A Portal to a Portal

If you've been working with IBM Lotus Web Content Management and tried to get your content rendered in IBM WebSphere Portal, you might have had a difficult time deciding where to define your site structure. Up to now, you have basically had two options:

* Define the site structure in both WebSphere Portal and Lotus Web Content Management, thus duplicating each WebSphere Portal page with a newly created Lotus Web Content Management site area for that page.

* Create only a stub page in WebSphere Portal and do all the rest in Lotus Web Content Management via the site areas.

Neither of these options is exactly optimal. Besides being very tedious and error prone, the first option requires that you put the Web content rendering portlets on each page and configure them to point to the current site area. Creating links between different pages requires a lot of hardcoded customization in each of the Web content rendering portlets to get it to dispatch to the right place. The second alternative isn't all that attractive either. Because WebSphere Portal is no longer aware of the navigation structure, you lose basic portal benefits.

But there is hope! You can now have a fully integrated solution in which WebSphere Portal V6.1 knows about your Lotus Web Content Management V6.1 content without requiring you to make hundreds of clicks to set up your site. The magic is contained in Web content pages and in new Web content rendering portlets.

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