The APCOM portal extends the idea of a conventional website into a web application framework – not only conventional web pages. but more dynamic content such as forums, blogs, social networking and beyond.

This is possible because all the functionality of the portal – the applications – sits under a framework that allows the visitor to identify themselves and personalise their content to make it more relevant, and also allow the portal administrators to control how portal users and visitors interact with the portal.

Many visitors to the portal may be interacting from within their company networks, which are normally secured against hacking, or virus attacks behind firewalls or proxy servers – these types of technologies can frequently cause problems with any type of portal technology, because information about who is signed on to the portal and what they are allowed to access is lost between the client browser in the organisation and the portal server.

If you are experiencing problems where you sign on to the portal and are not recognised unless you reload (or ‘refresh’) the portal web page you may be experiencing these types of problems.

There are several ways to resolve such issues, and I have given details below

You can clear the cache on your browser and reload, or refresh the page – but this is not practical as a permanent solution. Make a request to your organisation’s IT staff to allow direct (non proxyied) access to the APCOM portal – this is normally a simple matter of allowing you to go direct to http://www.apcom.org.uk – since the idea of a proxy server is to control what web sites are looked at and this website is a legitimate business website this should not be a problem and is the preferred approach. If this is not practical you can overcome these problems by instructing your web browser to never save or ‘cache’ the portal web pages so that they are always fetched from the portal web server – unfortunately there is no reliable way of doing this for just the portal web pages, but you can do this all web pages - this will mean a slight delay as the pages are fetched but has the advantage that the pages will always be up to date – many proxy servers do not correctly detect when pages have been updated, particularly on web servers with pages that change frequently, such as is the case on dynamic websites or portals.

Depending on the web browser you are using, the procedure for doing this can vary unfortunately – even between different versions of the same web browser, but I have shown the two common browsers below, and can investigate others.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.x

Tools | Internet Options | General (tab) | Browsing History (settings button) and then select the radio button that says

‘Every time I visit the webpage’ as shown below

and press the ‘Enter’ key.

Close Internet Explorer down and re-open it and you will now be working.

Mozilla Firefox 3.x

Go to the URL/address bar and enter ‘about:config’ and press the ‘Enter’ key

You should see a long list of browser preference settings (you may need to click a box that asks if you are sure you want to change them – you are!) and if you scroll down there is a preference value called

browser.cache.check_doc_frequency

Double click on this entry and change the number (probably set to 3) to 1 and press ‘Enter’

Close Firefox down and re-open it and you will now be working.