If you are responsible for building a portal for others to populate with content, this chapter can help you. As the page group administrator, your job is to think about the portal as a whole and the needs of the community it will serve. Among other things, you must decide how many page groups your portal should comprise, how to approach portal development, and how to optimize a given page group for the purposes it will serve.
Note:
Before you begin your work, make sure that the portal administrator has already completed all the necessary portal administration tasks, described in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide for Oracle Portal. (If you're unfamiliar with either of these highlighted terms or what's meant by them, see Section 3.1.2, "Knowing Your Audience").To build an effective portal, it's important to arm yourself with knowledge and to do some careful planning before embarking upon the actual work of creating the portal. Section 3.1, "Getting Up to Speed" contains three sections to help you acquire the knowledge you need:
Section 3.1.1, "Approaching Your Portal" discusses the ways in which people tend to tackle the portal-building process, and offers some recommendations to help you get off on the right foot.
Section 3.1.2, "Knowing Your Audience" defines the different user groups typically found at most enterprises.
Section 3.1.3, "Key Concepts and Terms" gives you an overview of the components comprising Oracle Portal. After reading this section, you'll be well positioned to take advantage of the wealth of features available to you in this product.
Once you've digested the information in Section 3.1, "Getting Up to Speed", you'll be ready to start tackling the job of creating the portal itself. You'll find that you can build your portal in less time, and achieve far more sophisticated results, if you take the time to study the information in Section 3.2, "Making Key Decisions", which contains:
Section 3.2.1, "Understanding the Planning Process" sketches out the decisions you need to make, in the rough order you'll need to make them.
Section 3.2.2, "Using Page Groups Effectively" introduces the concept of devoting page groups to discrete groups of users, rather than having a possibly diverse set of users share a single page group.
If you decide that you need to create a portal specifically for content management purposes, Section 3.2.3, "Configuring a Page Group for Content Management" discusses some points you'll want to consider.
Section 3.2.4, "Deciding What Content To Publish" helps you understand the different places from which content can originate and how best to bring them into your portal.
While it may be tempting to skip the preliminary information presented in this chapter, it is strongly recommended that you read through it carefully.