13.4 End-User Interaction

13.4 End- User Interaction

OracleAS Portal is designed to present information to end users. Although an administrator controls the basic creation and deployment of an OracleAS Portal site, end users can also take advantage of OracleAS Portal to customize their user experience, to search for information, or even to add content to an existing site.

13.4.1 Customization

End users have a habit of wanting things shown to them in a particular manner, and not all users in a community agree on what this exact manner should be. OracleAS Portal can help solve this problem by enabling end users to customize many aspects of their OracleAS Portal interaction.

You can grant the user the ability to customize the appearance of any of his pages. Customization can cover a wide range of possibilities, from setting the home page to changing the style of a page or page group , to actually moving, adding, or deleting portlets from a region. You can limit the degree of customization that any particular user has, as well as lock down any region in a page to prevent user customization of the content of the region.

13.4.2 Working with Content

OracleAS Portal was designed to be user friendly, from the way it displays information to the way it implements wizard-driven interfaces for developing some types of portlets. Individual end users can also work within the framework of an OracleAS Portal site to directly interact with content items.

With proper permissions, an end user can manipulate the items in a region. A user can add items to a page. An item can be text, a link to a file, or a link to another source of information on the Web. An administrator can specify a limit to the total amount of space allotted to store items for a particular page group.

Of course, not all users should be allowed to add items, willy-nilly, to managed OracleAS Portal sites. To ensure that added content is appropriate and relevant, a user can be given the privilege of adding content only with approval. Content approval can be specified for an individual page or for an entire page group.

The approval can be a simple sign-off from another user or an entire approval process involving many different users. When a user creates a content item, she is automatically informed of the progress of the item through the approval process, as well as whether the item has been approved or rejected at each step.

End users can also move items from one page or region to another or rearrange the order of items within a region. Users can also delete items with proper permissions. For existing items, a user can change the item's category, add or delete an item from a perspective, or add or delete search keywords for the item.

OracleAS Portal also enables users to "check out" a piece of content. If checkin/checkout is enabled for an item, this ability can be downloaded by only one user at any given time. OracleAS Portal can implement version control on items, in which older versions of edited items can be saved and retrieved.

There may be times when a user will want to know if a particular page gets new content items. You can set up a page so that a user with the proper privileges can subscribe to the page and be automatically notified when the contents of the page change. The notifications come to the user via a built-in notification portlet.

OracleAS Portal supports the use of Web-Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) clients to edit content accessed through OracleAS Portal. WebDAV allows users to view OracleAS Portal as a web folder within Windows Explorer. This displays OracleAS Portal and portal pages in the same manner as desktop file explorers. Pages are rendered as folders and items as files. Via this interface, users can seamlessly interact between OracleAS Portal and their file system by dragging and dropping content, files, and folders.

OracleAS Portal essentially supports WebDAV in parallel with its built-in features for content manipulation, and there are some restrictions on the types of pages and content that can be used.

13.4.3 Searching

The overall purpose of any OracleAS Portal site is to centralize the display of information. As we suggested earlier, all this aggregation of content can lead to information overload, as a result of the sheer volume of information. OracleAS Portal includes the classification schemes mentioned earlier, but also has a built-in search capability to help users find the information they need quickly.

An OracleAS Portal user can search through an OracleAS Portal site to find specific content. A search can look through items, pages, categories, and perspectives for a specific word or words.

You can add keywords to a particular item to help a user find the item. A user search can include keywords.

The user can limit the search results to specific page groups, categories, perspectives, or item types, among other selection criteria. This basic search capability can be accessed through a built-in Search portlet or through a built-in Search box object built into a page. You can perform more complex searches with the built-in Advanced Search portlet. You can also limit the results the Advanced Search portlet can return for users.

A user can save a search, which allows her to repeat it without having to reenter all the search criteria. A built-in portlet provides access to saved searches.

13.4.3.1 Oracle Text

You can enable Oracle Text for an OracleAS Portal site, and doing enables you to offer significantly more sophisticated searches. With the added capabilities of Oracle Text, a search can automatically look for related words or use functionality such as the nearness of words to each other, or the sound of the words (known as soundex ).

13.4.3.2 Oracle UltraSearch

Oracle Application Server also comes with a component called UltraSearch, an extensible search engine that uses a crawler to index documents. The documents are indexed from within their own repositories. The crawled information can build indexes that stay within an Oracle database.