Archive for August, 2008

Cool Tools Part XIV: FileMon

Collaboration, Notification on August 29th, 2008 No Comments

All right, admittedly, this is a little more low-level tool than we feature here, but I use this tool all the time and it proved indispensible in diagnosing the issue in my last post.  The tool is called FileMon, and is hugely valuable for diagnosing “File Not Found” or “File Permission” issues.  I’ve used it with [...]

ALI Publisher 6.5 Released

Publisher on August 26th, 2008 No Comments

As you may have heard, Publisher 6.5 was released last week.  And this isn’t one of those baby releases that just changes the BEA branding to Oracle – it’s a legit upgrade, and I’d encourage everyone to make the move – if not for the new features, for the boatload of bug fixes.  Even if [...]

ALI Notification / Collab Problems: The Joys of IIS security

Collaboration, IIS, Notification on August 23rd, 2008 No Comments

On my journey to get ALI Collab Notification working for us again, I came across this little gem: as far as I can tell, ALI Collab Notifications are broken out of the box when using IIS 6 (or 7) because of IIS’s infinite security wisdom. I just couldn’t get Collab Notification working, so I fired [...]

Collab 4.5 Notification – RSS Error

Collaboration, Notification on August 20th, 2008 1 Comment

Hm.  I was planning on doing a quick post on the new RSS feed in Collab 4.5 / Portal Notification Server 6.5, but apparently this is turning out to be a real pain.  We did our portal install as an in-place upgrade (which is bad; again, more details on 6.5 upgrades will come in the [...]

Beware The ALI Collaboration 4.5 Security Issue

Best Practices, Collaboration on August 17th, 2008 No Comments

Oops – looks like this one slipped past QA:  Collab 4.5 ships with “INFO” set as the logging threshold, which isn’t that much of a problem in and of itself (aside from giant log files being generated).  But when INFO is turned on, Collab actually records the UNENCRYPTED password to the ptcollab\4.5\settings\logs\wrapper.log file:

ALI Studio: Finding a Studio Database

Studio on August 14th, 2008 No Comments

Yeah, Studio is pretty much on life support as far as I can tell, but there are AquaLogic customers out there that still make extensive use of the product.  Customers like American Diabetes Association, who recently ran into an issue where a Studio Portlet wasn’t showing the survey results for a particular group of users.  [...]

Experience Rules Debug

Portal Server on August 11th, 2008 No Comments

Experience Rules are a powerful way to provide different UIs based on certain conditions, such as the URL used by the portal, the client IP address, or the community a user is visiting.  But with this power comes some complexity:  occasionally rules don’t work out the way you want, and you run into problems with [...]

Cool Tools Part XIII – WS Investigator

Cool Tools on August 8th, 2008 No Comments

We’ve re-posted some of Ray Gao Dev2Dev entries more than once, but this is one I’d have linked to even if Dev2Dev wasn’t going away because, well, it’s a Cool Tool. WS Investigator solves the age-old problem of easily identifying all of your Web Services, Portlets, Pages, and Communities deployed to your ALI portal.  Originally [...]

ALI 6.5 – Remember to import the portal PTEs (OOTB RSS Reader)

Portal Server on August 5th, 2008 No Comments

At F1, we’ve done countless ALI installations and upgrades.  So many that, frankly, we sometimes get a little too comfortable with the upgrade process: install, run scripts, import PTEs (more on upgrade tips soon), and occasionally overlook things when they’re first released.  Because the portal historically didn’t come with PTE files, I occasionally forgot to [...]

ALI 6.5 Adaptive Layouts – Sample Code

Portal Server on August 2nd, 2008 No Comments

As I’ve mentioned before, Adaptive Layouts are a great way to customize your UI.  But as they were first introduced in ALUI 6.5, there are still some rough edges to the technology.  Today’s tips come from our friend Geoff Garcia at March of Dimes (interested in helping the cause?), and includes some downloadable layouts that [...]