In Rational® Developer, you can choose to either manually or automatically publish a portal from a portal project, including all of its related portlet projects, to a WebSphere® Portal server.
Before you publish your portal, you should familiarize yourself with the necessary configuration information for your portal server. For more information, refer to Defining servers for publishing or importing portals.
Export - This method is recommended for publishing to a staging or production server. You need to manually move the exported portal to a portal server (by portable media or another method). Since exporting from your file system does not require FTP or copy access to the portal server, there is very little chance of interruption during publishing.
Deploy - This method automatically publishes a portal from a portal project to a portal server. Deploying is recommended for publishing to a test, integration or staging server. (For further restrictions, see the "Publishing across a firewall" section below.)
Note: If you are also transferring portal artifacts during deployment, you must have FTP or copy access to the portal server. If the file transfer is interrupted, for example by a network failure, there is a slight chance that the portal server may become inoperable.
If you created your portal project by importing from a WebSphere Portal server, then the server that you deploy to must have all of the portlets associated with the portal project installed before deploying. If not, then the deployment operation will fail. Portlets originating from portlet projects will be deployed when needed.
Trying to publish more than one portal project to a WebSphere Portal server at the same time will cause conflicts. The portal server cannot detect multiple deployments.
The best practice for publishing a portal project is to make sure that only one user has access to the portal server, and that person has the sole responsibility of publishing.
Limitation: Although the WebSphere Portal installer contains an advanced option to install an empty portal, Portal Designer relies on administration portlets for setting access control; therefore, publishing a portal project to an empty portal is not supported.