WebSphere Portal Common Mail Portlet

 

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Overview

The Common Mail portlet allows administrators to configure the portlet for different back-end mail systems and allows users to retrieve their mail from the back-end systems. The supported back-end mail systems are Domino, Exchange 2000, IMAP, and POP3.

The name of the Portlet in v5.1.0.1 is "Mail".

In addition to basic mail support, the portlet also supports features such as an inline rich text editor for message creation and editing, a spell checker, and the ability to save attachments to the Document Manager.

The Common Mail and Common Calendar portlets are known together as the Common PIM (Personal Information Management) portlets, which are found on the My Work WebSphere Portal page.

 

 

What's new

The Common Mail portlet is new to IBM WebSphere Portal V5.1.

 

 

Using the Common Mail portlet

This portlet requires administrators to use configure mode to specify the mail server type or protocol used to connect to the mail server. Then administrators can specify the following settings in configure mode:

  • Source: This section requires administrators to specify the default mail server for users and contains an option to allow or prevent users from changing the mail source in edit mode.

  • Authentication: This section requires administrators to configure a Credential Vault slot to store user credentials for authentication. This section also allows Domino adminstrators to enable or disable single sign-on (SSO) for the portlet.

  • Features: This section allows the administrator to select features to make available or unavailable to users, such as the rich text editor and the ability to attach files.

 

 

Domino support and security

When used with a Domino back-end mail system, the Common Mail portlet (and the Common Calendar portlet) supports displaying information stored within Notes mail databases located on a Domino server that has Domino XML Services enabled. This portlet works with Notes mail databases that have the Domino Web Access (iNotes) design (iNotes5.ntf, iNotes60.ntf, or iNotes6.ntf) or the standard mail design (Mail5.ntf or Mail6.ntf).

By default, this portlet supports single sign-on (SSO) with an LTPA token, giving the user access to both the Domino server that has been set up for use with the portlet and the Notes database that is the source for data displayed in the portlet. The user's access is based on the identity (name and password) the user specifies to log in to WebSphere Portal.

As portal administrator, you can set up the WebSphere Portal Credential Vault to allow portal users to log in to an instance of the portlet using an alternate name and password. Credential Vault must be enabled in portal administration to work with the portlet, and configure the VAULT_SLOT parameter for the portlet. When you have configured the parameter, the user name and password a user specifies in edit mode authenticates the user for access to one or more source Notes databases for the portlet.

You can create one slot in the Credential Vault to be used for every instance of the portlet, or you can create separate slots for different instances of the portlet with different values for the PortletType parameter. You can also create a shared vault slot that stores a common credential for all portal users or specific groups of users to use when logging in to any instance of the portlet.

Note When you configure a Domino 6.5.3 server for use with this portlet and create the Web SSO Configuration document, verify you leave the Organization field blank so that the configuration is available to server documents (instead of web site documents only).

 

 

Test assumptions

This portlet assumes that supported back-end mail systems have been configured according to their system specifications.

If used with Domino, this portlet assumes that WebSphere Portal and Domino have been configured to work together. Additionally, this portlet assumes that the lookaside property is set to true (rather than the default value of false) when you configure WebSphere Portal to work with the Domino LDAP server.

 

 

Set up the Common Mail portlet

 

 

Client requirements

This portlet supports browsers and devices capable of rendering HTML markup. The following table provides the minimum HTML requirements.

Requirement Value
Markup level HTML 4.0 Transitional
Java applet None
JavaScript 1.30
<iframe> No
Style sheets Portal styles
Software This portlet has been tested on the following browsers:

  • Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6.0

  • Mozilla 1.4

Accessibility
Yes

 

 

Server requirements

This portlet requires WebSphere Portal V5.1. For use with Domino, this portlet works with Domino version 6.5.3.

 

 

Deployment/installation

To enable this portlet to use Domino 6.5.3 as the back-end mail system, first use the WebSphere Portal V5.1 Product Fixes Disk to install the Domino 6.5.3 Update for CPP. Before installing this update, shut down the Domino server. After installing the update, restart the Domino server, and then restart WebSphere Portal.

Note: This portlet is not supported as a remote WSRP service.

 

Enable SSL connections to an Exchange 2000 server

To connect to an Exchange 2000 mail server using the WebDAV protocol with a secure SSL (HTTPS) connection, first use the following steps to download a required third-party package:

  1. Download the HTTPClient 0.3-3 package from http://www.innovation.ch/java/HTTPClient (or the current download location).

