Delivering Managed Settings Using WebSphere Portal

Overview

This article supplements the Creating Eclipse Preference Sets with the Policy Type Editor documentation in the Infocenter.
 

Managed Settings

Managed settings in Lotus Expeditor are delivered by WebSphere Portal through various technologies and conditions.  At a high level, the Expeditor client contacts a web service running on Portal to retrieve preferences.  The Portal server used to obtain managed settings is the same Portal server listed in the Home Portal Account preference.  This Portal server is contacted by Expeditor, supplied with credentials from the Home Portal Account, and provides managed settings through Portal's personalization engine.  Rules and Policies configured on Portal are validated and the corresponding managed settings are delivered to the Expeditor client.
 
The personalization engine on Portal is capable of using a wide variety of conditions to determine how to apply policies.  Expeditor leverages only a subset of these conditions.  Thus some rules which may evaluate within Portal are not applicable to delivering managed settings to Expeditor.  Primarily, administrators should create rules which act on the logged in user.

Managed Settings Example

Create the Default Rule

Let's assume that you have imported the Stock Trade Preferences in the sample listed in the Infocenter Creating Eclipse Preference Sets with the Policy Type Editor.

1. Select the policy listed in the Resource Policies portlet, and create a new rule.
2. Update the rule's name from the default "Profile User Rule" to something more meaningful - for example StockRule
3. Click and modify the Profile.  This can be an arbitrary text value but should be again meaningful as you will use it later.
4. Click the attribute, and select an attribute listed in Portal Users.
5. Click the value, and assign a value which applies to the attribute selected above.

This is a default rule because it applies all users which pair their Expeditor Client to the WebSphere Portal server.

Delivering Personalized Settings

Once a rule is created, we can create the child policy.  Back in the Stock Trade Preferences policy, click create New Policy.  Notice that you can select a condition which matches the profile you created in the rule.  A WallStreet rule should exist in the Condition combo.  Change any of the default values to specific settings you intend to be delivered when the rule create previously evaluates to be true.

Assume we have a specific trader, WallStreet Trader, that we wish to deliver specific settings.  We can create a rule which does this:


Should you need to deliver settings to a larger audience, you can similarly create the rule:



The above assumes that the directory used with Portal (LDAP for example) contains a group entitled traders which also contains the users who will receive specific settings.
Or perhaps trading changes throughout the year.  You can create a policy which applies to the date:



The above rules override the default rule and apply only to those Expeditor Clients for which the rule evaluates to true.

Example Summary

To summarize, the Expeditor client will request managed settings from Portal based on the Home Portal Account's Log in name.  The user is looked up by the Portal server, and information about the user is retrieved.  Portal's personalization engine then substitutes information when evaluating the rule.  If the rule evaluates to true, the child policy's whose condition corresponds the rule is delivered to the Expeditor client.

Additional Information

Administrators may find it useful to know the following technical details when deploying clients.

• The web service which facilitates delivering managed settings may be found at the following URL: /WSPolicyManager/services/PolicyWebservice
• Evaluation of rules is case sensitive.  When using the "is" operator, be mindful of case to ensure policy delivery.
• The Log in name of the Home Portal Account is paired with a suffix to create a distinguished name.  Configure the com.ibm.rcp.managedsettings.provider.portal/dnSuffix property in plugin_customization.ini depending on your Portal directory.  For example, an IBM Directory Server may list users within the base cn=users,dc=ibm,dc=com; update the property with the value com.ibm.rcp.managedsettings.provider.portal/dnSuffix=cn=users,dc=ibm,dc=com.  The default value of this property is o=defaultWIMFileBasedRealm.
• Managed settings may be reviewed in the following location on user's machines: <workspace>\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.core.runtime\.settings.
• Personalization troubleshooting can be used with the following trace specification: com.ibm.websphere.personalization.*=all:com.ibm.websphere.query.*=all.  See Must Gather for WebSphere Portal for more details.