Working In the Home Portal

About the Home Portal

In addition to having access to WebCenter Portal activities, your personal documents, available portals, and your profile, you can create your own personal pages . The Home portal can also be customized to expose System pages and business role pages to selected audiences.

Description of the illustration home_portal.gif

These pages are available to you in the Home portal. For instructions on how to show pages that are hidden by default, see Showing or Hiding Pages in Your View of the Home Portal.

To create your own personal pages to display here, see Creating and Managing Personal Pages.

Pages	Description	More Information
Activities	Make statements about your personal status and provide links to external or internal objects using Publisher; View information about activities using Activity Stream.	See Sharing Messages, Files, and URLs and Tracking Portal Activities
Documents	Create, view, and manage your documents in your personal document library.	See Adding Content to a Portal
Portals	Access available portals, and manage your portal memberships.	see Exploring Portals
Profile	View personal information, such as contact information, a photo, your location within the company hierarchy, and so on. You can also access to your connections, other WebCenter Portal users with whom you communicate or collaborate.	See Managing Your Profile and Managing Your Contacts
Portal Templates	If you are an advanced user, you can build portals and custom portal templates using this page. This page is hidden by default.	See Working with Portal Templates in Building Portals with Oracle WebCenter Portal
Tag Center	Allows you to view and manage tags on WebCenter Portal objects. Tags provide a means of applying your own meaningful terms to and bookmarking application objects, making them easy to locate the next time you go looking for them. This page is hidden by default.	See Working with Tags
WebCenter Portal Impersonation	Lets you assign the right for someone else to impersonate you and lets you impersonate a user for whom you have been given impersonation rights. For example, impersonation might be useful if a customer support representative needs to perform actions on your behalf to understand issues you are experiencing, a system administrator might need to perform operations on your behalf, or you might be delegated someone else's responsibilities while they are away. This page is hidden by default.	See Using WebCenter Portal Impersonation

How do I access the Home portal?

You can access the Home portal using any one of these methods.

Use the URL http://host:port/webcenter/portal/home
In the toolbar, click your user name and then select User Profile .
In the portal browser, select Home Portal .
From the Portals menu, select Home Portal, as shown.

Description of the illustration wcsug_portals_menu.gif

What You Can Do In the Home Portal

You can perform the following actions in the Home portal:

Work with system pages and business role pages made available to you on the Personalize Pages page. See the remaining sections of this page to customize, rearrange, show, and hide these pages.
Work with personal pages. For information, see Creating and Managing Personal Pages.
Manage your contacts, connect with them through instant messaging and email, and collaborate with other WebCenter Portal users. For more information, see the chapters in Connecting and Collaborating with Other Users.
Create and manage documents, collaborate with others on documents, and publish content. For more information, see the chapters in Adding Content to a Portal.
Use tools and services to notify you when things change, track activities, and monitor RSS feeds. For more information, see the chapters in Staying Informed.
Use tools and services to manage your schedule and work environment through calendars, notes, links, tags, and bookmarks. For more information, see the chapters in Staying Organized.

Opening a Page in the Home Portal

In the Home portal, you have access to your personal pages, system pages, and other pages to which you have been granted access.

The way that you access pages in the Home portal depends on the page template that is defined for the Home portal and the controls that the application specialist has made available. In all configurations, however, you can open pages using a pretty URL.

To open a page in the Home portal:

Click the page name in the Home portal navigation, such as tabs along the top.
Enter the following URL in your browser:
```
http://host:port/webcenter/portal/profile/userName/page/pageName
```
See Also:

WebCenter Portal Pretty URLs in Building Portals with Oracle WebCenter Portal.
Open the Personalize Pages page, and click the name of the page you want to open (Figure 7-1).

Tip:

The way you access this page depends on the page template in use. For example, you may access it through an Actions menu.

Figure 7-1 Personalize Pages: Opening a Page

Description of "Figure 7-1 Personalize Pages: Opening a Page"

Customizing Your View of a Page in the Home Portal

You can change your view of a given page in the Home portal in many ways, including rearranging your view of page content, hiding components, and resizing components. All of these options are user customizations, which affect only your view. The views of all other users who have access to the page remain unchanged.

This section describes the user customizations you can perform on a page:

About User Customizations on a Page

You can customize the way pages appear in your own personal view of the page in many ways. For example, you can change page layout, reposition, remove, resize, and collapse components, all within just your view of a page.

User customizations are yours and yours alone. That is, the changes you make through the procedures described in the following sections affect only your view of the page. No other users are affected by your changes.

Note:

When you revise a component in page view mode while another user deletes the same component in page edit mode, an error page opens. Simply navigate back to the original page. The deleted component does not appear, and you can continue working on other components.

