Customize and Personalize the Portal

WebCenter Portal uses the Oracle Metadata Services (MDS) repository to allow users to customize their portal experience. The information is stored as a layer on top of the base application deployment, which insulates you and your users from updates and patches to your base application or portal. MDS is used, along with business intelligence information, across business processes and Oracle's enterprise applications. It is a common metadata store that is unmatched by any other product.

Personalized content can include content or images targeted to specific users or audiences. For example, you can create dynamic images or links that are personalized for each user. You could dynamically guide users through a process (such as signing up for employee benefits or shopping online) that takes them to different places based on their personal preferences or characteristics.

You can even record the path users take through your portal to gauge the effectiveness of the portal, its design, or your process flows. Using this type of behavior-tracking provides information that can validate your strategies or help you make improvements. Additionally, WebCenter Portal provides an interaction management framework that enables you to create applications to:

• Automatically display user-specific content and portlets based on user profile attributes, user behavior, date/time, and so on.
  
  
• Track interactions that your users have with their applications or portals.
  
  
• Trigger custom actions when specific events occur.

Finally, the new Personalization for WebCenter Portal provides the ability to interpret the user's activities and deliver information to the portal based on specific scenarios.