Preface

Welcome to the Oracle Portal Building Advanced Portals Manual! The examples in this book are intended to help you learn about Oracle Portal and its advanced features.

Intended Audience

This book is intended for anyone who uses Oracle Portal to build portals. The needs of advanced users are addressed. If you are new to Oracle Portal and portal technology, refer to the Oracle Portal 3.0 Tutorial contained on the Oracle Portal 3.0 CD.

Each chapter contains step-by-step instructions to build a portal and its related applications from start to finish. Each portal that you build will demonstrate how to use many of Oracle Portal's powerful features.

Prerequisites

This book is intended for advanced Portal users, who are familiar with the Oracle Portal Release 3.0 environment. If you are unfamiliar with Oracle Portal, or would like to learn more about the basic concepts of Oracle Portal, see the Oracle Portal Tutorial.

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 5.0

• 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

• The sample portals and content areas provided on http://technet.oracle.com. Contact your portal administrator, or refer to Appendix A.3, "Installing the demo portals, schema, and content areas" for more information.

For information about installing and configuring Oracle Portal, see the Oracle Portal Release 3.0 Configuration Guide.

Example Scenario

For the purposes of the examples contained in this manual, you are building portals for employees of Healthy Living Wholesalers, a company that provides health and fitness products.

Structure

This book contains the following chapters:

Chapter 1, "What Is Oracle Portal?"	Briefly introduces you to the Oracle Portal environment and concepts.
Chapter 2, "Planning Your Web Content"	Provides recommendations for building a portal, and requirements you should keep in mind before beginning development.
Chapter 3, "Creating an intranet portal and adding simple portlets"	Explains how to build a page and add portlets. Also describes how to build a calendar application using links and database sequences.
Chapter 4, "Creating a line of business page for your intranet portal"	Explains how to build a portal specifically for a line of business: the Healthy Living Wholesalers Sales department. Describes how to add pages to an existing portal, as well as how to create report, form, menu, and chart components. Also demonstrates how to create multi-tabbed portlets, dynamic and static lists of values, and database links.
Chapter 5, "Creating a Human Resources portal with security"	Explains how to build a portal for a Human Resources department, where three different types of users have customized views of the portal. Describes how to implement security to pages and tabs, as well as individual components. Also demonstrates how to build hierarchies and reports based on SQL queries. Shows how to leverage information from an existing content area in the portal.
Chapter 6, "Creating an information repository"	Explains how to build a content area to contain information for a company, such as HTML pages, text files, and images.
Appendix A, "Oracle Portal Administrator Tasks"	Describes how to create a user for Oracle Portal who can create portals in the database.
"Glossary"	Explains terminology specific to Oracle Portal.

Related Documents

For more information, see the following manuals in the Oracle Portal Release 3.0 documentation set:

• Oracle Portal Release 3.0 Tutorial

• Oracle Portal 3.0 Release Notes

Conventions

The following conventions are also 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.
[ ]	Brackets enclose optional clauses from which you can choose one or none.