Back to Top

Understanding Oracle Instant Portal

Let's take a look at another page from Tangfish Software's portal to help illustrate some basic Oracle Instant Portal concepts:

1. For Tangfish Software, the default tabs along the top (Company, Sales, Finance, and so forth) are perfectly suited to company's goals, as they wish to create a company-wide intranet that includes these organizations. (The administrator did rename the Human Resources tab to HR.) This may be the case for your group as well, or you might want to rename the tabs, reorder them, and/or create new ones to better reflect your organization. A travel agency, for example, might find that tabs named Hotels, Restaurants, Air Fares, and Rental Cars are more closely aligned with the kind of work they do.
   
2. When you click a tab, a page called a top-level page is displayed. In the example above, the content of the Sales top-level page is displayed on the right side of the page, which is called the content area . Although the Sales page is populated with content in this example, all top-level pages are empty by default , waiting for you and your users to load them with content.
   
3. Notice the navigation area on the left, which appears on every page. Every navigation area contains:

1. The search box , which allows you to search the entire portal for a given string or limit your search to a single top-level page.
2. A list of the child pages for the current page. For the Sales top-level page, these pages are called Sales Reports, Presentations, Customers, and so on. Child pages are pages you create below a top-level page to organize the content associated with the larger theme, just as you used folders and sub-folders to organize content on your Windows desktop.

You can see how all of the Sales page's child pages clearly support the Sales organization. In fact, every top-level page comes with its own set of precreated pages, designed to help you organize your work within that theme. And because each child page can have its own child pages (the Customers page has three), you can easily create a hierarchy to neatly organize all of your content. The Sales hierarchy, for example, looks like this:

Now that you understand the concept of top-level and child pages, let's return to the home page for a moment. Recall that the content that appears there is simply a collection of content from other places. The News and Announcements areas of the home page are actually populated by two child pages of the Company page, as illustrated here:

By default, the Company page comes with two child pages, News and Announcements. Whatever you place on those pages also appears in the News

Tip: You can change the names of the News and Announcements pages to more closely reflect the kind of content you want to display on your home page. Simply rename the News or Announcements child page on the Company tab, and the name of the corresponding area on the home page changes as well. .

Back to Top

What Can You Do with Oracle Instant Portal?

As you begin working with Oracle Instant Portal, you'll immediately see how quickly you can customize it to reflect your organization. As time goes on, you'll find that it's very easy to administer the portal, and extremely easy for your users to come up to speed with it and to start contributing and sharing content. Let's take a look at some of these tasks.

Contributing Content

Here again is the sample page from the Tangfish Software portal:

Each block of text delineated by horizontal lines is an item within the portal. In this example, there are two items: Meet the Sales Department and Sales Forecast Figures Available Now. Items are the means through which you add content to your portal. You can add items to the portal by clicking the Edit Mode icon, which is located at the top of every Oracle Instant Portal page. You will see the Edit Mode icon, pictured below, only if you have the privileges to add content to the page.

(More about privileges later.) Once you are in Edit mode, you'll see the New Item button, located in the content area:

When you click the New Item button, a list of item types is displayed:

The type of item you select depends upon the kind of content you want to add, as described below:

After you select the type of item you want to add, simply follow the prompts to supply the necessary information. For example, when you add a File item, you are prompted for the file you want to upload. After you confirm the file name, the file is uploaded to the portal repository. Then you can add the title and summary text to the page so that others can understand what you just uploaded.

The first time you add a Rich Text or Expandable Rich Text item, you'll be impressed by how Oracle Instant Portal's in-place editing capabilities drastically simplify the task. As soon as you add an item, it appears on the page in context, ready for you to begin editing:

I

Now you can start entering the title, the summary, and the text of the item, exactly as it will appear to your users. And while you're writing the text, you have access to a full range of text editing controls, including bulleted lists, numbered lists, tables, cut and paste, indents and outdents, and so on. You can even work directly with HTML code (by toggling Source Editing mode on), or switch back and forth between edit modes as you need to. You can enrich your text by including images, hyperlinks, and tables. In the example below, a table is being added, which can be populated and/or modified using standard table editing tools:

To give you the flexibility you need, Oracle Instant Portal allows you to cut and copy items, move items to different pages, delete items—all the tools you need to develop content-rich portals and allow you to manage and share the content with others. And if something isn't quite right with what you've done, you can use the Revert key to restore the item to the way it was before you started editing.

