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CREATING A BRANDED PORTAL IN MINUTES WITH ORACLE PORTAL ONLINE

Sara Gardner, Oracle Corporation

 

What is Oracle Portal Onlines Who uses Oracle Protal Online?   How do you get started?   Using your generated portal   Customizing the page and adding content?   Site Adminstratiors and end users      

WHAT IS ORACLE PORTAL ONLINE?

This white paper will give you an overview of Oracle Portal Online, show you how to signup and give you a basic overview of some of the key features. It will also talk briefly about some of the new features that will be appearing on the service soon.


Figure 1: Home page for Oracle Portal Online


OVERVIEW
Oracle9iAS Portal is a software framework for building and deploying personalized web sites that deliver information and applications to customers, employees, and partners. Oracle Portal Online is a hosted service built on Oracle9iAS Portal. Fully accessible from the Internet, the service enables any company, organization or group to build and securely manage a self-service portal to enable their community to collaborate - in minutes!. Oracle Portal Online is primarily targeted at business communities including small companies, departments in a large companies or groups of business partners spanning different companies. Today Oracle Portal Online is used by a diverse range of companies spread over many different countries.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?
Since Oracle Portal Online is built with Oracle9iAS Portal users already familiar with Oracle's portal offering will feel right at home. We are running release 3.0.9 today. New users will find the tools simple to use and there is plenty of online help and tutorials available. Oracle Portal Online provides the following key features:
Registration and site generation wizard to enable you to quickly build and securely manage a self-service portal to enable your community to collaborate.
An extensible framework that integrates web-based resources such as web pages, applications, and syndicated content feeds, into your portal within standardized, reusable information components called portlets.
Self-service publishing features allowing you to post and share any kind of document or web content with other users anywhere in the world.
An easy-to-use, customization interface that provides an organized, consistent view of the business information, web content, and applications needed by each of your users.
Browser based administrative tools to enable you to add and manage users, control access rights and monitor usage of your portal.
Application wizards to enable fast development of commonly used applications including surveys and FAQs.

NO SET UP, JUST SIGN UP!
All you need is a Web browser! You can sign for the service through a registration wizard at http://portal.oracle.com/. The wizard gathers both registration information about your company or organization and preference information to set up your initial portal. (Note: At the time of writing, Oracle Portal Online is in free trial mode and registrations are therefore screened to determine eligibility before access is provided to the service). Once you have been approved you will be given usernames and passwords and a company identifier to access your account. Upon logging in, you will find a pre-generated portal based upon the information you provided at registration time and of course access to all the tools you need to customize this portal or build a completely new one. From building to viewing to administration, its all done right from your Web Browser!

WHO USES ORACLE PORTAL ONLINE?

Today there are over 1400 subscribers on Oracle Portal Online. There are many different types of organizations in many different countries. There are however some common themes that we have noticed.


COMMUNITIES
Oracle Portal Online provides an ideal solution for community communication. Communities already utilizing Oracle Portal Online include user groups, non-profit organizations and business associations. Since their portal is accessible from the Internet it easy for everyone to access and share information.

COMPANIES WITH AN OUTSOURCING STRATEGY
Many companies look to outsourcing especially when their company is small or geographically dispersed. Whether its a tactical solution for sharing marketing and sales collateral or a full blown company Intranet, Oracle Portal Online can provide the platform.

ORACLE ONLINE SERVICE USERS
Many users of Oracle Portal Online also utilize Oracle's other online service offerings including Oracle Sales Online, Oracle Small Business Suite and Oracle e-Business Suite. Oracle Portal Online enables them to manage and share related content.

ORACLE 9IAS PORTAL EVALUATORS
Oracle Portal Online provides a quick and easy way for companies to prototype and test out Oracle Portal.

HOW DO YOU GET STARTED?

So how do you get started?


