Tag: portal

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HCL to acquire key IBM software

I woke up to the news that HCL tech are going to acquire select IBM software products – This is big news

IBM already had a partnership with HCL where they would develop the code for IBM – Notes and Domino were among this group.
HCL have injected a massive amount of enthusiasm with thier aggressive development plans and release cycle for Notes/Domino which has given the Community a shot in the arm that it needed.
But the news was trickling out slowly and a lot of Domino customers are already moving mail off the platform – HCL are not backwards in coming forwards and they have budget to market – ICS was a tiny fish in a very big IBM pond so now it may get the attention it deserves.

This deal is still ongoing and may not be completed until mid 2019 and is subject to change, but these are the solutions on the table

  • Appscan for secure application development
  • BigFix for secure device management
  • Unica (on-premise) for marketing automation
  • Commerce (on-premise) for omni-channel eCommerce
  • Portal (on-premise) for digital experience
  • Notes & Domino for email and low-code rapid application development
  • Connections for workstream collaboration.

Of course there was already a partnership set up for some of these products, when the deal goes through these will be HCL products not IBMs.

I am super excited for this .. all of the tech I have worked with over the last 20 years from an IBM standpoint is in this list – I am especially excited about the future of Commerce. I spend 8 happy years as a WebSphere Commerce admin and consultant and it is still my favourite product to work with (I may need to brush up on some commerce skills now) .. We have already seen the possitive impact of HCL working with Notes and Domino and the new products they are spinning out of it (HCL Places being one of them). I have high hopes for Connections, Commerce and Portal – I am really looking forward to seeing what the furture will hold.

The press release can be found here

and the Register’s take on the deal

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Joined Up Thinking In Identity & Access Management: WebSEAL and WebSphere Portal – An Integration Pattern

Fantstic new post from the Identity Management Guru (ans all round lovely bloke) – Mr Stephen Swann

Joined Up Thinking In Identity & Access Management: WebSEAL and WebSphere Portal – An Integration Pattern

Very well put together post on Securing Portal with Tivoli Access Manager (TAM), with some sensible suggestions for approach and useful gotchas.

Stephen is a legend when it comes to this kind of thing, be sure to look him up if you need any assistance and tell him I said Hi.

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Futher to the Portal 6.1.5 set up

Futher to the Portal 6.1.5 set up – these steps were required from an ORACLE DB point of view to get the DB configured :

Grant create session to community
Create likeminds user
Grant create table to community
Grant create view to jcr
Grant unlimited tablespace to community

and also these

grant select on sys.dba_pending_transactions to public;
grant select on sys.pending_trans$ to public;
grant select on sys.dba_2pc_pending to public;
grant execute on sys.dbms_system to public;

if you don’t do this then it just doesn’t work 🙂

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Portal won’t start ??

I have come across a horrible little *feature* that occurs sometimes with WebSphere Portal where the server fails to start and writes absoutely nothing to the log … Just a tad annoying when you are trying to work out why it didn’t start in the first place.

Sometimes this is due to a tranlog problem which is pretty straight forward to resolve:
backup / delete the directory –
< profile root >/tranlog/cellname/nodename/servername

normally this will do the trick and a restart works – if it doesn’t do the following
rename the log folders (or delete them)

< profile root >/logs

to fix the issue that I had seen I had to rename the ffdc, nodeagent and portal server log directories

restart the servers in question and as if by magic it starts 🙂

I have experienced this at Portal 6.1.5 but I have had reports that this also appears to be a problem on 6.1.0.2 as well