Using Device Groups
The portal can be accessed by end users using different devices, such as a desktop computer or a smartphone. Device groups enable you to customize the portal appearance and behavior, according to the device being used to access the portal. You do this by using device groups in rule collections to assign a specific desktop at runtime, together with a desktop filter that defines the content to be displayed.
For example, if you access the portal from a smartphone, the following user agent could be sent from your device to the portal: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.3.4; fr-fr; HTC Desire Build/GRJ22) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1 . According to the defined device groups, you would be associated with the predefined Smartphone device group. In the master rule collection, the Smartphone Portal Desktop could be assigned to this device group. The Smartphone Portal Desktop includes the Smartphone Framework Page and the mobile theme, and it also has a mobile desktop filter defined. This means that when you access the portal using the user string specified above, you would see the mobile-adapted user interface and mobile content at runtime.
The Device Group Manager allows you to create device groups that contain user agent definitions. You use device groups to group user agent definitions according to the device or browser they relate to. At runtime, the user agent definitions are used to determine the type of device being used to access the portal.
You assign each device group a priority. At runtime, the device groups are evaluated in order of priority, to match the device in use with a user agent definition. The first device group that matches the user agent is used.
For more information about device groups, device types, and user agents, see Device Group Manager Concepts .
The Device Group Manager includes predefined device groups and user agent definitions. These default settings may be sufficient for your needs. If not, then you can modify the device group settings to meet your requirements, as described in the following sections: