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e-docs > WebLogic Platform > WebLogic Portal > Visitor and Administrator Features > Portal Management |
Visitor and Administrator Features
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Portal Management
WebLogic Portal 7.0 provides tools for developing, deploying, and administering enterprise Web sites. These tools are contained in the BEA E-Business Control Center and the WebLogic Portal Administration Tools. This document provides a tour of the Portal Management Tools, which are part of the WebLogic Portal Administration Tools. This section includes information on the following subjects:
Overview of Portal Management
The WebLogic Portal Administration Tools are browser based and can be easily accessed by and delegated to authorized users. Tasks performed through these tools typically take effect immediately in the running portal instance. The user interface of the WebLogic Portal Administration Tools is implemented using JavaServer Pages.
About this part of the tour This part of the tour demonstrates portal management functionality. You will be accessing the WebLogic Portal Administration Tools as a System Administrator. As such you will have access to all administrative functionality. Unlike the Visitor Options section, this part of the tour is not a strict step-by-step set of instructions. Feel free to explore and make changes not specified in this tour.
Starting WebLogic Portal Administration Tools
Before you begin this part of the tour, make sure that the Portal Example is running, as discussed in Starting the Tour.
Windows: Start Menu
UNIX: Log on to the Portal Example client. If you installed WebLogic Portal with the default settings, you can use the following (case sensitive) URL in a browser that is invoked on the same machine as the server:
The WebLogic Portal Administration Tools page appears, as shown in Figure 3-1.
Figure 3-1 WebLogic Portal Administration Tools
Portal Management Home
The Portal Management Home page is the starting point for accessing all portal functionality. The following paragraphs provide information to help you understand the features that the tour is demonstrating. Please read it carefully.
About portals and group portals An application can have multiple portals and each portal can have multiple group portals. Each portal and group portal can be managed by different administrators, have a unique look and feel, and contain different pages and portlets.
For example, you can have an application that has three portals: one for partners, one for retail customers, and a company portal. Within the company portal you could have a manager group portal and an employee group portal. The employee group portal would have a Home page that contains portlets such as Employee Newsletter, Human Resources, and Company Store, while the manager portal might have the same portlets plus portlets such as Corporate Meetings, Administration, and Expense Reporting. Each portal could contain different pages and have different skins.
Group portal definition Group portals are different configurations of a portal. Each configuration (group portal) has a specified user group and allows delegation of privileges among administrators and users.
Delegated Administration WebLogic Portal has delegated administrative capabilities, which is sometimes called decentralized administration. Delegated administration supports the allocation of administrative tasks, where administrators can entrust other administrators or users with full or partial administrative abilities. For example, a system administrator could delegate full control of an engineering group portal to the R&D director, who in turn could delegate some administrative abilities to each of the R&D managers.
Portal Management
From the Portal Management Home, you can access the following capabilities:
To learn about portal management and portal administrators, take the following steps:
Figure 3-2 Portal Management Home—Initial
Figure 3-3 Edit Portal Administrator Settings
Figure 3-4 Create New Portal Administrator
On this page, you can choose users or administrators and access their privileges. The Admin Eligible Users list contains users who are permitted to become portal administrators and the Promotable Group Administrators list contains users that already have some administrative abilities, that is, they are already Group Portal Administrators.
Why two lists? The purpose of these lists is to help ensure that a user is not inadvertently promoted to a portal administrator. Users in the Admin Eligible list are placed there using the User Management tools accessed from the WebLogic Portal Administration Tools Home page. For more information, see "Administering Users and Groups" in the Administration Guide at http://edocs.bea.com/wlp/docs70/admin/usrgrp.htm.
Figure 3-5 New Portal Administrator Settings
Figure 3-6 Create New Group Portal
Figure 3-7 Select a User Group
A group portal is always associated with a single user group. The everyone group is automatically generated as the default user group when the portal is created. You use the User Management tools part of the WebLogic Portal Administration Tools to manage user groups. For more information about user groups, see "Administering Users and Groups" in the Administration Guide at http://edocs.bea.com/wlp/docs70/admin/usrgrp.htm.
Figure 3-8 Browse Templates
Figure 3-9 Create a New Group Portal
This completes exploring the portal management features.
Group Portal Management
Group portals are configurations of a portal for a specified user groups. Two groups portals are provided with the Portal Example: an everyone group portal and the Avitek Users group portal. The everyone group portal is the default group portal. It is the portal displayed to visitors before logging in or who are not group portal members.
The Avitek Users group portal demonstrates the features available in group portals. To learn about Group Portal Management, take the following steps:
Figure 3-10 Group Portal Management Home
As you can see from Figure 3-10, the Group Portal Management Home page provides a number of group portal functions. The right column provides links to portal functionality and a brief description of each capability. The left menu column provides links to the same pages as those listed in the right column, plus information about the group portal.
As a system administrator, you can see all available functionality. Delegated administrators will see a subset of the functionality based on their delegated privileges. A description of each capability is presented in the sections that follow.
Appearance and Content Category
As the name suggests, you can change the content of a portal, its behavior, and its appearance.
Manage Pages and Portlets
A great deal of functionality is available in the category, including the following:
To learn about managing pages and portlets, take the following steps:
Figure 3-11 Pages and Portlets
Figure 3-12 Select and Order Pages
Figure 3-13 Set Page Attributes—Initial
Note: You can only set attributes for multiple pages on non default pages. Figure 3-13 shows an example that is not part of the out-of-the-box Portal Example. The default page is indicated by an asterisk.
