Building Document Libraries with Oracle9iAS Portal
One of the most powerful aspects of Oracle9iAS Portal is the ability to create libraries of important documents. Using page groups, pages, and items within Oracle9iAS Portal, you can easily:

• Create a hierarchy for your documents
• Create classifications to group your documents into useful subsets
• Enforce standards for the appearance of your documents
• Secure your documents (Controlling information exposure)
• Enable self-service publishing of documents Creating a Page Group to House Your Library

A page group enables you to collect a set of documents into one logical entity, so you can set properties and administer them as one. By setting properties at the page group level, you can control important attributes such as the types of documents that users may add to the page group, the templates used for pages within the page group, and the maximum size of the page group.

Adding Items to Your Library
In Oracle9iAS Portal, each document in your library becomes an item on a page. Rather than being trapped behind administrative bottlenecks, document owners may publish their documents simply by adding or updating an item on a page. In this sense, pages are the way to organize items into logical groupings. You can easily place items that are closely related (e.g., by author, subject, or item type) into one region on your page or into a sub page. As you add items to a page, you in effect create a navigation model for your users.

Setting Attributes for Your Documents
To make documents more accessible and easier to manage, you need to associate attributes with them. Page groups provide a built-in model for assigning a variety of attributes to each item that you place on a page. For each item in a page group, you can assign attributes such as the type of document (e.g., zip file, image, text), and the categories and perspectives to associate with the document to assist users in finding it. Document owners can also define which users and user groups may access the document. Oracle9iAS also has the advantage of extensible item types, which means that you may create your own custom item types for documents that are unique to your particular library.

Creating Pages to View Your Documents
Because most libraries have a wide variety of users with different needs, you may find it useful to create multiple views of your library. Not every user wants to see the same set of documents organized in the same way. In Oracle9iAS, creating a different view of your library is as easy as creating a page. You can quickly design and deploy different pages containing unique subsets of your documents for different types of users.To make this model even more flexible, you can enable users to customize these pages, thus creating their own tailored view of the documents in the library.