IBM® WebSphere® Portal Version 6.0 is an enterprise portal solution with the complete portal services necessary to deliver a single point of personalized interaction to applications, content, business processes, and people for a unified user experience. WebSphere Portal provides the following:

- Enhanced Web content management, portal workflow, electronic forms integration and collaboration to help deliver improved operational efficiency and productivity.

- Powerful new tools and application templates, enabling the quick building of business services and applications that help accelerate application and content deployment, which innovatively deliver on the promise of a service oriented architecture (SOA).

- A responsive and reliable portal platform from a leader in the enterprise portal market.

This IBM book introduces new key technical features in WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 and discusses how these new features have a strong bearing on best practices for deploying WebSphere Portal. Specifically, it focuses on the following areas:

- Planning for deployment with an overview of several typical deployment scenarios.

- High-availability deployment strategies by installing IBM WebSphere Portal V6.0 in a clustered deployment/Network Deployment configuration.

- Configuring WebSphere Portal Version 6 to support multiple different LDAP directories.

- Considerations and implementation details for configuring Portal to share data between different database domains.

- Strategies for tuning and testing your WebSphere Portal 6 environment.

- Configuration Management—procedures necessary to move your WebSphere Portal environment through pre-production release phases and deploy into the Production environment.

- Best practice approaches to problem determination and troubleshooting.

- Available tools for deployment automation, reducing the manual steps required by the portal server installation and configuration process.

- Discussion of how to use the IBM WebSphere Portal update installer application to install interim or cumulative fixes and fix packs in WebSphere Portal Version 6.0.

- A discussion of Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) and what this means within the context of Portal.

Chapter 1. Introduction

Chapter 2. Planning for your Portal 6.0 high- availability deployment

Chapter 3. Different deployment scenarios: building clustered environments

Chapter 4. Multiple LDAP directory support

Chapter 5. Database domains

Chapter 6. Strategies for tuning and testing

Chapter 7. Configuration management: moving between environments

Chapter 8. Troubleshooting and monitoring

Appendix A. Deployment automation options

Appendix B. Portal 6 Update Installer

Appendix C. Services Oriented Architecture and Portal