Whereas large corporations can invest in the resources to design and build enterprise portals and support the dedicated IT staff to maintain these portals, smaller businesses—and departments in larger enterprises—with a pressing need for publishing and sharing information can't afford the high cost of building and supporting the portals they need. Oracle Instant Portal provides an out-of-the-box portal solution designed for companies and departments that require cost-effective, easy-to-build, easy-to-maintain content portals.

When you install Oracle Application Server 10g Standard Edition One, your first portal application is created automatically based on a set of company departments, with prebuilt tabs for Sales, HR, Marketing, and so on. With in-place editing, you can easily customize the portal, upload content (WebDAV is supported), and choose a predefined color scheme. Use the one-click wizard to build any additional portals you require. The figure below shows the default My Company portal with some simple customizations:

Notice the following about the portal pictured above :

• The company name and logo appear on a banner across the top of the portal.
• The professional color scheme was selected from one of 10 pre-defined styles.
• A set of preconfigured tabbed pages, based on the default intranet structure include quick navigation links to the nested pages within a tab.
• A built-in search portlet appears on all pages and subpages.
• The Edit Mode icon allows users with Edit privilege to toggle between View and Edit modes.
• The content area on each tab enables facilitates the upload of a variety of content types, including rich text and expandable rich text, images, files, HTML, URLs, and email links. A table editor is one of several innovative content editing aids.
• An intuitive table editor is available for manipulating tables in Rich Text and Expandable Rich Text items.
• The home page (see below), which is always automatically generated, has portlets for displaying company news and announcements as well as for highlighting new content and user favorites. There are also email links to the site's project manager and to Support, as well as a URL link to the corporate Web site.

Oracle Instant Portal is all about point and click:

• You simply click the Edit Mode icon at the top of any page to toggle between view and edit modes. You never leave the page when editing—it's all done in place.
• The layered UI provides context-sensitive toolbars and menus to manipulate the page and its content.
• Editing features include point-and-click portal branding and styling, page management, content management, user management, and access control.
• Oracle Instant Portal supports rich text content, uploaded images and files, and links to Web sites and email addresses. You can copy and paste HTML directly from other sources or manipulate the HTML in place.
• Capabilities such as undo, redo, cut/copy/paste are also provided.
• The portal administrator can create and delete users, and grant privileges, directly inside a portal. A simplified security model organizes users into viewers, contributors, or managers for each of the main portal pages.

A Word about OracleAS Portal

Both Oracle Instant Portal and OracleAS Portal are included in the Oracle Application Server 10g Standard Edition One package. Whereas Oracle Instant Portal provides a content-sharing portal right out of the box, OracleAS Portal offers a complete and integrated framework for developing, deploying, and managing world-class enterprise portals. For employees, partners, and customers who want to access business applications, content, collaborative tools, and Web sites, OracleAS Portal brings a complete solution that is tightly integrated with Oracle Application Server. Visit Oracle Technology Network to learn more about this award-winning feature.