to use the original quickr admin user for administration – not ideal but fine in this instance .. as this goes gold next week I have a week to work out how to fix it … no pressure then 🙂