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What is a Portal Experience?
A starter portal experience is a site where users inside of your organization can find information, submit requests, and complete business tasks. We've released a portal app shell with Next Experience that can be used to create portal experiences from the ground up with a header and footer, or you can use App Engine Studio to launch a starter portal experience.
App Engine Studio provides the ability to create a templated portal experience for an application. Using UI Builder, users can create pages for a custom portal experience associated to an App Engine Studio application.
Unlike Service Portal, starter portal experiences created in App Engine Studio or via UI Builder/Studio is built on the Next Experience UI Framework, and not with AngularJS technologies.
Next Experience Starter Portals are Not a Replacement For Service Portal/Employee Center
As of the San Diego and Tokyo releases, starter portals created in App Engine Studio and/or UI Builder with the Portal App Shell are not a replacement for the Service Portal or Employee Center, as these products are still receiving ongoing investments with a robust roadmap and quarterly releases for the foreseeable future.
Our Portal FAQ covers common questions relating to the portal app shell and the Service Portal technology stack.
Employee Center is Our Recommended Enterprise Portal Solution
Employee Center is our recommended enterprise portal solution as of the Tokyo release. The Employee Center portal is a standard multi-department, dynamic portal for service delivery and employee engagement. See the product documentation for an overview of Employee Center. The Employee Center forum has a lot of great information such as Getting Started with Employee Center and FAQs.
Per the Employee Center FAQ:
The Service Portal application (i.e. the /sp portal) was designed as a demo portal for the Service Portal technical stack. If a customer is creating an employee-facing portal or a service delivery portal, they should always use Employee Center as their starting point even if they want a custom design.
There are two reasons for this:
- Employee Center will give them access to specialized widgets, which they will have to create on their own if they use the Service Portal application.
- Employee Center will give them a starting point, which is based on rich research and best-practice guidance.
App Engine Studio Starter Portals
The portal that you create in App Engine Studio includes several default pages. You can use these pages as-is or edit them to suit your business needs, so you'll receive a starter portal experience that you can begin configuring right away.
When creating a portal experience via UI Builder/Studio, the portal app shell only contains the header and footer elements, and does not contain the following pages:
- Article page
- Catalog item page
- Landing page
- Login
- Order success
- Record page(request)
- Record page(task)
- Search page
- Settings page
- Task approved
- Task rejected
For information on how you can configure portal app shell experience settings in UI Builder, see the product documentation.
Visit the Academies
The Next Experience Academy covers topics such as Next Experience UI, UI Builder, Components, Workspaces, and more. There is a new session every third Wednesday of the month and is a great resource to learn about everything Next Experience. Recordings of the previous and upcoming Next Experience Academy sessions can be found here.
The Employee Center team also has their own Academy which runs monthly. You can find their previous and upcoming sessions here.
