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Oracle® Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle WebCenter Portal: Spaces
11g Release 1 (11.1.1.6.0)

Part Number E10149-10
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50 Working with Space Templates

If you have been granted the Spaces-Create permission by the WebCenter Portal: Spaces administrator, you can create a space using one of the out-of-the-box space templates, your own custom space template, or a published space template created by others. Space templates provide a consistent look and feel and an efficient way to get started creating a space that is configured exactly as required by an organization.

This chapter includes the following sections:

Audience

This chapter is intended for users who want to know more about space templates, create custom space templates, and manage space templates.

To perform the tasks described in this chapter, users need to be assigned a role that includes the Manage Configuration and Manage Membership permissions. For information about roles and permissions, see Section 52.2.1.2, "Understanding Permissions and Permission Models in a Space."

The Spaces administrator has the authority to expose or hide some features and services for all spaces. Contact your administrator if some tasks discussed in this chapter are not available to you.

50.1 What You Should Know About Space Templates

When you create a space, you can base it on a template, either provided out-of-the-box by Spaces or a custom template that you or the Spaces administrator design, as described in the following sections:

50.1.1 Understanding Out-of-the-Box Space Templates

Spaces provides several space templates out-of-the box from which you can choose when creating a new space. These templates are named according to their general purpose, and can be used as a starting point for developing your own custom templates.

The out-of-the-box space templates are:

  • Blogger: Template for a space where members can publish their opinions through blogs, and preconfigures announcements, discussions, documents, events, lists, and mail.

  • Discussion Site: Template for a space where members can exchange ideas in discussion forums to quickly resolve issues, come up with new product ideas, resolve customer escalations, determine new service offerings, and more.

  • Document Exchange: Template for a space centered around sharing and organizing documents to enable teams to quickly hone in on delivering agreed upon wording and messaging. This template also enables checkin and workflow around document approvals and working in teams.

  • Portal Site: Template for a space appropriate for a large organization with several smaller groups or departments, each of which needs to store their own content, engage in discussions, and more. This template speeds enterprise portal construction and delivery and enables teams to easily provide their unique value to the company, promoting their group's charter to all other organizations while securely collaborating within their team or organization.

    This template provides an essentially unpopulated, unconfigured starting point for building a space exactly to your specifications. When you create a space using this template, it results in a blank Home page. All space services such as discussions, announcements, and so on, are disabled.

  • Project Site: Template for a space where members can share information about a common project and maintain a common calendar. This template provides an optimal structure for supporting a core project team where members might come from different departments to work together toward reaching a common goal.

    The focus of a space based on this template is to streamline the process of starting a new project, defining the project team, and executing on project deliverables. Members can share documents, communicate with one other, keep up to date on status, and generally function better as a team than as individuals working side by side.

  • Team Site: Template for a space that provides an optimal structure for supporting communities of people who are working together to achieve a common goal, collaborating through document sharing, team announcements, discussion forums, mail, wikis, and more.

    The focus of a space based on this template is to learn more about a subject area through the sharing of expertise, ideas, and content. Team Site spaces provide a consistent, dynamic, timely, and interactive participant experience. For example, all the Java programmers responsible for supporting your customer-facing Web site might want a place to keep up with what's happening in the Java world using discussion forums, links to articles about upcoming patches, and so on.

Note:

The out-of-the-box space templates available in prior releases (Basic, Community of Interest, and Group Project) are deprecated. However, if needed, you can expose them in your Spaces application by following the steps in "Exposing Spaces Templates From a Previous Release" in Oracle Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide for Oracle WebCenter Portal.

50.1.2 Understanding Custom Space Templates

A custom space template may be simple, or may include robust functionality such as:

  • Preseeded data, such as discussions, documents, lists, member information (including roles), pages, or site resources. When you select such a template to build a new space, the new space includes all the preseeded data.

  • Custom java code that executes when you select the template for a new space. For example, custom code may include logic to automatically create a mailing list for a new space. For more information, see the chapter "Extending Spaces Using JDeveloper" in Oracle Fusion Middleware Developer's Guide for Oracle WebCenter Portal.

50.2 Creating a Custom Space Template

You cannot modify or delete the out-of-the-box space templates described in Section 50.1, "What You Should Know About Space Templates", but any user with Create Space Template or higher permission can create new space templates.

To create a custom space template, you start by creating a space based on an existing template (see Section 51.2, "Creating a New Space"), and customize it according to your requirements. Then, you can create a new space template based on the customized space that you have developed. During the creation of a space template, you can select to inherit the discussions, documents, lists, member information (including roles), pages, or site resources from the parent space. The security settings for the parent space are inherited by the template

Note:

When creating a new space template, the template does not inherit announcements from a parent space.

