Promoting Portal Content

Introduction to Promoting Portal Content

	Promotion Methods for Portal Content
	What Can Be Promoted through Portal Promotion
	What Cannot Be Promoted through Portal Promotion
	Versions and Compatibility
	About the Portal Promotion Tools

Promotion Methods for Portal Content

The promotion of portal content typically requires the extraction, importing, and upgrading of portal content. You can use a holistic approach (promote the entire portal application tree), or you can use an incremental approach (promote specific pieces of portal content). Guidance about when to use each method is included in the topic that provides instructions.

Portal content should always be promoted last, after any related or support content has been brought into the target environment. The most common scenarios for promotion of portal content are as follows:

You are upgrading your system from SAS 9.1.3 to SAS 9.2, and you want to move your portal content to the new environment. In this scenario, most content (other than portal content) is moved by the migration tools and documentation. Promotion of portal content is an additional task that should be performed after the other upgrade, installation, and migration activities are complete. See the SAS Intelligence Platform: 9.1.3 to 9.2 Migration Guide.
You are developing and testing portal content on one system before deploying the content to a production system. The portal promotion tools enable you to move portal content from the development system to the production system, without manually regenerating the content. Before you promote portal content, you must promote any related content that is outside the scope of portal promotion. See What Cannot Be Promoted through Portal Promotion.

What Can Be Promoted through Portal Promotion

The following content types are within the scope of portal promotion:

Portal Application Tree. See Promote the Entire Portal Application Tree.
User or Group Permissions Tree. See Promote a User or Group Permissions Tree.
Portal content object. See Promote a Portal Page Template, Content Object, Portlet Instance, or Portal Page.
Portal page. See Promote a Portal Page Template, Content Object, Portlet Instance, or Portal Page.
Portal page template. See Promote a Portal Page Template, Content Object, Portlet Instance, or Portal Page.
Portlet instance. See Promote a Portal Page Template, Content Object, Portlet Instance, or Portal Page.

What Cannot Be Promoted through Portal Promotion

Portal content should always be promoted last, after all related and supporting content has been brought into the target environment. Here are some examples of content types that are outside the scope of portal promotion:

WebDAV content

Some portlets such as the WebDAV Content and WebDAV Graph portlets use files stored in the WebDAV. WebDAV files associated with these portlets are not promoted. For information about how to promote WebDAV content that is associated with metadata objects, see "Using the Promotion Tools" in the SAS Intelligence Platform: System Administration Guide.

SAS content

SAS content includes many different types of content that can be promoted by using the Export SAS Package and the Import SAS Package wizards:

information maps
data explorations
reports
stored processes
channels
subscribers
portlets that use SAS content
burst definitions

For more information about how to promote SAS content, see "Using the Promotion Tools" in the SAS Intelligence Platform: System Administration Guide. In the November 2010 Release of SAS 9.2, the SAS Web OLAP Viewer for Java application and SAS Visual Data Explorer are discontinued. However, when you upgrade or migrate to SAS 9.2, the SAS deployment tools automatically convert each bookmark in the data exploration into a SAS report. You can the SAS report view in SAS Web Report Studio 4.3. If there were references to the data explorations (in the form of SBIP URLs), those references would be updated. For more information, see "Performing Post-migration Tasks" in the SAS Intelligence Platform: System Administration Guide.

Custom portlets or user-defined PAR files

Content associated with custom portlets and third-party portlets is not promoted. This content should be promoted manually. For more information about custom portlets, see Developing Portlets for the SAS Information Delivery Portal.

SAS Themes

The import process does not import SAS Themes connection information, or the default references. For more information about SAS Web Application Themes, see Administering SAS Web Application Themes.

SAS BI Dashboard

The SAS BI Dashboard 4.3 portlet uses files stored on the file system and data stored in the SAS metadata server. Neither the files nor the metadata associated with this portlet is promoted. For more information about promoting SAS BI Dashboard portlet, see Promoting SAS BI Dashboard 4.3 Content.

Versions and Compatibility

In this chapter, we refer to source and target systems for promoting portal content.

A source system is:

a SAS 9.1.3 deployment with SAS Information Delivery Portal 2.0
a SAS 9.2 deployment with SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.2 or SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.3

A target system is a SAS 9.2 deployment with SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.2 or SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.3.

The portal content in SAS Information Delivery Portal 2.0 can be promoted to either SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.2 or SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.3. There are minor differences in the steps to promote portal content to SAS Information Delivery 4.2 or SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.3.

The following table shows the SAS releases that are compatible with supported versions of the SAS Information Delivery Portal.

Compatibility
SAS Release	SAS Information Delivery Portal Version
SAS 9.1.3	SAS Information Delivery Portal 2.0
SAS 9.2	SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.2
SAS 9.2 Maintenance Release 2	SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.2
October 2009 Release	SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.2
SAS 9.2 Maintenance Release 3	SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.2
November 2010 Release	SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.3

About the Portal Promotion Tools

Here is some general information about the extract, import, upgrade, and remove scripts:

You should always back up the entire system before running any of the scripts.
Provide the user ID and password for an unrestricted user.
For scripts that you run against the SAS 9.2 metadata server, you can use an internal account (for example, sasadm@saspw).
The extract script has a SAS 9.1.3 and a SAS 9.2 version. Use the SAS 9.1.3 version when the source is a SAS 9.1.3 metadata repository. Use the SAS 9.2 version when the source is a SAS 9.2 metadata repository.
Each script has a .bat form (for Windows) and a .sh form (for UNIX).
You can encode the password using PROC PWENCODE.
To run the script remotely, use the following additional parameters:

-server machine-name -port port-number

In addition to the scripts, portal promotion uses a set of metadata extraction templates. There is one XML file for each content type that can be promoted.

The entire set of promotion tools (scripts, batch files, and extraction templates) is available as follows:

If you have SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.3, the scripts are in the configuration directory under your equivalent of \Lev1\Web\Applications\SASPortal4.3\PortalPromotion.
If you do not have SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.3, obtain the scripts by contacting SAS Technical Support.

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