Understanding the Planning Process

Planning Your Portal 3-11 – Will different groups expect their search results to be confined to their own areas? By default, the search feature combs all pages belonging to the entire page group to which the current page belongs. 1 If your entire portal is housed in a single page group, someone in Human Resources looking for a particular HR document may be overwhelmed by search results reflecting the entire page group. If you think each group will want their search to be limited to just the data that is relevant to them, consider creating separate page groups for each group within your enterprise. If you do decide to create multiple page groups, you’ll probably want to develop some common objects and place them in the Shared Objects page group so that you can achieve some consistency across work performed by the different groups. Only objects navigation pages, templates, styles, and so on in the Shared Objects page group can be used across multiple page groups. Once you make your decision about what kind of portal makes sense for your organization, it’s time to contemplate how to go about actually building your portal. Here are some things you should consider before doing so: ■ Do you want each of the pages within your portal to look similar? One way to accomplish this is through the use of templates. You can build a Portal Template that has a common navigation bar, footer, and banner, then leave it up to individual content contributors to populate the remainder of the page with content. You might also want to create one template for each user group to clearly identify the page as belonging to that group. Note : Although you cannot force your page designersbuilders to use your template, you can make it the default so that it is the first template listed in the drop-down list in the Page Creation wizard. ■ Establish page group wide properties, such as the amount of space to allocate to uploaded files, the default style, navigation page, and Portal Template, and what type of items contributors can add to pages in the page group. You can identify such things as: – What level of access will each user or user group have on the pages created within this page group? – What template will be selected by default when a new page is created? – What navigation page will be selected by default for use as a banner when a new page is created? – What style will be applied by default when a new page is created? – Will users of this page group have access to HTML Templates, which are built using your own HTML code? HTML Templates include both Page Skins and Content Layouts. Page Skins place a border or wrapper around a page. Content Layouts format the content of individual regions on the page. Page group-wide settings are made either through the Navigator, or from the toolbar that appears along the top of your page while in edit mode. ■ Get started on acquiring the portlets you’ll need to populate your pages. You may want to have developers start building portlets to encompass data provided by legacy applications, and you may have a need for portlets provided by Oracle’s Partner Program or other third party vendors. See Section 3.2.4, Deciding What 1 Although it is possible to use the custom search feature to search multiple page groups, less sophisticated users may not be comfortable doing that. 3-12 Oracle Fusion Middleware Users Guide for Oracle Portal Content To Publish for some ideas on how to make these decisions. Visit otn.oracle.com for more information on acquiring externally available portlets. ■ Create, or have your graphics designer create, a style for your portal to determine the colors and fonts used by the pages in the page group. Later on, you can indicate whether page designers can change this style as they develop their pages and whether users who are viewing the pages can apply their own style preferences to the page. ■ Create your home page. – Decide how many regions you will need. – Create, or have your graphics designer create, a navigation bar and banner. You may also want to consider using a footer for links to related sites and Web pages. – Add portlets and items to your page. – Establish security for the page. Repeat this process for each page you want to create. ■ Remember, as page group administrator, you are in charge of not only making decisions that affect the page group as a whole, but also for developing the procedure by which the content on your portal is developed and maintained. You’ll probably want to delegate a good deal of the authority for page creation to others so you don’t become a bottleneck. You can do this by assigning the appropriate privileges to other users on the page group’s Access tab.

