Building Enterprise Information Portal using Oracle Portal 3 Building Enterprise Information Portal using Oracle Portal 3.0 Rizwan Akhtar 703-568-3702 rakhtar@tangible-tech.com

What will we cover today ? Portal Products Oracle Portal Architecture Portlets Database Applications,Content Area, Page Demo Database Portlets Portal Administration Features

Internet Portals If you are going to use internet , you have to start somewhere. A simplified gateway to the internet. Provides commonly used internet features such as searching , application integration, personalization. A portal provides a single, browser-based approach to finding useful information--independently of where the information comes from and how it is created. If made correctly, a portal should give a sense of community and organization for the average information-overloaded user.

Types of Portals Mega Portals Enterprise Information Portals (EIP) Business-to-Consumer web applications that can be personalized. Horizontal Portals (myYahoo, myExcite etc) Vertical Portals (iVillage) Enterprise Information Portals (EIP) Applications that enable companies to unlock internally and externally stored information, and provide users a single gateway to personalized information needed to make informed business decisions. Yahoo and Excite. These portals cover such a broad range of information and topics that can sometimes leave the User overwhelmed, especially when one small query yields thousands of results. Few people have the time or inclination to weed through all of these choices, many of which are outdated and irrelevant. Portals bring Order to the Internet Chaos, In comes Portals. Horizontal Portals are for broad consumer audience. My Yahoo, My Excite, and so on are consumer portals that work on the theory that each person has unique interests and needs.Horizontal portals feature a customized start page featuring the users' specific interests. A writer might have a dictionary on the home page, an astrology buff may have horoscopes, and a day trader could have a stock ticker. Such personal touches entice users to return to the portal, knowing that the information they want will be waiting for them. Vertical Portals/Industry Portals in-depth information about a particular industry . iVillage, for instance, targets women and provides a gateway of information on mothering, relationships, cooking, and pregnancy. Industry portals organize and index Web pages to related companies in a specific industry, and they often partner with other industry players such as consultants or distributors to give access to otherwise inaccessible information.

Enterprise Information Portal(EIP) Internal World Wide Web provides business users one-stop shopping for any information object they need inside or outside the corporation Enterprise portals use general-purpose applications in addition to applications specific to the enterprise or industry. Stock Ticker, E-mail, appointment Calendar Enterprise related information tapping into Corporate Database Provides some level of customization A company Portal is an internal World Wide Web. The Portal’s Home Page or Start Page generally includes search engines , appointment calendar . E-mail interface. Portal products such as Oracle Portal contains various other functions that can be used to tap into the Corporate Database. These products also provide some level of customization for the user. Examples of General Purpose Application ::….. Stock ticker ? Tech News ? Industry Related news. Enterprise Purpose Application:: …. Whatever the type, the most popular features of a portal are Web searching, news, reference tools, calendaring, and communication capability. Aggregating large amounts of content from a variety of sources is highly involved and involves a large chunk of change. No matter what your goals, the key to a successful portal is to offer an oasis of organization within the wrangled Web. A portal should be the first place customers look--and return--each day. As one avid portal user told me, "You got to start somewhere." So why not at your portal? Enterprise Portal Specific. Business Intelligence, Content Management, Data Warehouse & Mart and Data Management applications EIPs use both "push" and "pull" technologies to transmit information to users through a standardized web-based interface; EIPs provide "interactivity" – the ability to " ‘question’ and share information on" user desktops; EIPs exhibit the trend toward "verticalization" in application software. That is, they are often "packaged applications" providing "targeted content to specific industries or corporate functions;" EIPs integrate disparate applications including Content Management, Business Intelligence, Data Warehouse/Data Mart, Data Management, and other data external to these applications into a single system that can "share, manage and maintain information from one central user interface." An EIP is able to access both external and internal sources of data and information. It is able to support a bi-directional exchange of information with these sources. And it is able to use the data and information it acquires for further processing and analysis. Content Management Systems process, filter, and refine "unstructured" internal and external data and information contained in diverse paper and electronic formats, archive and often restructure it, and store it in a corporate repository (either centralized or distributed). Business Intelligence tools access data and information and through Querying, Reporting, On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP), Data Mining, and Analytical Applications provide a view of information both presentable and significant to the end user. Data Warehouses and Data Marts are integrated, time-variant, non-volatile collections of data supporting DSS and EIS applications, and, in particular business intelligence tools and processes. And Data Management Systems perform Extraction, Transformation and Loading (ETL) "tasks, clean data, and facilitate scheduling, administration and metadata management for data warehouses and data marts." portals that focus only on content are inadequate for the corporate market." Corporate portals must connect us not only with everything we need, but with everyone we need, and provide all the tools we need to work together. This means that groupware, e-mail, workflow, and desktop applications-even critical business applications-must all be accessible through the portal. Thus the portal is the desktop, and your commute is just a phone call Enterprise Information Portals connect people with information by organizing large collections of content on the basis of subjects or themes they contain. Collaborative portals enable teams of users to establish virtual project areas or communities along with the tools for collaboration they offer, and to work cooperatively within these communities. Expertise Portals link people together based on their skills and expertise, as well as their information needs. And Knowledge Portals do everything the first three types do and an unspecified something "more."