Figure 3-14 Set Page Attributes—Page Selected
Figure 3-15 Edit Layout Display Names
Figure 3-16 Select Page Layouts
Figure 3-17 Set Page Attributes
Figure 3-18 Set Page Entitlements—Everyone
On this page, you can set page entitlements for visitor groups called entitlement segments. Page entitlements control visitor access to pages and what a visitor can and cannot change (that is, privileges).
This page shows only the everyone entitlement segment. You can add other entitlement segments to this page by clicking Add or Remove Entitlement Segments (see Figure 3-20).
About entitlement segments An entitlement segment is a group of users who have common characteristics. The Avitek user group (not Avitek Users, which is the name of the Group Portal) has three entitlement segments: Approver, Investor, and FinancialAdvisor (see Figure 3-19). Entitlement segments are defined in the E-Business Control Center. Recall that each group portal is associated with a user group, as indicated in left column.
Figure 3-19 Add or Remove Entitlement Segments
Figure 3-20 Set Page Entitlements—Everyone and Approver
Figure 3-21 Edit Portlet Entitlements and Attributes
Figure 3-22 Set Portlet Attributes for Two Pages
Figure 3-23 Set Portlet Entitlements
As previously mentioned, entitlements control visitor access to pages and portlets and what visitors can and cannot change. Portlets have the added ability to be editable, as indicated by the Can Edit column.
You can add or remove entitlement segments, just as you did in the Set Page Entitlements window.
Figure 3-24 Position Portlets: home
Figure 3-25 Position Portlets: web
Notice that Visible Portlet Positions on the Default Layout section now contains two groups of portlets, reflecting the default two-column layout for the Web page.
Note: If you have changed the layout for this page, it will reflect the layout that you selected.
Select Skins
Skins define the overall appearance of the portal; skins define the fonts, colors, and graphics used by the portal and its pages and portlets. The Portal Example provides five skins as samples. A skin is a cascading style sheet (CSS) and a set of images. An HTML designer and a graphic artist can design new skins. After a skin is designed and placed in the proper directories, you need to use the E-Business Control Center to make the skin available to the Portal Management tools.
To learn about the group skins functionality, do the following:
Figure 3-26 Select Skins
Figure 3-27 Edit Skin Display Names
Group Portal Attributes
This category allows you to choose the user group associated with the group portal and edit the name displayed in the group portal.
What is a user group? A user group consists of users that have been defined in the User Management Administration Tools part of the WebLogic Portal Administration Tools. Alternatively, users can be integrated into WebLogic Portal from a third-party system using Unified User Profile (UUP).
Group portals and user groups A group portal is always associated with a user group. You assign a user group to group portal in the Portal Management section, as described in Portal Management. You create user groups and add users to groups in the User Management tools part of WebLogic Portal Administration Tools., and you create user properties in the E-Business Control Center. For more information about user groups, see "Administering Users and Groups" in the Administration Guide at http://edocs.bea.com/wlp/docs70/admin/usrgrp.htm and the E-Business Control Center online help
To learn about the Group Portal Attributes, do the following:
Figure 3-28 Group Portal Attributes
Figure 3-30 Select a User Group
The left column indicates any changes made in the group assignment and name, as shown in Figure 3-31.
Figure 3-31 Changing User Groups
User and Group Management
This category allows you to manage users and set user group properties. Specifically, you can do the following:
About properties You define user group properties in the E-Business Control Center and set the default values. In Group Management, you can set the properties for groups associated with group portals. For more information about defining properties, see E-Business Control Center online help.
User Management
User management allows you to view, edit, remove, and create visitors in a user group.
To learn about user management, do the following:
Figure 3-32 User Management Home
The users displayed in Figure 3-32 have been added to illustrate functionality; initially this page does not show any users. The buttons and links on this page have the following functions:
Figure 3-33 Create New User
User Group Management
User group management allows you to view and edit the properties in the user group associated with the group portal.
To learn about user group management, do the following:
Figure 3-34 User Group Management Home
Figure 3-35 Edit Property Values
Delegated Administration
In this category, you can do the following:
To learn about delegated administration, do the following:
Figure 3-36 Edit Group Administrator Settings
Figure 3-37 Edit Group Administrator Settings—Delegate Administration
The Create New Administrator button opens a page like that displayed in Figure 3-36, where you can choose from a list of existing administrators. If the person you want to set administrative privileges for is not on the list, you must first designate that person as an administrator. For more information on designating a user as an administrator, see "Creating Administrative Users" in the Administration Guide at http://edocs.bea.com/wlp/docs70/admin/usrgrp.htm#1189735.
What's Next
This concludes the Portal Example—Visitor and Administrator Features. To learn more about the administration features of WebLogic Portal, see the Administration Guide at http://edocs.bea.com/wlp/docs70/admin/index.htm.
To learn more about WebLogic Portal development, see the Development Guide at http://edocs.bea.com/wlp/docs70/dev/index.htm.
To learn about portlet functionality, see the Portal Example—Portlet Features and Functionality tour at http://edocs.bea.com/wlp/docs70/samptour/index.htm.
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