Administering Portals with the WebLogic Administration Portal

Portal administration involves many traditional system administration activities, as well as tasks that control the behavior, content, and appearance of portals. While portal administrators do not typically develop the resources required for a portal Web site, they use those resources to build, maintain, and modify portals.

The WebLogic Administration Portal provides you with the tools to administer portal Web sites built with BEA WebLogic Platform:

Portal Management: Portals, desktops, books, pages, portlets, and other portal resources
Content Management: Content and repositories
User Management: User and group management, delegated administration, entitlements
Interaction Management: Campaigns, Placeholders, Content Selectors, and User Segments
Service Administration: Server settings
Search: Search within WebLogic Administration Portal

The Portal Administrator

As an administrator, you can user the administration portal to manage other users, groups, and roles to control access to the applications and assets available on a portal server.

Depending on the type of authority granted, an administrator can perform administrative tasks such as creating new portals, modifying the authority of visitors and other administrators, and modifying many of the attributes displayed in the portal. Administrators can have further control over user access by creating roles to suit the types of activities that a user (either other administrators or visitors to the portal) will undertake when using the system.

Administrators of portal assets in the Portal Library can work with portal applications and portal components to create the portals that are available to portal administrators and users.

What is a Portal?

A portal is a doorway, an entrance, or a gateway. Similarly, a portal application acts as an entrance or a gateway to content and applications that users must access to complete business transactions, locate and acquire information, or collaborate with other users. Portals provide the following benefits to the user:

Aggregation – The user can go to a single place to access all information and applications.
Customization – Users and administrators can be granted the ability to manage portal appearance and behavior based on their personal preferences or audience requirements.
Personalization – Business policies can be used to deliver specific information and content to the user based on profile attributes and behavior.
Integration – Multiple applications, composite applications, and content sources can be presented to the user in a unified way.

The portal provides dynamic provisioning of portal components based on user, group, and role attributes. The portal acts as both a controller, by determining the context of the user, and a container, by aggregating and presenting applications and information based on the intersection of business policies and access privileges of the portal user.

Portal Business Services

WebLogic Portal includes the following portal business services:

Content Management – Enables the creation, management, and delivery of content and repositories
Search – Offers enterprise and web-based search capability
Collaboration – Provides connectivity to personal information management applications and supports team and group communication
Interaction Management – Provides tools for personalizing the user experience and driving portal usage to meet business goals
Commerce – Supports business-to-consumer or business-to-business scenarios

Portal Enterprise Services

WebLogic Portal also supports the following enterprise services:

Business Process Management – Provides support for connecting portal users to business processes and allows portal applications to participate in business processes
Single Sign-On – Allows users to log on once for all applications accessed from the portal