The introduction of the Solution Installer has been an excellent addition to the WebSphere Portal product.  Having worked with Portal for years, a comprehensive deployment tool for all of the various Portal resources and assets has always been lacking to put it nicely.  After recently developing a polling widget for Portal / WCM, I figured the best way to make it reusable for colleagues was to make it easily deployable, especially considering there are many different Portal resources involved in deployment of the asset (e.g. .war, WCM library, user, access control, etc.).  I decided to dive in and create my first Portal Application Archive (or PAA).  I’ll by no means claim to be an expert, but at least getting started was relatively painless.  I downloaded and installed the Solution Installer and along with it, is documentation on how to create and use the Solution Installer.  Because I never find reading documentation to be the easiest way to learn something new, I also downloaded an existing PAA asset (a lot of the Portal Solution Catalog assets (here) are now packaged as a .paa) and extracted it to “see” what a .paa actually looks like. At the root of the .paa file is the configuration XML file (sdd.xml) and documentation and components folders.  You can store any documentation relating to your PAA within the documentation folder and the components folder is the root folder in which all of your various Portal resources to deploy will be contained, we’ll talk about that further in a second.  Let’s start with the configuration XML file, or sdd.xml. I started with an existing sdd.xml from the PAA that I extracted and the key elements to be concerned with are the PAA name, version, displayName and then the containedPackage element, which contains the path within the PAA to another XML configuration file which automatically gets generated during the deployment process (also named sdd.xml). The XML configuration file that gets generated is done so based on the contents of the subdirectories of the components folder and is used by the PAA installation process to determine what needs to be executed. Under the components folder will be a folder given the name of the PAA (in my case, polling) which contains subdirectories for each of the various Portal resource types. In my case, I had two subdirectories, content and installableApps and the content subdirectory also contains two subdirectories, xmlaccess for XML access-based resources and wcm for WCM-based resources. Within each subdirectory, you can simply drop the associated resource(s), for example, .xml files within the xmlaccess subdirectory. You may also notice an order.properties file within each subdirectory so that you can tell the Solution Installer in which order you would like your resources deployed. The installableApps directory contains any deployable enterprise (.ears) and/or web applications (.wars) that are to be installed or updated, in my case, the Polling widget / portlet .war. Again, the Solution Installer does include documentation which I’ll admit is actually pretty good.  I would definitely recommend downloading and following this, but I also wanted to document my experience and perhaps give a primer on the Solution Installer. There is MUCH more to the Solution Installer than I’ve mentioned here, such as the ability to install and update other Portal resource types as well as the ability to write custom scripts, here is a link to a white paper / user guide for the solution installer. As always, feel free to reach out with any questions!