What Is a Portal?

1-2 Oracle Fusion Middleware Users Guide for Oracle Portal Figure 1–2 Three Different Page Configurations In this illustration, the dashed lines forming rectangles depict independent areas of a page called regions. Like most pages, those shown here contain a region along the top for the banner, which displays the corporate name and logo. The actual content appears in the body of the page; in these pages, the body consists of three regions, each in a different configuration. Each region is a completely independent area of the page that can display data from vastly different sources. If you were a Human Resources professional, for example, one region might contain the Oracle Human Resources Application, another might have your e-mail application, and the third might display a chart that shows each employee’s name, department name and number, and current salary. In most cases, what appears in each region is determined by the page designer. Although a page like the one just described might prove extremely valuable to an HR employee, it’s unlikely that a single page could provide all the information relevant to a given role. One might need to access a page covering corporate news and events, for example, or a collaborative page enabling the entire department to share and exchange information. In Oracle Portal, you can create links or tabs to all the pages you use the most, keeping only the most important information right at your fingertips. If you’re a typical end user, the pages you access most frequently will be built for you by other people at your site. However, depending on your privilege level, you may have the ability to add content to one or more pages. 1.2 What Is Content? In Oracle Portal, content comes in two forms: items and portlets. An item is something that you explicitly create or add to your portal page. A file is a type of item; so is a block of HTML code, a link to another page, a zip file, and so on. A portlet is a reusable component that is created by someone else—someone at your site, perhaps, or perhaps by Oracle or one of Oracle’s partners. For example, to make your company’s e-mail application available to you as a portlet, someone with programming expertise must use Oracle Portal’s APIs application programming interfaces to enable communication between Portal and that e-mail application. Once the portlet is created, anyone with the proper privileges can simply drop that e-mail portlet onto a page. Oracle Portal makes it easy to work with items on pages, once the appropriate privileges have been established. For example, you can use a step-by-step wizard to help you add, edit, or delete items from your pages, or, if you have a WebDAV client such as Web Folders available, you can seamlessly drag and drop files and folders back and forth between your desktop and Oracle Portal pages. What Is Oracle Portal? 1-3 Keep in mind that just because you have add or edit privileges on a page, you may not see your changes reflected on the page immediately. That’s because there are further gradations of privileges beneath the overarching write privilege, to help page designers control what is displayed to large audiences and when. If you have Manage With Approval privileges on a page, your changes and additions must be approved by one or more people before it becomes visible to others. To help you keep track of the status of those items, you’ll want to have the My Approval Status portlet on one of your frequently used pages so you can see whether your content has been approved, rejected, or is still pending. Figure 1–3 My Approval Status Portlet

1.2.1 Keeping Up with Changes

Because the information contained in portlets is dynamic, you don’t have to do anything to ensure that you always have the latest information. But how do you make sure that you’re notified if something changes in one of possibly hundreds of pages and items that impact you? Oracle Portal helps you keep tabs on important pages and items with its subscription and notification services. When you subscribe to an item or page, an alert is sent to your My Notifications portlet to notify you of the change. Figure 1–4 My Notifications Portlet If you are part of an approval chain, the My Notifications portlet also notifies you when something requires your approval. For example, if you must review all HR policies before they are published company-wide, you’ll receive an alert when a policy requiring your approval has been published. The policy won’t be displayed publicly until you explicitly approve that item.

1.2.2 Controlling Content Handling

Oracle Portal provides many methods to help ensure that items are handled appropriately within your site. For example, you may find that in order to update an item, you first have to check out the item. While you’re making your changes, no one else can edit the item, although authorized viewers can still see the item as it was before you checked it out. Once you’ve checked in the updated item, what happens to the older version? That depends on which versioning options have been established for the item. Depending on the requirements for a particular item, a new version of an