As a space template creator, you can publish space templates for others to use; otherwise, they remain private and hidden from others. To make the template public, you must be granted Space Templates-Manage All permission.

Note:

Spaces administrators can also create space templates to be made available at the application level, and import and export custom space templates from and to other Spaces applications, including seeded data. For more information, see Chapter 53, "Administering Spaces and Templates."

To create a space template:

  1. In the Home space, go to the Space Templates page (see Section 50.3.1, "Viewing Available Space Templates").

  2. On the Space Templates page, click Create.

    The Create a Space Template dialog opens (Figure 50-1).

    Figure 50-1 Create a Space Template Dialog: Setup Step

    Create a Space Template Dialog: Setup Step
    Description of "Figure 50-1 Create a Space Template Dialog: Setup Step"

  3. In the Setup step, enter a suitable Space Template Name and (optionally) Description. Choose a name that describes the space template and other Spaces users will recognize. Note that this is your only opportunity to enter a space template description.

    Space template names can contain alphanumeric characters, underscores, spaces, multi-byte characters, and special characters such as & and #. The maximum allowable length is 200 characters. The following reserved keywords are not allowed as the full space template name in either upper or lower case, or a combination of both—webcenter, pages, page, spaces, space, group, groups, webcenter space, webcenter spaces, webcenter administration, my spaces, admin, last. These reserved words are allowable as part of a longer name (for example, Sales Group).

  4. Click Next.

  5. In the Spaces step, select a space to use as the basis for your new space template, then click Next.

  6. In the Content step, select the services that contain data that you want the space template to inherit from the parent space (Figure 50-2).

    Note:

    Space templates can not inherit Announcements from a parent space.

    List definitions are always copied; checking Lists in this step specifies that you want to copy the list data, too.

    Figure 50-2 Create a Space Template Dialog: Content Step

    Create a Space Template Dialog: Content Step
  7. Click Create.

    Note:

    If an error message notifies you that the template creation failed because selected services could not be provisioned, the most likely cause is that backend servers (such as UCM or JIVE server) are down. Contact your Spaces administrator to resolve this issue.

    The new space template displays on your Space Templates page in the Home space. By default, the template is private, which means that only you as the template creator can see the template on your personal Space Templates page in the Home space. Other users will not see the private template on their personal Space Templates page in the Home space, but users granted the Application-Manage Configuration permission can view and manage private templates on the application-level Space Templates page. For more information, see Chapter 53, "Administering Spaces and Templates."

  8. To publish your space template to make it available to all Spaces users, you must be granted the Space Templates-Manage All permission by the Spaces administrator. If you have this permission, select the template name, then click the Edit menu, and choose Make Public.

    The template is published and displays on the Space Templates page in the Home space for all users.

50.3 Managing Space Templates

You cannot modify or delete the out-of-the-box space templates provided by Spaces (see Section 50.1.1, "Understanding Out-of-the-Box Space Templates"), but any user with Create Space Template or higher permission can create new space templates, based on spaces that they own (see Section 50.2, "Creating a Custom Space Template"), and manage the space templates that they own.

The Space Templates page in the Home space displays the out-of-the-box space templates, space templates created by the current user, and published templates available for general use.

The following sections describe the management tasks available to space template creators, Spaces administrators, and users granted the Space Templates - Manage All permission by the Spaces administrator:

50.3.1 Viewing Available Space Templates

To display the Space Templates page, showing the space templates available to you for creating new spaces:

  • In the Home space, open the Space Templates page (Figure 50-2).

    Tip:

    The way you access this page depends on the page template in use. For example, in a side navigation template, you may access it through a Personalize Pages link.

    You can also navigate to this page using the direct URL provided in Section A.4, "User Interface URLs for Space Pages."

    If the Space Templates page is not exposed in the Home space, refer to Section 29.3.4, "Showing Hidden Pages."

    Figure 50-3 Space Template Page in Home Space

    Space Template Page in Home Space

50.3.2 Viewing Information About a Space Template

To view information about a space template:

  1. In the Home space, open the Space Templates page (Figure 50-3).

    Tip:

    The way you access this page depends on the page template in use. For example, in a side navigation template, you may access it through a Personalize Pages link.

    You can also navigate to this page using the direct URL provided in Section A.4, "User Interface URLs for Space Pages."

    If the Space Templates page is not exposed in the Home space, refer to Section 29.3.4, "Showing Hidden Pages."

    Figure 50-4 Space Template Page in Home Space

    Space Template Page in Home Space
  2. On the Spaces Template page, click in the row of the space template that you want to learn about, then click About Space Template (Figure 50-5).

    Figure 50-5 Opening About Space Template Dialog

    Opening About Space Template Dialog

    The About Space Template dialog opens (Figure 50-6).

