Portal Help 

Welcome to the portal!

A portal is a centralized point for accessing applications, information, and other resources in your enterprise or on the Internet. The portal provides a desktop view of applications and information from either the Internet or from a corporate network or intranet.

Portal content is divided into Web modules called portlets. Each portlet provides a view of certain types of information, such as stock quotes or weather, or to applications, such as email or calendar. Portlets are displayed with a title bar that provides the name of the portlet and display controls that allow you to minimize, maximize, edit the portlet settings, or obtain help information.

The following terms are helpful as you use the portal site.

Container
an area on a page that contains content. A container can be structured as a row, column, or cell in a table. That is, when you are arranging content on the page, the content can be placed in a container that spans the width of the page (row) or the height of a page (column).
Label
a type of node that has a name and is used to hold other nodes.
Node
a level of hierarchy in the portal. Nodes include pages, labels, or URLs, and are used to navigate the portal structure. The portal has a tree structure that is used to organize the portal into branch nodes, which belong to other nodes that are higher in the tree. The single highest node in the portal is called the content root. Nodes are represented and accessed from the portal navigation menu.
Page
a type of node that provides portal content, similar to a page on any Web site. However, portal pages display content in the form of portlets, which are arranged on the page by row and column containers. Each page displays content that has been customized for the portal user.
Portlet
a type of application that can be accessed through a small box or window in a portal page. Portlets provide access to specific services or information, for example, a calendar or news feed.
Skin
defines the border, margins, and title bar of the portlets on a page.
Theme
defines the look of the portal, including background colors and images, margins, and fonts. Depending on your access permissions, you can set each root or top-level page in the portal to use different themes. Each theme can support one or more skins.
URL
a type of node that can open locations within the portal or external Web sites.

The following figure helps illustrate some of these terms.

Portal banner Edit my profile | Help | Logout
Navigation (first level)
 Navigation  (next levels) 
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Page
Row container
Column container
Portlet title bar controls


Portlet
Column container
Portlet title bar controls


Portlet

Signing up

If self-registration is provided, use these steps to create your account at the portal.

  1. In the portal, click the Login. A form for entering your information is displayed.
  2. Complete the form by typing the requested information.
  3. Click ContinueContinue to go to the next page. A confirmation page is displayed with your enrollment information.
  4. Review the information you provided.
  5. When prompted that the enrollment was successful, click ContinueContinue to return to the portal.
  6. After you sign up, click the Log in icon to enter the portal and get started. The Log in and other icons are described in the following section.

Customizing the portal

One of the main features of a portal is the ability to change the layout or content according to your needs. This task is performed by clicking the Add page and Edit page links in the portal banner. When editing an existing page or creating a new one, you can perform the following tasks.

Depending on site policies, you might not have access permissions to perform all of these tasks. For example, some enterprises might not permit you to customize their portal pages.

 Supported browsers 

The following are some of the browsers that have been tested and are known to work: