| What is a Portal?
| Who Needs a Single Point of Access?
| How Are Portlets Used?
| How Can You Customize Your Portal?
| Let Oracle Portal Log on for You
|  | A Personalized, Integrated Working Environment How does Oracle Portal provide a personalized integrated working environment? By allowing you to bring together diverse data sources and organize them in a way that makes sense. Once you—or your administrator—has created a view of the data you need most, you can customize that view based on your own preferences and requirements. In this section of the Quick Tour, you will learn how Oracle Portal enables you to create your own personalized view of data both internal and external to your enterprise. What is a Portal? Who Needs a Single Point of Access? How Are Portlets Used? How Can You Customize Your Portal? Let Oracle Portal Log on for You What is a Portal? A portal is simply a common, integrated starting point for accessing all your data: files, images, applications, Web sites both internal and external to your company, and so on. The term portal implies many other capabilities as well, but central to the definition is the ability to support personalized views, so that each user or user group can tailor both the content and the appearance of the portal to suit individual preferences and requirements. In Oracle Portal, you build your portal using specially designed tools that help you create Web-enabled applications, content areas—which are repositories for all your corporate data—and pages, which provide the starting point to access that data. Oracle Portal makes it easy to secure, manage, and customize your data through a set of robust administrative tools. Top of page Who Needs a Single Point of Access? When trying to access the information they need to do their jobs, users can easily become confused by the multitude of Web pages they see. Many don't know where to start and don't understand the relationship between the myriad sites and applications distributed across the corporate Intranet and even the Web at large. To make matters worse, many sites employ vastly different navigation methods and organization that can result in conflicting views of the same information. With Oracle Portal, access to both internal and external data is brought together under a common interface, thus providing a single point of interaction. How does Oracle Portal do this? By bridging the largely disconnected worlds of dynamic data, documents, and Web sites through the use of portlets. A portlet is an area on a page that contains data from a particular data source. For example, your page might contain an application that you use frequently in one portlet, stock quotes for your investments right next to it in another portlet, and a standard corporate navigation bar running along the bottom. You can create your own portlets using Oracle Portal Development Kit, or take advantage of the extensive portlet library shipped with Oracle Portal. And Oracle Portal itself allows you to create portlets quickly and easily: just by checking a box, folders, components, and even other pages instantly become portlets. Top of page How Are Portlets Used? Portlets appear on a Oracle Portal page. Each page is configured into regions; one or more portlets occupy each of those regions. Here is a page divided into three regions. Into each region you can place an Oracle Portal folder—or just a few regions from the folder—a navigation bar, items belonging to a certain category or perspective, an Oracle Portal component, or even another page. Anyone who logs on to Oracle Portal with the proper permissions can create a page. In most cases, however, the Oracle Portal administrator builds a separate page for each distinct user group that provides access to the data relevant to them. For example, a member of the Human Resources department will want to see the latest compensation data, while someone in the Financial department needs access to financial spreadsheets and applications. Everyone in the company will want to pick and choose from various corporate portlets, like a company event calendar, stock option calculator, corporate bulletin boards, and so on. Top of page How Can You Customize Your Portal? The creator of a page or folder decides how much control users have over the content and appearance of the object. Subject to the proper approval, portlets can be added or hidden from pages, and different page and folder styles may be selected to control the text and color settings for the page or folder. If the Oracle Portal administrator wants to maintain a standardized corporate look and feel, individual privilege levels can be reduced or even eliminated. Top of page Let Oracle Portal Log on for You Having access to the applications you use the most can certainly speed things up, but having to log on to each one individually can slow things down considerably. Oracle Portal's security mechanism is constantly in place, making sure that only the data you're allowed to see is displayed, and supplying the necessary user IDs and passwords so even your external applications come up quickly, without you ever having to fill in a log on screen. Top of page

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