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This chapter describes portal structure and content at a high level.
The purpose of this chapter is to help you develop a plan to assign administrative responsibility for managing portal structure and content.
At the end of this chapter, you should be able to scope the effort involved in deploying the initial administrative objects and content. You should also be ready to assign administrative responsibility for the initial deployment.
Before you proceed, print Portal Content Responsibilities Worksheet. You can use the worksheet to record your decisions and assignments.
This chapter includes the following topics to help you scope and assign tasks for your deployment effort
The Administrator Guide provides detailed procedures for implementing these objects.
First, decide whether you plan to deploy one portal with multiple Experience Definitions or multiple, federated portals. Figure 3-1 and Figure 3-2 illustrate the difference in deployments of a single portal, in which a single instance of ALI manages various service requests from users; and a federated portal, in which multiple ALI instances manage various service requests from separate portals.
In the past, an enterprise might have used a federated model for any of the following reasons:
Consider the many benefits of having only one portal:
If you are starting with multiple portals, there are several ways to take advantage of what you have already done:
For more information on the business cases in which single portals or federated portals are appropriate, visit the Product Center.
In Portal Content Responsibilities Worksheet, record your decision.
Next, determine how many different Experience Definitions you plan to deploy.
Experience Definitions allow you to display different branding and features to different audiences.
Experience Definitions control the overall look, feel, and access features for a group of users—the header and footer; the navigation scheme; the default page displayed at login; access to My Pages, communities, and the Knowledge Directory; and any mandatory links displayed in the navigation.
For example, you might create an Experience Definition for a particular customer that includes the customer's logo and company colors and that includes access to My Communities and the Knowledge Directory, but not to My Pages or Administration.
Experience Definitions are applied according to rules you configure with the Experience Rules Manager. For example, you can create rules that sort users from a particular customer IP address into an Experience Definition you have configured for such customers.
For information on configuring Experience Definitions and Experience Rules, see the Administrator Guide.
Figure 3-3 illustrates the correspondence between various audiences and Experience Definitions. For example, if you have three divisions in your company that should have somewhat different access, you might create Experience Definitions A, B, and C. Similarly, if you have four customers, you might want them to view customized support sites F, G, H, and I. You might create definition J for guests from trusted domains and definition K for guests from non-trusted domains.
In Portal Content Responsibilities Worksheet, identify the Experience Definitions you want to implement and assign a leader to be responsible for their implementation.
BEA provides the following resources to prepare the leader for this assignment.
Next, determine the types of content you plan to make available through the portal Knowledge Directory.
Content might be located in multiple systems: file repositories, ERP systems, databases and so on. ALUI pulls content into the portal through various mechanisms, including Content Services, searches, portlets, Publisher, and Collaboration. In the portal, content is discoverable through the Knowledge Directory and through Search indexes.
All common file types can be full-text indexed, but ALI has extra capabilities to extract metadata from the following types of file repositories.
In Portal Content Responsibilities Worksheet, identify the content types you want to support and assign a leader to be responsible for implementation of each.
BEA provides the following resources to prepare the leader for this assignment.
Next, consider the numbers and types of Communities you plan to include initially in your deployment.
Communities are pages shared between the members of a group to collaborate and communicate on a particular project or on departmental goals.
Communities provide the following benefits to users:
Here are a few ideas for how to use communities:
On Portal Content Responsibilities Worksheet, identify the types of communities you want to include initially in your deployment and assign a leader to be responsible for implementation of each.
BEA provides the following resources to prepare the leader for this assignment.
Next, consider the numbers and types of portlets, as well as tools you might use to develop additional portlets.
Portlets are applications that are embedded in a portal and can be interactive or merely informational. They are able to communicate preferences with the portal and communicate with other portlets.
There are several components involved in a portlet. A portlet must be based on a web service. The web service controls the bulk of the portlet settings, for example, the URL and cache settings. The portlet controls the name, width, type, and administrative preferences (if available). You can also create portlet templates allowing you to create multiple instances of the same portlet, with each instance looking different or displaying different information based on the administrative preferences set in that instance.
BEA provides pre-packaged portlets to support integration with commonly requested applications or services. For a complete list of pre-packaged portlets, see Components of AquaLogic User Interaction. For a description of these products, visit the Product Center.
You can also create your own portlets using Studio or Publisher. For a description of these products, visit the Product Center.
