5.1 What Is Oracle Instant Portal?

Oracle Instant Portal provides instant out-of-the-box portals for secure publishing and content sharing, ideal for enterprises with a need for smaller-scale intranets or an internal communications hub. Unlike Oracle Portal portals, Oracle instant portals are intended for user communities that have well-defined, somewhat limited needs for information sharing. These kinds of communities might include:

Individual departments or groups within a larger organization
A subset of your organization that wishes to share information with partners or ISVs

With Oracle Instant Portal, you can have a functioning portal in less than an hour. Consider these benefits:

Pre-created, preconfigured pages mean no initial development costs. Pages are ready to start loading with content right away.
Preconfigured home page displays news, announcements, and newly added content. Plus, each user has an area for their favorite content, selected through simple personalization tools.
Point-and-click operations let you easily manage pages, contribute and manage content, and create and manage user accounts.
Intuitive user interface is extremely easy to learn and easy to use.
In-place editing provides a simple, WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editing experience right on the page.

Oracle Instant Portal is a pre-built application that was built using Oracle Portal. If you know Oracle Portal well, it should be fairly easy for you to deduce how Oracle Instant Portal was constructed. You might even be tempted to experiment with the Page Group settings for the Oracle instant portals in an effort to fine-tune the portals a bit more. Keep in mind, however, that Oracle supports only those activities described in Section 5.3, "Using Oracle Portal to Affect Oracle Instant Portal".

Note:

Oracle Instant Portal supports the use of Netscape 7.2 or later, Internet Explorer 6.0 or later, and Mozilla Firefox 1.4 or later. It is preferred that you use IE to edit and manage your portal. Although Netscape and Firefox work well for viewing pages, there are some known issues regarding their performance while editing, especially where tables are concerned. In addition, when adding text items, you'll find that the HTML source looks different in Mozilla than it does in IE.