Most information and records that you can access from any of your home pages can also be accessed from the tab bar. However, home pages and portal panes provide a quicker means of doing so.

The Home Page Example image shows the different components that you may see on your home page. Some portal panes, like Employee Messages, contain important textual information, such as messages to employees or important announcements.

Other portal panes are more interactive. You can click hyperlinks to access saved searches, web sites and records, such as existing appointments, contacts, claims. There are also hyperlinks that open tools or record screens with blank fields so that you can create new appointments, contacts, tasks.

Certain portal panes that appear on your home page may contain hyperlinks to stocks, weather, or headline news.

Certain portal panes are designed to display search results for a specified type of record. For example, in the My Appointments portal pane, shown in the Home Page Example image, the records displayed are filtered according to the specified search criteria. See To use the portal pane title bar buttons for details on how to change your search criteria.

The number of displayed search results is determined by your system administrator. If the number of search results exceeds the maximum number entered, you can always click the More hyperlink. All of the search results are displayed on a standard search screen.

Note: In order to use the links that do searches, you must be subscribed to the object collections that are associated with the searches. (More information about subscribing to collections is in Managing Collections.) Ordinarily this subscription is done for you automatically by the solution developers for your organization. However, if you manually unsubscribe from an object collection, then later click a search link that is associated with that collection, you will see an error message that says you must first subscribe to the collection before attempting to use the search link.

Portal panes that contain graphic output from reports cannot "wrap" the graphic output as they can wrap text output. If the pane is too small, the graphic output is truncated. For this reason, consider the size of the graphic output when deciding how to size and place the portal pane in a home page.