You can also develop portlets using the IDK. For information, visit the ALUI Developer Center http://dev2dev.bea.com/aluserinteraction/.
There are many reasons you might want to build your own portlets:
Consider the following questions when deciding which portlets to build first:
Here are some ideas for portlets:
In Portal Content Responsibilities Worksheet, identify the types of portlets you want to initially include in your deployment and assign a leader to be responsible for implementation of each.
BEA provides the following resources to prepare the leader for this assignment.
Next, consider requirements for incorporating collaboration features in your site.
This section describes the following topics for Content Managers to consider:
This section describes how you can deploy Collaboration to support applications with a focus on producing documents, transferring knowledge to a large external audience, or simply organizing a small team around a common goal. It includes the following examples:
Suppose each account manager at a given organization manages several prospective clients. A sales process automation application powered by AquaLogic User Interaction would enable account managers to create Web properties for each prospective client in their portfolio. Each of these Web applications would have a Collaboration project as part of the application template. The project itself would be based on a Collaboration project template that was region specific. For example, there might be two project templates, one for United States sales and one for International. The template would then create a project with all of the appropriate legal contracts, product schedules, marketing documentation, and support contracts automatically preloaded.
Account managers would simply have to enter a new prospect's account name and e-mail address into the portal. The Web property would be automatically created and Collaboration would send a notification directly to the client. The account managers would also subscribe to the Collaboration project as a whole so that they would be notified when clients begin to interact. This online property would then be available to the prospective client from anywhere in the world. Clients could share documents, upload an RFP, assign various tasks to their account managers, post discussion questions on topics of concern, or schedule meeting events through the Collaboration project available in this application.
Not only would this application increase contact and communication between sales representatives and prospective clients, but it would serve to minimize unnecessary work-load on the sales representatives. Managing prospective clients becomes much easier with Collaboration notifications. Each time a client poses a question or uploads a new document, the sales representatives are instantly notified. In addition, because Collaboration is fully integrated into the portal, sales representatives can easily invite other employees with valid expertise into the Collaboration project.
Most organizations today have some sort of support Web site. Collaboration can be used in this support context to improve response rate, decrease incident resolution time, and give customers an inside look into how their issues are being solved.
Assume that a customer can log in to an external support Web site and file incident reports for problems they are experiencing with a product. For each new incident that is filed, a Collaboration project is created and the relevant support engineer is notified. The engineer and the customer can then enter a discussion through the Discussions portion of the Collaboration project. Collaboration will keep track of all the messages that go back and forth and in the end will provide a clear record of the incident resolution. If this particular incident becomes common, the support engineer might forward the discussion information to the entire group so that everyone is immediately aware of the resolution.
The Collaboration project thus becomes the hub for every incident that Customer Support deals with. Each incident can be populated with the appropriate tasks and documents that are necessary to solve the customer's issue. The customer then has a real-time outlook into exactly what is being done to resolve the issue.
At the end of each quarter, the accounting departments of most organizations run through a number of tasks and produce several documents detailing the organization's financial performance. Many customers have created a Finance Dashboard that incorporates Collaboration to automate the process of closing their books.
Normally the heart of these applications is a Collaboration project template which outlines all of the necessary tasks, documents, and dates that must be met to close the books. Each quarter a new project is created from this template and all of the necessary data is loaded up and all of the relevant employees are automatically assigned their tasks for the quarter. In addition, notifications are set up so that employees know when their particular tasks should start, when they are due, and which of their tasks are overdue. Employees come to the Collaboration project to examine their tasks, post questions or concerns, and check-in relevant documentation. The head of the finance department then has a consistent outlook onto the close process and is able to communicate results more quickly and accurately to the executive team.
Once the close process is complete, the project is archived and stored as a record. In the event of an audit, the finance department can easily pull up all of the actions that were performed each quarter by simply restoring old Collaboration projects.
A number of customers in the education field use Collaboration as an online classroom. Normally each class has an associated Collaboration project where the instructor posts a syllabus, assignments, and answers student questions. A similar application can be applied to e-learning in the corporate environment.
Process builds upon AquaLogic User Interaction to allow people to rapidly build and deploy applications which automate business processes in their enterprise.
Process is a set of business tools that provides the ability to design, activate, and deploy business processes into a live environment. The platform lets users quickly combine dissimilar applications into integrated business processes. Users can then modify these processes in realtime, enabling business to react dynamically to changing market conditions.
