Identifying Business Intelligence Portals

You can create two types of portals in WebFOCUS: basic and collaborative. Basic portals reside under the Portals node, in the Resources tree, on the Legacy Home Page, while collaborative portals are part of the domains in your Repository. Collaborative portals appear under domains in the Legacy Home Page and the WebFOCUS Home Page. From the Legacy Home Page, you can access your collaborative portals under the Domains node. By default, both basic and collaborative portals are available. To change these defaults, an administrator can clear the corresponding check box in the WebFOCUS Administration Console. When the collaborative portal is enabled in your environment, the shortcut menu options for domains and folders include the ability to create new portals and individual pages. You can copy, paste, and move portals and pages between domains and folders, creating a fluid workflow and possibilities for sharing, securing, reusing, and modifying content.

Basic portals are characterized by the following features:

• Portal pages are included in the portal structure and cannot be shared across portals.
• Since portal pages can only be created inside a portal, only Developers can create and edit both portals and portal pages.
• Administrators must use security rules to establish a workflow between domain groups and portals. To simplify this process, domain templates were created.

Collaborative portals are characterized by the following features:

• Portal pages and portals exist as distinct objects in the Repository.
• You can copy or link pages to one or more portals.
• You can unlink portal pages from all portals and store them as standalone content items.
• You can copy, paste, and move portals and portal pages between domains and folders.
• Creating portal pages and creating portals can be assigned to different user roles.
• Most portals do not require special security rules.

In addition to these structural differences, collaborative portals offer several usability enhancements, such as pre-configured page templates, commenting and blogs, the Page Designer, aliasing, and embedding capabilities. The following sections describe the architecture and components of a basic portal, as well as the features that are available to the users of the collaborative portal.