Oracle9iAS Portal Getting Started

Welcome to Oracle9iAS Portal!

No matter what you want to dobrowse content, add content, or create the portal infrastructureOracle9iAS Portal provides an open, productive, and complete environment with just the tools you need, and without the distraction of the tools you dont need. Depending on the type of user you are, you can learn much of what you need to know simply by reading a few concepts and working through the accompanying handson exercises. What do you want to do?

Learn the Basics Find Content and Make Your Portal Your Own Add Content Create Pages Build Portlets Administer Page Groups Administer the Portal

If youre new to Portal, be sure to visit the Learning the Basics section. It will introduce you to terms and concepts essential to using Oracle9iAS Portal.

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Learn the Basics

Oracle9iAS Portal is a browser-based application for building and deploying e-business portals. It provides a complete set of open, productive, self-service tools for publishing information, building applications, and deploying and administering your enterprise portal environment. But what is a portal? In a way, a portal is like a shopping mall: one structure housing many different types of content that spring from many different sources, all presented under a single roof--the portal. Typically, a shopping mall is divided into multiple levels, each with its own floor plan.

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The floor plan specifies how space on a given floor is divided up among that floors resident vendors. Similarly, a portal is comprised of groups of pages, each page divided into regions. The regions specify how space on a given page is allotted to that pages items and portlets. Just as the shopping malls floor plan includes rules for how much space is to be allocated to each participant vendor and how that space can be used, you may apply rules to each region within a portal page to specify how the region should appear and how the data within it should behave.

Vendors may apply for special-use waivers that allow them to vary from the shopping malls standard rules for look-and-feel. Similarly, you can specify style standards for pages, and override them with a different style specification for a particular region on the page.

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The shopping mall provides static content, such as signs, directions, and listings of available services, and dynamic content in the form of stores with ever-changing inventory where business is transacted. A portal provides static items, such as images and text, and dynamic items, such as portlets that display or link to forms, reports, charts, news feeds, Web pages, or other components that may interact with one or more underlying data sources.

Oracle9iAS Portal provides an assortment of building blocks for creating content-rich portals:

Pages. Pages make your content accessible. They combine the features of a directory folder and a browser page. Like a folder, a page exists within a hierarchy and can contain content. Like a browser page, it has a user interface that permits page designers to control how the information displays on the page.

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Page Groups. Page groups define a user environment that includes pages and their associated supporting objects. When you first create a page group, you specify the language and, optionally, the template against which all pages within that group will be built.

Regions. Each page is divided into one or more regions. Many aspects of how page content is displayed are defined at the region level. For example, regions can contain multiple items or one or more portlets. Regions can also be set up to include one or more tabs.

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Items and Portlets. In Portal, content takes one of two forms: a portlet or an item. A portlet is a reusable building block for easily publishing information and applications to your community. An item is a lower-level building block used to provide navigation or display content, such as documents, URLs, text, and images.

Templates and Navigation Pages. Templates are special pages from which other pages can inherit properties that define, among other things, the size, location, and number of regions on a page. Navigation pages provide a way for authorized users to create things like navigation bars and banners, which can be reused on multiple pages. Navigation pages do not show up in your regular page hierarchy. You can select them as a banner during page creation, or add them to a page as a portlet at any time. Styles. Styles control the colors, fonts, and backgrounds of pages and their content. You can apply styles to pages and regions within pages.

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Classifications. Portal provides categories and perspectives as a means of applying a classification to the content (items and portlets) you add to your portal. Categories and perspectives can be used to locate that content during searches. Use categories to describe the type of content you are adding. For example, if you are creating a Human Resources page you might have categories such as Benefits, Policies, and Payroll. Use perspectives to describe the type of person who might be interested in the content, for example, managers, supervisors, and non-exempt employees.

When you first log in to Oracle9iAS Portal, you may notice many different navigational elements, typically, buttons, links, and tabs. Depending on your companys configuration, the upper right corner of your Portal home page may contain a shortcut bar with links and buttons that will take you to advanced functional areas within Portal or to other portals. The buttons, links, and tabs you see depend on which ones your companys page designer included as well as what privileges you have on the page.

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You may see any combination of these links, as well as those your company page designer has included:

The Edit link is the entry point for edit mode, where you can change page properties, styles, and user access rules, as well as add sub-pages. Edits affect the page everyone sees. The Customize link is the starting point for rearranging portlets and adding existing portlets to a page. Customizations affect only your view of the page. The Builder link is the starting point for developing Page Groups, Providers, and Database Objects. Page Groups provide the organizational environments for pages. They include the pages themselves as well as the portal objects that support building and classifying pages and page content. Providers are the registered entities through which components, such as portlets and applications, are created and made available. Database Objects are database schemas that are exposed through the portal. The Help link links to a rich source of descriptive and step-by-step information on how to use Portal. Additionally, some banners include a question mark icon. This links to context-sensitive help topics that will assist you with whatever page youre on.

Tabs near the top of the page take you to member pages within your current portal. Within some Portal functions, tabs are also frequently used to break up a task into groups of related steps. Click the Builder link to view the Portal Design-Time page. In addition to any custom tabs your portal administrator may include, your view of the Portal Design-Time page may also include any of these default tabs, typically visible only to those building the portal and those with privileges to see them:

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The Build tab is a starting point for creating and editing pages and page groups or providers and provider groups. (Some of this functionality is also available when you click the Navigator button in the shortcut bar.) The Administer tab is a starting point for creating and editing users and groups, administering security for Portal and Oracle Reports, setting user and group profiles, and configuring Portal services, such as the Global Settings you will use with Portal. By default, only portal administrators can access this tab. The Administer Database tab is useful for creating and editing schemas, creating and editing database roles, and viewing reports on database memory consumption, storage use, and lots of other information concerning your database. By default, only database administrators can access this tab.

Find Content and Make Your Portal Your Own

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No matter the size of the enterprise, most companies have a vast library of useful documents and applications that are essential for getting your job done. It can be a challenge to locate just the document you need, to return to it once youve found where its stored, and to keep on top of critical changes to it. Oracle9iAS Portal helps you with all of these challenges. For locating essential information, Portal provides a search feature that enables you to look for information according to the ways it has been classified (via categories and perspectives), or against terms available in its content, its author, or a number of other criteria.

Oracle9iAS Portal comes with a Saved Searches portlet you can use to save useful search strings. Your search string displays as a link in the portlet, which you can click to initiate another search based on the string. If your companys page designer did not include this portlet in your default set up, you can always add it yourself. Once you find the information youre looking for, you can add a link to it in the Favorites portlet on your personal page.

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[Viewlet] Show me how to add a link to the Favorites portlet! Additionally, Portal provides a subscription service you can use to subscribe to pages and receive notification when those pages are updated.

[Viewlet] Show me how to keep up with changes to pages that are important to me! Portal also gives you the power to arrange the information on your personal start page to suit your specific needs and preferences. Add your own tabs, show or hide the default portlets, or add new portlets from registered portlet providers.

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[Viewlet] Show me how to arrange information on my personal page!

Oracle9iAS Portal offers comprehensive task help that will step you through any type of action you wish to perform within Portal. To access help, click the Help button in the Shortcut bar at the top of every Portal page. For context-sensitive help, click the question mark icon that appears in the page or portlet banner.

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Add Content

In a business environment, bottlenecks can easily form as new content from multiple sources moves to the one or two people allowed to publish it to the Web. Oracle9iAS Portal destroys these bottlenecks with its highly collaborative environment. With Oracle9iAS Portal, you can share content management tasks, like adding, editing, and placing content, across your organization.

