Participate with Others Using Spaces

Spaces support discrete communities of users organized around an area of interest or a common goal. Spaces provide a wide range of Web 2.0 services and tools, and enable social networking capabilities to effectively concentrate the efforts of a team on solving a concrete problem, scheduling events, assigning tasks to individual team members, contributing to wiki pages and announcements, linking related information, creating customized lists, or participating in discussions.

However, enterprise teamwork is not limited to the functionality provided by these shared projects and communities. Almost every useful web application depends on users working together in some form, and most of the information resources that users plan to share originate from desktop tools such as Microsoft Office. To ensure effective sharing of information in all of these environments, Oracle WebCenter Portal: Spaces delivers flexible integration through WebDAV, the Console for MS Sharepoint, RSS, and an extensible programming interface that is based on REST and Web services. Members of a space can include resources such as charts, reports, portlets, business applications, Web 2.0 services, lists, links (to discussion forums, documents, or other pages), announcements, RSS feeds, Web clips, and other ADF resources or task flows. For example:

• Sales people can work together on reports and planning documents linked to a CRM record.
  
  
• Accountants can input tasks from Microsoft Project and associate key deliverables with invoices from an ERP system.
  
  
• Managers can bring together data from enterprise systems with documents in Microsoft Office, and securely share the results with customers and colleagues.
  
  
• Users can check in documents, check out documents, add personal tags, and send notification links directly.
  
  
• Users can manage documents and communities using Windows Explorer, create new project documents on the fly with Microsoft Office, and update each other through a team wiki.
  
  

In many projects and communities, not all users are created equally. Often, there is a project manager who has the ability to delegate responsibilities for the items in the space. They also have the flexibility to restrict the use of different services if the capability is not required for the project. For example, a project manager may disable the built-in Announcements service, if all project updates are tracked in a wiki page. There is complete control over the resources that are made available and how they can be used by the team to meet their business objectives. By leveraging Resource Catalogs, administrators and end users get a role-based view of what they can add to the project. Furthermore, spaces can be completely customized, including navigation controls, the color scheme, and the look and feel of any task flow or portlet from within the browser.

In WebCenter Portal: Spaces, you can use Space templates to create Spaces, create Space pages, and manage your Spaces.