Many organizations use Oracle WebCenter Portal to develop these basic types of portals:

• Intranet portals used for collaboration, employee self-service, and company communication
• Extranet portals used by customers and partners for self-service and support
• Team collaboration portals that allow users to share documents and content, track activity, and engage in discussions

Portals are intended to provide a personalized, single point of interaction with web-based applications and information. The user experiences that a Portal is capable of displaying should be relevant to an individual user or class of users (a group or role). The components of a Portal that would vary based on a user’s identity include:

• Web content such as images, news articles, and on-screen instruction
• Social tools such as threaded discussions, polls/surveys, and blogs
• Document management tools to upload, download, and edit files
• Web applications that present data visualizations and data entry modules

These collections of content, tools, and applications make up valuable workspaces. The challenge that a development team may have is defining which combinations are the most effective for its users. No one wants to create and manage a workspace that goes un-used or (even worse) that is used but is ineffective. Oracle WebCenter Portal provides you with the capabilities to not only rapidly develop variations of portals, but also identify which portals are the most effective and should be re-used throughout an enterprise.

Capturing Portal Analytics
Oracle WebCenter Portal provides an analytics service that allows administrators and business users to track and analyze portal usage. These analytics are captured in the form of:

1. Usage tracking metrics
2. Behavior tracking
3. User Profile Correlation

The out-of-the-box task reports that come with Oracle WebCenter Portal include:

• WebCenter Portal Traffic
• Page Traffic
• Login Metrics
• Portlet Traffic
• Portlet Response Time
• Portlet Instance Traffic
• Portlet Instance Response Time
• Search Metrics
• Document Metrics
• Wiki Metrics
• Blog Metrics
• Discussion Metrics
• Portal Traffic
• Portal Response Time

By determining the usage and behavior tracking metrics that are associated with specific user profiles (including groups and roles), your administrators will be able to identify the components of your solution that are the most valuable. 

1. Your first step as an administrator should be to identify the specific pages and/or components are used the most frequently.
2. Next, determine the user(s) or user-group(s) that are accessing those high-use elements of a portal.
3. It is also important to determine patterns in high-usage and see if they correlate to a specific schedule.

One of the goals of any development team (especially those that are following Agile methodologies) should be to develop reusable web components to minimize redundant development. Oracle WebCenter Portal provides you the tools to capture the successful workspaces that have already been developed and identified so that they can be reused for similar user demographics.

Re-using Successful Portals
When creating a new Portal in Oracle WebCenter, developers have the option to base that portal on a template that includes:

• Pre-seeded data such as pages, tools, user roles, and look-and-feel assets
• Specific sub-sets of page-layouts, tools, and other resources to standardize what is added to a Portal’s pages
• Any custom components that your team creates during development cycles

Once you have identified a successful workspace and its most valuable components, leverage Oracle WebCenter’s ability to turn that custom portal into a portal template. By creating a template from your already successful portal, you are empowering your enterprise by providing a starting point for future initiatives. Your new projects, new teams, and new web pages can benefit from lessons learned and adjustments that have already been made to optimize user experiences instead of starting from scratch.

***For a complete explanation of how to work with Portal Templates, be sure to read the Fusion Middleware documentation available online.