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The following steps assume that Centric CRM has been deployed and that you want to tightly couple a portlet with Centric CRM.

The integrated portlets have access to the Centric CRM database as well as the Centric CRM application, system, and user objects. This enables though for the portlets to access key framework items and redirect to hard-coded centric crm modules, something that is difficult with jsr-168 alone. This approach enables delivering a single application with embedded portlets that work on the Centric CRM supported web application servers.

Register the portlet for use with Centric CRM

Add the contents of your portlet's web.xml file to the main Centric web.xml file. You will see loads of examples of portlet deployment declarations there.
Add the contents of your portlet's portlet.xml file to the main Centric portlet.xml file. Again you will see many examples of this in the Centric portlet.xml file.
Add an entry for your portlet to icelet_(your language).xml file. You'll see examples in the existing icelet...xml file.
Explode your portlet's war file someplace. You'll need to manually copy every dependency for your portlet to the Centric webapp directory. Following are the steps:

Copy all the JSPs to their proper location under the Tomcat root directory for the Centric web app.
Copy all the libraries that your portlet needs to the WEB-INF/lib directory of the Centric web app. You're on your own at resolving any class loader issues that get introduced by the inclusion of your portlet's libraries in the Centric Enterprise classpath.
Copy your portlet's classes into the Centric webapps WEB-INF/classes directory. That directory does not exist by default. Your portlet introduces it to the Tomcat class loader mechanism. (or use a .jar and place in WEB-INF/lib which does exist)

Run the Centric ant task called "ant import.icelets". This task will write the contents of the icelets...xml file to the appropriate database tables in the Centric database.
Startup Tomcat
Log in as an administrator and go the to the Admin module where you must add add your portlet to a dashboard or some custom tabs for a module.

Planned Improvements

There are many capabilities of a portal that Centric CRM is currently not. Future improvements will include:

hot deployment
edit/view/help/admin modes
window modes
window states (min/max)
user preferences
portlet messaging
caching
and more.