| The viaContext™ portal technology enables your content to be published under a unique Internet domain of your choice. To safely and easily distinguish between public and private content, viaContext™ offers an appropriate set of reliable tools. |
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| The initial setup of a portal is straightforward and easy. When you register for an account with viaContext™, an initial portal is even created automatically with proper default settings to start with (provided, that the optional field for the domain name has been filled in correctly at registration. Of course, a later setup is possible and easy, too). |
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| When a new portal is being created, a so-called 'public portal group' is also created and attached to the portal. Each visitor of the portal is now a 'virtual member' of this group and can access all content, which has been released to the public portal group. |
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| To make your start with a viaContext™ portal even simpler, with the creation of your first portal, you will get an automatically generated start page as well, including the appropriate access rights for the public portal group and your visitors. This start page serves as an ideal start for building up your site hierarchy. Since subsequently created subfolders of your start page inherit the access rights of the start page, you can build up your site quickly without the need to look into access rights management in-depth. |
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| To simplify the distinction between public and private content in viaContext™, public folders (i.e. folders released for access by some public portal group) are displayed in a different colour (green). Note that the distinction by colour is only active for account members being logged into the system. Since guests can only see public content anyway, a special colouring does not make sense for your visitors. |
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| For the arrangement of your portal, viaContext™ offers a number of powerful but straightforward options. These options are based on the features of viaContext™ available to account members. |
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| An automatically created portal is presented to visitors with a page structure similar to the page structure of viaContext™ for account members after being logged into the system. The page is subdivided into three parts: the heading frame at the upper border of the page, the navigation frame at the left hand side of the page and the content frame, occupying the remaining space and also being the largest area of the page. |
| Although suiting the needs of most portal applications, this arrangement is not the only option. The heading frame and the navigation frame are optional elements and can be disabled or customized to the users needs. |
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| One of the convincing advantages of portals powered by viaContext™ is the instant availability of the portal. The default configuration provides a proper presentation of the content released to the public, but the owner of the portal has many options to customize the portal step by step towards a fully custom presentation of its content: when the heading frame and the navigation frame are disabled, the site design is subject just to the design of the contained pages, with almost no limitations through the usage of the integrated WYSIWYG page editor. |
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| However, abandoning the navigation frame also means that the site navigation must be integrated manually into the page design. |
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| Incidentally note that a portal does not necessarily need to provide public content. A portal also makes much sense for various types of closed groups of users - from working teams to product portfolio presentations for selected customers you will certainly find many gainful use cases. |
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| Continue with the Options and Configuration of Portals |
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