SIGNING UP

Step 1 is to sign up at http://portal.oracle.com/ You will need to complete our registration wizard in order gain access to the service. You will asked some basic registration questions about yourself and your company.
Next you will be asked for a site title, description and logo. The site description is important - we use this as part of our screening process during the trial period to determine eligibility for service. The description should describe what you plan to use your Portal site for. The logo is optional but if you upload one it will be added to your default site.
Next choose a color scheme for your portal. We have defined 8 basic schemes - choose the one you prefer. Don't worry if you are not sure, it is easy to change colors later when you get access to your portal.
The next step is to specify your users. It is worth spending some time first to figure out who will be in your user community and how you want to organize them. Groups are used to organize users - they will be used later for access control. We create 2 groups automatically. Site Administrators have the full privileges needed to manage the portal and environment. End users just have basic access to view and personalize the portal generated. You will likely want to create additional groups that relate to your organization e.g. Sales, marketing and finance. Once you have specified your groups you will be asked to add your team members by specifying their email addresses.
The last step is to add some default content to your generated portal. We provide some basic news feeds and productivity tools to get you started. There are lots of other content feeds and tools that you can pick from once you get access to your portal.
Once you have signed up we will process your registration and either generate your site and send you access details or notify you if you are ineligible for a free site. As previously mentioned we are screening applications during the trial period and give preference to organizations rather than individuals. We generally respond to registrations within 2 business days.

 


Figure 2: Signing up for Oracle Portal Online


USING YOUR GENERATED PORTAL

Once your request has been processed and approved you will be sent instructions for accessing your site. You will use your unique company identifier each time you login. When you login for the first time you will see the default generated environment based on your preferences at registration time. A basic overview of your generated portal follows.


USERS
An account will have been created for each team member that you entered during registration. Users will have been organized into the groups you specified. Users login at http://portal.oracle.com/ by specifying their username, password and company each time they login to your site. (We'll talk more about public access later in the "What's next?" section)

CONTENT AREA
When you register with Oracle Portal Online, you receive, among other things, your own content area. A content area is an area within the database that you use to store, organize, classify, and publish content. Each content area is made up of at least one folder, and usually many more. A folder contains and displays content and they are organized hierarchically. In your default Portal you will have a folder called "Group Docs" with sub folders for each group that you created. Each group folder will only be accessible by the members of the relevant group. You will also have a folder called "My Docs" with a personal folder for each user. (Site Administrators can see all folders by default.)

PORTAL PAGE

A page is the face of a portal; what you see and use to interact with the content of the portal. Each page is divided into regions, each of which contains information in the form of portlets. A page usually contains portlets from many different sources. In fact, that is the beauty of portlet technology--a single page can provide information from several different sources side by side, so that you can access them quickly.
Your default page will have 3 tabs Main, My Docs, and Group Docs. On the Main page will be portlets enabling you to search content in your portal, search your user directory and keep track of your favorite web links. You will also see the content feed or productivity application portlets you chose at registration time. On the My Docs and Group Docs tabs are folder portlets. That is, what's displayed in this portlet is actually the contents of a folder. On My Docs tab you will see your own personal folder and on the Group Docs tab you will see folders for the groups you belong to. (Site Admins will see all folder portlets by default).
Once you familiarized yourself with the generated portal its time to start customizing.

 

Figure 3: Example of a generated portal


CUSTOMIZING THE PAGE AND ADDING CONTENT?

This paper will not cover all of the tools and techniques available to you to build your portal, just a brief description of some of the basics. To experience all that Oracle Portal online has to offer you will need to signup!


SITE ADMINISTRATORS AND END USERS

Site Administrators have more privileges than end users. You can alter privileges to suit your needs but by default only Site Administrators will have full capabilities over page customization. End users will only be able to personalize their own view.


CUSTOMIZING THE PAGE

There are lots of ways to change the look and feel of your portal. You can change the color scheme and fonts (style), the layout of the portal pages (regions) and edit the banner to change the greeting, site logo and shortcut bar. Everything is done through simple to use wizards. Adding portlets is easy too. We provide a whole library of portlets called the Portlet Repository. You will find a plethora of content feeds, productivity tools and specialized portlets delivering Internet content and enabling you to surface content stored in your Portal content area.

