WebSphere Portal + TeamSite

All,

I'm about to get started on a project where we're adding WebSphere Portal (WSP) to our Member site. We manage our current site via TeamSite. Could anyone share their experiences with:
using TeamPortal
managing content in TeamSite with WSP (not through WSP's CMS abilities)
any pitfalls WPS/TeamSite integration

Any feedback is definitely appreciated!

Thanks,
Jonathan

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Migrateduser

Jonathan,

I'm not sure Interwoven would appreciate me relaying my experience with TeamPortal. Other than content services, I found almost no value in it. I believe that someone could custom code a better solution (using CSS) easier than trying to modify TeamPortal to suit your needs. One of the major short-falls of TeamPortal is its inability to support multiple workareas (without significant customization). The other MAJOR short-fall is that it doesn't support CGI tasks or group tasks. It has no mechanism for taking ownership of group tasks nor executing CGI tasks. It took significant customization from IWOV Professional Services to resolve this issue for us. If you know JSP, you may be able to handle the customizations yourself. But, if you know JSP, I'd almost urge you to custom code your own solution.

Managing content through TeamSite that would get rendered on WAS is tricky. You have 2 choices: if you're going to only have one workarea, then you just need another WAS server to render content that lives in TeamSite and then proxy to that server when trying to virtualize the content. If you want more than one workarea, I'd recommend TeamTurbo used on a separate installation of WAS. Although TeamTurbo is a little flakey, it makes it a lot easier to manage multiple instances of application servers. I don't believe that there's an out of the box solution for rendering portlets. The best solution might be to deploy them to a dev WPS server and then proxy to that server.

Also, if you're going to be deploying JSP to the app server, you'll need to do some customization in the deployment step to take care of the compilation and registering the application. I'm not entirely familliar with this process as I'm not a WPS admin. Deploying portlets can be even more tricky. You'll want to work out the process with your WPS admin and try to customize an automated (or nearly automated as it was in my case) solution for deploying applications and portlets.

- Jason

AKB

in addition to what jmeyer503 wrote I think it is a good idea to go through the referral(tooklit) integration implementation that you can get from the software vendors. I do not have the latest toolkit..the one I have is around 15 months old. If u want that then I can pass it to you.

bturns

Jon,

We are also getting ready to use WebShpere Portal? Which version of TS are you going to be integration with?

Thanks,

Brian

bturns

Hey Jason,

I can validate your thoughts on TeamPortal. It was definitely lacking in functionality. However, if I'm not mistaken the implementation your refering to was for TS 5.5.2 which used TeamPortal built around Content Services SDK 1.0. The latest Content Services 2.0 is supposed to be 10x as robust as the first one. However from what I've heard it only works with TS 6.0.

I would be interested in hearing from IWOV if the problems with the original Team Portal have been resolved using Content Services 2.0.

Thanks,

Brian

Migrateduser

Brian,

I can answer that to some extent. CSS 2.0 does only work with TS 6.x. As far as I know, there are no new TeamPortal versions coming out in the near future which use CSS 2.0. I think I heard that perhaps in Q4, but I haven't heard anything confirmed. Looking to an Interwoven person in the know for this.

Personally, if I were going to integrate from a portal to TeamSite, I'd definately wait until you've got CSS 2.0 and I'd probably custom code my own portlets/widgets with hooks into TeamSite via CSS or custom CGI/JSP code. From what I got in responses from Interwoven, when we were having trouble with TeamPortal, TeamPortal was never meant to be an end-all solution. It was just meant to be a starting point from which to custom code a solution. If you go into it with that in mind, you might not be disappointed. If you go into it with the mindset that it's an all-in-one UI to TeamSite for portals, you're in for a harsh reality check.

- Jason

bturns

Hey Jon,

Did you ever complete this WebSphere integration? We are looking at doing an integration with TS 6.5 and are looking for success stories. Got any?

Thanks,

Brian