How to customize the portal page

When logging in to UAG, it will display the portal itself, but sometimes, you might want to have your own page. For example, one scenario is when you want to have your own custom links to your applications, or a very customized design that goes beyond what you can achieve with editing the regular standard.master page. The good news is that the UAG portal page supports the standard CustomUpdate customization framework just like most of the pieces on UAG. However, the portal code is written in ASP.NET, which means you need some accommodations to make it work.

To customize the page, follow these steps:

1. Create your custom home page as “default.aspx”, and place it in <UAG Path>/Von/PortalHomePage/CustomUpdate

2. Make sure the page has the basic formatting as below:

<head runat=”server”> </head> <%              ‘Your custom ASP code*** %>              ‘Your custom HTML and/or JavaScript

***You can use any standard HTML, ASP and JavaScript code in there – just make sure the page starts with <head runat=”server”></head> , otherwise it will cause the .Net Framework to error out.***

3. If you want the page to have images, place the image files in /von/PortalHomePage/Images/CustomUpdate, and then, when referring to them in the code, use something like:

<img src=images/CustomUpdate/logo.jpg>

4. You don’t have to activate the configuration after each change, as UAG will update immediately (save time when testing and playing around), but do make sure you activate occasionally, so as to store the configuration in TMG storage, and propagate across array members, if you are using an array.

Naturally, you can use any web-page editing software to create your page. You can simply copy the links from the default portal page, and then build your own page around them in any way you like, or create a richer page content with ASP and/or JavaScript. As in any customization, the possibilities are infinite.