WebCenter Portal 11.1.1.8 new features - Administration

When we start WebCenter Portal 11.1.1.8 we see that the look and feel is brand new.
The styling is the new Skyros skin which is also available in the new JDeveloper.
It is a new and refreshing look and feel.

The first thing we do is of course checking out the new Administration options.
What we notice is the new menu orientation. In previous releases the menu was horizontally orientated with tabs and sub-tabs. Now it is a combination of a horizontal menu and a vertical sub-menu on the left which works fine. Sometimes the menu and sub menu and options of the sub menu get a bit confusing. It might have been better to split some settings to different menu options.

At some locations it's a bit confusing to see what change is set immediate and what change has to be committed explicitly wit the save button.

I can imagine the frustration with the less experienced business users who administers one or more portal.
I am sure I changed this setting but....

Some concepts have been renamed. Resources are now called Assets. And resources which were created on the Spaces application level (and not on a Space level) are called Shared Assets. Same things, different names.
Managing the Shared Assets is the same as in previous versions. New in this are is the Pagelets asset. In the previous versions you would have to know the URL of the WebCenter Ensemble Admin interface. Now, when you select Create Pagelet, you are redirected to the admin interface. It is nice the interface is easy accessible, but it would have been even better if you can create the pagelet from within the Portal interface.
The actions column often contains the most important action, Edit, but for other actions you still need to select the asset and select the action from the menu

New in the Administration section are the Device Settings. You can now differentiate between different device groups such as:

• Desktop Browsers
• iOS Phones or Tablets
• Android Phones or Tablets

Within the groups you can create devices which are selected based on the User Agent they set. Per device you can specify attributes like CSS, streaming preference, height, width etc.

For most of the pages (lets say all new, user created pages) you can create a page variant to support a specific device group. Changes to the Desktop variant are copied to the device specific page variants (and vice verse)

One nice other feature is the ability to change attributes of the Portal application. The one attribute defined per default is the wcSessionTimeoutPeriod making it 100% easier to change the Session Timeout Period for the application.

In addition, there are a lot of small changes in the possibilities you have. Check them out by spending an hour clicking around in the Administration pages.