This chapter provides an overview of the concepts and tasks that are covered in this guide, Oracle Fusion Middleware Building Portals with Oracle WebCenter Portal.
This chapter includes the following topics:
This guide is aimed at the application specialist or an advanced knowledge worker, who uses WebCenter Portal to create, edit, and administer portals using Portal Builder. It provides instructions for tasks such as creating, customizing, and administering portals and subportals; managing and developing portal templates; creating and editing portal pages and the content they expose; defining the assets and tools available to portals; setting portal and page security through membership, roles, and permissions; and more.
If you already have a concept of what you want your portal to look like and the content you want to include in it, you probably want to dive in and create your portal without reading a lot of background conceptual information. To help get you started quickly, this chapter provides a brief overview of the basic Portal Builder concepts that are necessary knowledge before you begin.
The following approach provides an efficient path to creating your new portal:
Review the Oracle Fusion Middleware Planning a Portal with WebCenter Portal guide.
The Planning guide addresses the overall direction and implementation of your portal project, and will help you choose between a JDeveloper-centric approach with WebCenter Portal Framework (covered in Oracle Fusion Middleware Developing Portals with Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle JDeveloper), or a browser-centric approach with Portal Builder (covered in this guide). Additionally, you will read about common portal use cases, and develop ideas for building your portal.
If you determine that Portal Builder is appropriate for building your portal, read Section 1.3, "Building Portals Concepts."
For an overview of the range of tasks available to you in the development of a portal, review Section 1.4, "Building Portals Tasks."
Now you are armed with the basics, and are ready to begin!
Go to Chapter 2, "Creating and Building a New Portal" to follow the steps to use the portal creation wizard to create your new portal.
When your initial portal is created, you will probably have questions about where to go next to build out the portal you envision. While this guide contains all the information you need, you will find a summary to guide you in Section 2.4, "What's Next?"
This section introduces the concepts involved in building portals to give you a general overview before you begin to build a portal. These basic concepts are explored in depth in the chapters of this guide:
A portal is an online gateway to a wide variety of purposes. A portal can provide tools to connect employees within an organization, actively sharing both profile and project information across teams; another portal may be directed towards customers, allowing them to explore and purchase products. Some portals are focus areas for small teams, others are loaded with functionality for use by thousands of members. For example:
Intranet portals used for collaboration, employee self-service, and company communication, such as:
Company-wide portal: Data is a mixture of public, private, and secure.
Department portal : Data is viewable within a specified team and editable or publishable by only a few managers.
Private portal: Data is highly sensitive, for example for mergers and acquisitions. Extra care related to who can download, print, or view is important.
HR portals: Display highly secure information based on login.
Extranet portals used by customers and partners for self-service and support.
Team collaboration portals that allow users to share documents and content, track activity, and engage in discussions.
For more about portal use cases, see the "Common Portal Use Cases" section in Oracle Fusion Middleware Planning a Portal with WebCenter Portal.
WebCenter Portal provides all the tools you need to quickly create a robust portal through an intuitive user interface and out-of-the-box portal templates (see Section 1.3.4, "What Is a Portal Template?") to help you get started with built-in functionality appropriate for the portal you want to create. After creating a portal, you can easily develop it by adding pages, components, and more. You can customize the look and feel of a portal, define security and membership in the portal, and continually add new features and functionality as the needs and demands of your portal change.
When you publish your portal, it is available for others to access through a URL allowing them to perform actions in the portal as allowable by their permissions. A user may be a viewer, a participant, or a moderator of a portal with defined permissions, or may be granted ad hoc permissions to certain areas of the portal, such as editing permissions on a particular page in the portal.
The Home portal is the area where users have access to their profile, available portals, portal templates, and documents, and can customize certain elements of their own view of the Home portal. Users can create their own personal pages in the Home portal, and system administrators can expose system pages and business role pages to selected audiences. A system administrator may also choose to hide the Home portal from view by modifying the security settings on user roles.
