These are the release notes for Red Hat Enterprise Portal Server Preview Release. They contain an introduction and overview of Red Hat Portal Server, installation, and known issues.
The Red Hat Enterprise Portal Server is a full-featured Persistence-backed open source Portal product built upon the Red Hat Web Application Framework (WAF). The Red Hat WAF is a web application framework written in Java that provides a set of APIs for data storage, retrieval, and presentation. For more information, visit http://www.redhat.com/software/rhea/tech/.
Portal Server features include:
The Portal Server Preview Release deployment includes the following Red Hat Enterprise Applications and Portlets:
An overview of the Red Hat Enterprise Portal Server architecture can be found at http://www.redhat.com/software/rhea/portalserver/architecture.html.
An overview of the Red Hat WAF architecture can be found at http://www.redhat.com/software/ccm/tech/architecture.html.
For information about the Red Hat EA community, see http://rhea.redhat.com. You may also want to subscribe to the redhat-ccm-list.
This Preview release of Red Hat Enterprise Portal Server is a Beta-quality release and may contain bugs - known or otherwise.
A Portal is a configurable web location that aggregates content from multiple sources (web applications, published content, data sources) into a single page view. Portals are frequently used by:
In order to be useful, a Portal should offer flexibility in how content in the Portal is laid out. Portals usually provide a variety of layout templates for displaying content, such as Two-Column, Three-Column, Narrow vs. Wide profile, etc. Red Hat Portal Server offers several layout options out of the box, and is extensible for adding custom layout templates.
Portal Server terminology provides us with a term for an atomic unit of content to be displayed in a Portal: A Portlet. A versatile Portal product should allow a portlet to be located within any Portal content area, and then be relocated as desired. The Red Hat Enterprise Portal Server ships with a rich interface for composing Portal views.
Permissioning for Red Hat Enterprise Portal Server can be as fine-grained as needed, depending on the implementation requirements. Permissions can be catagorized by role, or by privilage. Privilages are behavior restrictions, such as read, edit, and manage. Roles are a named set of privilages granted on a particular Portal Server resource or set of resources. Portal Server ships with the pre-defined roles of Administrator and Member. Means are available through the User Interface for creating additional roles.
Personalization support allows Portals to be personalized with a user defined look and feel. In addition to choosing typical L & F parameters such as color and line style, Red Hat Enterprise Portal Server provides an interface for adding corporate or organizational branding to a Portal.
Perhaps the best way to learn about Portal Server, is to install this Preview release and play with it! Set yourself as admin in the enterprise.init file, and then create a portal by navigating to /ccm/portal-admin/ (if you have not changed the default settings in the com.arsdigita.web Initializer) and click the link to Create Top-Level Portals. After creating a Portal, navigate to the admin section via the 'configure portal' link, and then create some portlets and move them around. Try clicking on other admin tabs and explore what they offer.
Red Hat Enterprise Portal Server is copyrighted 1999-2003 by Red Hat Inc. It is released under the CCMPL 1.0. The text of the CCMPL 1.0 can be found at http://www.redhat.com/licenses/ccmpl.html
The CCMPL is based on the OSI-approved IBM Public License Version 1.0. The IBM Public License is a true open-source license that requires open-sourcing of any modifications or other "derivative works."
Documentation for Red Hat Enterprise Portal, including JavaDoc, developer guides, and engineering standards, can be found at The Red Hat Portal Server site.
In order to install Portal Server and the Collaborative applications
distributed with this Preview release, the installation procedure
detailed at http://rhea.redhat.com must be followed. There is one very important deviation from a typical WAF installation: When running Portal Server, the parameters enterprise.init parameters
for com.arsdigita.kernel.Initializer must be modified.
Two default values must be changed:
Great care has been taken with this product to insure easy future upgradeability. It is unlikely that there will be any data upgrade issues when migrating from this Preview release to the full release of Red Hat Enterprise Portal Server. There will, however, be some file locations changed before full release, and import statements will be adjusted accordingly, but none of these changes will be apparent to the API.
This preview release of Portal Server does not have the Create Theme UI turned on. The deployment comes with 10 predefined themes that the Portal Administrator can select through a radio button interface.
Please file bug reports in the appropriate section of http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla.