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What Customer Portal features are available for mobile devices?

Environment:

Mobile Pageset, Mobile Customer Portal
Oracle B2C Service, May 2010 and newer

Resolution:

Beginning with the May 2010 release, a reference implementation has been added to the Customer Portal pageset for mobile devices that has been tested on the Android 1.5+, and iPhone 3.1+ operating systems and associated browsers and can be extended to other mobile platforms.

Customers can view the most popular answers and featured support categories, search the knowledge base using product and category filters, view individual answers, and provide answer feedback.  In addition, this release allows multiple pagesets to be deployed at any one time on a single interface, allowing customers to offer tailored experiences to a variety of devices and interaction patterns (point-and-click, touch, etc.).

Other elements of the mobile customer portal include the following:

• The new javascript_module page meta tag can be used to determine the framework components to be used, which helps optimize performance on mobile browsers. 
• A page set mapping feature allows for the detection of the browser customers are using and directs them to an appropriate page set. For example, customers using mobile browsers can be directed to the mobile page set or a new page set.
• Six new widgets have been developed for the mobile page set for searching, navigating, displaying products and categories, and showing and filtering search results.

For an overview of mobile customer portal, refer to Answer ID 4321: Overview of working with Mobile Customer Portal.

For more information, refer to the 'Mobile Customer Portal' section of online documentation for the version your site is currently on. To access Oracle B2C Service manuals and documentation online, refer to the Documentation for Oracle B2C Service Products.

Viewing the Mobile Page Set prior to deploying for use in Production

Before deploying the Mobile Page Set for use in production, you can view the mobile page set on a non-mobile device such as a PC using a non-IE browser such as Chrome or Firefox. You must also have at least one "User Agent" enabled. You do not have to deploy Customer Portal unless you want to make the mobile pages available to end users using the device(s) you select.

Note: Designers can customize the mobile pages using a WebDAV connection to download files and then upload modified files. For more information about WebDAV, refer to Answer ID 4704: Popular answers about WebDAV.

To view the mobile page set prior to deploying for production in August 2010 and newer releases, use these steps:

1. Log in to the site administration area using a non-IE browser such as Chrome or Firefox -- http://{site name}/ci/admin
2. Click the "Page Set Mappings"
3. Under Page Set Mapping select the mobile device you wish to enable and click the "Enable" button to the right. Click "Save"
4. Navigate back to the Customer Portal Administration page by clicking the Dashboard tab and click "Set Environment"
5. First, Set the Site mode to either "Development" or "Reference Implementation."  Next, select Mobile page set. Note: If you select "Production" and have not re-deployed CP after enabling the device, you will see the standard (non-mobile) pages. The mobile pages will only be visible after you have re-deployed CP
6. Ready? Click Set viewing mode and view the site button
7. Once you have enabled any device, you will need to deploy Customer Portal. If you have deployed Customer Portal previously, you will need to re-deploy for any changes made to Page Set Mapping

Adding a custom mobile device to the Mobile Page Set

To access the Mobile Page Set and add a device:

1. Log in to the site administration area -- http://<site>/ci/admin
2. Click the "Page Set Mappings"
3. Click the "Add Mapping" button"
4. Enter information in the following fields: "User Agent Regular Expression, "Description", and "Page Set"
5. Click Save
6. After testing any changes in the Development area, you will need to deploy Customer Portal.  If you have deployed Customer Portal previously, you will need to re-deploy.

For information on deploying the customer portal pages, refer to these resources:
Answer ID 2849: Deploying Customer Portal pages 
Answer ID 5304: Deploy change to mobile page sets only