Once your portal administrator has assigned you Edit privileges, its easy to add new content: enter Edit mode, select a region, choose Add Content, grab the item, and click OK. Additionally, depending on what attributes have been assigned to the item, you can choose the category under which an item appears, enter a description of the items content, or enable a checkout feature to ensure that only one person at a time will edit the item. Oracle9iAS Portal Getting Started Page 13 of 31

Those with Manage with Approval privileges, can use the Status Portlet to see where the items you want to publish are in the approval queue. These are just a few of the features and customizations you can apply to any item you publish through Oracle9iAS Portal! [Viewlet] Show me how to add a file! When youre in Edit mode, a control panel appears in the upper left portion of the page. This gives you access to different editing views, including graphical, layout, list, and mobile. Edit mode is the starting point for adding content; editing page properties, styles, and access rules; creating sub-pages; adding and arranging portlets and tabs; and editing page regions.

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The actions you perform in Edit mode affect everyones view of the portal. [Viewlet] Show me how to use the Edit mode control panel! Whether you have one or many items to upload, Oracle9iAS Portal provides the tools to make it easy. Once you have Manage Content privileges, you can even upload a Zip file then unzip it in Portal.

This enables you to load many files at once, including the files directory structures, significantly reducing the time it takes to load multiple files. It simplifies the process of loading, for example, HTML and image files intertwined with relative links by preserving the files locations relative to each other, and consequently preserving the links. [Viewlet] Show me how to upload multiple files simultaneously!

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To make adding content even easier, with Oracle9iAS Portal you can edit any WebDAVenabled item in your portal, without having to upload the newly edited file. For example, edit a Microsoft Word file that is stored in your portal, then save your changes. This automatically updates the file in your portal without requiring that you upload the newly edited version.

Create Pages

Whether youre short on time and want pre-built components to help create pages rapidly or simply want a wide range of tools and options for creating custom pages, Oracle9iAS Portal has what you need. Portal includes many easy-to-use tools for creating pages, applying styles, adding images, and providing navigation to get your pages up-to-speed and out the door.

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Create Portal pages by accessing the Portal Navigator and completing a series of dialogs through a page creation wizard. Simply provide a page name, and youre done. If you want, you can also select a template, apply a pre-packaged or a custom style, and specify page access privileges to control who may view your page. [Viewlet] Show me how to create a page!

You can define your layout with a Portal-provided template or a custom template you provide. You can keep your templates private during development, and make them public and accessible to all users when youre ready to roll them out. Only you can modify the templates you own.

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Page styles control the colors and fonts used within the page and the colors, fonts, and header style used by any portlets displayed within the page. You have two options for setting a page style:

Select a style from a list of available styles (the ones you own and public styles). Create a new style and apply it to a page.

When you create a page style, you define background colors and font attributes, like size, color, face, and style. The page styles you create can be applied to one or more pages. This means you can change a style setting for a style you own, and immediately update all the pages that use that style. [Viewlet] Show me how to create a style! You can further customize your pages by adding images, for example, in place of default banner text, in a page background, or in a consistent location on a page to reinforce company branding or enhance the appearance of the page.

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To help users get around your pages, you have many options for adding navigation:

Set up a navigation bar that includes links and linked images, search fields, and dropdown lists of your site categories and perspectives. Add links to banners that appear within the page. Create site-wide links that appear at the bottom of each page that you create (footers).

[Viewlet] Show me how to add a link to a banner!

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Build Portlets

In Oracle9iAS Portal, developers at all levels of sophistication will find an open environment with a complete set of productive tools for creating static, dynamic, and transactional components and exposing them as portlets in your enterprise portal.

For developers who prefer a declarative environment, Oracle9iAS Portals wizards step you through the creation of reports, forms, charts, and other types of dynamic components with tools so easy to use that even a novice developer can turn out a report in no time! [Viewlet] Show me how to build a simple report portlet!

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With Oracle9iAS Portals mobile capability, its easy to adjust a portal component for display on a mobile device. The wizard allows you to select the columns in the original form, report, or chart that you want to display, allowing you to pare data down for display on a very small screen.