Back to Top

Creating New Pages

It's just as easy to add top-level pages and child pages in Oracle Instant Portal as it is to add items. One of the aspects of Oracle Instant Portal that makes it so easy to use is that navigation and creation are inextricably linked. You don't have to create an entity and then introduce that entity later into an existing structure. Everything is done in context. For example, you can create child pages right in the navigation area, then use simple controls to reposition, edit, or delete that page:

Similarly, Oracle Instant Portal administrators can add, delete, or edit top-level pages right in context.

Back to Top

Administering Oracle Instant Portal

Managing an Oracle Instant Portal is far less complicated and takes significantly less time than managing a full-scale enterprise portal. With just a few simple steps, you can brand your portal with your corporate identity, select a color scheme for your portal, and set up accounts for all your users.

Back to Top

Customizing the Look and Feel

There are three main ways in which to brand your portal: change its title, add a logo, and choose an appropriate color scheme.

The banner is the top region of the page, which is constant, no matter which tabbed page is active. Here is an example of a typical banner:

The Welcome link at the top of the banner contains the name of the logged in user (in this example, PORTAL), along with links to log out of the portal and to change aspects of the user's profile. You can add your own corporate logo to the right of the banner, and provide a name for the portal on the left.

Selecting a style for your portal is equally easy. By clicking the style icon in the Edit toolbar, you can display a list of ten different styles, each centered around a professionally designed color scheme. As you run your cursor down the list, you can instantly see how your portal appears in each color. When you select the one you want, the entire portal is rendered in that color scheme for every user. In the image below, we're previewing the Blue style.

Back to Top

Controlling Access to Your Portal

Creating users and managing the roles they are to play within the portal can be an arduous task. In Oracle Instant Portal, however, a simple security model protects your content without placing an undue burden on you, the administrator.

A single user can have a different level of security (View, Contribute, or Manage) for each top-level page within the portal:

• View privileges allow the user to view content on the page.

• Contribute privileges allow the user to add items to the page.

• Manage privileges give the user full permissions over the page, including the ability to add child pages.

The privileges you set for a top-level page always cascade down to the child pages.

You create users and manage their privileges through a single, easy-to-use dialog:

The left pane lists all registered users, while the pane on the right lists all the pages in the portal. When you select a user on the left, the pane on the right reflects that user's privilege level for each page in the portal. Granting or revoking privileges is as simple as checking or unchecking a box.

You can also control access to a page from the page itself by clicking the Manage Page Privileges icon:

The Manage Page Privileges window looks similar to the Manage User Rights window, but the privileges you can set there are confined to the page from which it was launched.

When a user is granted Manage privileges on any portal's home page, that user is considered an Oracle Instant Portal administrator and has full privileges over that particular portal. Additionally, the Oracle Instant Portal administrator can:

• Create new users.

• Delete any user in the Manage User Rights dialog, even those he or she did not create. (For this reason, it's wise to restrict the number of users who have Manage privileges on a home page.)

• Create new Oracle instant portals.

Users that were created through OracleAS Portal can also have access to Oracle instant portals, as long as you first add the users to the OIP_AVAILABLE_USERS group. Then you can use the Manage User Rights dialog to grant appropriate privilege levels to the users.

Back to Top

Creating New Portals

You may find that you need more than one instance of Oracle Instant Portal to fulfill your needs. For example, Sales, Marketing, and Development may wish to have their own portals, or perhaps you want to set up separate portals to exchange information with your suppliers or customers. Generating Oracle Instant Portal instances is easy. Simply click the Portal Builder link in the Edit Mode toolbar:

This link takes you into OracleAS Portal, through which you can access the Oracle Instant Portal portlet:

With this portlet, you can create new portals, navigate between your portals, or delete portals you no longer need—assuming you have the appropriate privileges. You can also generate a portal with a custom structure (that is, tabbed pages and child pages) based upon a predefined XML taxonomy file.

Back to Top

What's Next?

Now that you're familiar with the basics of Oracle Instant Portal, you're ready to begin using it! Assuming that you're the Oracle Instant Portal administrator, check out the online help to find out exactly how to customize your instance of Oracle Instant Portal as described in this document.

You'll find that most tasks within Oracle Instant Portal are completed through steps that are quick, easy, and intuitive. You'll find that most of your users will be independent almost immediately, and few will have to spend valuable time experimenting or consulting the documentation to see how to complete a given task. With Oracle Instant Portal, you'll have a customized portal for secure publishing and information sharing in just a few hours:

Back to Top