Red Hat Portal Server 1.0 Release Notes

Table of Contents
1. Release Notes

1. Release Notes

These are the release notes for Red Hat Portal Server 1.0. They contain an overview of Red Hat Portal Server 1.0, an installation reference, a list of known issues, and an enumeration of significant changes since Red Hat Portal Server beta.

Contents

1.1. Overview

The Red Hat Portal Server 1.0 is a full-featured portal server. Powered by Red Hat Web Application Framework technology, the Red Hat Portal Server aggregates both local and remote content within a configurable framework that supports multiple languages in its user interface and pervasive devices such as WAP, XHTML, and VoiceXML in its rendering pipeline. Portals can be built and targeted for the individual, for work groups or teams, for people with a common set of interests, and for large corporations and organizations.

For more information about Red Hat Portal Server, visit http://www.redhat.com/software/rhea/portalserver/.

1.2. What's New

Features introduced in Portal Server 1.0 include:

Look and feel

The Portal Server user interface has a new look and feel designed for ease of use and clarity. Various user interface metaphors have been standardized and made consistent throughout the UI.

Portal Management

Portal Server includes complete user interfaces for managing user and group portals.

Themes

Portal Server includes the ability to choose different themes to customize the look-and-feel of a specific portal.

Archiving

Portals can be archived once they are no longer active. This removes the portal from general use, but the information within the portal can still be accessed by administrators and unarchived if necessary.

RSS

Portal Server supports displaying content that is syndicated using the RSS standard.

Permissions

The Portal Server permissions management UI has been modified to allow the creator of a new child portal the option of choosing whether the new child portal inherits the permissions of the parent portal. When the inherit permissions option is chosen, the privileges members of the parent portal enjoy will be available to them in the new child portal. The members group of the child portal is also added to the members group of the parent portal, forming a two-way relationship between members of each portal.

When a creator of a child portal chooses not to inherit permissions from the parent portal, then members of the parent portal will enjoy no privileges in the child. Only the parent portal member who is creating the child portal will be added to the new child portal's member group. Individual members of the parent portal can be explicitly added to the child portal as participants or members through the 'People' tab in the admin UI for the child portal.

	Caution
	When choosing not to inherit permissions during the creation of a child portal, the inheritance association between the two portals is only removed one way: from parent to child. The members group of the child portal is still added to the parent portal's member group. If desired, the child portal's member group can be explicitly removed from a parent portal's member group, effectively severing the permissions association between the two groups completely. Not understanding this policy could inadvertently lead to a security vulnerability. For example, portal A's admin creates a new child portal B with the 'No Inheritance' option selected. Then an admin for portal B adds a registered user C to the members group of portal B. Now C has membership in portal A. This policy can be extremely useful, and in practice, it is expected that this policy will be desired for most child portal's. It is imperative, however, that Portal Server administrators understand this policy. The policy can also be overridden easily when desired.

Caution

When choosing not to inherit permissions during the creation of a child portal, the inheritance association between the two portals is only removed one way: from parent to child. The members group of the child portal is still added to the parent portal's member group. If desired, the child portal's member group can be explicitly removed from a parent portal's member group, effectively severing the permissions association between the two groups completely.

Not understanding this policy could inadvertently lead to a security vulnerability. For example, portal A's admin creates a new child portal B with the 'No Inheritance' option selected. Then an admin for portal B adds a registered user C to the members group of portal B. Now C has membership in portal A. This policy can be extremely useful, and in practice, it is expected that this policy will be desired for most child portal's. It is imperative, however, that Portal Server administrators understand this policy. The policy can also be overridden easily when desired.

Note

	Note
	The permissioning policy described above is in effect only when the `permissionsDMLChecking` flag in the Kernel Initializer section of the Portal Server `enterprise.init` file is set to true (which it should be). For a complete description of this configuration flag as well as the Portal Server permissioning policies, please see the Portal Server section of the Red Hat Web Application Framework Installation Guide.

The permissioning policy described above is in effect only when the permissionsDMLChecking flag in the Kernel Initializer section of the Portal Server enterprise.init file is set to true (which it should be). For a complete description of this configuration flag as well as the Portal Server permissioning policies, please see the Portal Server section of the Red Hat Web Application Framework Installation Guide.

1.3. License

Red Hat Portal Server 1.0 is copyrighted 1999-2003 by Red Hat Inc. It is released under the CCMPL 1.0. The text of the CCMPL 1.0 can be found at http://www.redhat.com/licenses/ccmpl.html.

The CCMPL is based on the OSI-approved IBM Public License Version 1.0 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ibmpl.html. The IBM Public License is a true open-source license that requires open-sourcing of any modifications or other "derivative works."

1.4. Installation

The most recent installation documentation is available at http://rhea.redhat.com.

Portal Server 1.0 requires a complete and working installation of WAF 6.0.

1.5. Documentation

Documentation for Red Hat Portal Server, including Javadoc and a developer guide can be found at http://rhea.redhat.com.

1.6. Upgrading

This is the first complete release of Portal Server, so no upgrade from previous versions is available.

1.7. Known Issues

Deletion of system objects such as portlets is restricted to site wide administrators in this release of Portal Server for security reasons. Support for delegating deletion privileges will be available in an upcoming release of Portal Server.

1.8. Bug Reporting

Please file bug reports in the Red Hat Portal Server section of http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla.

Last modified: $DateTime: 2003/08/21 11:30:59 $