If you are familiar with WebDB 2.x, you'll notice that Oracle Portal
3.0 is very different. To acclimate yourself to Oracle Portal's new
functionality scan the Quick Tour, which takes you through the entire
product. To access the Quick Tour, click 
in
the upper right corner of any Oracle Portal page and click the first
link in the folder area.
The biggest change in Oracle Portal is philosophical. WebDB allowed you to create Web sites and Web-based applications. Oracle Portal gives you the power to create portals: amalgamations of content from both inside and outside of Oracle Portal that provide access to the tools and data your customers need. In keeping with Oracle Portal's focus on developing portals, many enhancements were made:
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Sites are now called content areas, which more accurately reflects their purpose within Oracle Portal: a place to store and manage content.
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The ability to create pages. A page is the face of a portal; what users use to interact with the content of the portal. A page displays data from different folders--even different content areas or data from Oracle Portal applications--all on the same page. When you create a page, you configure it into areas called regions, then populate each region with portlets. A portlet is information from data sources called portlet providers.
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In 2.x, the application and site building pieces of the product occupied separate schemas and employed vastly different interfaces. In 3.0, the entire product inhabits a single schema, regardless of the number of content areas, pages, or applications. In addition, the user interface has been re-tooled to make the product easier to use.
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Each Oracle Portal page can include data from many different portlet providers, each of which can have their own log-on procedures. To prevent you from being confronted with user ID and password requests for each portlet provider, Oracle Portal provides a single sign-on feature. When you log on to Oracle Portal, Oracle Portal logs you into all registered portlet providers and subsystems.
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Oracle Portal 3.0 expands your ability to publish content on the Web. Not only do pages make it simple to bring together diverse data in a single location, but 3.0 offers the following enhancements as well:
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Improved folder layout |
In Oracle Portal 3.0, the layout scheme for folders is flexible. In 2.x, the navigation bar had to be placed along the left margin, and items appeared wherever their display options dictated (Quickpicks at the top, followed by Announcements, News items, and finally, Regular items). In 3.0, these restrictions have been lifted. A folder is now considered simply a set of regions containing items. The names of the regions, and how the data appears within them, is controlled by the folder style owner. And navigation bars can appear wherever you decide they're most useful. |
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Better custom typing/attribution
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In 2.x, custom item types were based on one of the built-in item types (File, URL, Text, and so on. In 3.0, the content area administrator can create item types to suit a wide variety of needs, and can create the necessary attributes to support those types. For example, for a new type called Movie Review, the content area administrator might define a set of attributes including Director, Actor, Release Date, Rating, and so on. Each of these attributes can be designated mandatory or optional. |
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In 2.x, access to content was controlled at the folder level. In 3.0, individual items within a folder can be controlled just as folders were in 2.x. Privileges may be extended to individual users, groups, or public users using new options available in the Item Wizard. |
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Although you could display a 2.x Oracle Portal development environment to one of 24 languages, none of the user-provided content was similarly translated. For example, if a 2.x user changed the browser language to French, only Site Builder-specific screens and labels appeared in French: Administration page and Managers, default logo, and so on. The user content remained in the language in which it was created. In 3.0, both the content area and its content are translatable. |
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In 3.0, you can search for a string across all of Oracle Portal, or limit the search to just a subset of content areas, or even a single content area. |
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Oracle Portal 3.0 provides a set of scripts so you can export content areas, pages, or applications, including all their dependencies, then import them into another instance of Oracle Portal. |
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With the bulk load utility, you can upload compressed files of virtually any size or quantity into one or more specified Oracle Portal folders. Files are displayed on folder pages as text links. By creating appropriate, descriptive file names before zipping files to be uploaded, you can provide meaningful link names to guide users to the files they need to access. |
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The wizards to create components are similar to those in WebDB 2.X. Oracle Portal 3.0 includes additional options to enhance the finished component:
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Custom layouts |
The Reports and Forms Build Wizards enable you to specify your own HTML code to lay out text, fields and buttons. |
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You can display chart data in a variety of styles, including pie charts, 3D charts, and line charts. |
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In addition to custom layouts, you can display report data in a tabular layout (all table or view rows display in a single box) or form layout (data from each row displays in a separate box on the form). You can also use color, fonts, even blinking text to conditionally highlight particular rows and columns in reports. |
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Simplified Query by Example (QBE) Reports
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QBE Reports provide a single interface to query, insert, edit, and delete table or view data.
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