PORTALS AND PORTLETS 2006
Identity and Community/Collaboration
Technologies in the Sun Portal
July 2006
Tim Rault-Smith
Sun Microsystems
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PORTALS AND PORTLETS 2006
Agenda
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Introducing Sun Microsystems
Identity-Enabled Portals
Communities, Collaboration Technologies
Opening these to the developer community via open
source
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PORTALS AND PORTLETS 2006
Sun Microsystems and Portals
• 1999: Portal Server 3.0 (acquired)
> Focus on Secure Remote Access to intranet
• 2002: Identity Server aka Access Manager
> Access management across intranet
> Based on the Identity technology in Portal Server
• 2003: Java Enterprise System
> Integrated stack of web middleware
• 2005: Portal Server 7.0
> Focus on Communities and Collaboration
> “Web 2.0”
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PORTALS AND PORTLETS 2006
Identity on the Internet
• From anonymity...
> “On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog” (1993)
• ...to identity overload
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Mail – bob.jones
Research project - bjones
Amazon - bob.jones@companyxyz.com
Bank – bj196706204033
Inland Revenue – GH7KJJI659K8R
...etc, etc
How many passwords?
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PORTALS AND PORTLETS 2006
Identity-Enabled Portals
• Role-based and personalised content
• Authentication to the Portal using JAAS
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LDAP, Active Directory
Database
Certificates
Two-factor
eg SecureID, Safeword
• Community identity
> Membership
> Self-registration
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PORTALS AND PORTLETS 2006
Identity-Enabled Portals – SSO
• Channels internal to the Portal know the user's ID
• Rich content provided by external applications
• Single sign-on methods to pass user's identity to
provider applications
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Password relay
Proxy user
Token based SSO
Federation/SAML
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PORTALS AND PORTLETS 2006
Identity-Enabled Portals – SSO
• Channels internal to the Portal know the user's ID
• Rich content provided by external applications
• Single sign-on methods to pass user's identity to
provider applications
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Password relay
Proxy user
Token based SSO
Federation/SAML
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PORTALS AND PORTLETS 2006
Token-based SSO
• Client is issued SSO token by Access Manager, via
the Portal login process
• Delivered to the browser via the Portal as a cookie
or a URL parameter
• SSO token has no content – just a long random
string used as a handle
• For non-web applications it is delivered using a C or
Java API
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PORTALS AND PORTLETS 2006
Token-based SSO – Integration
• For personalised content, a portlet passes the token
through to its provider application
• Provider web container has a Policy Agent plug-in
which intercepts resource requests
> Validates token
> Retrieves session data from Access Manager
> Checks policy
• Policy = Rules + Subjects + Conditions
eg Portal Desktop access by students with a certificate
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PORTALS AND PORTLETS 2006
Token-based SSO – Web Flow
Access Manager
SDK
User
Portal
Access Manager
Policy Agent
Sun Java System
Access Manager
External
Application
1. Request Portal desktop
2. Portal checks for
SSO token + policies
3. Return anonymous desktop
4. Authenticate + create SSO token
5. Return SSO token
6. Request Portal desktop
7. Portal checks for
SSO token + policies
8. Request content from external application
9. Agent checks for
SSO token + policies
10. Provide personalised content (or refuse resource)
11. Return personalised desktop
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PORTALS AND PORTLETS 2006
Case study: BT NHS Spine
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1.2m NHS employees
Requirement for high degree of confidentiality
Certificate authentication using smart card
Core applications provided in the Spine
Other applications provided by regional centres
All protected using the “Spine Security Broker”
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Sun Portal Server
Access Manager
AMSDK applications
SAML
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PORTALS AND PORTLETS 2006
Communities
Dynamic Organization
Structured
Organization
Communities
Evolving the Identity-Enabled Portal
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PORTALS AND PORTLETS 2006
Communities
• Structured Organisation
> Organised by business function
> Administrator created and
maintained
• Dynamic Organisation
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Organised by Interest
User created and maintained
Community-specific view
Users modify and contribute
Promotes collaboration
Community
• Community Services
> Group calendar
> Group tasks
> Wiki
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> Including portlets
Surveys
Polls
Search
Discussions
Community templates
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PORTALS AND PORTLETS 2006
Identity Based Content Delivery
Enterprise
Portal Pages
Formally define a
Portal Page or Portlet
and deploy to:
Community
Portal Pages
Allow anyone to create a community to facilitate
the adhoc productivity requirements
Portal 1
Portal Home
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Organizations
Sub-Organizations
Roles
Communities
Private
People
Dan
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Realms
Roles
Community Home
www.sun.com
Realm 1
or
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Public
Operations
People
Roles
Su
ProjectX
Jeff
Engineer
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PORTALS AND PORTLETS 2006
Community Framework
• Users can
> Create a Community
> Add portlets, services, data
to community
> Search Communities
> Join Communities
• Is a user-defined group of:
> Users (or orgs/groups)
> Services (portlets)
– Calendar, Wiki, Survey, Tasks, etc.
> Content
– WebPages/Desktops/Docs/etc.
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PORTALS AND PORTLETS 2006
Wiki
• Users can create a
community as a two-column
table portal view, a left menu
bar navigation portal view or
as a Wiki view
• Users can edit the wiki page,
add new pages, etc.
• Do not need to use wiki
syntax to edit pages, editing
toolbar is automatically
included
• Can include portlets on the
wiki page!
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PORTALS AND PORTLETS 2006
Community
Collaboration
• Share files throughout a group
• Create folders,
upload/download
docs
• Future:
upload/download from
Desktop, StarOffice,
MSOffice, IM, or from
websites and
applications!
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PORTALS AND PORTLETS 2006
Community Calendar and Tasks
• Create a community calendar of events
• Also Create tasks for community members
• Update and track status of project tasks
Allows user to
group community
and personal
calendars
together into a
single view
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PORTALS AND PORTLETS 2006
Discussions
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Create, read, rate, reply, search, subscribe
HTML Editor Toolbar
Add to communities
Searchable
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PORTALS AND PORTLETS 2006
Community Survey and Polls
• Create new surveys for community
> Can create custom questions and answers
> Allows multiple choice, yes/no, custom answers
• Respond to surveys
• Review survey results
• Also provide Polls
Can be useful for team
decision making
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PORTALS AND PORTLETS 2006
The Developer Community
Sun is open-sourcing its enterprise Portal software
• Initially Portlet container, and open portlet repository
• Eventually the entire product will be open-source
• Vibrant community emerging (contributors, users, partners, SIs customers etc.)
Portal and Add-Ons
Portlets
Portal
Portlet
Container
WSRP
Collab
Human
Workflow
CMS
SRA
Search
Etc.
EAI
BI
Etc.
http://portal.dev.java.net
https://portlet-repository.dev.java.net/
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PORTALS AND PORTLETS 2006
Summary
• Single Sign-on
> Token based SSO allows for rich content from external
applications without the security risk of password relay
• Evolution of Portals
> Role-based content
> Identity-based content
> Community-based content
• Sun's Portal contains a large collection of
community portal features
> Shared with the developer community via OSS
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