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Introduction

The following document (wiki) discusses best practices for building and managing your WebSphere Portal v. 6.1 Environment. High level information is provided about how to set up a Portal v. 6.1 Environment, including a development, staging and production environment. Within the context of each of these environments, we cover topics related to how to move changes through the system and successfully manage releases of a Portal 6.1 site.

Topics covered

Topics which are covered include:

1. Overview of how to setup as Portal environment system
1. High level discussion of the steps involved in setting up a Portal 6.1 Enviroment
2. Introduction to the infrastructure used for the sample company River Bend Tea and Coffee Co, illustrating a diagram of the environment and a discussion around why we made specific decisions to build the environment this way
   
2. Different kind of Portal content : pages, portlets, documents
1. Conceptual overview of the different types of portal content and the relationship between these elements
2. Overview of the components and entities which make up a complete Portal Solution Release
3. Discussion how components and entities within a solution release are moved between environments
   
3. Connecting Testing and Staging Systems / Recommendations on handling concurrent development
1. Discuss which test and staging systems are needed and how are they connected.
2. Introduce best practices and recommendations for organizing development teams and handling concurrent development efforts on the test and staging systems
3. Provide a specific case scenario example - illustrating how to use RAD v. 7.5 to move development artifacts from RAD v. 7.5 into a Portal 6.1 Environment
   
4. XMLaccess, Release Builder and Site Management - when to use what - how to use the tools
1. How to apply this to the flow of data through the development/test/staging/prod phases,
2. Describing each of the transfer tools – what they are and in which cases they are appropriate to use,
3. Specific case examples - How to do the transfer using each of the specific tools
   
5. Syndication
   1. Provide a specific Syndication example as it applies to the River Bend Tea and Coffee Company Portal v. 6.1 environment.
      
6. A fastpath for quickfixes
1. This section provides an overview of the Portal product maintenance strategy and how it applies to a Portal Infrastructure which includes several different Portal environments from development through to production.
2. This section also includes some consideration for the application of both emergency Portal product Interim Fixes and urgent customer application fixes
   
7. Backup and Restore procedures
   1. This section discusses best practices and specific methods to follow when performing back up and restore procedures.