Customizing the Forefront UAG Portal

Introduction

Forefront UAG Administrators are able to customize nearly every aspect of a Forefront UAG portal beginning with the Portal entry site, the portal itself and the internal site. With Forefront UAG portal customization you are able to give the portal your own look and feel to fulfill the corporate identity needs; you are able to change portal buttons, text and messages.

Let’s begin

A Forefront UAG Administrator can customize nearly every aspect of Forefront UAG. The customization is split into the following core categories:

  • Look and feel of the portal Homepage, internal site, logon page and more
  • Endpoint detection, Clients and Endpoint policies
  • Application templates
  • UAG authentication
  • Authentication to backend applications
  • Application and data flow

Basic customization of Forefront UAG is a simple approach. For many possible configuration changes Forefront UAG provides a directory called CustomUpdate in the different installation directories of Forefront UAG. The CustomUpdate directory allows the UAG Administrator to populate specially designated folders with custom files, and Forefront UAG automatically detects these files and incorporates them into its code. User don’t have to log off from the portal, they only need to refresh their web browsers to see the changes. If you are unlucky with the configuration changes, simply delete the files from the CustomUpdate directory.

If you are using a Forefront UAG array you only need to copy a modified file to the CustomUpdate directory on one of the Forefront UAG Servers, Forefront UAG will automatically copy these files to the other array member Servers.

The main configuration changes can be found under the following directories:

  • \Program Files\Microsoft Forefront Unified Access Gateway\von\PortalHomePage
  • \Program Files\Microsoft Forefront Unified Access Gateway\von\InternalSite

Send an e-mail to the Site Administrator

Let us start with the task to add the e-mail address of the Forefront UAG Administrator to the Portal logon homepage. By default there is no e-mail address configured as you can see in the following screenshot.

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Figure 1: E-Mail to Site Administrator

To add the e-mail address of the Site Administrator, navigate to the InternalSite\Languages directory and copy the language specific file to the CustomUpdate directory and edit the file with a text editor like Notepad.exe and add the e-mail address of the Administrator to the mailto: text as you can see in the following screenshot.

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Figure 2: Add the e-mail address in the language specific text file

If the end user now clicks the site administrator hyperlink in the Forefront UAG portal logon page, the configured e-mail address appears.

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Figure 3: The e-mail address now appears in the logon page

Adding text to the Portal

If you want to add text to the Portal navigate to the directory \von\PortalHomePage\Data\Languages directory and copy the language file that you want to customize to the …\PortalHomePage\Data\Languages\CustomUpdate folder. You can now change the text you want to customize as you can see in the following screenshot.

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Figure 4: Customize the language specific text file with your own text

Save the text file and refresh the web browser on a client and you will see the results.

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Figure 5: Customized Portal text

Changing logos in the Portal

In our next example we want to change the Homepage icon in the Forefront UAG Portal.

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Figure 6: We want to change the Home button logo

Copy the home.gif file from the \von\PortalHomepage\images\Toolbar directory to the CustomUpdate directory and change the icon with a tool like Microsoft Paint.

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Figure 7:
Change the Home.gif button with Microsoft Paint

Go to the client and refresh the web browser to see the changes.

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Figure 8: Home button after customizing – looks great 🙂

Changing the logo of an application

If you want to change the logo of an application in the Forefront UAG portal, navigate to the \von\PortalHomePage\images\Appicons directory and copy the required application specific icons to the CustomUpdate directory and modify / change the icons to your required look and feel.

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Figure 9: Copy the application icons from the AppIcons directory to the CustomUpdate directory and change the icons

Go to the client and refresh the web browser to see the changes.

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Figure 10: The changed application icon for file access

Conclusion

In this article I tried to show you how to customize a Forefront UAG portal to fulfil your needs. With some basic knowledge you are able to do some basic customizations and if you are familiar with ASP, COM objects, ActiveX, Java, HTML and CSS it is easy to do some enhanced customizations of a Forefront UAG portal. I highly recommend having a look at the Forefront UAG customization book from Erez-Ben-Ari, published by PACKT publishing. This book is a great resource for enhanced customization.

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