PeopleSoft Community Portal Overview
This document provides an overview of the PeopleSoft Community Portal and discusses:
PeopleSoft Community Portal sites.
PeopleSoft Community Portal content.
PeopleSoft Community Portal inter-portal integration capabilities.
PeopleSoft Community Portal Overview
PeopleSoft Community Portal joins PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal as an option for creating a portal experience using PeopleSoft’s portal platform.
The PeopleSoft Community Portal provides collaborative tools, content management, context management, transactions, documents, news, events, and business system access to groups of users who typically work in a shared business area such as financial, supply chain, or human resources management. From a single spot with one sign-in, the PeopleSoft Community Portal connects groups of users to resources they need to do their jobs more effectively.
The PeopleSoft Community Portal has the same features and functions as the PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal. However, with the PeopleSoft Community Portal, you are limited to creating and managing a maximum of three sites. With the PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal, you can create and manage an unlimited number of sites.
PeopleSoft Community Portal Versus PeopleSoft Enterprise PortalPeopleSoft recognizes that there are different strategies when it comes to implementing portals.
Some organizations need a multi-portal, or federated strategy, to better meet their needs. In this case, we provide the PeopleSoft Community Portal as an option. PeopleSoft Community Portal provides a solution that maps with the portal strategy of an organization that has already deployed an enterprise portal within their organization.
Some organizations prefer to have a single portal platform to handle all of their portal requirements. In this case, we provide the PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal as an option.
PeopleSoft Community Portal Sites
A site is a logical grouping of content that supports the activities of a defined set of community members. A community site may be narrowly defined, such as a marketing or benefits community; or broadly defined, such as an employee community. Typically, organizations define communities by mapping them to business functions such as finance, supply chain, sales, and human resources; or by an audience, such as customer or employee.
The PeopleSoft Community Portal provides two methods for creating and managing sites. Your maximum of three community sites can be created using one or a combination of the following methods:
Decentralized communities.
Each community is implemented and managed separately, with its own hardware environment.
For example, you might use the decentralized community method to implement a customer community when you must follow a standard business practice that internet accessible sites, such as customer-facing systems, must be implemented separately from intranet applications for security reasons. In this case, a customer community would be implemented as a separate, decentralized site.
Centralized communities.
Site Management, a key feature of the PeopleSoft Community Portal, is used to create and manage multiple community sites within a single portal environment.
For example, you might use the centralized community method to implement a financial community and a human resource community as logically separate sites within a single environment using the Site Management feature. These two communities would share a common hardware environment, security model, support structure, and so forth. Using the centralized community model, the portals appear to be separate to end-users, but in fact, share a single infrastructure.
The decentralized customer community site and centralized financial and human resource community sites described here provide an example of three community sites that can be created and managed using the PeopleSoft Community Portal.
See Also
PeopleSoft Community Portal Content
In this section, we discuss some of the more common types of content that can be displayed in the PeopleSoft Community Portal.
PeopleSoft Content Provider ContentYou can display content from PeopleSoft applications; FSCM, CRM, and HRMS systems, for example; in a single community site. Displaying PeopleSoft content provider content in the PeopleSoft Community Portal is not limited by content or domain.
PeopleSoft Portal Pack ContentYou can implement PeopleSoft portal pack pagelets in the PeopleSoft Community Portal. This portal pack content can be used in conjunction with the PeopleSoft Community Portal in the same way it can be used with the PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal.
Non-PeopleSoft ContentThe PeopleSoft Community Portal is designed with the expectation that much of the content needed by your communities will originate from non-PeopleSoft sources. For this reason, the PeopleSoft Community Portal is delivered with robust features that enable the integration of non-PeopleSoft content.
PeopleSoft Community Portal Inter-Portal Integration Capabilities
PeopleSoft recognizes the need for inter-portal integration and supports the use of standards to accomplish this. The PeopleSoft Community Portal and PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal support the consumption of portlets developed using JSR168 and WSRP standards.
The following example illustrates the type of inter-portal integration possible using the PeopleSoft Community Portal.
A financial controller interacts with an enterprise portal and a financial community site created in the PeopleSoft Community Portal. She may access the enterprise portal to view company news, HR information, reports, email, calendar entries, and so forth. One of her user homepage portlets, supplied by the finance community site, might inform her of activities or points of interest occurring in the community. These might include notices for required approvals, reports ready to be viewed, pending documents, new discussion threads, and so forth.
The financial controller can click one of these notifications in the portlet to be seamlessly placed into the PeopleSoft Community Portal-managed financial community site and presented with the selected task. Once she completes the task, she can work with other applications in the financial community site, or return to the enterprise portal.