Microsites: Add a Map Component and Publish your Microsite

When continuing to adding components to the website, I added a Map component. Open your component palette in the Sites Cloud and drag and drop the map component to your site.

To make sure the maps shows the right place, we need to add the location. The easiest way to do this is to go to google maps, click on the location you want to display in your map and copy that location.

Once copied, you can enter this in the Map settings, adjust the zoom as you wish and select the other options. For example, I want to show a Display Marker, so I tick that checkbox.

Save your modifications, this will bring you back to the Sites Overview page. Now you can select to change the status of the site from Offline to Online. If you do this, you will get a warning poup that the site will be publicly available.

After this, you should see the site status being changed to Online and the url of your website is visible.

If you click the URL, it will bring you to the website.

Nothing too fancy yet, but you can see how you can work with different components to build your website based on the Documents you have added.

Microsites: Interact with DCS using the ipad app

You can use the Oracle Documents ipad app to interact with the Documents Cloud Service. Go to the app store and search for ‘Oracle Documents’, you will find the Oracle Douments application, get and install the app to your ipad.

The app would like to send you notifications, after that you will also have to accept the License Agreement.

When the app starts up, you will get a quick tutorial to tell you the basics or you can skip this.

In the sign in screen, you have to enter your e-mail address and password again. You will also need the Server URL, just like you did when installing the synchronization client.

After signing in, you are in the app and you can browse your documents.

By default the app does not have the security code on. It is wise to put this on, for this go to the settings page.

Click on the passcode lock and enter a passcode and select to unlock through TouchID if your device supports this.

That is all it takes to set up the app. You can now start using the Documents Cloud from your ipad.

Microsites: Start building your site in the Cloud!

So after requesting the services, and installing the synchronization client, you can start building your site. When setting up the synchronization client I added some documents about my house, pictures, descriptions, maps, stuff like that.

Now with the help of Sites I will use the files that are synchronized to the Documents Cloud to start building a webpage about my house. After you login to your Cloud Services, go to the Service Console.

 Use the left side menu to switch to the Sites part of the console.

Follow the wizards that will help you set up your site. We start with creating a new site.

We do not have any themes yet, so we create a new theme as well.

I selected the Basic theme to start with.

Give your site a name and optional description.

Select edit, you will get a pop up to give your update a name and after that you will be brought to the edit modus of your

Use the Toggle in the upper right corner to switch from Preview to Edit modus, so you can start dragging and dropping components.

 I choose to delete the whole site tree, because I want to start with just one page on my website.

In the left hand menu, select the second tab to start adding components. I drag and dropped a gallery grid on the page.

Go to the settings of the gallery.

Click the images button to add your images to the gallery.

Now the file picker will open and you can select files that you have previously synchronized to your Documents Cloud folder.

After adding the images, I also drag and dropped a document as a component on the page.

Once again, use the file picker to select a document to display under the pictures.

You will now see the images on top of the site, with the document shown below.

This website is not very fancy, but it gives you an idea of how you can start building your website using the component palette and the integration between Documents & Sites Cloud.

Microsites: Requesting Oracle Sites Cloud Services

The process of requesting a Cloud product is pretty straight forward, however, you can experience some hiccups as well. So for my future self and anyone wondering about this process here is what to do. First of all, decide what product you want to request after going to the Oracle Cloud page.

I am requesting a Platform (PaaS) Service, so Sites will be visible under the Platform Section. You can either click Sites or Documents, since they are in the same PaaS solution. In the top right corner click the ‘Try It’ button.

You will get a pop up and need to select ‘Start Trial’.

After that you will get the Sign Up form that you need to fill. Provide Oracle all your information and you will receive a text message with the verification code. However, it sometimes happen that you do not get the verification code, in that case, you can click the ‘chat’ icon on the right side menu.

Provide your information before starting the live chat.

Tell your assigned agent that you did not get your verification code and he will make sure you will get it by e-mail.

After using the verification code you should have successfully submitted your request.

If you go back to the Oracle Cloud page and choose ‘sign in’ in the top, you should now see your services after login in to ‘My Account’.

The status will first be Initialized.

After that it should be ready for activation.

You should have gotten another e-mail about this as well. Open the e-mail and active your trial.

You can now see that the Service is activated. You should get another e-mail with the final information that you need. Your trial account is ready for use!

Microsites: Overview

In October after OOW15 I wrote in one of my blogs about Microsites with SCS on top of DCS. Now that both Documents and Sites are available for trial, I thought it was time to give it a try and start building a microsite.

The plan is to create a series of blogs about both Document Cloud Services (DCS) and Sites Cloud Services (SCS). From requesting the product, to building the microsite.

In the first blog, Requesting Oracle Sites Cloud Services, I will describe how to set up your trial account with Oracle and activate it.
In the second blog, Install the Documents Synchronization Client, I will show how to set up Documents to start using it. After setting up and installing the Client, we can Start building your website in the Cloud.
If you want to use DCS from the ipad, you can install the Oracle Documents app.

After in stalling the app, I showed how to add a Map Component and Publish your Microsite.


Resources:

• Oracle Cloud Home Page
• Oracle Documents Cloud Documentation
• Oracle Sites Cloud Documentation

OOW15: Microsites with SCS on top of DCS

Most of us are familiar with or have at least heard of the concept of microservices, this year at Open World I also heard the term microsites more and more and I went on an investigation to find out more about the possibilities. I was surprised to find out I got more and more enthusiastic about this concept and the possibilities with the Oracle Cloud.

Microsites is a concept for a small temporary site. You can think of example like a page for a market campaign, an event, a product launch, etc. Oracle offers this with the help of two cloud services the Document Cloud Service (DCS) and the Sites Cloud Service (SCS).

The DocumentCloud Service is already live and ready to use, this is a tool to help you collaborate and share documents with others. It has a lot of out of the box functionalities, a mobile application and you can even get your content offline, for example to work on your ipad when disconnected.

In the concept of microsites you put all your web content, documents, images, etc in one or more folders on your machine. Use the sync master tool to synchronize these folders back to the document cloud. The DCS assets can then be used by the Sites Cloud Service.  

This is what the sync master tool looks like:

Oracle Sites Cloud Service will be coming soon, this is in terms of a couple of weeks. The documentation of SCS is already up and running, so you can check it out. Within SCS you have a WYSIWYG editor to create sites. The product is shipped with a few standard themes, but you can create your own or use an existing bootstrap theme to help you set up the basics for  the site. The layout management of the site is not done by the theme, but in the edit modus of the site.

In the left hand sidebar you can easily switch between the Documents in DCS and the Sites in SCS:

After this you can drag and drop out of the box components to create your website, add images/galleries, youtube videos, documents/folders and more. You can access any content in DCS and drag & drop it on the site. You can rearrange component on the page any way you like.

When you start editing you create an ‘update session’ in which you make several changes, this features helps with creating several changes and publish (or schedule) them as one batch to the live website. You can even work separated on different batches in different parts of the microsite. 

In the left hand side bar you see that you can drag & drop components from several menus, in the top bar you see a toggle to switch between edit and preview modus:

I am sorry the screenshots are a bit blurry and vague, but they are the best I have for now :)