Overview of Portal Administration

Portal administrators work with portal resources to assemble portals and entitle parts of the portal to end users and other administrators. A portal represents a Web site that can be one of many within an Enterprise Application. Each portal can support multiple desktops using shared components. The administration of the portals, desktops, and components can be delegated to the distinct administrators who have the correct Delegated Administration privileges.

You can assemble your portal using portal resources that exist in the Portal Library, or in some cases you can create your own resources. If you create portal resources outside of the Portal library, you are creating "one-off" versions that have the following restrictions:

Your resource will not show up in the Portal Library
Your resource cannot have entitlements that are scoped to the enterprise applications. You can entitle your resource to your Desktop level.
Visitors will not be able to add these resources to their personal views of a portal via the Visitor Tools because the will not be available in the Library.
If you delete this resource, it will be permanently deleted since no version of it exists in the Library.

Portal desktops are the specific views of a portal application that visitors access, while components in the library are used as templates to create and deploy portals and desktops. As a portal administrator, the changes you make to a portal affect only that portal, while changes made by a Library Administrator can impact resources used across all portals that use those components.