The IBM® Connections portlets render social data from IBM Connections in the WebSphere Portal environment, and IBM strategically promotes the integration of Connections with WebSphere Portal using IBM Connections portlets. Customers and Business Partners can download the IBM Connections 3.x Portlets for WebSphere Portal from the Business Solution Catalog and customize them per their requirements.
The portlet application bundles portlets for nearly all services provided by the Connections server (Activities, Blogs, Bookmarks, Forums, Profiles, Wikis, and Tag Cloud), most of which have two flavors of portlets:
The details portlet, which provides full-fledged read, write, and edit capabilities and is used to perform all major functionalities offered by the service.
There are also the summary portlets, which provide a read-only snapshot of the service and redirect the user to the details portlets for any write, edit, or advanced functions.
Connections portlets consume the Representational State Transfer (REST) services from the Connections server for integration, and they use IBM Web Experience Factory (WEF) as a development environment.
This article describes the authentication mechanisms used with the Connections server that are supported by portlets. The article not only describes the use case of Connections portlets but also can serve as a reusable asset for technical developers for other similar implementation scenarios.
We begin with how SSO is used by the portlets with WebSphere Portal Ajax Proxy and also cover basic authentication and its use with AJAX proxy in WebSphere Portal. Since the Connections portlets use WEF as the tool for portlet application development, we also discuss implementation methods using WEF for both authentication mechanisms.