June 2008 Archives

So you know Dev2Dev blogs are being decommissioned, but there really is a treasure trove of information out there, and individual bloggers are scrambling to repost their articles elsewhere. Two of the top Plumtree/Aqualogic/ALI bloggers out there are Ross Brodbeck (new blog site here) and Fabien Sanglier (new RSS blog feed here), and a tip of the hat to our friends at BDG, who have gone on to "find other fun things to do with our time and money"; Chris Bucchere will no doubt have plenty of interesting content on his Ruby on Rails/Enterprise 2.0 blog.

Another prolific blogger back in the day before leaving Bea/Oracle was Ray Gao, who has given us permission to post more of his previous blog entries here. While I won't rehash all of his old articles in this blog, one in particular that stood out for me as a "neat trick" was his post on getting IE7's search bar to search your corporate portal.

Rather than reprinting his entire article, I'll just share the the steps he described:

1. Go to http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/searchguide/en-en/default.mspx?dcsref=http://runonce.msn.com/runonce2.aspx.
2. Enter http://<your_portal_server>/portal/server.pt?in_hi_space=SearchResult&in_hi_control=bannerstart&in_tx_query=TEST in box 3 on the right.
3. Enter a name for the search provider ("My Portal Search") and click "Install".
4. Confirm the security prompt and specify if you want this to be the default provider.
5. You should now see the new provider in the search bar!

In case you haven't heard, we've got a developing product line at Function1.

Next in our showcase is Reader, our RSS reader portlet.  Unlike the out of the box RSS functionality in the Oracle/ALI/ALUI/Plumtree portal, which restricts the number of feeds available, has a very "Web 1.0 feel", and doesn't flag articles as read for individuals, Function1's RSS Reader provides rich functionality to Community Managers and End Users alike, in a rich, adaptive layout that users will find intuitive and easy to use.

Articles are captured on a regular basis, so your end users don't just see the articles that are currently available on the feed (which can be problematic for not-so-frequent users), and feeds are shared portal-wide to reduce bandwidth consumption.

Check out the product page for more information, and contact sales@function1.com for a demo!

Now that Oracle's running the AquaLogic show, they wasted no time killing the $300 million AquaLogic brand, "reshuffling the BEA deck", and removing the onerous BEA license key process.

So what does this mean for the future of the Plumtree/AquaLogic product line?  Will it survive the reshuffle?  What's Oracle's road map for future development?  Well, those answers will come on a July 1 conference call for customers and partners: "BEA Welcome and Middleware Strategy Briefing" - definitely worth checking out, and if you can't, stay tuned here for a synopsis.

I did come across one clue about the fate of the product line: Oracle is actively hiring for BPM and Portal consultants in Chicago, Dallas, and Columbus (actually, nationwide with 100% travel requirements): "aqualogic bpm albpm / fuego; aqualogic portal alui / plumtree Consultants".  Funny, they mention "Previous BEA employees are encouraged to apply." Hmmmm...

Yeah, this one is only marginally useful, can only be considered a "Cool Tool" in the broadest sense of the title, and not nearly as fun of an Easter Egg as we've posted in the past, but it's neat to check out JavaScript internals of the portal nonetheless.

Basically, open up your portal in FireFox (this doesn't seem to work in IE), and hit CTRL-SHIFT-3.  That is, hold down CTRL and SHIFT and hit 1, 2, or 3.  You'll get a little JS window at the bottom of your portal page showing some JS debug information that you can use to see what's going on under the covers and evaluate ALI portal JS objects in real time.

The "1, 2, or 3" that I mentioned above refers to the log threshold you'd like to look at (use "0" to turn it off); three is the highest.

Fun?  If you're a curious techie who gets a thrill out of this sort of stuff.  Useful?  I've never used it (but then again, I only meet the first two of these criteria.  OK, fine, who am I kidding, I meet all three - but it's still never been useful for me).

Find any practical uses for this hidden feature?  Hit me up in the comments.

In Analytics, there aren't many options to filter the reports well - some reports allow filtering on a user property, some on an auth source, and some on communities.

It's the latter one that I found myself needing when I wanted to create Community Analytics Reports, filtered on a certain set of communities (we're using lots of Experience Definitions, so since that wasn't an option to filter on, I figured I'd create an Analytics Report that just filtered on all communities within each Experience Definition).

Problem is, Analytics 2.1 has a bug that prevents you from browsing and selecting multiple communities in a folder. So when trying to configure a Community Traffic Report and using the Browse button here:

... you just got this when navigating to a folder with a bunch of communities in it:

The standard BEA (Oracle?) party line is that this bug is fixed in Analytics 2.5 (which I'm sure it is), and to just search for communities here.  But unfortunately 2.5 only works with the 6.5 portal, and many of you aren't ready to make that move (drop us a line when you are!).

