Creating a Custom Landing Page or Custom Home Page for your OBIEE / OBIA environment

Creating a Custom Landing Page or Custom Home Page for your OBIEE / OBIA environment

Your organization may want to have a custom home page or landing page for your OBIEE or OBIA environment.  (I will use the term “Landing Page” going forward to not confuse it with the OBIEE delivered “Home Page”).  When users log in, they need to be automatically taken to this custom landing page instead of to the delivered OBIEE Home Page.

This post describes some of the reasons you may want a custom landing page, the content that could be on the page, how to automatically navigate users to the page, and security associated with the page.

Why would you want to create a Custom Landing Page?  The reasons will vary by organization, but these could be some of the reasons:

1. Deliver the look and feel that your company or users desire.
2. Allow for a place that serves as a central location for the content you want to emphasize, in the way you want to display it.
3. Provide a central place for messages of any kind for your users.

What content will be on this Custom Landing Page?  Some of the possibilities are:

1. Create a page with your custom logos, images, and colors that are in line with your company’s or department’s branding.
2. A section with messages for your user community. This information could include things such as:
   1. The date/time of the last data load?
   2. The sources of the information displayed on your dashboards
   3. Information about recent dashboard releases
   4. Upcoming downtime
   5. Upcoming events such as user training events
   6. Action needed by the user community
3. A section that lists links to useful resources, such as:
   1. user’s guides or tutorials
   2. dashboard and report glossary
   3. analysis/report request forms
   4. Security/Access Request forms
   5. general OBI information
4. A section with Contact Information – containing information about who, what, when, how to contact people for help or information, or how to submit new requests for data/analyses/reports, maybe by functional area, etc.
5. An area to display your company’s or division’s top key performance indicators (KPIs). These should be limited to just a few – I would say not more than 5 – and they should be relevant company-wide or “OBI user community-wide”.
6. Links to dashboards. You may create an area or areas of links to various dashboards. Your dashboard list may include many of your dashboards or just a select few that you know are frequently used or that you want to emphasize.

All users that are authorized to use the OBI system will have access to this page.  So, maybe BI Consumer role will be provided access.

However, you will need to set security on the sections containing links to dashboards to allow access only to those authorized for the each set of dashboards.

Once your custom landing page is ready, you will then need to set it as the default page for users (or a subset of users).  To do this you will need to create an initialization block that sets the PORTALPATH built-in OBI variable to point to the new landing page dashboard page.

One final note … you can have multiple custom landing pages if you desire, for example, a different page for each division or a different page for each major group of users.  You would then need to set the PORTALPATH variable based on the user’s profile.

Good luck with your custom landing page project.