User search filter for Active Directory user repository in WebSphere Portal

This is a very trivial entry for most people in the know, but not so trivial for others. If you are configuring WebSphere Portal to use either Active Directory or Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM) as the LDAP user registry, then it is critical to set up the user search filter correctly or else you are going to run into issues with users not being able to authenticate. We have a client for whom we are using ADAM wherein ADAM is used for the Portal LDAP and it syncs up with Active Directory. Well, my portal administrator who is working on that project ran into a problem with Portal users not being able to authenticate successfully.

How do you change the LDAP server name for a WebSphere Portal v6 server?

Today one of the portal administrators in my team was trying to reconfigure the LDAP server being used by an existing WebSphere Portal v6 install. The specific reconfiguration that he was doing was extremely simple – he was replacing one LDAP server with another identically configured LDAP server – so the only change was the name of the LDAP server. We were able to perform this change without disabling/re-enabling security in WebSphere Portal.

Liferay Portal users not able to login?

I just thought that I will blog about a common issue that afflicts people getting started with Liferay Portal. If you tie Liferay Portal to a LDAP and you have different password policies on your LDAP versus Liferay, you can run into issues with users entering a valid password for their LDAP but they still cannot login to Liferay.

Deploying WebSphere Portal Document Manager (PDM) on a guest page

Recently our team needed to deploy the Portal Document Manager (PDM) portlet on a public WebSphere Portal page for guest user access. It turned out that this was not as trivial as expected if you don’t know what actions are required and there is nothing on IBM’s site documenting the steps involved in getting the document manager portlet to work for guest users. I figured I would capture the key steps here in case you need to do the same and are having a hard time with this task!

How do you add a “create a new sibling page” link in a WebSphere Portal v6 theme?

This blog entry is straight plagiarism! I got this from Keith (a co-worker) and thought that it was pretty cool and decided to share his work. Keith has been doing some cool stuff for an Xtivia client and some of this work has been around some serious theme customizations. One of those theme customizations that he had to figure out was how to add a persistent link to the theme which will add a new page at the currently selected level of navigation in WPE. This is useful for many situations including where you have a tab based navigation, you can have a “New page” tab where users can simply specify a page name and add a new tab at the same level as the other tabs. It goes like this: