Welcome to the Oracle9i Application Server Portal Tutorial!

Welcome to the Oracle9i Application Server Portal (Oracle Portal) tutorial! This manual will help get you started with Oracle Portal Release 3.0.9.

This preface includes the following sections:

Intended Audience

This manual is intended primarily for new users of Oracle Portal, to introduce them to the product and its functionality. Existing users who want to learn more about Oracle Portal's new features may also find this manual useful.

After reading this preface, you should read Chapter 1, "Learning the Basics" for an introduction on how to use Oracle Portal. To complete the tutorial, you need to read only those chapters that relate to your particular job function. To find out which chapters you should read, see "Structure".

If you are already comfortable using Oracle Portal and want more advanced examples, see Oracle9i Application Server Building Portals, Release 3.0.9.

Prerequisites

The exercises within the tutorial make use of a demo schema, content area, and application. These demos are available on http://otn.oracle.com/docs/products/iportal/doc_index.htm. Contact your portal administrator, or refer to Section A.1, "Installing the Demo Schema, Content Area, and Application" for more information.

You must have a Web browser installed on your machine. The minimum and recommended requirements are:

Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0.1 (Service Pack 1) or 5.01
Netscape Communicator 4.0.8 or 4.72

You should be familiar with using your Web browser. For example, you should know how to start your Web browser and be familiar with the basic user interface elements, such as hypertext links.

You must set up or obtain the following information from your portal administrator:

A user name and password to log on to Oracle Portal.
The URL of the Oracle Portal home page.

In addition, to complete Chapter 5, "Building Application Components", you should have a basic understanding of PL/SQL and database concepts.

Tutorial Scenario

During this tutorial, you are an employee of Healthy Living Wholesalers, a company that provides health and fitness products.

Healthy Living wants to have an Intranet portal to provide its employees with quick access to the content and applications that they use the most. They also want a single repository for all the information about the company, its products, and other information required by both employees and customers. The Healthy Living Human Resources department also wants an application that enables HR staff to query and update information about the company's employees. In the tutorial you will assume several roles within the Healthy Living company in order to fulfill these requirements.

Structure

You do not need to complete all the exercises in the tutorial. The following table lists the chapters included in the tutorial and indicates what type of user should complete the exercises in that chapter. Only complete those chapters and exercises that relate to your actual role within your own company.

Chapter/Appendix	Contains	Read this if you are
Chapter 1, "Learning the Basics"	Lessons on how to start Oracle Portal and how to navigate through the product.	Any user
Chapter 2, "Designing a Portal"	Lessons on how to create a page: the front-end of a portal.	Responsible for building your company's portals (a portal administrator)
Chapter 3, "Maintaining a Content Area"	Lessons on how to set up a content area or a folder.	Responsible for maintaining a content area or a folder within a content area (a content area administrator or folder owner)
Chapter 4, "Adding Items to a Content Area"	Lessons on how to add content to a content area.	Responsible for adding content to a content area (a content contributor)
Chapter 5, "Building Application Components"	Lessons on how to build applications.	Responsible for building your company's applications (a portal developer)
Appendix A, "Setting Up the Tutorial"	Instructions on how to set up this tutorial.	Responsible for setting up users for the tutorial

Conventions

The following conventions are used in this manual:

Convention	Meaning
bold text	Bold text indicates a term defined in the text, the glossary, or in both locations. Bold text also indicates button names, labels, links, and other user interface elements.
`monospace text`	Monospace text indicates text that you need to enter.
italic text	Italic text is used for emphasis, and to indicate a cross-reference to another manual.
< >	Angle brackets enclose user-supplied names. Substitute an appropriate value.