For more information, see the "Exploring WebCenter Portal" section in Oracle Fusion Middleware Using Oracle WebCenter Portal.
Portal Builder comprises the portal creating, editing, and administration areas of WebCenter Portal. In Portal Builder, you can create a portal, add and edit the pages of a portal in the page editor (Composer), and administer a single portal as the portal owner. The system administrator has access to the Portal Builder administration area that allows for administering all portals.
All aspects of using Portal Builder to build, edit, and administer a portal are covered by the chapters in this guide, Oracle Fusion Middleware Building Portals with Oracle WebCenter Portal. For application-level administration tasks performed by the system administrator in Portal Builder to apply settings to all portals, see the chapters in "Managing Portals in Portal Builder Administration" in Oracle Fusion Middleware Administering Oracle WebCenter Portal.
A portal template is the starting point for building a new portal. When you first create a new portal, you select a portal template on which to base the new portal. A portal template can be one of the out-of-the-box templates provided with WebCenter Portal, or a custom template developed for a specific use. Subsequently, you can modify and customize the portal to add more features to those initially provided by the template.
For more information, see Chapter 3, "Working with Portal Templates."
In terms of developing portals, the portal server allows portal creators to publish portals available for others to use.
For more information, see Chapter 4, "Publishing a Portal."
Any portal can be a parent to one or more child portals, or subportals. The use of subportals to create a portal hierarchy is optional, and dependent on the design you wish to achieve for your end users.
For more information, see Chapter 5, "Working with Subportals."
You will encounter several types of pages in WebCenter Portal. Pages in WebCenter Portal may be out-of-the-box or user-created.
The out-of-the-box pages in WebCenter Portal are:
System pages, which offer a ready-to-use set of customizable, utilitarian pages, such as the Login page and the Self Registration page. Additionally, the tools offered by WebCenter Portal each have an associated system page to provide a user interface to the tool (called a tool console), such as the Documents page. System pages are prepopulated with relevant input fields and boilerplate text. System pages are customizable at the portal level and at the application level. For more information, see:
Portal-level system pages: Chapter 8, "Customizing System Pages for a Portal"
Application-level system pages: the "Customizing System Pages" chapter in Oracle Fusion Middleware Administering Oracle WebCenter Portal.
Business role pages, which can be populated with information of relevance to a particular business role, such as salesperson, accountant, or marketing associate, and then pushed into the Home portal views of all users who are assigned that role. Business role pages are customizable only by the system administrator at the application level, as described in the "Managing Business Role Pages" chapter in Oracle Fusion Middleware Administering Oracle WebCenter Portal.
No matter how you structure your portal, there is always a need for new pages in addition to those that are available out-of-the-box. You can create new pages to meet the needs of your portal:
Custom business role pages, created by the system administrator to add to those provided out-of-the-box. For information about creating new business role pages, see the "Managing Business Role Pages" chapter in Oracle Fusion Middleware Administering Oracle WebCenter Portal.
Personal pages, which you can create for your own exclusive use in the Home portal. By default, personal pages can be seen in the Home portal only by the user who created them, but users can also allow other users to see their personal pages. For more information about personal pages, see the "Creating and Managing Personal Pages" chapter in Oracle Fusion Middleware Using Oracle WebCenter Portal. While individuals are primarily responsible for managing the content of their personal pages, a system administrator has the authority to administer all personal pages in WebCenter Portal administration, as described in the "Managing Personal Pages" chapter in Oracle Fusion Middleware Administering Oracle WebCenter Portal.
Portal pages, which can be created by anyone with permissions to create pages in a portal, and may serve different purposes:
Pages created by the portal moderator, designed to contribute to the knowledge base of the portal, and typically made available to all members of the portal.
Pages created by a portal member, selectively exposed in the portal either for their own use, or shared with other selected portal members. While such portal pages may not be exposed to all portal members, a portal moderator has the authority to administer all portal pages.
