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MicroStrategy Portal Integration FAQs

1. What is portal integration and how can it be achieved with MicroStrategy 9.x?
2. What factors should I consider when planning a portal integration?
3. Can I customize and extend MicroStrategy Portlets?
4. Does MicroStrategy SDK offer customization samples or scenarios that I can use to quickly customize my portal?
5. What programming language is used for portal integration?
6. Does MicroStrategy support JSR 168 and WSRP?
7. Can I implement single sign-on (SSO) with a portal server application in MicroStrategy?
8. Is portlet-to-portlet communication possible in MicroStrategy 9.x?

1. What is portal integration and how can it be achieved with MicroStrategy 9.x?

Enterprise portals are quickly becoming the single point of personalized information access for all users in an organization. Integrating portals with all enterprise applications, including business intelligence, is quickly becoming imperative in the pursuit of distributing and receiving business intelligence software. Portal integration enables greater user scale and easier user adoption for your business intelligence using your existing enterprise portals.

The easiest way to integrate MicroStrategy Web in a portal environment is to use one of the out-of-the-box portlets that MicroStrategy provides for four enterprise server products—Microsoft® SharePoint, IBM WebSphere®, Oracle™ WebLogic, and SAP® Enterprise Portal. In addition, MicroStrategy SDK allows you to integrate with other portal servers and custom applications. Please refer to the MicroStrategy Developer Library for more information on this topic.

2. What factors should I consider when planning a portal integration?

You should start by carefully defining your requirements, both from the user perspective and from the technical side. Simple user requirements to consider include such factors as the content displayed in the portal, the layout of the portal page, the information to display in each of the portlets, the “look and feel” of the customized portlets, and the behavior of the portlets. From the technical perspective, it is important to analyze such factors as the requirements for installation, maintenance, single sign-on (SSO), and the use of LDAP.

3. Can I customize and extend MicroStrategy Portlets?

You can customize and extend both custom MicroStrategy portlets that you build from scratch, as well as the out-of-the-box MicroStrategy portlets. With the MicroStrategy SDK, you can customize not only the look and feel of a portlet displaying MicroStrategy content, but also the interactivity, or behavior, of the content in that portlet. Potential changes to interactivity include modifying single-sign-on behavior, adding text boxes to capture additional user input, and reading and passing additional portlet properties.

There are two ways to build custom MicroStrategy portlets:

1. Using MicroStrategy Web functionality to provide and display BI data in a portlet. This method allows you to use the full range of current and future MicroStrategy functionality.
2. Using the MicroStrategy platform only to provide BI data in a portlet. You work at the API level and must assume complete responsibility for data presentation.

Refer to the MicroStrategy Developer Library for more information on this topic, including general techniques for customizing and extending MicroStrategy portlets, as well as some portal integration scenarios that provide step-by-step instructions to perform specific portlet customizations.

4. Does MicroStrategy SDK offer customization samples or scenarios that I can use to quickly customize my portal?

Yes, you can find several custom portlet samples in the MicroStrategy Developer Library, such as the iGoogle Gadget, the Type B JSR 168 MicroStrategy portlet, and the Struts portal integration sample. In addition, the MicroStrategy Developer Library provides multiple portal integration scenarios including:

• Displaying only the report name and content in a portal iFrame
• Displaying a custom web page in a portlet using a URL in an iFrame
• Using a URL to link to MicroStrategy through a portlet
• Displaying only report content in a portlet
• And many general customizations in the following categories:
  • Cosmetic changes for look and feel
  • Altering application workflow and navigation
  • Customizing existing functionality
  • Customizing presentation of data and Web components
  • Extending existing or adding new functionality
  • Using streamlined versions of the report page

5. What programming language is used for portal integration?

Developers can build portlets in either Java or by using custom .NET tags. This allows developers to work with both Windows and UNIX environments and for different application servers and web servers.

6. Does MicroStrategy support JSR 168 and WSRP?

Yes. MicroStrategy is committed to adhering to all common industry open standards, such as Java Specification Request (JSR) 168 and Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP).

JSR 168 establishes a standard API for creating portlets and for the integration component between applications and portals that enables the delivery of this application through the portal. Without this standard, each version of an application would need its own portlet API and each portlet would need to be specifically tailored to a particular portal, increasing development time, effort, and costs.

Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP) are visual, user-facing, web services-centric components that plug-and-play with portals or other intermediary web applications to aggregate content from different sources. They provide businesses with content in a form that does not require any manual content or application-specific adaptation.

7. Can I implement single sign-on (SSO) with a portal server application in MicroStrategy?

Single sign-on allows enterprise network users to access MicroStrategy Web content and functionality seamlessly on the basis of a single authentication that is performed when they initially access the network or the application controlling enterprise authentication. Single sign-on enables the smooth integration of MicroStrategy Web with portal applications, identity management systems, and other Web and third-party applications.

MicroStrategy Web has built-in single sign-on support for four portal server applications— Microsoft® SharePoint, IBM WebSphere®, Oracle™ WebLogic, and SAP® Enterprise Portal. To implement single sign-on when MicroStrategy Web is used with identity management systems or other portal server products, you must create a custom External Security Module that performs the necessary work. Refer to the MicroStrategy Developer Library for more details on this topic.

8. Is portlet-to-portlet communication possible in MicroStrategy 9.x?

Yes. MicroStrategy 9.x provides some plug-ins that enable out-of-the-box MicroStrategy portlets to communicate with other MicroStrategy and non-MicroStrategy portlets without requiring additional configuration. Instructions on how to use these plug-ins are available in the MicroStrategy Developer Library.