3.2.2 Using Page Groups Effectively

A portal is simply a collection of one or more page groups. This section will give you some pointers to help you decide how many page groups you’ll need, but keep in mind that each page group usually has a focus that is largely determined by its viewership: ■ Page groups devoted to viewers tend to focus on the presentation of the content itself, as opposed to managing that content. Because viewers don’t have the privileges necessary to publish content, they become the consumers of information that is published by others. Where that content is managed—in the same or in a different page group—is completely irrelevant to the viewers of the content. Content typically produced for the consumption of viewers includes: ■ Announcements of corporate programs, events, quarterly earning reports, and so on ■ Reports that enable users to acquire information and make key business decisions ■ News, weather, and stock quotes from syndicated content feeds ■ Availability of email, calendar, meeting scheduling tools, and other heavily used business applications ■ Smaller portals created and maintained by independent departments within the company ■ Business documents and other information published by fellow employees The following illustration depicts the convergence of many disparate information sources on a single page: Planning Your Portal 3-13 Figure 3–5 Many Data Sources On a Single Page The presentation of this information is frequently augmented by typical portal services like personalization the ability for users to specify their own preferences for color schemes, the content that appears, and the layout and content of a page, as well as a sophisticated search engine to help users locate critical information quickly. ■ Page groups can also be configured to meet the needs of content contributors working in a collaborative manner. In this type of page group, which is tuned for content management, self-service publishing features allow end users to post and share any kind of document or Web content with other users, even those geographically dispersed. For example, consider a development group consisting of engineers, product managers, and quality assurance engineers working at locations scattered all over the world. Each has documents they need to share with members of their own teams as well as the other groups. Nearly every user has the ability to add documents to the page group; certain users have privileges to modify documents produced by other users or groups. Unlike more generalized page groups, a content management page group relies heavily on Oracle Portal’s assortment of collaboration features: ■ Check-incheck-out capabilities, so that users cannot overwrite each others changes ■ Version control, so that successive versions of a particular item can be retained or overwritten ■ A security mechanism, by which content can be protected from unauthorized view or manipulation ■ Workflow, which establishes a process through which a document or request flows among users ■ Organizational mechanisms to create a content structure that is easily browsed by the portal user If you’re operating in a small environment, with no company firewall or no plans to make content available outside your firewall, you may find that a content management page group is sufficient for your needs. Or, you may want your content contributors to produce and edit their business documents in such a page group, and use the page portlet or the autoquery feature of the custom search portlet to expose those documents to viewers, either within a set of pages just for them or within a different page group entirely. 3-14 Oracle Fusion Middleware Users Guide for Oracle Portal You’ll probably want to read this chapter thoroughly before deciding how many page groups you’ll need and the focus of each. Your ability to make these key decisions wisely will have a profound impact on the final usability of your portal.

3.2.3 Configuring a Page Group for Content Management

If you’re wondering if you should use Oracle Portal as your content management system, or if you should seek out or perhaps continue to use a third party solution, you may want to read the white paper Manage, Integrate, and Publish Your Enterprise Content on the Oracle Technology Network OTN. Building a content management page group involves many of the same considerations as any other type of page group. There are some additional things you need to consider that are unique to an environment in which users are creating content. These things include: ■ Will a single page group meet your content management needs? Or will you need more than one? Consider the following: – How many groups of content contributors do you have? How different are their needs? – Are the content attribution needs different for each group of content contributors? Your Travel department might require categories such as Hotels, Air Fares, and Rental Cars, while your Financial group needs categories like Statements, Forecasts, and Data Sheets. Then again, you may deliberately want to develop a taxonomy that is general enough to satisfy all users, regardless of departmental role. – What is the amount of information produced by each group? Does the amount suggest that each group or department may require its own page group? – Do you need to implement different controls for different groups within your organization? If so, you’ll want to set up multiple page groups to address these needs. For example, one group may need to keep multiple versions of their files intact, while others don’t require this capability. Or you may want to limit the amount of space a particular group can consume on your server. To get an idea of the kinds of settings you can control at the page group level, click Properties in the Navigator next to your default page group and take a look at the fields on each tab. If you do decide to create multiple page groups to support content management, you’ll probably want to develop some common objects and place them in the Shared Objects page group so that you can achieve some consistency across work performed by the different groups. Only objects navigation pages, templates, styles, and so on in the Shared Objects page group can be used across multiple page groups. ■ Within a page group, can you keep the editing experience fairly simple? Doing so may make it easier for content contributors to add content to your portal. For example, consider creating a Portal Template consisting of a very simple layout: a banner, a navigation area along the left side, a footer, and a content region in the center. For all regions except the main content region, you can de-select the check box Enable Users To Include Content In This Region one of the region properties. When content contributors access this page, they will see edit controls only in the main content region, thus providing a more streamlined, simplified editing experience. Another way to simplify the editing experience is to configure the page group so that editing mode is displayed in List view by default or you can suppress the