The portal includes some basic functionality in the portal banner and menus to access the different areas of the portal. The areas you see depend on the portal configuration, whether you are logged in, and your portal access.

• To determine whether you are logged in correctly, look at the portal greeting (at the top of the portal banner). By default your greeting is Welcome, user name where user name is the name of the user by which you are logged in. To change your greeting, click My Account, then, on the My Account page, click Display Options.
• To access the Administrative Objects Directory, where you can create and manage portal objects and access portal utilities, click Administration.
  Note: You see Administration only if you have the Access Administration activity right.
• To edit your user profile, personalize your display options, set your locale settings, set your search preferences, change your portal password, and manage user names and passwords for external accounts, as well as view your user profile, click My Account.
• To display help for the page you are viewing, click Help.
• To log in to the portal or log off the portal, click Log In or Log Off.
• To search for documents or objects in your portal, type your search string in the box in the portal banner and click Search.
• To go directly to the result that your portal administrator has set as the top best bet for a term, without first seeing all the search results, type the top best bet operator (>) followed by your search string and click Search, or type your search string and click .
  Note: If no top best bet has been set for the term, the regular search results appear.
  Note: The top best bet button () is available only if enabled by your portal developer.
• To search for documents or objects using metadata properties and location, click Advanced Search.
• To search other content, portals, and web search engines, click Federated Search.
  Note: The Federated Search button is available only if enabled by your portal developer.
• To view your user profile, in the My Profile menu, click View User Profile.
• To view one of your personalized pages, in the My Pages menu, click the page you want to view. My Pages are your personalized view of the portal. You choose the applications, tools, and services (in the form of portlets) that you want to display on each My Page. For example, you might create a My Page that includes a search tool for all the employees in your company and a portlet that displays the most recent news about your company.
• To view and manage the communities to which you belong, select an option from the My Communities menu:
  • To view a community, click the community name.
  • To join a community, click Join Communities, select the communities you want to join, and click Finish.
  • To unsubscribe from a community, click Unsubscribe Communities, select the communities from which you want to unsubscribe, and click Finish.
  Communities are sites within a portal designed for a specific audience or task, such as collaborative projects.You might have communities based on departments in your company. For example, the Marketing department might have a community containing press information, leads volumes, a trade show calendar, and so on. The Engineering department might have a separate community containing project milestones, regulatory compliance requirements, and technical specifications.
• To browse documents in the portal, click Directory. The Knowledge Directory is similar to a file system tree in that documents are organized in folders and subfolders. A folder can contain documents uploaded by users or imported by content crawlers, as well as links to people, portlets, and communities. If your administrator has given you permission, you might also be allowed to add documents to the Knowledge Directory, or submit yourself as an expert on a particular topic.