“I have a hard time telling what a dashboard is these days. For example, what’s the difference between a portal and a dashboard? Even the terms are the same – “Portlet”, for example, is used in both paradigms to describe a little container of like subject matter.”

This recent comment by a Dashboard Spy reader rings true. There is a real convergence in thought, and in product offerings, making it hard to really differentiate between shades of dashboa rding. But, what does it matter? To me, they are all dashboards. Anything that consolidates information in a visual, concise fashion counts as a dashboard in my mind.

Anyway, speaking of portlets, let’s look at some dashboard screenshots from an Oracle Portal system. They officially use the word “portlet” to denote:

“Web components” which display excerpts of other Web sites and generate summaries of key information. These portlets can then be collected with other portlets so that users have easy access to frequently used sites and information, all from one page. Oracle Portal uses portlets to integrate both structured and unstructured data into a single, personalized view.

You can use portlets to access nearly any type of Web-accessible information, such as files published on the corporate intranet, reports on data managed by enterprise applications, and news or stock quotes from the Internet.

Thank you to the Dashboard Spy reader who grabbed these screenshots while investigating Oracle Portal. I think these images are of an older version, but still interesting to look at.

Let’s start by looking at an internal system screenshot. This is the utilities screen where you can create new applications, schemas, users and groups for your portal.

Here is another configuration screen. This is where you would set security rights.

Moving to the dashboard user’s view, here is a look at the Program Management screen of the system. There are 2 separate portlet views. One is Program Rollup by Contract where you see the Program name, budget, actual cost, contract code, manager name, contract budget and contract actual spend. The other is Contract Rollup by Work Order:

Next we have a dashboard acting as a document repository. There is a portlet for photos, one for files and a third for maps. A simplistic approach, but hey it works:

And finally let’s take a quick peek at how customized reports are requested:

Tags: Oracle Portal Dashboard Portlets, DASHBOARDS