Whether you can customize a page depends on permissions granted to you or your application role and on how user customizations are configured. You can tell if you have such permission by the presence or absence of the controls discussed in this section. If you do not see these controls, contact your system administrator to ask for a higher-level of access or for a configuration change.

Rearranging Page Content

Components can be repositioned by dragging and dropping them on the page.

To rearrange components by dragging and dropping:

Click and hold the header of the component you want move, drag it to its target position, and release your mouse button.

A shadow indicates where the component is placed when you drop it (Figure 7-2).

Figure 7-2 Dragging and Dropping a Component on a Page

Description of "Figure 7-2 Dragging and Dropping a Component on a Page"

Removing Components from Your View of a Page

If you find that a component, such as a document viewer or portlet, is not useful to you and the component displays a Remove icon, you can remove it from your view of the page. The Remove icon is exposed by the component Display Options properties.

Keep in mind that you can restore a removed component only by editing the page and adding a new component instance.

To remove a component from your view of a page:

Click the Remove icon on the component header (see Figure 7-3).

Figure 7-3 Remove Icon on a Component

Description of "Figure 7-3 Remove Icon on a Component"

The component is removed from your view of the page.

Resizing Components

The border and header surrounding a component is also known as chrome. Chrome can clarify the boundaries of the component and provide an access point for component actions, such as those on the Actions menu and those embedded in the chrome itself. In the latter case, the chrome may include a Resize handle that you can use to increase or decrease the height of the component (Figure 7-4).

Figure 7-4 Resize Handle on a Component

Description of "Figure 7-4 Resize Handle on a Component"

Note:

The position of the resize handle differs for bidirectionally displayed components. Those components displayed in a right-to-left orientation display the resize handle on the left side.

To use this feature, click and hold the Resize handle and drag it up to decrease the height of the component or down to increase the height of the component.

Collapsing and Expanding Components

With one click, you can collapse some components so that they roll up like a window shade, useful for removing the visual noise of an unused component from your application view. Collapse is available when a component shows a header. With another click, you can expand a collapsed component.

To collapse and expand components on a page:

Click the Collapse icon on the component header to roll the component up like a window shade (Figure 7-5).

Figure 7-5 Collapse/Expand Icon on a Component

Description of "Figure 7-5 Collapse/Expand Icon on a Component"
Click the Expand icon on the component header to restore the full component to view (Figure 7-6).

Figure 7-6 Collapsed Component

Description of "Figure 7-6 Collapsed Component"

Resetting All of Your User Customizations on a Page in the Home Portal

You can change your view of a page in many ways, including rearranging your view of page content, hiding components, and resizing, as described in Customizing Your View of a Page in the Home Portal.

To reset all of your personal customizations on a page in the Home portal:

In the Home portal (see How do I access the Home portal?), open the Personalize Pages page.

Tip:

The way you access the Personalize Pages page depends on the page template in use. For example, you may access it through an Actions menu.
On the Personalize Pages page, click the Actions icon for the page, and choose Reset Layout (Figure 7-7) to open the Reset Layout dialog.

Figure 7-7 Page Actions: Reset Layout

Description of "Figure 7-7 Page Actions: Reset Layout"
To confirm your intent to remove all of your user customizations from the page, click Reset.

Rearranging Page Order in the Home Portal

On the Personalize Pages page, you can change the order in which pages are listed or arranged in your view the Home portal. This affects the order of the tabs exposed in the Home portal.

To rearrange page order in the Home portal:

In the Home portal (see How do I access the Home portal?), open the Personalize Pages page.

Tip:

The way you access this page depends on the page template in use. For example, you may access it through an Actions menu.
Use the icons in the Reorder column to rearrange page order (Figure 7-8).

Note:

You can also reorder pages by dragging and dropping the page names

Figure 7-8 Personalize Pages: Reorder

Description of "Figure 7-8 Personalize Pages: Reorder"

Showing or Hiding Pages in Your View of the Home Portal

By default, the Home portal exposes your personal pages and selected system pages as tabs. You may want to hide some pages, or expose system pages that are hidden by default, such as the Portal Templates page.

To show or hide pages in your view of the Home portal:

In the Home portal (see How do I access the Home portal?), open the Personalize Pages page.

Tip:

The way you access this page depends on the page template in use. For example, you may access it through an Actions menu.
On the Personalize Pages page, select or deselect the Show Page check box for the pages you want to show or hide (Figure 7-9).

Note:

If you deselect the Show Page check box for the current page, the Personalize Pages page closes and the current page is hidden.

Within the Home portal, one page must always be shown; therefore, you cannot hide all pages.

Figure 7-9 Personalize Pages: Show Page

Description of "Figure 7-9 Personalize Pages: Show Page"