Portal Products (Web Site Building Tools) Yahoo Corporate (Yahoo Portal Builder Software) Autonomy Inc. (Portal in a Box) BRIO Technology (Brio.Portal) Epicentric ( Portal Server) IBM EIP 7.1 Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server Plumtree Oracle Portal Corporate Yahoo! is a customized EIP based on the My Yahoo! interface. Corporate Yahoo! enables companies to integrate proprietary corporate content and applications with Yahoo!'s personalized Internet content. The site utilizes Tibco's ActivePortal technology. Yahoo! and Tibco co-developed the Yahoo! Portal Builder software, which resides behind the corporate firewall. This software enables the integration of customized Internet content delivered by Yahoo! with corporate content from a company's existing intranets, databases and enterprise applications. Its product, Portal In A Box, is a pre-configured set of intranet content management, personalization, categorization and spider/alert tools. Brio integrates business intelligence, enterprise reporting, portals and analytic applications into an all-in-one solution. The Brio ONE product, which includes Brio.Enterprise, Brio.Report, Brio.Portal and Brio.Inform, is designed to deliver easy access to real-time business information. The product enables users to build and deliver business intelligence, enterprise reporting, self-service information exchange and analytic applications to a range of users in client/server, Web-based and hosted application environments. The Epicentric Portal Server is an e-business portal application. Epicentric was founded in 1997 to enable companies to build custom corporate portals for their IP networks and the Internet. IBM's EIP technology is called Enterprise Internet Portal. It allows users to implement Web-based document searches across both IBM and non-IBM data sources. Version 7.1 also contains a Unified Content Application Programming Interface that allows developers to deploy portal applications quickly. IBM's EIP also features improved federated search and access across a variety of e-business apps, allowing users to integrate data across their transactional, business intelligence and content management systems, said company officials. According to Tulipman, the company is extending its EIP strategy to encompass not only its own databases, but those from Oracle and Sybase. EIP 7.1 links to "the broadest range of sources—text, images, audio, video, the Web, intranets and file systems," he said. IBM is also employing a partnering strategy with industry-leading vendors. As of this writing, the company has linked up with more than 20 partners, including Brio Technology, Epicentric, Plumtree and Viador, all of whom are delivering IBM EIP-enabled offerings. Other partners, such as Business Objects, Cognos, Corechange, Visual Mining and Verity are providing value-added applications and services. "IBM is listening to our customer's needs and providing them with solutions that enable them to compete more effectively," said Janet Perna, general manager, IBM Data Management Solutions. "Businesses need to leverage all types of information in a relevant context. With the new capabilities of the IBM Enterprise Information Portal, we're building an industry standard for portal application development, focused on information access and integration." The company is also leveraging its new Garlic search technology in its EIP search features. Developed under Perna's auspices at the company's Santa Teresa research facility, Garlic delivers relevant information in a usable context. IBM's subsidiary, Lotus, has its own portal strategy for the Lotus Notes/Domino suite. Its new "knowledge portal," code-named Raven, is a server product that integrates knowledge management functions such as expertise location and content mining, wrapped in a customizable browser workspace that features a personalized hot list of activities, multiple application windows and ready access to a database of people, places and things. Raven is built on an infrastructure of Domino, Sametime (Lotus' real-time collaboration software) and DB2, all integrated in one server. Raven will sit on top of the IBM EIP. For Microsoft, there is the portal-like Digital Dashboard, which will include its Windows 2000, Office 2000, Exchange 2000 messaging and Commerce Server. But to date, most of the dashboard solutions are coming from partners, such as InfoImage (the InfoImage Freedom Corporate Portal). Digital Dashboard creates a single interface to access local files, server-based corporate apps and resources on the Internet. Like enterprise portals, Digital Dashboards will be built on Web standards such as HTML and JavaScript (or Visual Basic Script). But through Microsoft's Outlook PIM app, they will provide hooks into a user's local in-box, calendar and address book, as well as to Office 2000 files. Analysts see the dashboard offerings as an attempt at defining a framework from which a very Microsoft-centric portal can be constructed. But for now, it is missing many of the capabilities that users are coming to expect in a complete enterprise portal, including indexing capabilities, search features and personalization options. Microsoft watchers expect some of these features to appear in the next version of Microsoft Exchange. Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server…. SharePoint Portal Server brings together document management, advanced search capabilities, and an intranet portal within one powerful, easy-to-use server. It enables groups of any size to create, manage, and publish new content, and to organize existing content. By previewing this product and providing feedback through newsgroups, you will help us improve and ship the newest Microsoft server.

