This chapter provides a general introduction to WebCenter Portal, including defining useful terms and providing an overview of this guide.
This chapter includes the following topics:
WebCenter Portal provides the tools to quickly and easily create portals, communities, and social networking sites, enabling users to consume information and interact with other users more effectively and efficiently. This guide is aimed at the knowledge worker, who is tasked with interacting with information and users through WebCenter Portal.
This section contains the following topics:
A portal is an online gateway to a wide variety of purposes. A portal can provide tools to connect employees within an organization, actively sharing both profile and project information across teams; another portal may be directed towards customers, allowing them to explore and purchase products. Some portals are focus areas for small teams, others are loaded with functionality for use by thousands of members.
A portal presents information and resources that are diverse in location, technology, and derivation, through a single point of entry. Content and technology that originate from widespread sources appear as a cohesive set of information and services that are easily available from one location.
For example, in a portal, a user can look at all the Worklist items coming from their organization's eBusiness Suite, the detailed customer information coming from a CRM suite, and the latest sales figure charts coming from a Business Intelligence tool. Despite these multiple sources, all of this content is available in one place and appears to be coming from a single source.
Portals also deliver personalization capabilities. Personalization provides a means of leveraging the information in a user's Profile to tailor the user's experience of the portal. For example, Mary the manager logs in and sees department-wide results information and links to reporting applications, while Sal the salesman logs in and sees his reports on his own results and links to leads.
The Home portal is the area where you have access to your profile, preferences, available portals, and can customize certain elements of your own view of the Home portal. You can create your own personal pages in the Home portal, and system administrators can expose system pages and business role pages to selected audiences.
For more information, see Chapter 2, "Exploring WebCenter Portal."
You will encounter several types of pages in WebCenter Portal. Pages in WebCenter Portal may be out-of-the-box or user-created.
The out-of-the-box pages in WebCenter Portal are:
System pages, such as the Login page and the Documents page are prepopulated with relevant input fields and boilerplate text. System pages are managed by portal moderators and system administrators.
Business role pages, which can be populated with information of relevance to a particular business role, such as salesperson, accountant, or marketing associate, can be pushed into the Home portal views of all users who are assigned that role. Business role pages are managed by the system administrator.
No matter how your portal is structured, there is always a need for new pages in addition to those that are available out-of-the-box. You and other WebCenter Portal users can create new pages to meet your needs:
Personal pages, which you can create for your own exclusive use in the Home portal. By default, personal pages can be seen in the Home portal only by you (the user who created them), but you can also allow other users to see your personal pages. For more information about personal pages, see Chapter 5, "Creating and Managing Personal Pages." While you are primarily responsible for managing the content of your personal pages, a system administrator has the authority to administer all personal pages in WebCenter Portal administration.
Portal pages, which can be created by anyone with permissions to create pages in a portal, and may serve different purposes:
Pages created by the portal moderator, designed to contribute to the knowledge base of the portal, and typically made available to all members of the portal.
Pages created by a portal member, selectively exposed in the portal either for their own use, or shared with other selected portal members. While such portal pages may not be exposed to all portal members, a portal moderator has the authority to administer all portal pages.
You can customize a page for your own personal view by rearranging items, expanding or collapsing viewers, and resizing areas, visible only to you.
Portal pages can have any number of subpages, as well as page variants, which are optimized for display on other devices, such as tablets or mobile phones.
As you use WebCenter Portal, you will work with elements on the pages. These elements are many and varied, and are collectively referred to as portal components, Portal components include views/viewers, portlets, content containers, and other types of resources such as images and links.
WebCenter Portal offers many tools and services that allow you to collaborate and communicate with other WebCenter Portal users. If WebCenter Portal is installed and configured correctly and your system administrator has set up valid connections to the required external back-end servers, tools and services are available for use in WebCenter Portal.
Tools and services can be exposed on their own page in a portal with a separately addressable URL, or as one of many components on a page. Tools and services include: announcements, discussions, documents, events, lists, search, tags, instant messaging and presence, links, mail, polls, activity graph, notes, and notifications.
This section provides an overview of the tasks involved in using WebCenter Portal. These tasks are described step-by-step in the chapters of this guide:
For more information, see Part I, "Getting Started," which includes the following chapters:
For more information, see Part II, "Connecting and Collaborating with Other Users," which includes the following chapters:
For more information, see Part III, "Working with Documents," which includes the following chapters:
For more information, see Part IV, "Staying Informed," which includes the following chapters:
For more information, see Part V, "Staying Organized," which includes the following chapters: