Home  /  Thought Leadership  /  Social Media  /  Blogs  /  Perficient Portal Solutions Blog
Perficient Portal Solutions Blog

Business Solutions

Technology Solutions

Multi-Shoring

Subscribe via Email


 

Subscribe to RSS feed

RSS RSS Feed

Archives

avatar

Dave Jones

Posts by this author:

avatar

Using Splunk for WebSphere Application Server

by on February 29th, 2012

Splunk hosted a webinar earlier today on their Splunk for WebSphere Application Server 2.0 application. This is an application they wrote that extends Splunk’s already powerful capabilities to provide WebSphere-specific searches and reports.

If you’re not familiar with Splunk, you should take a look. In a nutshell,

Your IT infrastructure generates massive amounts of data. Machine data – generated by websites, applications, servers, networks, mobile devices and the like.

By monitoring and analyzing everything from customer clickstreams and transactions to network activity to call records, Splunk turns your machine data into valuable insights.

Troubleshoot problems and investigate security incidents in minutes (not hours, or days). Monitor your end-to-end infrastructure to avoid service degradation or outages. And gain real-time visibility into customer experience, transactions and behavior. (more…)

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in search, Technical, WebSphere Portal | 4 Comments »

avatar

WebSphere Portal v7 Tuning Guide just released

by on February 17th, 2011

If you don’t regularly check the IBM Portal wiki or subscribe to updates via RSS, you might not have seen the WebSphere Portal v7 Tuning Guide that was just released.  Many of the sections are similar to the previous editions, but there are also new sections for areas such as:

  • Disabling features you might not be using, such as tagging and rating, search, and friendly URLs.
  • Page Builder Theme Tuning
  • Nested Group Cache
  • Startup performance using Development and Lite Modes
  • Many others…

Don’t get too carried away and start tuning right away.  The very first paragraph of the PDF contains a very important recommendation:

Remember that both tuning and capacity are affected by many factors, including the workload scenario and the performance measurement environment. For tuning, the objective of this paper is not to recommend that you use the values we used when measuring our scenarios, but to make you aware of those parameters used in our configuration. When tuning your individual systems, it is important to begin with a baseline, monitor the performance metrics to determine if any parameters should be changed and, when a change is made, monitor the performance metrics to determine the effectiveness of the change.

Tags: ,
Posted in Technical | 1 Comment »

avatar

Release Management Options for WebSphere

by on February 17th, 2011

Every non-trivial implementation of WebSphere Portal (are there any trivial ones?) will need some degree of automation, mostly around release management.  Most customers have three or more portal environments: Development, Production, and one or more in the middle.  In the last few years, we’re seeing a greater demand for Disaster Recovery environments as well.  Promoting code and other portal assets through these environments from development to production isn’t a trivial task.

There are a number of different ways to tackle the problem, but the solution that is right for your environment will depend on a few things:

(more…)

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in News | No Comments »

avatar

Comprehensive list of security concepts for WebSphere Portal

by on January 15th, 2011

Jason Wicker of IBM has posted a comprehensive set of security concepts and considerations for IBM WebSphere Portal.  While much of this information exists in various forms throughout the v6.1 and v7.0 InfoCenters and Redbooks, Jason captures it all in one place.

I’d recommend that Portal customers and consultants use that article as a security-related checklist to help ensure all of those items are at least discussed.

The title of Jason’s article states that the information is for Portal administrators.  I agree that it’s important for Portal admins to know about these topics, but I think it’s even more important for the Portal Architect to be familiar with them and know when to recommend each for implementation.

Tags: ,
Posted in News | No Comments »

avatar

Using SSL only for some WebSphere Portal pages

by on January 3rd, 2011

A nice article was recently published on IBM’s WebSphere Portal wiki about using a mixture of HTTP and HTTPS pages on a WebSphere Portal site.  The reasoning for that approach is basically that you need to encrypt certain sensitive traffic, but don’t want to encrypt traffic for the entire site for performance reasons.
Before you go off and implement that solution, you should ask yourself a few questions.
  1. Is the performance impact of using https everywhere really a problem for YOUR site? Configure Portal to use https for all requests.  This will be easier if you’re using a reverse proxy such as Tivoli Access Manager (WebSEAL) or CA SiteMinder.  Perform load tests to compare and see if your SLAs will still hold up.  If performance is fine with https for all requests.
  2. Do you have a lot of pages that would need to be encrypted, and will it change frequently? You’ll have to main sure you set the configuration parameter to ensure the page is encrypted, which is easy enough to do.  However, the more pages you have that need this, the higher the chance of it getting missed.  Also, if you’re using dynamic portal pages, ensure that you take those into account.
  3. Your users’ sessions can still be hijacked while on non-https pages.  Do you care? Many sites secure just the login, but that’s not good enough if you really want to be safe.  This is a calculated risk based on the type of content and functionality on your site.  Even if your portal is intranet-only, you need to determine how much damage one rogue employee could cause.
  4. Do you have any page resources (css, JavaScript, images, etc) that have hard-coded URLs using http? This can give you the annoying messages that say your page has a mixture of HTTP and HTTPS content.  Perhaps you can just change the link from http to https, or you might also need to get a little trickier and use mod_proxy or another technique to proxy an https request through your web server to the original http resource.
And finally, don’t forget to use ssl as appropriate between systems in your internal networks.  This applies to connections from your reverse proxy to the web servers, from the web servers to WebSphere via the WebSphere plug-in, and from your portal system to any back-end services.

Tags: , ,
Posted in News | No Comments »

avatar

Moving WebSphere Portal to the Cloud

by on December 14th, 2010

In the past few years, we have seen a lot of our new and existing customers show interest in having someone else run their WebSphere Portal infrastructure.  They’re happy with their investment in Portal, but may have any number of reasons why they don’t want to manage it themselves anymore.

As you start to talk to cloud providers, you’ll get a wide variety of responses on how they’ll actually support WebSphere Portal.  It’s easy enough for any provider to say “yes, we’ll support WebSphere Portal”, but what does that really mean?

Many will basically support the underlying infrastructure, but not touch WebSphere Portal.  They’ll rely on someone else to do that, and may have a partner like Perficient that they’ll recommend to provide those services.  Other providers have started to add in-house services around WebSphere Portal (and WebSphere Commerce) to address the more common services.

Once you identify a few cloud providers to approach, here are a few questions to get the conversation started and find out exactly what they will and will not do with WebSphere Portal:

(more…)

Tags: , ,
Posted in News | No Comments »