Portal 10.1.4 and Item placeholders

Well, it’s been a while, cartman and I have been a bit busy and we haven’t be able to continue writing for the blog, but we still believe in the idea and that’s why I want to start updating again so we can create our little community and exchange ideas, tips, complains, jokes or anything we want, all in the name of the Oracle app server and the headaches and triumphs it causes us.

But now, to the point, I’ve been wanting to talk about the new version of Oracle Portal 10.1.4. It is still not part of any release as you’ll need to upgrade the repository of the 10G r2 app server version, and the portal for the release 3 hasn’t been release.

The reason why I believe this new version of portal is important is a new feature that allows us to define templates for the items we upload. This html based templates are not something new in portal, we saw them on early release of webdb and portal for the portal providers (forms and reports within portal), and one of the best features of r2 was the ability to apply them to portal pages (I believe cartman has implemented a couple of sites in Colombia using this functionality). But in my opinion, being able to assign these templates to uploaded HTML files or text items will change the way companies use oracle portal to publish content on the web.

Let me explain, in my own experience, I have seen quite a few companies struggling to covert html pages into portal text items and put other portlets and customized content around them, them after that tedious process they struggle again to be able to migrate the same content from one environment to the other, I’ve hear some pretty convincing arguments against portal when the companies are coming from a static content to a personalised portal, of course we all know the advantages of a common gateway for all applications and the power of the portal tool, but plain html files that can be copied and pasted across any web server are just to simple and easy to argue.

One of the first things I have always said in favour of Oracle Portal is that companies should not try to replicate their current content into the portal, that doesn’t add value and just increase complexity and overheads to publish content, instead companies should explore the customised services portal provides and combine them with their existing static content, but again Oracle’s sales speech are sometimes too good to change the already sold minds of some CIO’s.

And here is where the new feature of items placeholders or templates, comes to play. Basically, it allows you to keep the content in html files, and then define a template, that can be a mixt of html and some portlets you want around your content. After that you will simply map you webdav access to portal as network drive on your pc and copy and paste the content in whatever environment you want. When you call the item, portal renders the item and displays it with the pre-defined template, showing a portal page, that can have customized content and which content is maintain as any other plain html site.

It’s probably easier to see it working; oracle has a nice OBE with the feature, check it out on http://www.oracle.com/technology/obe/obe1014portal/item_placeholders/itmplacehold.htm

Once again it is not the “one solution fits all” and I still believe we need to find the right solution for each problem not try to put it all in what oracle salesmen told us we should, nevertheless, if well applied, I do see a significant change on how companies manage their content and a lot of opportunities with this new portal. Let me know what you think.

Juan Becerra (Homer)