Fortunately, there's a (relatively) easy fix after the jump!

We've got a handful of recurring themes on this blog, but here's another one for you:  a showcase of our product line.

As you may know, Function1 offers consulting services to ALI, ALBPM, and Enterprise Social Networking services.  But we also write best-in-class products:  tools you may have desperately needed, maybe without even knowing it (trust me, we've been in this market segment long enough to understand the product and business challenges you face today and tomorrow!).

Our feature today is "LockDown", an ALUI Security Management product.  In a nutshell, this product makes portal security management and administration MUCH easier, providing you more control over your administrative and KD taxonomies than the portal itself offers. 

For example, I was at a site a couple months back where the customer had hundreds of communities with individual ACEs (Access Control Entries) created over many years in an administrative folder.  At the parent folder, there was a user who had ADMIN access to everything, and she wanted to remove that particular user, who had moved on to other things.  Deleting the ACE, she was prompted with the question "You have changed the security of this folder. Would you like to apply the new security settings to all child objects and subfolders?", and clicked "Yes".  BOOM!  Years of work setting ACLs (Access Control Lists) gone, because the portal COPIES those security settings to all child objects, rather than just CHANGES to them. See this article for another description of the problem.

Enter "Lockdown":  Giving you a better way to view your security and administrative taxonomy, it also provides a much richer set of options to propagate your security settings down the administrative taxonomy:

Check out our Products Page for other products (that we'll feature in upcoming posts), and the LockDown page for more details on this ALI Security Management game-changer.

Interested in a demo?  Contact us at info@function1.com!

For those of you unaware, Dev2Dev is meeting a grisly fate:  it won't be with us much longer (apparently all content except for the blogs up there will be migrated to the Oracle Mother Ship).  No doubt our friends at Oracle will come up with an alternative way for employees to speak their minds, but for now many employees and "alumni" still have something to say, and we want to give them a forum.  Today's guest post is from Ray Gao, one he started while still at BEA (warning: dev2dev links are not long for this world...) on Performance Tuning of the ALI Portal.

The gist of his post is that there are a lot of moving parts in performance tuning, including the portal, remote tier, and the database: the performance chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

To get more of his great high-level overview on performance tuning, click on through for a good read!

Well, Oracle's gift keeps givin':  First, they published unlimited license keys for all ALUI products, and now, they've release maintenance packs for everything with all the licensing stripped out completely!

Go Oracle!

Update June 9, 2008: Sorry ladies and gents, I just spent the day trying to upgrade our dev environment here.  After downloading hundreds of megabytes worth of installer packages that wouldn't even open in Winzip, I tried again and was able to open them.  Sadly, they (at least Publisher and Collab, and I assume the rest of them) still required license keys.  I suspect what happened is that whovever uploaded the real updated installers didn't FTP them as binary files (which would corrupt the files), and they rolled back to the original versions today.  I'm sure it's coming, but I was also a little disappointed in this false start...

Update June 10, 2008:  OK, my fault.  The link above makes it pretty clear that the delicensed products are on Oracle's download site and not available through BEA's download center.

My love for e-licensing at BEA, or lack thereof, was no secret.  I was mostly appalled as an employee when I was working at client sites - who completely trusted me with administrative access to their servers - and tried to get a license key.  Often this process took days, and occasionally took weeks.  In fact, we've got a client struggling with trying to wrangle legit keys from eLicensing now, who didn't even know that that particular product (Analytics) even HAD keys!

Well, no more.  The wicked witch is dead.  The clouds have parted.  Angels are singing.  Oracle has released generic license keys to legitimately licensed customers.

Now, people, I'm not saying this gives everyone free reign to steal Oracle products or use them in ways they're not licensed for.  I have no idea what Oracle's new licensing scheme is - particularly around using instances in development and DR environments (a common sore point with license keys) - so be good with these things.  I understand Oracle focuses more on customer audits than oppressive licensing schemes, so make sure you stay legit - contact your sales person if you've got any questions!

Without further ado, you can download the generic ALI keys here. 

Use them responsibly - our customers always maintained compliance at Plumtree without the keys, and I'm sure you all will again (well, I guess they did: I was just a consultant - what do I know?).

Here's a quick tip for ya - we've talked about using the audit log manager to track and archive events, but if you're getting the following error:

JobShell: Exception occurred when processing operation n:nnn:  Error in function PTAuditManager.DiscardOldAuditMsgs (lAuditTypeMask == -1, dtCutoffMsgTime == nnn)

... the likely cause is an extraneous file in your archive destination, which can easily happen when you're trying to just consolidate space on that file server:

Move the extraneous file (basically, any file not created by the archive process itself) to another folder and you should be good to go!