    Figure 50-6 About Space Template Dialog

    About Space Template Dialog
  3. Explore the information in the About Space Template dialog:

    • Name: Internal name of the space template displayed in the space URL. You cannot change the internal name of a space template.

    • Display Name: Display name of the space template. This name displays in places where the templates are available for selection, such as the Create a Space dialog and the Space Templates page. You cannot change the display name of an out-of-the-box space template. To change the display name of a custom space template that you create, see Section 50.3.4, "Renaming a Space Template."

    • Internal ID: ID of the space template, which other applications may use to reference this space template.

    • Description: A description of the space template, specified when creating the space template. You cannot modify the description of a space template, unless you rename the template, where you can enter a new descirption in the Rename dialog, as described in Section 50.3.4, "Renaming a Space Template."

    • Created By: User name of the space template creator.

    • Date Created: Date and time that the space template was created.

    • Direct URL: URL that provides direct access to the space template.

50.3.3 Searching for a Space Template

To search for a space template by a string in the Name or Description:

  1. On the Space Templates page (see Section 50.3.1, "Viewing Available Space Templates"), enter a search string in the Filter field.

  2. Click the Filter icon (Figure 50-7).

    Figure 50-7 Filter Icon

    Filter Icon

    The Space Templates page displays space templates where the search string is found in the Name or Description.

  3. To clear the current search string and display all space templates, click the Clear Filter icon (Figure 50-8).

    Figure 50-8 Clear Filter Icon

    Clear FIlter Icon

50.3.4 Renaming a Space Template

To rename a space template:

  1. On the Space Templates page (see Section 50.3.1, "Viewing Available Space Templates"), select the space template.

  2. From the Edit menu, choose Rename Space Template.

    The Rename Space Template dialog opens.

  3. In the Display Name field, enter a new name for the space template. Optionally, enter a Description.

  4. Click OK.

50.3.5 Setting Up Access to a Space Template

You can grant specific users and groups read-only or manage access to a space template.

To set up access to a space template:

  1. On the Space Templates page (see Section 50.3.1, "Viewing Available Space Templates"), select the space template.

  2. From the Edit menu, choose Set Template Access.

    The Set Template Access dialog opens (Figure 50-9).

    Figure 50-9 Set Template Access Dialog

    Set Template Access Dialog
  3. In the Set Template Access dialog:

    • Click Add Users to open the Search Users dialog where you can select from a list of users or search for a user name.

    • Click Add Groups to open the Search Groups dialog where you can search for a user group.

    For tips on searching for a user or group in the identity store, see Section 52.3.4.1, "Searching for a User or Group in the Identity Store."

  4. For each user or user group listed in the Set Template Access dialog, specify the level of access granted to grant:

    • Select the View checkbox to grant read-only access to the space template.

    • Select the Manage checkbox to grant full access to the space template.

  5. Click OK.

50.3.6 Publishing or Hiding Space Templates

When you create a space template (see Section 50.2, "Creating a Custom Space Template"), it is private by default. This means that only you as the template creator can see the template on your personal Space Templates page in the Home space. Other users will not see the private template on their personal Space Templates page in the Home space, but users granted the Application-Manage Configuration permission can view and manage private templates on the application-level Space Templates page. For more information, see Chapter 53, "Administering Spaces and Templates."

To publish or hide space templates that you create to make them available to all Spaces users, you must be granted the Space Templates-Manage All permission by the Spaces administrator. If you have this permission:

  1. On the Space Templates page (see Section 50.3.1, "Viewing Available Space Templates"), select the space template(s).

    To select multiple space templates, Ctrl-click each template.

  2. From the Edit menu, choose either of the following, depending on the template's current state:

    • Make Public to publish the template to all Spaces users.

    • Remove Public Access to hide the template from all other Spaces users (except yourself, as the template creator).

      Note:

      If you are in the process of creating a new space (see Section 51.2, "Creating a New Space"), and the space template you select for the space is made private by another user before you have completed creating the space, the template remains valid for your use while you are still creating the space.

50.3.7 Deleting Space Templates

To delete one or more space templates:

  1. On the Space Templates page (see Section 50.3.1, "Viewing Available Space Templates"), select the space template(s).

    To select multiple space templates, Ctrl-click each template.

  2. From the Edit menu, choose Delete Space Template.

    In the confirmation prompt, click Delete.

Note:

Out-of-the-box space templates cannot be deleted. However, Spaces administrators and users granted the Space Templates-Manage All permission can hide the out-of-the-box templates from everyone's view by making them private on the application-level Space Templates page, if granted the Application-Manage Configuration permission by the Spaces administrator. For more information, see Chapter 53, "Administering Spaces and Templates."