Oracle Portal Next Generation WebDB Web Site Building Tool by Oracle Links database technology with other application suites and development tools. Information stored entirely in Oracle 8i (much like Oracle Designer) Uses Web-base Components called portlets Highly Customizable for the End User Uses Single Sign-on With Oracle Portal SSO ; this solution, users do not have to login separately to multiple applications or track multiple passwords. The Oracle Portal SSO solution involves cookie-based user authentication from a centralized Login Server. 

Oracle Portal Architecture Client Middle-Tier Database mod_jserv mod_plsql Web Provider HTTP Listener Browser Login Server Portal Repository & Databases Providers Page Cache Session Cache Parallel Page Engine Portal DAD SSO DAD 9i Application Server From IAS Portal Configuration User manual by Oracle Corp

Portal Architecture Client Middle Tier Netscape or Internet Explorer Middle Tier HTTP Listener (by Apache) mod_plsql, mod_jserv (Parallel Page Engine Java Servlet) Portal DAD, SSO DAD Portal Server (running on Oracle 8i DB) Portal Repository Login Server Repository Highly Scalable Multiple instances of IAS on the middle tier Multiple nodes of Portal Server to distribute database load. Discuss the Old OAS listener by Spy Glass. The Portal Server is the repository for all information required to manage and execute the Portal. It includes Page Metadata, provider and security information, user customization, preferences, etc. as well as a set of PL/SQL procedures userd to store and retrieve this information

What is a Portlet (Demo) A Portlet is information that is placed within a region on a page All portlets come from a data source registered with Oracle Portal, called a Portlet Provider Depending upon security a Portlet can be customized by the Portal User Providers are the communication link between the Portal framework and portlets.  Use Database Providers for creating PL/SQL portlets that reside in the database and use Web Providers for creating web portlets that exist on remote web sites.

Oracle Portal Key Sources Applications:Web-enabled applications built using robust component-building wizards Content Areas: Repositories of corporate information, such as documents, spreadsheets, presentations and even list of useful related Hyperlinks External Sites (Portal Providers): content from any external source (Web Site), such as stock quotes, or important news information. Custom-built Sources: content and application pieces built using the special Portal Development kit PDK

Oracle Portal Developer Interface (Demo) Built using Oracle Portal Technology Home Used to perform Maintenance Tasks using various portlets Portlets available depends on user priviliges Navigator Build database portlets Content area management Design and Build Pages Database Objects definition access and modification Demo Oracle Portal Developer Interface Demo Oracle Portal :-- Login Page. Talk about Single Sign On

