Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Oracle WebCenter Interaction: Adaptive Layouts: Profile Page Layout

Have you implemented customized adaptive layouts yet?
If you changed the basepagelayout file then be sure to take a look at the user profile community also.

The user profile community doesn't heed the basepagelayout, and instead uses the profilepagelayout file.
Rather than creating another system file for a customized profilepagelayout you could just create a new webservice and point it to the basepagelayout file you already customized.

After a few months running a customized basepagelayout, I've only just discovered this! Yikes!

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Tip for System Admins: Install XMarks

Do you manage a lot of servers and rely on web based documentation, configurations, and multiple system/server websites?  If you answered yes to any of those then you might want to consider installing XMarks on your server.

Xmarks stores bookmarks on their servers and allows you to synchronize them down to your browser.

I have a fairly good list of about 30 complex URLs that I need access to when I login to each of the servers I work on.  Manually keeping them up to date and synchronized is a pain.  But that pain is gone thanks to Xmarks - I just installed a new server and immediately have access to all of my configuration and documentation URLs!
Thanks Xmarks!!!!

http://www.xmarks.com

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Oracle WebCenter Interaction: Customizing Collab Subscription Emails

Changing the subscription emails from Collab is super simple and can go a long way in getting users to actually read the emails.  I'll admit that after a few years of getting them I've learned to tune out the content once I open a subscription email and see the standard heading it has.
By removing the top table and doing some reformatting the emails can look just like any other email and, fingers crossed, maybe more folks will read them!

The email templates are located in \bea\alui\ptimages\imageserver\plumtree\collab\templates.
The discussion board message post template is called: DiscussionPostNotification.nst

Here is how our discussion board message post emails now look:





This is the code that makes that happen:
## Collaboration Server Notification Template
## Type: Discussion Post
## Channel: Email - HTML

## content type
#set( $contentType = "text/html" )

## sets the subject line for the email
#set( $cns_subject = "$projectName Discussion Board Post" )

## Body Start
#parse ("/plumtree/collab/templates/header.inc")

<table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="5" cellpadding="3">
   <tr>
      <td class="customappText"><b>${rootMessageName}</b><br><i>${messageAuthorName}</i><br><div>${messageBody}</div></td>
   </tr>
   <tr>
       <td class="actionbarDirBtn"><A href="${messageReplyURL}"><img src="$imageServer/plumtree/collab/private/img/actionMsgReply20.gif" align="absmiddle" border="0"><span class="actionbarText">Reply</span>&nbsp;&nbsp;</a></td>   
    </tr>
   <tr><td height="100">&nbsp;</td></tr>
</table>

<hr width="100%">
<table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="5" cellpadding="3" >
   <tr>
      <td class="customappText">Workspace: <A href="${projectOverviewURL}">${projectName}</a>
      <br>Discussion Board: <A href="${rootMessageURL}">${discussionName}</a><br>${messageCreatedDate}</td>
   </tr>
   <tr>
      <td class="customappText">Why am I receiving this email?<BR>You are subscribed for email notification when new messages are posted to the ${projectName} discussion boards.</td>
   </tr>
   #parse ("/plumtree/collab/templates/attachment.inc")
</table>

#parse ("/plumtree/collab/templates/footer.inc")


One final tip - if you get annoyed with all of the subscription emails for deletions, just DELETE the .nst files associated with content deletion! Problem solved! (yes, your log file might grow faster with error messages about the missing file, but that is better than the annoyance of these emails!!!)