First, as an FYI: it usually doesn't help get responses to your forum requests by explaining the urgency of your problem. If someone has time to help, they will. Second, the problem you're seeing is a result of setting a session attribute in the portal-server.war web application and trying access it from your custom portlet WAR web application. These sessions aren't implicitly shared. Also, I'm not sure if you'd want to write custom code (especially setting session values in a JSP) to store/access user information. Is there a problem with using the standard JAAS principal? renderRequest.getUserPrincipal() View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4217885#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...