First Steps into Liferay Portal 6EE (Enterprise Edition): Part 1

Recently I was tasked with setting up a test Liferay portal environment to see how it compares with our current Oracle WebCenter Interaction 10.3 platform.  While I'm withholding my opinion for now, I thought I would share some information to help others that are also seeking to setup a Liferay environment.  All of this info is available elsewhere obviously, but you'll have to browse through a series of documents and do a little hunting to dig it all up, so I thought I'd share the basics.

1. Download 
1. Get the software: http://www.liferay.com/get-ee-trial/downloads/portal
2. you'll need to create an account on liferay.com to get to the download page
3. you'll need a trial license to do anything with the downloaded software so contact their sales team for a 30 day license - you can extend your license by contacting the sales folks again later
4. For evaluation purposes they recommend getting the tomcat bundle
2. Hardware/Software Requirements
1. Liferay doesn't seem to offer official documentation on what is/isn't supported.  Naturally this was extremely disconcerting, but given that this is just a test environment I took them at their word that their software is OS and DB agnostic.
2. We chose to run on a single VM (Citrix XenServer) running Windows 2008 R2 SE 64bit, Xeon x5670 2.93GHz processor, 4gb RAM and MS SQL Server 2008 SE 64bit
1. I've heard you can run on a laptop with 2gb of RAM with no problem
3.  Install
1. Unzip the tomcat bundle
2. Copy the license file into the /deploy folder
3. Run startup.bat from /tomcat/bin
4. Voila! you are up and running

The Basics
Admin login: test@liferay.com/test

Navigation:
The "Go to" dropdown is essentially a list of all Communities a person is subscribed to. This is synonymous with "My Communities" from Oracle WebCenter Interaction.

Create a community

1. Under the “Manage” dropdown select control panel
2. Click on Portal: Communities
3. Click on Add
4. Click on Save
5. Note: Communities won’t appear under the “Go to” dropdown until they have pages assigned to them.

Create a page within a community

1. Under the “Manage” dropdown select control panel
2. Click on Portal: Communities
3. Click the Actions link to the right of the community you want to add pages , and select Manage Pages
4. Type the name of the page and select the type of page it will be then click  the Add Page button

To add a portlet to a page

1. Under the “Add" dropdown select "More..."
2. Drag the elements onto the page or click the "Add button" to the right of the element

Configure Active Directory Authentication & Profiling Source

1. Login as an Admin
2. Under the “Manage” dropdown select control panel
3. Click on Portal: Settings
4. Click on “Configuration: Authentication"
5. Configure AD

Helpful links:

1. Admin guide: http://docs.liferay.com/portal/6.0/official/liferay-administrator-guide-6.0.pdf
2. Forums: http://www.liferay.com/community/forums/-/message_boards/category/243728

(Click to enlarge)

Oracle WebCenter Interaction: Using multiple logins and URLs to access your portal

When we purchased Plumtree licenses way back in the day we had visions of using the software to run our intranet and as an extranet for small groups of outside users.  The setup was fairly vanilla in terms of experience definitions, rules, and URLs - we based everything upon what folder a user object was stored in and fed the experience definition on that.  Extranet users are directed to a secure URL which points to the IP of our DMZ portal server and then exposes the portals functionality, while internal users access a pair of load balanced internal portal servers using the same URL.  In IIS 6 and what is now WCI 10.3, this type of setup is quite straight-forward.

Recently we were asked to build a new site for medical professionals which would use a different secure URL and allow users to create their own accounts before logging in and viewing targeted content.  Because security certificates attach to IIS Web Sites we needed to create a new site and obtain a new certificate.  Could we have put 2 certs on a single site? Maybe...but that didn't seem like a best practice and we figured the tried and true approach would pay off in the end.

We pointed the new URL to a new IP address which was attached to a new "Web Site" in IIS with a corresponding certificate.  Once that was setup we created a virtual directory to point to the /portal and /imageserver directories.  The default site page routed to /portal/server.pt as required but there we received nothing but a 404 message.  After some head scratching and browsing of the Oracle Support archives and Oracle Technology Network discussion boards a quick conversation with support identified the obvious issue - we hadn't registered the product specific file extension within IIS! duh!
On the Web Site you must configure the application settings.  Go to the mapping application extensions area and add a new mapping for .pt which points to the executable located in C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_isapi.dll
then limit the verbs to: GET,HEAD,POST,OPTIONS,PROPFIND,PROPPATCH,MKCOL,LOCK,UNLOCK,
PUT,DELETE,COPY,MOVE

Restart IIS and voila!

To complete the experience we developed a new login page which included a "Create Account" link, and defaulted the Auth Source to our portal repository.  An Experience Rule was created for the new URL and points to an Experience Definition that has a custom Login page defined (if you don't do this your site will use whatever your Guest login page is).