Process is used to create and manage departmental and enterprise business processes and workflows. Common examples of these processes include purchase order requisitions, performance reviews, travel authorizations, and work order requests. All businesses have tens or hundreds of processes that can potentially be automated with Process. These processes generally involve human participants viewing and entering data through a Web browser and a flow of data through a dynamic sequence of steps encompassing both humans and systems.
For more information on Process, visit http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E13174_01/alui/index.html.
Next, consider requirements for incorporating search features in your site.
Search allows users to quickly and efficiently find a wide variety of information from sources across the enterprise, both inside and outside the Portal and related Publisher and Collaboration products. Search works with the ALI Directories and Web Services infrastructure to help employees do their jobs. Salespeople can find contract resources needed to close deals; marketing executives can find in-progress design documents for new products; customer service representatives can find resources stored in a variety of CRM, file, and Web repositories.
There are a number of possible sources of searchable content, and it is important to understand the options for providing that content to end-users:
The Search administrator is responsible for creating and scheduling the initial search index jobs as well as update jobs. The Search administrator is also responsible for customizing search "Best Bets" and the search thesaurus.
On Portal Content Responsibilities Worksheet, assign a leader to be responsible for implementing Search.
BEA provides the following resources to prepare the leader for this assignment.
ALI offers integration packages for commonly used applications. If ALI does not offer an integration package for an application you use, you can use the AquaLogic Interaction Development Kit (IDK) to develop integration packages for existing applications, packaged or custom, or to develop new applications to meet the needs of a dynamic enterprise.
This section provides the following examples of applications you can develop with the IDK:
For complete information on the IDK and more examples of custom-developed applications, see http://dev2dev.bea.com/aluserinteraction/.
Suppose your customer accounts are set up in a CRM system such as Siebel. As new accounts are added to Siebel, you need to provide customers access to the portal and certain communities on the portal.
You can set up an authentication web service to enable the portal to periodically connect to the Siebel system, query for customer users, and provision accounts for them on the portal. In addition, this authentication web service can also be configured to accept the username and password at login and authenticate the user against Siebel. This eliminates the need for creating portal accounts manually. Also, since access is based on the back-end system, the moment the customer account is suspended on Siebel, access on the portal is also automatically denied.
You can also set up a profile web service in conjunction with the authentication web service to tap into each customer's profile information on Siebel and augment the portal user profile. This profile information can be used to add the customer user to the appropriate groups that will drive personalization. This profile information might be the basis for providing access to relevant communities; for example, a company that sells wines could provide their distributor with access to the appropriate community depending on their geographical address, a portlet that lists all the special events could be personalized based on the user profile information that tracks geography.
Suppose that you want to provide a way for customers to look at the status of their orders and these orders are stored in a Lawson ERP system (it could be in any ERP system, packaged or homegrown). One solution is to develop a custom search web service that, given keywords such as start and end dates, pulls in a set of sales orders and associated status information. The search web service would use the customer user credentials and information for identification purposes and return only those sales orders corresponding to that customer. This search could be conducted from the Federated Search page or, alternatively, set up as a portlet inside a community.
Suppose that you want to be able to provide the customer with access to all the contracts that they have signed with your company and that these contracts are stored in an Windows file server. You can use the Content Service -Windows Files to crawl these documents into the Knowledge Directory, and the customer can browse the Knowledge Directory to find the contracts. Alternatively, you can create a content snapshot portlet that provides them with links to the Knowledge Directory that correspond to the contracts that pertain to them.
What if instead of just finished contracts, you need to keep various versions of contracts that are being negotiated between your sales representative and the customer. Use a Collaboration project to store these documents. Collaboration projects are appropriate for work in progress. When the document is finished, it can be stored in a document repository.
You can choose to give each customer a personalized experience replete with custom branding. You can create a Experience Definition that includes the customer's own branding. As soon as the customer logs in to the portal, they are directed to their branded Experience Definition. You can build custom navigation using the IDK Pluggable Navigation, replacing the portal's regular navigation. The look of a Experience Definition can be completely different from that of the parent portal.
Suppose that whenever a user from a particular customer site logs on, you want to be notified. Using the IDK Portal Event Interface (PEI), you can write custom code that gets triggered upon the customer logging in and notifies you via e-mail.
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