You also have the option of extending your component by adding PL/SQL that runs at different points during the execution of the form, report, or chart. Through the wizard, enter PL/SQL that will execute before displaying the page, after displaying the header, before displaying the footer, and after displaying the page.

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In Oracle9iAS Portals open environment, youre not limited to the tools Portal provides. You can build components with your tools of choice and integrate them with Portal through Portals many Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), available in the Portal Developer Kit (PDK). The PDK is also a means for developers who prefer to have total control over development to hand-code their own portlets.

Administer Page Groups

To keep your companys internal and external Web sites uncluttered and well organized, Oracle9iAS Portal provides a sophisticated but simple means of securing and delegating ownership of the page groups that comprise your companys presence on the Web.

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Setting up a new page group is as easy as clicking a Create button and specifying some basic page group properties. These include naming the group, specifying the default language for member pages, and selecting a default template on which new group pages can be based. [Viewlet] Show me how to create a page group!

Once you create a page group, you can edit it to exercise a greater level of control over how member pages will behave and who will have what kind of access to them. In the Page Group portlet, select a page group and click the Edit button to revise basic page group properties, configure the page group, specify rules governing item versioning and deletion, define rules governing translation, and set user and group access privileges to member pages.

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[Viewlet] Show me how to edit a page group!

Oracle9iAS Portal creates some default page groups during installation. You can start using these right away. They include:

Corporate Pages for your corporate home pages Portal Design-Time Pages for pages to be used in Portals design-time environment (e.g., default search pages) Documentation for the Portal online help Portlet Repository for pages that list all the portlet providers and associated portlets available in your installation User Approval Page Group for creating an approval process for self-registered user accounts (this page group displays only if self-registration with approval required is enabled) Shared Objects for page group objects that may be used in any page group, including categories and perspectives (Shared Objects contains users personal pages)

Each item you add to a page comes with a default set of item attributes, such as display name, basic search keywords, or display options. You can use Portal to create a custom item type by copying the base attributes of a standard item type (such as a file, a banner, or a link), then revising them, or by basing an item on none, then creating all new attributes. Add custom item types to your page group to extend standard type definitions or to create entirely new item types.

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Change an attributes default value, enter a custom value in an attributes entry field, or specify whether the attribute is required. You caneven specify whether the attribute will display in the Portal Add or Edit Wizards. Advanced users can add calls to PL/SQL and HTTP procedures and pass attributes to these procedures. Once configured, a custom item type allows you to capture information about the content as it is being published or edited. In this way, you can ensure that content is relevant to your business and easier to locate. (You can use Advanced Search to search for a particular type of item attribute.)

[Viewlet] Show me how to create a custom item type!

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You can also create custom page types. Like items, pages come with base attributes you can customize. The only exception for pages is that you cant base a page on none and build from nothing. You must work with the base attributes that apply to the page.

With Oracle9iAS Portal you can design an approval process that begins whenever a user with Manage with Approval privileges creates or edits an item. The item moves to one or more approvers, simultaneously or in parallel, and is published only when your approval chain is complete. This can be particularly useful for document reviews!

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You can pre-design default content classifications by setting up categories and perspectives. Your users can take advantage of these to classify the content they add to pages and to simplify the search for content of interest. [Viewlet] Show me how to create categories and perspectives!

Administer the Portal

When we say Oracle9iAS Portal is complete, we mean it provides an application framework that supports every level of involvement with a business portal, from content viewers, content publishers, and application developers, all the way up to those administering the portal. For the administrator, the Portal framework provides services, such as access to monitoring and configuration tools, single sign-on, directory integration, caching, and security. All features needed to manage users and groups, to set up security Oracle9iAS Portal Getting Started Page 27 of 31

and search features, and to administer the portal and database are incorporated into a series of dialog boxes accessed through portlets on a portal page.

