Introduction to SAS Information Delivery Portal Administration

Main Tasks for Administering the Portal

Determine the types of content that you want to provide, and then add content items to the SAS Information Delivery Portal environment. In general, content falls into the following two main categories:

SAS content, such as information maps, reports, stored processes, and packages that are created by the SAS Publishing Framework
Other Web content, including Web applications, documents, links to internal or external Web pages, and syndication channels that provide syndicated, continually updated Web content

For details and instructions, see Overview of Adding Content.

Developers in your organization create many of these content items. In addition, your organization can develop custom portlets and themes for the portal. For more information, see Developing Portlets for the SAS Information Delivery Portal.

Implement Security for the Portal

For general security tasks, see Middle-Tier Security. The following security tasks apply specifically to the portal:

Set up users for the portal.

Enable users to log on to the portal by creating metadata identities for the users. For instructions about adding users and groups, see "User Administration" in the SAS Management Console: Guide to Users and Permissions.

If you want particular users to help administer portal content for their respective groups, then you can configure these users as group content administrators. Group content administrators can create portal content and share it with members of the group. Group content administrators can also edit or remove content that has been shared with the group. For instructions, see Configure a Group Content Administrator.
Manage access to content.

You implement authorization in order to control which users have which permissions for which resources. You can implement authorization for the portal in the following ways:
- Configure permissions for the users and groups that are defined in SAS metadata. You can add portal users to groups that you define in SAS metadata, grant the necessary permissions to those groups, and then limit the permissions for the PUBLIC group.
- Set up authorization for the portal content that you deploy. When you set up authorization for content, only users who have the proper authorization can access the content. The method that you use to control access varies with the type of content. For details, see Understanding Portal Authorization.
Set up Web authentication.

(Optional) You can configure the portal to use Web authentication. For a detailed discussion of different types of authentication and configuration guidelines, see "Authentication Mechanisms" in the SAS Intelligence Platform: Security Administration Guide. For instructions on configuring Web authentication for JBoss, IBM WebSphere, or Oracle WebLogic, see the SAS third-party Web site at http://support.sas.com/resources/thirdpartysupport/v92.
Enable unchallenged portal access.

(Optional) Effective with SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.3, you can choose to enable unchallenged access to the portal. When unchallenged access is enabled, users can access the portal and interact with selected content without providing a user ID and password. The option is similar to the Public Kiosk feature in the SAS 9.1.3 release of the SAS Information Delivery Portal. After you have enabled unchallenged access, users can access the portal by entering the URL http://host-name/SASPortal/public. For details, see Enabling Unchallenged Portal Access.

Set Up Portal Views

The SAS Information Delivery Portal gives each user a personalized virtual workplace within a Web browser. This workplace is referred to as a portal view. When you deploy the portal, you can create initial portal views for different groups of users by sharing pages and content with the groups.

For example, suppose that you want to provide different types of information to engineers, to sales people, and to managers. You might first create an "engineers," "sales," and a "managers" group identity in SAS metadata. Then, you might create pages, add information to the pages, and share the pages and information with the appropriate group. When users log on to the portal, those users who belong to one of these groups see the pages that were shared with the group. This enables you to ensure that users have access only to the information that is appropriate for them. (To make information available to everyone in your organization, you can share information with the PUBLIC group.)

To facilitate the process of deploying views, you can designate a group content administrator for a group that is defined in SAS metadata. This person can then assume responsibility for sharing information with the respective group. For instructions, see Configure a Group Content Administrator.

Customize the Portal's Appearance

You can make some changes to the appearance of the SAS Information Delivery Portal that affect all portal views:

You can set up a default theme. When users log on to the portal, they see the theme that you specify as default. In addition, you can make new themes available to portal users. For information about themes, see Administering SAS Web Application Themes.
You can change the application name that appears in the banner.
You can change the default preferences that were set during installation. For example, you can change the locale, date format, time format, and other preferences on the Settings tab for Configuration Manager. See Using Configuration Manager.

The changes are seen by all users who log on to the portal.

All users can personalize their portal views. For example, users can change the order in which pages appear, the number of columns on a page, and other aspects of their portal views.

Perform Routine Maintenance

Here are some maintenance tasks that you might need to perform:

Change passwords for users as needed. See "User Administration Tasks" in the SAS Management Console: Guide to Users and Permissions.
Add new users, groups, and roles. See "User Administration Tasks" in the SAS Management Console: Guide to Users and Permissions.
Add new custom-developed portlets, Web applications, themes, and other content.
Update existing portal pages.
Delete portal content items from the portal environment. For more information, see the online Help that is provided with the portal.
Remove old publication channel files from the file system or from the WebDAV repository. (The expiration date for a package does not delete files; it only removes them from the channel.)
If necessary, remove and then reinstall portal metadata to its initial state (the state that it was in after you installed the portal).

Promote Portal Content

Beginning with SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.3, a content promotion tool is available. This tool consists of stand-alone batch scripts, shell scripts, and metadata extraction templates. These scripts and templates use the metadata server's import and export capabilities to promote portal metadata from a SAS 9.2 system to another SAS 9.2 system. You can promote the following types of content in SAS 9.2 deployments:

Portal Application Tree
User Permissions Tree
Portal page template
Portal content object
Portlet instance
Portal page

Remove the Configuration or Redistribute the Portal

The SAS Deployment Manager enables you to remove the configuration for the SAS applications, including the SAS Information Delivery Portal. You can then use the SAS Deployment Wizard to reconfigure the portal. For more information, see Using the SAS Deployment Manager.

Files that are specific to the configuration of the portal are located in the SAS-configuration-directory /Lev1/Logs/Configure directory. The filenames for the portal configuration begin with javaportal_configure and have a time and date stamp appended to the filename. When you remove the portal's configuration, a javaportal_unconfigure file is also created.

You might need to move portal components to different hosts. For example, if you initially installed the portal on the same machine as other SAS components in order to develop and test custom portal content, then you can later move some or all of the portal components to different machines. The Web applications are designed to operate in a tiered environment using various servers, each of which can run on a separate machine.

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