Customising a WebSphere Portal Theme - Remove Signup and Edit My Profile Link

I have recently had the requirement to customise a Portal Theme a couple of times and every time I do it I fall for the same gotcha's so I thought I would document the process so I can remember next time. I recently modified a Theme to remove the Signup and Edit My Profile Links. Dave Hay shows us one way of doing this using XMLAccess however sometimes modifying the theme is required for other reasons as well.

The main reference on how to do this is the Info Center (http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wpdoc/v6r1/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.wp.ent.doc_v6101/dev/dgn_crthm.html) however there are a couple of steps that arn't terribly clear so I have recorded what I did below here.

The easiest way to build a theme is to take an exiting one and modify it.

First copy an existing Theme
Copy the following directories and files contained within -
...\wp_profile\installedApps\portal1\wps.ear\wps.war\themes\dojo
...\wp_profile\installedApps\portal1\wps.ear\wps.war\themes\html\Portal
...\wp_profile\installedApps\portal1\wps.ear\wps.war\themes\html\psw

Then copy all of the tld files from the WEB-INF/tld directory in wps.war into the theme WAR's WEB-INF/tld directory in order to get support for all the custom tags used for themes and skins.

I found the description of the above a little confusing so maybe this screen shot helps to explain what the directory structure of your new theme should be.



Now to modify the Theme (to remove the Self Care links)
Now you can modify the theme quite dramatically but here I just want to remove the selfcare and signup links.

Find banner_toolbar.jspf in the html/MyThemeName directory and edit it. Now basically what we need to do is comment out the appropriate bits. Don't be mislead by the comments in the document as they arn't exactly worded well. Basically you just need to comment out the sections that refer to the selfcare and signup


Now a key step/gotcha in the process is to Edit and Save Default.jsp as well. This updates the timestamp so that Default.jsp will be recompiled with the updated jspf elements. It seems that if you don't do this then it just doesn't work.

Package & Deploy the Theme
This part wasn't so bad. Just follow the doco - http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wpdoc/v6r1/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.wp.ent.doc_v6101/dev/dgn_crthm.html

Importing a Theme
and again this part isn't too bad. http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wpdoc/v6r1/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.wp.ent.doc_v6101/dev/dgn_crthm.html

So once all that is done all you do is apply the Theme to your Portal pages. You might need to flush your cache and if you use a Proxy that cache's as well you might need to refresh that.

Introducing the Beautiful Molly Jayne



Lotusphere News from a distance

Well unfortunately I couldn't make Lotusphere this year as fortunately Jayne is due with our first baby in Feb. A little too close to be on the other side of the world.

So I am watching the news come in from afar and here is the latest news I have been able to find out. ISW has a number of our team at Lotusphere so I am sure we will get more info coming in soon as well.

• IBM announces that since Lotus Notes 8 was released they have added 12,236 new customers. From my knowledge there used to be approximately 50,000 so this is a huge increase in new organisations that have adopted Notes & Domino.
• Lotusphere is bigger this year. Customer attendance is up 2% on last year.
• RIM introduced their first Blackberry 10 years today.  Blackberry Enterprise Server 4.16 released to support Domino 8.5 (only 10 days after the release of 8.5).
• New Blackberry Client for Lotus Connections 2.0.1 announced for release in early 2009. Supports all Connection services.
• New Blackberry client for Sametime as well. Also plans to support Quickr and Lotus Symphony.
• Blackberry XPages support in Domino Designer through an Eclipse plugin coming later this year.
• Lotus Bluehouse has been renamed Lotus Live - http://www.lotuslive.com
• Lotus Symphony for the Mac can be downloaded today including the ODF Toolkit for Open Document workflow
• Symphony 1.3 will support Office 2007 file formats.
• Lotus Notes is 20 this year.
• Quickr is integrated into the iNotes 8.5 client.
• XPages is a huge hit in Designer 8.5. This will revolutionise development of Domino Web Applications.
• Xpages will be supported in the Notes client in 8.5.1. This is truly a major new capability. Imagine the interfaces we can build for the Notes client now.
• LinkedIn Integration via the Notes Sidebar.
• Lotus Quickr will offer XPages support
• IBM is going to release SmartMarket - ibm.com/smartmarket . An store that partners can promote and distribute applications
• IBM and OpenNTF are going to form a partnership. IBM is going to provide more support for OpenNTF.
• Domino 8.5 offers 50% reduction in I/O
• Lotus Foundations will ship with VMWare support
• New release of ST coming in 2009 - ST8.5, including iPhone support
• Sametime 8.5 web client - No Java Applets required. You can export recordings of Sametime meetings as Quicktime
• Lotus Connections 2.5 - Can customise interface across the product. Profiles will support Microblogging (like twitter and Wall).
• Connections will have Widgets to integrate Flickr and Twitter etc. Will also have bi-directional sharing with LinkedIn and more. Connections extended to iPhone. Wiki's can be part of Communities with support for versions and ratings. Lots of new Connections capabilities. New file sharing capability in Connections.
• Quickr 8.2 for Domino to ship later this quarter, including LC integration and Domino 8.5 support
• Websphere Portal now to include entitlement for ePhox Live rich text editors. This is great news. Portal really needed Ephox for Rich editing of web content.
• LotusLive is a portfolio of integrated social software and collaborative services. Seems to be Connections, Sametime, Quickr all rolled into one service.
• LotusLive partnerships with Salesforce, LinkedIn and Skype

And that is it for now. More as it comes in. 

Exchange to Notes 8 Migration Case Study - Tasmanian Perpetual Trustees Limited

IBM and ISW has just published a great case study on Tasmanian Perpetual Trustees Limited migrating from Exchange and Outlook 2007 to Notes & Domino 8 as well as their adoption of Workflow-Xpress.

More information here... 

TripIT and Lotus Notes 8.5 Federated Calandars

I have been using the Notes 8.5 beta for a month or so now and one of the best features is the federated calendars.

Essentially this feature allows you to overlay additional calendars with your own. For example you might want to add some of your colleagues calendars or you might have an events calendar for your organisation. Well with Notes 8.5 you can simply select which calendars you want to overlay with your calendar. On the left hand panel of your calendar go to Show Calendars and you can choose to Add a Calendar...

You choose a calendar to add and you have the option of using a user's calendar, Notes Teamroom Calendar, and even a Notes application Calendar. The ability to bring together disparate calendars is awesome. We have been able to look at shared calendars in the past and use Group Calendars to kind of compare different calendars but this is just seamless calendar overlays.

An example of how I am using this new feature is leveraging TripIT. TripIT is a new Web 2.0 type service that enables me to forward all my airline and accommodation bookings to it. When I email a booking to it the clever team at TripIT somehow automagically reads the itinerary and adds it to my TripIT Calendar. Now I can access my TripIT calendar directly via a web browser or via my Blackberry Bold's browser but I can also subscribe to an iCal feed.



 So all I do is Add a Calendar, select an iCalendar Feed as the source, enter the URL to my TripIT feed, select a colour, and their you go. Your flights etc are automatically added to your calendar!!



So all I do now is email all my flights to TripIT, there secret sauce reads the document, and they add it to my calendar!! Now there is a reason to upgrade to Notes 8.5 when it arrives!