42 Introduction to Portal Tools and Services

Learn about the tools and services available in WebCenter Portal, and how to enable or disable tools in a portal.

Permissions:

To perform the tasks in this chapter, you must have one of the following roles or permissions:

• Portal Manager or be a portal member with Portals: Manage Security and Configuration permission

• Delegated Manager or a member with Portals: Manage Configuration permission in the portal

For more information about permissions, see About Roles and Permissions for a Portal.

Topics:

• About Tools and Services

• Enabling and Disabling Tools and Services Available to a Portal

42.1 About Tools and Services

WebCenter Portal offers tools and services that allow portal members to collaborate and communicate. 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 a portal.

Table 42-1 shows which tools and services are provided out-of-the-box and those that require additional configuration:

Table 42-1 Availability of Tools and Services in WebCenter Portal

WebCenter Portal (All Portals)	Tools and Services
Automatically available out-of-the-box	Portal events, links, lists, search, people connections, tags
Only available when a valid connection exists to a back-end server or database	Analytics, announcements*, discussions*, documents*, calendar events, instant messaging and presence, mail, search (using Oracle SES), worklists (using Oracle BPM Worklist)* * A default connection is set up at install time. The back-end configurations are done by the system administrator through Fusion Middleware Control or using the WLST command-line tool, as described in Managing Tools and Services in Oracle Fusion Middleware Administering Oracle WebCenter Portal.

If the necessary connections exist to make them available, Table 42-2 shows which tools and services are always available in a portal and those that need to be enabled by the portal manager:

Table 42-2 Enabling Tools and Services in a Portal

Individual Portals	Tools and Services
Always enabled (if available)	Analytics, links, people connections, tags
Portal manager can enable/disable (if available)	Announcements, discussions, events, lists, documents

When a back-end server is not configured, a portal cannot consume the features or functionality related to the tool or service:

• Associated task flows are not available in the resource catalog.

• Existing task flows display a message indicating that the tool or service is unavailable.

• Tool or service is listed as unavailable on the Tools and Services page in the portal's administration settings.

The following tools and services require a connection to a database schema where relevant information (such as relationship mapping) is stored:

• Analytics

• Documents (for documents, wikis, and blogs that want to include the comments and Activity Stream)

• Links

• Lists

• People Connections

• Tags

It is the portal template that is used to create a portal that defines whether tools are initially enabled or disabled in the portal:

Note:

Mail is enabled upon portal creation, and, if it is configured by the system administrator, then it cannot be disabled for individual portals.

• If a tool is disabled in the portal template, portal managers can manually enable the tool from the portal's administration settings to make it available for use in the portal.

• If a tool is enabled in the portal template, portal managers can manually disable tools that are not required from the portal's administration settings.

See Enabling and Disabling Tools and Services Available to a Portal.

After enabling tools and services for a portal, the portal manager also must make sure that the portal members have the required permissions to work with some of these tools, such as announcements, discussions, lists, and so on. For more information about portal-level permissions, see About Roles and Permissions for a Portal.

The portal manager must also make sure that portal members can access tools and services in the following ways:

• By providing users with a pretty URL to access the tool page. For more information, see Pretty URLs for Pages in a Specified Portal.

• By adding the associated tool or service task flows to a portal page. For more information, see Adding a Component to a Page.

• By adding a page link to the tool page in the portal navigation, as described in Adding an Existing Page to the Portal Navigation.

Note:

For more information about the tools and services available in a portal, see Table 42-3.

42.1.1 Tools and Services Available in a Portal

Table 42-3 lists the tools and services available in a portal.

Table 42-3 Portal Tools and Services

Tools and Services	Description	For More Information
Activity Stream	Provides a streaming view of the activities of your connections, actions taken in portals, and business activities	Adding Activities to a Portal
Analytics	Enables you to display usage and performance metrics for your portal application	Adding Analytics to a Portal
Announcements	Provides the ability to post announcements about important activities and events to all authenticated users	Adding Announcements to a Portal
Discussions	Provides the ability to create threaded discussions, posting and responding to questions and searching for answers	Adding Discussion Forums to a Portal
Documents	Provides content management and storage capabilities, including file upload, file and folder creation and management, file check out, versioning, and so on. Exposes these capabilities through the Content Manager task flow. The documents tool also supports the wiki and blog functionality.	Enabling Document Management Working with Workflow-Enabled Content Enabling Wikis in a Portal Enabling Blogs in a Portal
Events	Provides the ability to create and maintain a schedule of events relevant to a wider group of authenticated users. Also provides access to your personal events from your Outlook calendar if the Exchange server is configured.	Adding Events to a Portal
Instant Messaging and Presence (IMP)	Provides the ability to observe the status of other authenticated users (online, offline, busy, or away) and to contact them instantly	Using Instant Messaging and Presence Viewer in Oracle Fusion Middleware Using Oracle WebCenter Portal
Links	Provides the ability to view, access, and associate related information; for example, you can link to a document from a discussion	Linking Information in WebCenter Portal in Oracle Fusion Middleware Using Oracle WebCenter Portal
Lists	Provides the ability to create, publish, and manage lists	Adding Lists to a Portal
Mail	Provides easy integration with IMAP and SMTP mail servers to enable users to perform mail functions, such as reading messages, creating messages with attachments, replying to or forwarding messages, and deleting messages	Adding Mail to a Portal
Messages and Feedback	Provides the ability to post messages, attachments, and feedback for your connections and to the Activity Stream	Adding Messages and Feedback to a Portal
Notes	Provides the ability to "jot down" and retain bits of personally relevant information.	Adding Personal Notes to a Portal
Notifications	Provides a means of subscribing to services and application objects and, when those objects change, receiving notification across one or more messaging channels	Adding Notifications to a Portal
People Connections	Provides the ability to establish a social network with business colleagues, allowing you to see their portal activity and contributions and them to see yours	Adding Connections to a Portal
Profiles	Provides views of users' contact information (such as email address, business address, phone number), department, manager, photo, portal activities, public documents, and connections	Adding Profiles to a Portal
RSS	Provides the ability to access the content of many different web sites from a single location—a news reader	Adding RSS Feeds to a Portal
Search	Provides search functionality (This includes integrating Oracle Secure Enterprise Search.)	Adding Search to a Portal
Tags	Provides the ability to assign one or more personally-relevant keywords to a given page or document	Adding Tagging to a Portal

