Using Page Groups Effectively

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 Planning Your Portal 3-15 other options, Graphical and Layout, entirely. List view organizes all items on the page into a simple list that you can sort according to the most relevant criteria. You can also perform an action on multiple objects simultaneously while in List view. ■ Examine the item types provided by Oracle Portal. Are they sufficient for your needs? Will you require additional attributes, or would you like to remove some attributes defined by default? For example, files may have authors, create dates, or keywords associated with them. You may want to include additional attributes, so that you can use the Custom Search portlet to build preconfigured searches based on a given attribute. With the Custom Search portlet, you can collect data together irrespective of category, perspective, item type, and so on. For example, you might want to regularly publish all reports belonging to the category For Review on a weekly basis. To do that, you can use the Publish attribute to specify dates greater than the previous week’s publish date. If you construct your attributes wisely, you’ll have a great deal of flexibility when creating custom searches. ■ How much control do you want to give your page designers and content contributors? Should your page designers be allowed to create sub-pages? ■ Establish page group wide properties, including: – What level of versioning do you want to enable for all pages in the page group? – How do you want to handle the deletion of items? Should the items be soft-deleted so that a page manager can undelete them later? – What template will be selected by default when a new page is created? – How long should the New and Updated icons appear beside new and updated items? – 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? – What item types will be available to users creating new pages? ■ Will your users want to use Web Folders to add content to their pages? Web Folders is a Microsoft extension that supports the WebDAV protocol. After configuring Web Folders on a user’s computer, the user can browse the contents of any page group through Windows Explorer and drag and drop files into any page to which they have access. ■ Do you need to establish any approval or other types of workflow chains so that documents or requests can move from one user to another? For more detailed information on the features that make Oracle Portal a viable Content Management System CMS, see Oracle Portal 10g Release 2 10.1.2 Technical Overview, available on OTN. If you decide you want to manage your content in an external CMS but publish that content using Oracle Portal, there are at least two methods for doing so: ■ Move and copy content from your CMS into the Portal repository. For more information, see the white paper Using WebDAV Clients to Replicate External Content on OTN. ■ Use a query-based method for exposing your data. For example, you may want to use custom portlets to publish content within a portlet, or you might want to rely on Omniportlet. If you prefer the latter option, consider licensing the FAST Data 3-16 Oracle Fusion Middleware Users Guide for Oracle Portal Search application and taking advantage of their Omniportlet integration. Or use the PDK or Omniportlet to build a custom solution.

3.2.4 Deciding What Content To Publish

Although your work as page group administrator may not require you to actually create the content displayed in your portal, you no doubt will have a role in determining what kind of content is required and possibly assisting others in producing that content. You will most likely need to work closely with developers at your site, who have the responsibility of building components and portlets for others to include on their pages. Some of the things you should consider in terms of content creation are: ■ Are there any reports, charts, forms, or other components you’d like to display? Assuming that the data required is already in the Oracle Portal or another enterprise database, you can create these components yourself without the assistance of a developer. 2 Just go to the Portlet Builders folder in the Portlet Repository and click Additional Portlet Builders. ■ You may need to sift through hundreds or thousands of Web sites to find appropriate content. Make your job easier by using Web Clipping portlet. Web Clipping portlet offers an easy, intuitive way to capture content and functionality from existing Web sites and present them as portlets. Create Web clippings on the fly by navigating to the source Web page and selecting the portion of the page to clip. You can find the Web Clipping portlet in the Portlet Repository’s Portlet Builders folder. Note: Web Clipping may be used outside of Oracle Portal only. ■ Publish Web Service, SQL, XML, or CSV comma separated value, also known as spreadsheet data easily using OmniPortlet, or let an existing Web content be your data source. OmniPortlet essentially separates the content publishing from the content layout. Whereas changing a portlet’s layout often involves regathering the data, with OmniPortlet you can experiment with layouts at will, without ever having to regenerate the data itself. See the Oracle Fusion Middleware Developers Guide for Oracle Portal or the online help for more information. OmniPortlet is available in the Portlet Repository’s Portlet Builders folder. ■ Browse through the Portlet Repository and see if any of the portlets provided by Oracle Portal will be useful to you. You may also want to check, or have someone else check, the Knowledge Exchange to see if you can incorporate any of the work done by other Oracle Portal developers. In addition, be sure to peruse the Oracle Partner Network Solutions Catalog, an impressive collection of portlets and services offered by our Oracle Partner program. You can see the full list of partners and get a brief description of their offerings at http:www.oracle.comwebappsopuspagesSimpleSearch.jsp . ■ To publish static information, such as corporate announcements or press releases, use text items. Oracle Portal provides an integrated Rich Text Editor that provides a WYSIWYG interface for creating formatted HTML. ■ Much of your content will probably come from documents produced by fellow employees. If their work has been loaded into Oracle Portal and the correct attributes have been supplied, you’ll find that the Custom Search portlet is an excellent means for gathering documents together based on a common set of criteria and displaying them in a portlet. In a nutshell, the Custom Search portlet enables you to define a complex set of portal search criteria that executes a search 2 If you are relying on data in another enterprise database, make sure your portal administrator has established the proper database links from the Oracle Portal database to that data source before you begin your work.