6.1 Things You Can Do with Content

Portals are all about bringing together the information that users need to do their jobs more effectively. Since managing business documents and other content is an important part of most jobs, and since the portal is the focal point for user collaboration and the logical location to publish and access business content, it only makes sense that content management features should be part of the Oracle Portal framework.

• Oracle Portal includes several attributes, page types, and item types that are intended as a starting point for describing the content in your portal. If you find that you wish to store more information about the pages and items in your portal, you can create your own attributes and add them to page and item types. You can also create your own page and item types. See Section 6.2, "Working with Attributes, Item Types, and Page Types".

• Because of its self-service features, a portal has the potential to contain a great deal of content. To make it easier for your users to find the information stored in the portal, Oracle Portal provides the ability to classify content using categories and perspectives. Users can then search for content of a particular category (for example, Sales Report), or that is written from a particular perspective (for example, Sales Representative). See Section 6.3.1, "Working with Categories" and Section 6.3.2, "Working with Perspectives".

• To ensure validity of content, Oracle Portal can route content for approval before it is published on the page. Simple or multi-step processes can be defined with single or multiple reviewers at each step. Notifications are sent to each approver in the approval process indicating that action is required, while the Approval Status portlet tracks the item's progression from the contributor's point of view. Expiry notifications let users know about content that will expire soon. See Section 6.4, "Setting Up Approvals".

• Additional features support collaborative document creation, ease content management tasks, and make finding published items very easy. These features include item version control, check-in/check-out, publish and expiration dates, and automatic indexing. Users can also subscribe to items or pages and are notified whenever the subscribed content changes. See Section 6.5, "Managing Item Behavior at the Page Group Level".