Configuring a Page Group for Content Management

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. Planning Your Portal 3-17 each time the page is rendered. You may want to display all documents created by the Human Resources department in one portlet, for example, and create another portlet with all the internal forms employees may need to reference, irrespective of which department created them. To use the Custom Search portlet, add it to your page from the Portlet Repository, then use the Edit Defaults action to establish your search criteria. ■ What kinds of applications are required? Do you have third-party or in-house applications you want to make accessible to your user base? If so, your developers can choose among several paths, ranging from simple to complex: – Include the application in the External Applications portlet, then add the portlet to a commonly accessed page. – Assuming that the application is Web-enabled, use a Web Clipping, iFrame, or URL portlet to display the application’s home page. – Use the Portal Developer Kit PDK to transform the application into a portlet provider. By doing so, discrete areas of the application can then become portlets that can be manipulated individually. 3-18 Oracle Fusion Middleware Users Guide for Oracle Portal