Portal Services

An enterprise portal is defined as an application that enables organizations to unlock internally and externally stored information and provide users a single gateway to personalized information needed to make informed business decisions. By providing end users with relevant data from across multiple data sources and presenting that information in a context that is meaningful to the user , portals offer the promise of providing a competitive advantage through new business processes, increasing productivity by putting more power into the hands of business users, and increasing effectiveness through knowledge sharing and reduced search time.

Oracle Portal can handle and display virtually any type of data, giving you the ability to create portals that give users access to web applications, business documents, business intelligence reports , charts , and links to other forms of data that can exist both inside and outside your corporate intranet. Portal pages contain regions , which can hold items of content, such as spreadsheet or word processor files or portlets that provide access to web resources such as applications or other web pages. After portlets are written and tested , then can be published to a page, where they will be viewable by those users who have access to the page. Depending on the level of expertise of your end users and the amount of flexibility you re willing to give them, the Portal page can be set up so that the end users can modify their pages by adding, removing, or modifying content, similar to a site like http://my.yahoo.com. Portal is unique in the sense that its development environment is itself a Portal application. Once your developers and administrators become comfortable with the Portal environment, it will be easy for them to understand the mechanics of Portal development. Combined with the wizard-based approach to developing Portal applications, your developers can be productive in a very short period of time. Portal is discussed in Figure 1-10 shows a Portal development screen.

Figure 1-10: A screen of the Portal development environment