What are Portal Applications (Demo) Group of integrated components and shared components designed to solve a business need or task. Portal Developers can use wizards to create and deploy Forms and Reports application quickly

Oracle Portal Application Types Form (demo) Master-Detail Simple Report (demo) Query Wizard Manual Query Chart Calendar Dynamic Page Hierarchy Menu Frame Driver Link List of Values Forms --- Data Entry Forms Forms based on table/views , Forms based on Procedures, Master-Detail Forms; You can control the layout of the form through options in the forms build wizard, or you can create your own custom form working directly with HTML. Because you are writing your own HTML, you can create a more elaborate and sophisticated layout. Options in the wizard allow you to control the look and feel of the overall form as well as the individual entry fields and buttons on the form. For example, you can create a form with a blue background and fields labeled with black text. Or you could change some field labels to red to indicate to users that they are mandatory. You can perform JavaScript validation on user-specified values entered in any text field on the form. In addition, you can add PL/SQL event handlers that run when a user clicks on the buttons on the form. After successful submission of a form, you can specify that a PL/SQL block or procedure that will execute.   Reports CHARTS Charts display data from database tables or views as bar charts. The example below shows a chart based on the SCOTT.EMP table that displays employee names as labels and chart bars representing each employee's salary. Charts are based on at least two table or view columns: Values in the Label column identify the bars on the chart; for example, ALLEN, JAMES, MARTIN, etc. Those in the Value column calculate the size of the bars on the chart relative to one another. Value columns must always contain numeric data. You can also specify a Link column. Values in this column create hypertext links from the chart's labels to other Oracle Portal components or URLs. The above example contains links from the employee name labels to another component; for example, a form that allows an end user to update the employee's salary. Building charts You can build a chart using one of two build wizards: Chart from Query Wizard Guides you through all steps for creating a chart, including creating the SQL query that selects the data displayed in the chart. If you are unfamiliar with SQL or are new to Oracle Portal, you may want to create your chart using this wizard. Chart from SQL Query Allows you to write your own SQL query that selects the data displayed in the chart. After you write the query, the wizard allows you to set the same display, text, customization form, and PL/SQL options that you can set in the Chart from Query Wizard. Using Group By functions in charts Charts are an effective way of displaying aggregate data. You can use Group By and Summary Options in the wizard to sum the column values returned by your query; for example, the minimum, maximum, or average value; or the number of values in a column. Setting other options You can set options to control the size and color of chart bars, label fonts, and background colors. The final chart can be displayed on a web page or downloaded in SYLK format to Excel. You can also provide end users of the chart with the option to execute charts based on large amounts of data in batch mode rather than real-time. Examples Example chart SQL query using an expression (sysdate - hiredate) This chart shows the number of days from the employee's date of hire to today. select null the_link,ENAME the_name,sysdate-hiredate the_data,from SCOTT.EMPgroup by JOB Example SQL query using GROUP by expression The chart created by this query is shown below. select null the_link,JOB the_name,avg(SAL) the_data,from SCOTT.EMPgroup by JOB

What is Content Area ? A content area is a collection of related information stored completely within an Oracle database Organized logically into Folders and sub Folders Folder (Folder Area containing items, Banner, Navigation Bar) (Demo) The basic unit of content is an item. Folder items may be of the following types Show creation of a sample Content Area. Application component PL/SQL File Image Text Java Application URL Zip File

What is a Page Page is the place where the information is brought together from all the sources (portlets) is called a Page. A typical Oracle Portal Page consists of Content Areas Portals Tab Pages Data from External Sources, URL’s

Database Portlets (Demo) Reports QBE (query by example report) Allows end users to query, insert, update and delete data in table and views Query wizard SQL is built using a wizard Manual SQL is built manually Forms Simple form based on a table or view Master/detail form Others

Oracle Portal Administration Demo

Some Web-sites Developer reference Sites using Oracle Portal http://technet.oracle.com/ http://www.testdrive.compaq.com/ http://portalstudio.oracle.com/ Sites using Oracle Portal http://www.orca.tv/ http://www.mywebpartner.nl/ http://www.ixarm.com/ http://www.tomatoland.com http://www.ncnielsen.com/

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