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Self-service Content Publishing Are you responsible for delivering Web content for your department or company? Do you find that you have a backlog of content that other people want you to upload because you're the only person with the access and know-how to do it? This Webmaster bottleneck is why so many sites are full of out-of-date content. With Oracle Portal, you can build highly efficient content areas that let you store, manage, and publish up-to-date Web content on corporate Intranets and Extranets. By simplifying and distributing the management of content to the creators of that content, the Webmaster bottleneck is completely eliminated. Using intuitive tools, content contributors can upload files themselves which frees up your time so that you can concentrate on more important tasks. The simple wizard-based tools for file uploading, folder management, and style layout encourage self-service content publishing and provide you and your users with unprecedented power. Anyone familiar with surfing the Internet can easily contribute content in Oracle Portal; no technical expertise or knowledge of HTML is required. In this section of the Quick Tour, you will learn how the many features of Oracle Portal can help you to take control and manage your company's Web content.
Oracle Portal's powerful
ability to classify content logically makes sought-after information quick
and easy to find. For example, using folders, you can structure and secure
content. You can arrange the regions within a folder to organize the content
on the page. You can then further classify folders and the items within
them by category and perspective.
You can also create hierarchical sub-categories and sub-perspectives for categories and perspectives that encompass a large number of items or folders. This helps to better organize, display, and locate category and perspective groupings in the content area. Additionally, items added to a content area are immediately indexed in the search engine. The Webmaster is not required to crawl the content area to update information and make it available in the search engine. Built-in search finds information by keyword, theme, folder, and meta-information. As the content area administrator, you are responsible for the content area's overall style, appearance, security, and structure. But once these preliminary tasks are set up, you can delegate secondary tasks such as content creation and maintenance to the actual creators of the content. Rest assured, however, that at all times you maintain overall authority of the entire content area. Delegating tasks
to content contributors empowers them since they now possess considerable
decision-making capabilities over their own content. Specifically, when
adding an item, contributors make important decisions such as where the
item is displayed in the folder region, the item's link text and description,
its category, perspectives, publish and expiration date, which keywords
will make the item easy to find in a search, if the item is enabled for
document control, and whether to associate an image with the item. Furthermore,
if item level security is enabled, contributors can specify which users
and groups can view the item and their level of access. Even after their content is uploaded and stored in the database, it still doesn't leave their control and responsibility. Contributors continue to own and maintain it. For example, content management tasks such as uploading a modified document version, moving or deleting the content, changing the publish date or expiration period, and adding a sub-item are all within their realm. The content is always up-to-date and instantly shared with other teams, regardless of location. Gone are the days of multiple or outdated versions of the same document. Oracle Portal guarantees a single source of truth. All Types of Content Displayed in a Single View Content contributors with the appropriate privileges can publish a wide variety of content. With Oracle Portal, it is easy to display different types of information or items in a single view. Using the Item Wizard, contributors can simply upload any of the default item types such as files, folder links, images, Java applications, PL/SQL code, text, URLs, application components, and Zip files for bulk loading directly into the Oracle database for display in the content area. Additionally, Oracle Portal supports item attributes beyond the defaults. For example, if you want to add an item for a new product offering on an e-commerce site, you would probably want the cost and quantity attributes defined along with the item's name and description. To fulfill such requirements, Oracle Portal lets you create custom item and folder types by adding attributes or procedures to extend the basic item and folder type functionality. All You (and Your Users) Need Is a Browser Oracle Portal's browser-based interface lets your users access information, and even add and edit items within a browser. Since most of your users are already familiar with the browser interface and controls, they can perform many of these tasks intuitively by pointing and clicking hypertext links. When you are logged on as a content area administrator, all administrative functions such as securing the content area, managing and deploying content areas from a central location, and monitoring performance are also done in a browser. You can also use the Navigator to quickly access content area objects. In short, Oracle Portal makes accessing, creating, and managing Web content easier than ever while still providing a rich set of content management features. Controlling Document Collaboration In addition to being
designed for a content publishing environment, Oracle Portal provides
many features to support document collaboration. This is most important
in work environments where maintaining document integrity is crucial,
particularly when multiple users and groups are working with the same
documents. Oracle Portal supports document collaboration in the following ways:
When so many different people have access to your content area, how can you maintain security over the information? Oracle Portal offers various levels of access to content items and folders, from full ownership of an item or folder to view-only privileges. Folder owners and content contributors decide what level of access to grant users or groups. Since those adding the content are more familiar with it, it makes sense that they control who is allowed to view, edit, delete, or own it. Even though Oracle Portal permits practically anyone to view public content, access to secure content is governed by Oracle Portal's overall security mechanism. This means that unless a user or group is authorized to access content, it is impossible for him or her to access any protected documents or content items. Security is usually defined at the folder level, but in some situations, you may want to enable security at the item level. For example, a content contributor may want to prevent users that have folder-level privileges from accessing a certain item in the folder. Conversely, the contributor may want a certain user or group that does not have folder-level privileges to gain access to a specific item in a given folder. Publishing Content as Portlets While accessing a folder in the content area is useful when you are actively publishing, editing, and managing content, once the content area is near completion, you may want to publish the folder to a wider audience. You can do this by publishing folders, navigation bars, categories, and perspectives as portlets. Accessing the folder from a page is especially practical for users who primarily view the content contained within the folder, or users who want to incorporate the folder contents with other portlets on a single page. By providing the ability to dynamically tailor the structure of the portal based on the information users and visitors are looking for, Oracle Portal provides powerful advantages over tools that only manage static Web content. |
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