To clear up my earlier post, I am not implying that I can have a war file with just a porltet-instances.xml file and an *-object.xml file. That will not work because the Portal ignores portlet-instances.xml files if there is no portlet to deploy. Thus, I need to declare at least one porltet, along with its portlet.xml file, within the war file. Then the portlet-instances.xml file can create instanceso fthat portlet and any other porlets in other war files. Of course, as Julien noted, you can run into a problem if the new war file is deployed before the war file(s) containing the portlets you are referencing. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4011403#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...