Users can customize a page for their own personal view by rearranging items, expanding or collapsing task flows, and resizing areas, visible only to the user.
Portal pages can have any number of subpages, as well as page variants, which are optimized for display on other devices, such as tablets or mobile phones.
For more information, see Part III, "Working with Portal Pages."
As you develop a portal, you will add elements to the pages of your portal. These elements are many and varied, and are collectively referred to as portal components. Portal components include task flows, portlets, content containers, and other types of resources such as images and links.
For more information, see:
Assets are the objects that define the structure, look and feel, and the content of portals. WebCenter Portal provides the following assets, which can be used out-of-the-box or customized: page templates, navigation models, resource catalogs, skins, page styles, Content Presenter display templates, task flow styles, pagelets, task flows, and data controls.
A portal moderator or member with appropriate permissions manages the assets available to an individual portal, and the application specialist manages shared assets, which are available to all portals.
For more information about assets available to individual portals, see Chapter 20, "Creating, Editing, and Managing Assets." For information specific to shared assets, see Chapter 59, "Working with Shared Assets."
WebCenter Portal offers many tools and services that allow portal members to collaborate and communicate. If WebCenter Portal is installed and configured correctly and your system administrator has set up valid connections to the required external back-end servers, tools and services are available for use in a portal.
Tools and services can be exposed on their own page (console) in a portal with a separately addressable URL, or as one of many components on a page. Tools and services available for use in your portals include: announcements, discussions, documents, portal events, lists, search, tags, instant messaging and presence, links, mail, polls, activity graph, notes, and notifications.
For more information, see Chapter 39, "Introduction to Portal Tools and Services."
This section introduces the tasks involved in building portals to give you a general overview before you begin to build a portal. These tasks are described step-by-step in the chapters of this guide:
Section 1.4.2, "Editing, Administering, and Customizing a Portal"
Section 1.4.3, "Creating, Editing, and Managing Portal Pages"
Section 1.4.4, "Creating, Editing, and Managing Portal Assets"
Section 1.4.7, "Adding and Managing Portal Tools and Services"
Section 1.4.8, "Managing Portal Templates and Shared Assets for All Portals"
The basics of developing a new portal begin with creating the portal using a portal template for the initial design and layout, and publishing the portal for others to use. If the portal design supports subportals, you can add subportals to an existing portal.
For more information, see Part I, "Getting Started."
After creating a portal, the tasks associated with building and maintaining the portal include editing the portal to add content, administering the portal settings and security, customizing system pages used by the portal, managing device groups to display the portal on various devices, and customizing task flows for the portal.
For more information, see Part II, "Managing a Portal."
The portal pages that you create, populate, and manage present the substance of what users see in a portal.
For more information, see Part III, "Working with Portal Pages."
WebCenter Portal includes a variety of assets that you can use to define the structure, look and feel, and content of your portals.
For more information, see Part IV, "Working with Portal Assets."
Portal moderators are responsible for managing the roles, permissions, and members in a portal, which provide the security for the portal.
For more information, see Part V, "Working with Portal Roles, Permissions, and Members."
Working with content in a portal includes using Content Presenter, adding the task flows and components provided by the Documents tool to a page, establishing workflow on documents, and adding wikis and blog to a portal.
For more information, see Part VI, "Working with Content in a Portal."
WebCenter Portal offers many tools and services that allow portal members to collaborate and communicate. If WebCenter Portal is installed and configured correctly and your system administrator has set up valid connections to the required external back-end servers, tools and services are available for use in a portal.
For more information, see Part VII, "Working with Portal Tools and Services."
Resources that are available to all portals are administered by the application specialist. These resources include portal templates and shared assets.
For more information, see Part VIII, "Managing Shared Resources for All Portals."
Portals can be extended to offer portal members and end users design and language choices.
For more information, see Part IX, "Enhancing Portals Through Design and Language."