New in Portal SP11: System Administration
Two system administration changes were made in SP11 to make life easier for system administrators:
- Viewing and Transporting Permissions: You can now view the entire ACL structure (all permissions) for the portal, and you can transport the ACL structure from one portal to another.
- System Landscape: You can now view all the systems defined in the portal on a single page.
Viewing and Transporting Permissions
The changes regarding permissions deal with viewing permissions as well as transporting permissions between two portals.
Viewing Permissions
System administartors can now view the entire ACL structure, instead of just seeing the permissions for a single portal object.
To view the permissions, do the the following:
- Log on to the portal.
- In the same browser session, open a new browser window (File –> New –> Window).
- Enter the following URL in the new window:
http://hostname:port/irj/servlet/prt/portal/prtroot/
com.sap.portal.admin.acleditor.listPermissions
A list of portal objects is displayed, along with the name of each user assigned permissions for each object.
Transporting Permissions
The portal provides the capability to transfer permissions for portal objects in the PCD and security zones from one portal to another.
This mechanism is useful since exchanging content between portals through transport packages does not include permission assignments.
In fact, what you do is export the permissions to an XML file which contains the exported ACL structure in your source system. You then import the XML file to the target machine.
To export the permissions, do the following:
- Log on to the portal.
- In the same browser session, open a new browser window (File –> New –> Window).
- Enter the following URL in the new window:
http://hostname:port/irj/servlet/prt/portal/prtroot/ com.sap.portal.admin.acleditor.initialPermissionsCreator
An XML file representing the permissions for PCD objects is created.
To import these permissions into another portal, place this file on the target portal and restart the J2EE engine.
For more information on importing and exporting permissions, see Transporting Permissions on the Help Portal.
System Landscape
The System Landscape Overview page shows all the systems that have been defined in the Portal Catalog.
In the past, if you wanted to find a system, you had to navigate through all the folders in the Portal Catalog. You may have wanted to know if a system object had been created for a particlar back-end system, or you may have wanted to know the aliases for a particular system.
Below is the System Landscape page, which you use to manage systems.
If you did not know what folder the system was in, it was either very time consuming or virtually impossible to find the system.
Now, system administrators can use the System Landscape Overview page, which shows a list of all the systems defined in the portal. For each system, you can see the default alias and other aliases, as well as the object ID.
The articles in this series:
as an additional may I note that both the "listPermissions" report as well as the ACL exporting feature are already available on older releases (I used both of them on SP2 before).
But good to mention them in detail, as they are not really publically known.