 

Figure 4: Customizing your portal page


MANAGING CONTENT

Oracle Portal Online makes self service content publishing easy through the use of simple wizards. Access controls determine which users can publish to which folders. Content can also be classified using categories and perspectives and easily searched using the built in search facilities.
Folder portlets are used to surface content on the portal page and layout and style can be configured to get the exact look and feel required.


BUILDER

By default when you login to your site you will see the portal that was generated for you. Clicking on the Builder link (Site Administrators only) takes you to the Oracle Portal Design Time pages. You will find 3 tabs - Build, Administer and Monitor.

 


Figure 5: Portal Design Time pages


BUILD TAB

On the Build tab you will find portlets that enable you to create brand new portal pages, surveys and FAQs. Although we have generated a portal page for you, you may want to create a new one from scratch. The page creation wizard will guide you through the process.
The Survey wizard enables you to quickly build surveys and polls and place them on your portal so that you can get feedback from your community. All survey results are tracked in the Oracle database and results can be reviewed as reports or charts.
The FAQ wizard enables you to easily organize questions and answers into an FAQ and stage it on your portal.


ADMINISTER TAB

You will find wizards to create and manage groups on the Administer Tab along with advanced administration features to allow you to register external applications either as single sign-on links or as full blown portlets on your portal.


MONITOR TAB

The Monitoring Tab provides monitoring reports and charts to enable you to track activity on your Portal.


NAVIGATOR

The Navigator link is also only presented to Site Administrators by default and allows you to easily browse and manage your pages, content area and content area objects.


GETTING HELP

This white paper presents only a brief overview of the features that Oracle Portal Online offers however, there is plenty of help once you signup.


TRAINING

There is a simple tutorial to get you started when you first access your site. It will walk you through all the features discussed in this white paper step by step. We are adding more training materials to Oracle Portal Online including more advanced content management features.


SUPPORT

There is an FAQ on the site but if you can't find answers to your questions we also provide email support. Alternatively there is an Oracle Portal Online discussion form on the Oracle Technology Network at http://otn.oracle.com/


NEWSLETTER

Every month we send out a Newsletter highlighting new features on the service, tips and tricks and examples.


WHAT'S COMING NEXT WITH ORACLE PORTAL ONLINE?

We are continuing to evolve the Oracle Portal Online service gradually exposing more features of Oracle 9iAS Portal as well as adding more pre-built components and tools to make building your portal easier.


EXTENDED COLLABORATION FEATURES

Since many of our subscribers are using their portals to collaborate with their teams and communities we are adding more collaboration features.
We are about to beta test our discussion forums which will enable you to easily build and manage discussion forums on any subject relevant to your community. We are using the same technology that we use to host discussion forums on the Oracle Technology Network.
We will also providing a chat portlet to enable you to communicate real time with other users on your portal. We plan to release Calendar, To Do and simple Address Book functionality next year.


APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT

The only major area of functionality in Oracle 9iAS Portal that is not yet enabled is Application Development. Oracle 9iAS Portal provides wizards to enable you to build and manage database objects including tables and views and to publish and edit the data using tools like charts, reports and forms. We are hosting the portal hands-on sessions here at Oracle Open World using these features and will turn them on to our beta sites shortly.


BRANDED URLS AND VPN

Today you and your users access your portal site through http://portal.oracle.com/ by logging in with username, password and company information. We plan to introduce branded URLs early next year so that you will be able to go direct to your portal at your own unique branded URL e.g. http://mycompany.portal.oracle.com/ This will also enable you to present a public face to your site. Users will only need to provide username and password to login.
For companies who want to integrate their Oracle Portal Online site with their own Intranet we will offer a VPN solution.


SUMMARY

Oracle Portal Online is a hosted service built on Oracle9iAS Portal. Fully accessible from the Internet, the service enables you to build and securely manage a self-service portal to enable your community to collaborate - in minutes!.
Today you can take advantage of our free trial service. We will announce competitive pricing in the New Year. Oracle Portal Online is the fastest and easiest way to build your portal.

 

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