Moving from Novell Portal Services to Novell exteNd™

Dale A Anderson

Sr. Software Engineer

Novell, Inc.

Anne Hall

Principal Technical Writer

Novell, Inc.

Agenda

Introduction and Background

NPS to Director - How?

How do I use the migration utility?

What if I want to migrate other gadgets?

Questions and Answers

Introduction and Background

Introduction and Background

The Good

Novell Portal Services (NPS)

exteNd Director™ Standard

The Ugly

Migration

The Bad

exteNd Director Professional

Novell Portal Services
“The Good”

Pros:

IT/Network administrator was target user

Appealed to the base and channel

Some market penetration

Leveraged the capabilities of the directory

Cons:

Proprietary portal

Failed to keep pace with standards

Tied to the directory

Lacked penetration beyond user base

Novell exteNd 4.1 Enterprise
“The Bad” - NOT BAD JUST DIFFERENT

Pros:

IT developer was target user

Appealed to folks that coded portals

Comprehensive framework subsystems

Personalization, Transcoding, CMS, Rules etc.

Standards based (Portlets, multi J2EE etc.)

Cons:

Limited market penetration

No “quick start” portal

Didn’t appeal to Novell user base

Seemed expensive

Novell exteNd 5 Enterprise
“The Bad” – Addressing the Issues

Pros:

Borrowed the best of NPS

IT administrator was now considered as a user

Express portal was added

Directory affinity improved

Authentication and Personalization

Standards based

Portlets, multi J2EE etc.

Cons:

A little late

Not all NPS features implemented

No “magic upgrade”

Seemed expensive

The Best of Both Worlds!

Unified balanced environment

Business Solution

Architectural

High Performance

Standards based

Secure

Service-oriented

J2EE environment

Functional

Visual development

Portal Layout

Themes

Rules

Identity based personalization

“The Ugly”

From NPS to exteNd
“The Ugly” – Questionable Migration

NPS or

Director Standard

Novell exteNd

Ugly because no automated migration

or upgrade

(until now!)

NPS to Director - How?

What is the NPS Migration utility?

It is:

A command line utility that reads an NPS dump archive and converts the pages and gagdet assignments into a format that can be imported to an exteNd Director portal

Can convert the HTML, iFrame, Shortcut, and Message gadgets to exteNd Director portlets

Alleviating approximately 70% of the manual configuration

NPS Dump

What the NPS Migration utility is NOT?

It is not:

A silver bullet

A best practice

A product

An end user tool

NPS Dump

What are the prerequisites?

The prerequisites are:

Novell exteNd Director

Version 5.2.1 or higher

The exteNd Director npsmigration.zip file

“unzipped”

Novell Portal Services Dump Archive

What are the limitations?

The limitations are:

Not all gadgets*

HTML, iFrame, Shortcut, and Message ONLY

Gadget assignments and configuration are approximated on conversion

Security assignments must be redone*

No communities

No skin migration

No migration of user preferences

No custom gadget conversion*

How does it work?

NPS or

Director Standard

Configured

Portal

NPS Dump

Novell exteNd

Re-configured

Express Portal

https://forge.provo.novell.com/modules/xfmod/project/npsmigration

Via a download from:

Where do I get the migration tool?

How do I use the migration utility?

To use the NPS migration tool...

Download and unzip the NPSMigration.zip

Modify the utilities config.xml

Run NpsDataMigrationTool.bat

Use exteNd Director's Portal Data Import utility

Modifying the config.xml file

Located in the migration tool's \config directory

Specifies how the migration utility should handle conversions between security settings, pages, etc.

The config.xml schema

nps-migration-config

•••

•••

•••

•••

gadgets

pages

migrate-empty-pages

export-share-pages-acl

default-acl-secure

ldap-realm-name

portal-name

gadget-class

portlet

preferences-class

producer-name

default-acl-secure

gadget

1...∞

Modifying config.xml

<portal-name> -- The exteNd Director portal name

<ldap-realm> -- The target servers LDAP realm

<default-acl-secure> -- (gadgets) False (always)

<migrate-empty-pages> -- True/False. True migrates shared pages even if they contain gadgets that cannot be migrated

Modifying config.xml

<export-shared-pages-acl> -- True/False. Depends on whether the target exteNd Director portal uses the same LDAP realm as the source NPS portal

<default-acl-secure> (shared pages) – True/False. Do you want to secure migrated pages on the target server

Running the utility

The arguments are:

-e Creates an export file in extend Director format

-f <NPSDumpfile.zip> The NPS dump file name

-cf <configfilename.xml> The modified config.xml

-a <archivename> What you want to call the output file

The command is:

NpsDataMigrationTool.bat -e -f <npsdumpfile.zip> -cf <configfilename.xml> [options] -a <archivename>

Valid options for logging

The [options] are:

-l logoptions	out (default), error, file

-lf logname	Names the logfile

-ll loglevel	INFO (default), WARNING,

ERROR, TRACE

Importing data

Use the Portal Data Import utility

Open the exteNd Director Administration Console

Choose Administration Tools

Choose Portal Data Import

Portal Data Import Utility (1)

Portal Data Import (2)

Portal Data Import (3)

Testing the import

To verify that the migration and import was successful:

Test the imported pages

Test the new portlets

What if I want to migrate other gadgets?

To modify the utility to include more gadgets...

You must:

Make sure that a portlet for that gadget exists in the portal.

An accessory portlet is the name of an exteNd portlet that has been converted from a gadget.

They are documented in Chapter 29, “Working with Accessory Portlets” in the Portal Guide

If an accessory portlet for your gadget exists, you can extend the utility to migrate it.

Steps for extending the migration utility

You have to:

Create a Java class that extends com.novell.migration.dumpPreferences

Override the exportPreferencesInternal() method with preferences specific to the gadget you want to migrate

Compile the new Java class

Add the new class to the classpath in the NpsDataMigrationTool.bat file

Steps for extending the migration utility

You also have to:

Add a new gadget configuration node to the config.xml

Copy nps-migration.dtd to your working directory

Run the migration utility

Questions and Answers

Questions and Answers

https://forge.provo.novell.com/modules/xfmod/project/?npsmigration

Moving from Novell Portal Services to Novell exteNd™

2005-02-14T21:51:12