This chapter describes WebCenter Portal, defines useful terms, and provides an overview of this guide.
This chapter includes the following topics:
This guide is for the knowledge worker who interacts with information and other users through WebCenter Portal.
WebCenter Portal provides the tools to quickly and easily create portals, build communities, and participate in social networking. It enables users to share and consume information and interact with other users effectively and efficiently.
This section contains the following topics:
A portal is an online gateway to a wide variety of tools, services, and applications. A portal can provide networking tools within an organization, easing the way towards building connections, posting content, and sharing files across teams. It can provide external users with a clear pathway to company services and information. It can provide support networks for small and large internal teams as well as thousands of partners, suppliers, and customers.
A portal presents information and resources that are diverse in location, technology, and derivation, through a single point of entry. Content and technology that originate from widespread sources appear as a cohesive set of information and services that are easily available from one location.
For example, in a portal, a user can look at all the Worklist items coming from their organization's eBusiness Suite, the detailed customer information coming from a CRM suite, and the latest sales figure charts coming from a Business Intelligence tool. Despite these multiple sources, all of this content is available in one place and appears to be coming from a single source.
Portals also deliver personalization capabilities. With personalization, you can leverage the information in a user's Profile to tailor his or her experience of the portal. For example, Mary the manager logs in and sees reports on department-wide results and links to reporting applications, while Sal the salesman logs in and sees reports on his own results and links to leads.
The Home portal is your portal landing page. It's where you have access to your profile, preferences, and all the portals that are available to you, and where you can customize certain elements of your own view. You can create your own personal pages in the Home portal, and system administrators can expose system pages and business role pages to selected audiences.
For more information, see Chapter 2, "Exploring WebCenter Portal."
WebCenter Portal offers several types of pages. These may be out-of-the-box or user-created.
System pages, such as the Login page and the Documents page, are prepopulated with relevant input fields and boilerplate text. System pages are managed by portal moderators and system administrators.
Business role pages are populated with information of relevance to a particular business role, such as salesperson, accountant, or marketing associate, and pushed into the Home portals of anyone who is assigned that role. Business role pages are managed by the system administrator.
You and other WebCenter Portal users can create new pages to meet your needs:
Personal pages are pages 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 you (the person who created them), but you can also allow others to see your personal pages. For more information, see Chapter 9, "Creating and Managing Personal Pages."
While you are primarily responsible for managing the content of your personal pages, a system administrator has the authority to administer all personal pages in WebCenter Portal administration.
Portal pages are pages that can be created by anyone with permissions to create pages in a portal. Portal pages may serve different purposes:
Portal pages may be created by the portal moderator, designed to contribute to the knowledge base of the portal, and made available to all members of the portal.
Portal pages may be created by a portal member and exposed in the portal either for personal use or for the use of other selected portal members. While this type of portal page may not be exposed to all portal members, a portal moderator nonetheless has the authority to administer them along with all other portal pages.
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.
You can customize your own view of a page by rearranging items, expanding or collapsing content viewers, and resizing areas, visible only to you.
As you use WebCenter Portal to build a portal, you will work with elements on the portal pages. These elements are many and varied, and are collectively referred to as portal components. Portal components include views/viewers, portlets, content containers, and other types of resources such as images and links.
Portal tools and services are provided by WebCenter Portal and available once WebCenter Portal is installed and configured and your system administrator has set up valid connections to the required external back-end servers, tools, and services. They provide such features as activity streaming, connections, scheduling, lists, notifications, and the like.
Tools and services can be exposed on their own page in a portal with a separately addressable URL, or as one of many components on a page. Tools and services include: announcements, discussions, documents, events, lists, search, tags, instant messaging and presence, links, mail, polls, activity graph, notes, and notifications.
This section provides an overview of the tasks involved in using WebCenter Portal. These tasks are described step-by-step in the chapters of this guide:
For more information, see Part I, "Getting Started," which includes the following chapters:
For more information, see Part I, "Working with Portals and Pages," which includes the following chapters:
For more information, see Part I, "Connecting and Collaborating with Other Users," which includes the following chapters:
For more information, see Part I, "Working with Documents," which includes the following chapters:
For more information, see Part I, "Staying Informed," which includes the following chapters:
For more information, see Part I, "Staying Organized," which includes the following chapters: