The IBM Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) is a federated search gateway that provides a rich development environment for the composition of mass customized applications or views.

This IBM Redbook describes one example of a Content Manager installation, based on the Windows NT platform for a Web enabled system configuration. We outline the steps for installing and configuring the necessary Content Manager components and prerequisites for this example, based on our configuration.

This redbook also discusses how to build a Java client application to search the Content Manager datastore. Our application is written as Java servlets, using the IBM WebSphere application server. With this client application, we can perform three types of searches: a parametric search, a text search, and a combined search which executes a parametric search and a text search at the same time and produces, as a result, the combined set of the two searches.

We also discuss the design and development of a Lotus Notes based client application for the content servers using the EIP Java APIs.

The IBM Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) is a comprehensive portal environment that can bring all your enterprise resources to your workstation desktop. EIP can help maximize the value of your information and multimedia assets by connecting disparate content servers through a single client.

The EIP client provides search capabilities that enable users to quickly and concurrently access all connected servers.

This IBM Redbook will help you design and create a solution for the IBM Enterprise Information Portal Version 6.1, from a typical business case.

This redbook outlines the justification, design, and implementation of solutions to address the requirements of a fictitious company, BB Insurance, and provides Java examples of how to program to the EIP and its supported datastore interfaces.

These samples include a fat Java client and a thin Java client using JSP’s and servlets.

A solid understanding of Java programming, database architectures, and the Internet is assumed.

IBM Enterprise Information Portal Version 7.1 (EIP) is IBM’s state of the art middleware product that provides the ability to perform a single federated search across multiple back end repositories. It is also the preferred vehicle for providing Web access to the IBM Content Management products.

Planning an EIP implementation requires an understanding of the components in the IBM EIP Version 7.1 product, the EIP severs and clients, the backend content servers to be connected to, and the requirements for additional features.

This Redbook describes typical configurations for an EIP implementation, and discusses the sizing, security, and performance issues related with each configuration.

This Redbook also describes the processes for fat client deployment, thin client deployment, and MIME type configurations for viewing the documents.

Installation and configuration check lists are also provided.