42.2 Enabling and Disabling Tools and Services Available to a Portal

For an understanding of how tools and services are made available for use in a portal, see About Tools and Services.

To enable or disable a tool or service in your portal:

1. In the portal administration (see Accessing Portal Administration), click Tools and Services in the left navigation pane (Figure 42-1).

   You can also enter the following URL in your browser to navigate directly to the Tools and Services page:

   http://host:port/webcenter/portal/PortalName/admin/services

   See Also:

   WebCenter Portal Pretty URLs

   Figure 42-1 Tools and Services Page for a Portal

   
   Description of "Figure 42-1 Tools and Services Page for a Portal"
2. To enable a tool you want to use in the portal, select the check box next to it.

   Note:

   If the back-end server is not configured by your system administrator and an active connection is not present between the application and WebCenter Portal, the tool or service will not be available in the portal. See Managing Tools and Services in Oracle Fusion Middleware Administering Oracle WebCenter Portal.

3. Click OK to dismiss the warning about giving users the appropriate permissions to work with a tool.

   Notice that Disabled updates to Enabled next to the tool and the configuration fields for that tool or service appear. For example Figure 42-2 shows the Announcements tool as Enabled when the check box is selected.

   Figure 42-2 Announcements Tools and Services Page

   
   Description of "Figure 42-2 Announcements Tools and Services Page"
4. Optionally, perform some additional configuration for some of the tools and services.

   • Announcements—search for a new forum ID to store portal announcements (see Modifying Announcement Forum Settings for a Portal).

     For more information about working with announcements, see Adding Announcements to a Portal.

   • Discussions—search for a new forum ID to store portal discussions or select to support multiple forums in the portal (see Modifying Discussion Forum Settings for a Portal) and publish portal mail as discussion topics (see Publishing Portal Mail in a Discussion Forum).

     For more information about working with discussions, see Adding Discussion Forums to a Portal.

   • Documents—For more information about working with documents, see Working with Content in a Portal

   • Events—create event categories, for grouping events, as described in Creating and Managing Portal Event Categories.

     For more information about working with calendars and events, see Adding Events to a Portal.

   • Lists—For more information about working with lists, see Adding Lists to a Portal.

   • Mail—although the default distribution list is created during portal creation, you can update the distribution list for the portal (see Configuring the Mail Distribution List for a Portal) and specify a shared distribution list for a portal (see Configuring the Send Mail Feature).

     For more information about working with mail, see Adding Mail to a Portal.

   • Search—shows the search option that has been configured for WebCenter Portal. Your search environment varies depending on the option configured.

     Note:

     Oracle WebCenter Portal supports Oracle SES 11.2.2.2.

     • If your system is configured with Oracle SES 11.2.2.2, then you can make search customizations for a specific portal on this page. Oracle SES 11.2.2.2 supports faceted search and document thumbnails, while earlier releases of Oracle SES and implementations with live (delegated) search do not. You can revert to Oracle SES 11.1.2.* functionality on this page by deselecting the Use new search task flow with facet support check box.

     • If your system is configured with Oracle SES 11.1.2.*, then you can make search customizations using search task flow parameters only. Oracle SES 11.1.2.* supports setting user preferences with search, while the 11.2.2.2 adapter and implementations with live (delegated) search do not.

     For more information about working with search, see Adding Search to a Portal.

5. To disable a tool, deselect the check box next to the appropriate tool.

   Notice that Enabled reverts to Disabled.

   Note:

   Unlike the other tools and services, if Mail is configured by the system administrator, the Mail service cannot be disabled by the portal manager.

6. Grant appropriate permissions for each member role on the Roles page to allow portal members to access the enabled services.

   See Viewing and Editing Permissions of a Portal Role.

7. Make sure that portal members have access to the tools and services in any of the following ways:

   • Provide users with a pretty URL to access the tool page. For more information, see Pretty URLs for Pages in a Specified Portal.

   • Add the associated tool or service task flows to a portal page. For more information, see Adding a Component to a Page.

   • Add a page link to the tool page in the portal navigation, as described in Adding an Existing Page to the Portal Navigation.