For monitoring and configuration services, Oracle9iAS Portal integrates seamlessly with Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM), included with Oracle9iAS. In Portal, click the Builder link in the shortcut bar, then the Administer tab, scroll down to the Services Portlet, and click on Portal Services Monitoring. Here you can configure Data Access Descriptors (DADs) to specify how mod_plsql connects to a database to fulfill an HTTP request; configure mod_plsql cache settings; and monitor the components Portal depends on, such as the Oracle HTTP Server, mod_plsql, the Parallel Page Engine, the Oracle9i Database, the Single Sign-On Server, the Syndication Server, Ultra Search, and your various Providers. Additionally, OEM offers a user interface to maintain other relevant mid-tier configuration files, such as httpd.conf, jserv.properties, zone.properties, and plsql.conf configuration files.

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For administering users, a user, portal user profile, group, and portal group profile manager enables you to create and manage user accounts, profiles, and groups. Users are granted portal privileges that allow them to authenticate to the portal through Oracle9iAS Single Sign-On and access secured information and features. Additionally, you can grant users global privileges on objects within specific object types. (Object types include pages, layouts, styles, portlets, providers, page groups, applications, shared components, user profiles, group profiles, schemas, logs, and transport sets for export/import.)

The main advantage to Single Sign-On is that it reduces or eliminates the necessity for users to enter multiple logins as they access multiple applications and multiple data sources. Credentials are stored in the Oracle Internet Directory (OID). The SSO Server ensures that a user only logs on once to access any of the partner or registered external applications as they move from one application to another.

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To create a new user, you access the user manager in the Delegated Administration Service (DAS) of OID through the User portlet of the Portal. A minimal amount of information about the user is required to create a user account: a username, an e-mail address, and a default password. Account information is stored in OID. You can also import account information from any LDAP directory into OID. By assigning privileges to various groups, you establish roles that control which group has access to what Portal functionality. During installation, Oracle9iAS Portal creates several groups to implement base user privileges and additional database-level privileges. Unauthenticated users are given access to all objects that are granted to the PUBLIC user. Likewise, logged-on users have access to the objects granted to the AUTHENTICATED_USERS group. You can grant additional portal-level privileges to users and groups to perform special specific functions:

The PORTLET_PUBLISHERS group has Create privileges for publishing portlets. The PORTAL_DEVELOPERS group has Create privileges for developing components, applications, and database objects. The PORTAL_ADMINISTRATORS group has Manage privileges for all nondatabase object types, the ability to administer the SSO Server, and the necessary privileges in OID to create and edit users. The DBA group has Manage privileges for all object types and all the necessary privileges in OID to manage users and groups and to administer the SSO Server.

To enhance performance and scalability, Oracle9iAS Portal makes use of Oracle9iAS Web Cache. This provides two key performance advantages:

Metadata and content are cached in memory, providing a significant performance enhancement over file-based caching. Different types of caching are available, including expiry-based, validation-based, and invalidation-based caching. Expiry-based caching uses the cached portlet for Page 30 of 31

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a specific period of time, then refreshes content when that time expires. Validation-based caching checks the cached portlet and uses the information in the cache as long as its current. In invalidation-based caching, the application notifies the cache when specific metadata or content becomes invalid due to a change in the metadata or content. Page metadata, login metadata, and database and Web portlets are cached using Web Cache. Caching page metadata eliminates the need to go to the database to obtain the page metadata or provider session information. Caching Web portlets eliminates the need to contact the provider to obtain Web portlet content. Database providers can use a combination of invalidation- and validation-based caching at the same time. Oracle9iAS Portals export/import feature supports the migration of portals and content between development and production environments. Use the Portal Navigator to export page groups or database providers. When you export page groups, all objects within the page group as well as referenced and shared objects are exported, including pages, categories, perspectives, styles, custom types, Web providers, and Access Control Lists (ACLs) associated with the page group.

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