  2. Create a folder named httpClientUnzip and unzip the HTTPClient package into the folder.

  3. Download the Sun JSSE patch for HTTPClient (JSSE.zip) from http://www.innovation.ch/java/HTTPClient (or the current download location).

  4. Unzip the JSSE patch into the httpClientUnzip/HTTPClient folder. When prompted to overwrite existing files, click Yes.

  5. Use the contents of httpClientUnzip to create a jar file named httpclient.jar. (The httpClientUnzip folder contains a README file and a folder named HTTPClient.)

Then modify the WebSphere Portal JVM to accept the Exchange server's SSL certificate. In order to use SSL features with the mail portlet, the JVM for WebSphere Portal Server must be informed that it should accept the Exchange Server's SSL certificate. To do this have the certificate from the Exchange server available. The certificate can be obtained in a number of ways. The best way to obtain it is to ask the Exchange administrator to send it to you.

To make the Exchange Server's SSL certificate available to WebSphere Portal, use the key management tool supplied by IBM HTTP Server to import the certificate into the necessary Java key store (.jks) format key storage files. Note that the HTTP Server-supplied key management tool, IBM Key Management Utility (IKeyMan), is not the same as other key management tools, even though the user interface may be very similar. IKeyMan supports the Java key store file formats necessary for WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Portal, whereas other key management tools may not. See the HTTP Server documentation for details on using this tool. This is a brief overview of the steps to perform:

  1. Make sure the JAVA_HOME environment variable is set to was_root/java, where was_root is the WebSphere/AppServer folder.

  2. Click Start > IBM HTTP Server [version number] > Start Key Management Utility to start IKeyMan.

  3. In the folder was_root/java/jre/lib/security, open the cacerts file. By default, the password for this file is changeit.

  4. Select Signer Certificates and click Add.

  5. Select Base64-encoded ASCII data as the data type, and browse to the certificate file of the Exchange Server's SSL certificate. You may have to rename the certificate file so that the file extension matches the extension that IKeyMan is looking for (.arm).

  6. Specify a label for the new certificate.

After installing the portlet and completing the preceding steps, restart WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Portal.

 

Enable SSL connections to a Domino server

To configure the Common Mail portlet (and the Common Calendar portlet) to work over SSL, use the following steps to exchange the Domino SSL certificate with the WebSphere Application Server trust key stores:

  1. Open the Domino key file store file with a certificate manager tool appropriate for the key file types, such as the IBM Key Management Utility (IKeyMan) supplied by IBM HTTP Server for the Domino key store.

  2. Select the personal certificate, click Export/Import, and save the file.

  3. Copy the extracted file to a location accessible to WebSphere Application Server.

  4. Open the server trust file for WebSphere Application Server with a certificate manager tool appropriate for a Java key store (.jks), such as IKeyMan. The default server trust file is DummyServerTrustFile.jks in the folder /AppServer/etc with the default password WebAS.

  5. Switch to Personal Certificates, and then click Import to import the certificate file that was extracted from the Domino key file store to the client trust file.

  6. Open the client trust file for WebSphere Application Server with a certificate manager tool appropriate for a Java key store (.jks), such as IKeyMan. The default client trust file is DummyClientTrustFile.jks in the folder /AppServer with the default password WebAS.

  7. Switch to Personal Certificates, and then click Import to import the certificate file that was extracted from the Domino key file store to the client trust file.

 

Enable and disabling Spell Checker

The Spell Checker function is automatically installed with WebSphere Portal and is enabled by default after installation. To enable or disable Spell Checker, change the SpellCheck_Enabled value in the SpellCheckConfig.properties file (found in the folder <WPS>/shared/app/com/ibm/wps/odc/spellcheck/util) to true or false, and then restart the WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Portal.

 

 

Configuration parameters

Configuration options for this portlet are set using configure mode. In configure mode for this portlet, keep the following in mind:

  • If you enable features for users (for example, if Domino is the back-end mail system and you enable users to launch Domino Web Access), log out and log back in to see the changes in the portlet.

  • specify the fully-qualified host.name of the mail server. Additionally, users that have access to change the mail server in edit mode must specify the server's fully-qualified host.name.

 

 

See also

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