Creating channels and subchannels

Channels and subchannels can be created only by an administrator working in Admin mode. You create channels and subchannels using a Manage Channels portlet. You can either add a Manage Channels portlet to a page of your choice, or use the portlet on the predefined Channel Search page.

Adding a Manage Channels portlet to a page

Open a Web browser, and enter:
```
http://HOSTNAME.DOMAIN:PORT/onepage/index.jsp
```
Where machine_name is the name of the machine where the onepage Web application is installed. This displays the Portal Login page.
Enter your member name and password, then click Sign In.

Open the page group and page where you want to create the portlet, and click Add Portlet.

You can only add portlets to your personal page groups and pages. See Chapter 10, “Building Pages,” and Chapter 4, “Building Portlets,” for instructions.

When the Add Portlet window displays, select Search, select Manage Channels, then click Done.

Creating channels

On the page where you added the Manage Channels portlet, click the New button to the right of the Channels list box.

In the Edit Channel window, enter a name for the channel.

Select one or more roles (hold down the Ctrl key), then click the right-facing double arrow button to move those roles to the Assigned list.

Click OK.

Creating subchannels

In the Manage Channels portlet, select a channel from the Available Channels list.

When you select a channel, wait for the portlet to refresh before continuing.

Click New to the right of the Subchannels list.

In the Edit Subchannel window, complete these fields:

Name – enter a name that describes the type of information this search retrieves. Be specific so you can distinguish between subchannels if you use more than one (for example, “Programs, C++” for one, and “Programs, Java/JavaScript” for another).
Training – enter a word or phrase that defines the results you want. Using specific criteria to more narrowly define your search is called “training.”

To train subchannels, use these guidelines:
- Type in a few descriptive words to return a list of relevant results.
- To restrict a search further, include more terms.
- To get fewer results, use a minus sign before a word to exclude pages containing that word. Include a space before the minus sign, but not after. For example, type “animals -cats” to find pages that contain the word “animals” but not the word “cats.”
- To get more results, use wildcards. Type an asterisk at the end of a word or partial word. For example, typing “part*” returns pages that include “partner,” “particle,” “participate,” and so on.
- Portal Interface searches are not case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you type them, are understood as lowercase. For example, searches for “george washington”, “George Washington”, and “gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN” all return the same results.
Minimum Relevancy – an integer between 0 and 100 that represents the relevancy of the results as a percentage. For example, if you enter “Adaptive Server”, results that contain information about Adaptive Server are more relevant than results that contain information about other servers. If you enter 100, you only get results that contain “Adaptive Server”.
Number of Returned Results – choose the number of results you want to display each time you activate this subchannel’s predefined search.
Age of Information – select a time period in which to search for Web results, between 1 and 14 days. Leave this option blank to see results from any time period.

Click OK. You return to the Manage Channels portlet, and the new subchannel displays in the Subchannels list.