Oracle WebCenter

Owned by Oracle, Oracle WebCenter is a product built on top of the JSF based Oracle Application Development Framework. It contains a set of components for building rich web applications, portals, and team collaboration/social sites. Oracle WebCenter is targeted at both the development community and business users, delivering a development environment that includes WebCenter Framework and WebCenter Services along with an out-of-the-box application for team collaboration and enterprise social networking. According to Oracle^[1], this is the strategic portal product, eventually replacing Oracle Portal as well as the portal products acquired from BEA.

Versions

• WebCenter 11g Release 1 - released July 2, 2009
• WebCenter 10g (10.1.3.2.0) - released January 2007

Cost

The product costs $70,000 per CPU for the WebCenter Services, and $125,000 per CPU for WebCenter Suite ^[2]. In a production install, expect to deploy at least 4 CPUs as a base system and likely additional CPUs in dev & test. WebCenter includes embedded US licenses of Oracle Secure Enterprise Search, Oracle Universal Content Management, and Oracle BPEL Process Manager. In addition, WebCenter needs a database to store information: a licenses for any supported database like Oracle database, MS SQL Server or IBM DB2 will work.

WebCenter product stack

There are three major products in the WebCenter product stack.

The base WebCenter Framework allows you to embed portlets, ADF Taskflows, content, and customizable components in your Oracle ADF application. All Framework pieces are integrated into the Oracle JDeveloper IDE, providing access to these resources as you build your applications.

WebCenter Services are a set of independently deployable collaboration services. It incorporates Web 2.0 components such as content, collaboration, and communication services - the full list is provided below. WebCenter Services includes Oracle ADF user interface components (called Taskflows) that can be embedded directly into ADF applications. In addition, APIs can be utilized to create custom UIs and to integrate some of these services into non-ADF applications.

Finally, WebCenter Spaces is a closed source application built on WebCenter Framework and Services that offers a prebuilt project collaboration solution. It can be compared with solutions like Microsoft Sharepoint and Atlassian Confluence. There are limited mechanisms to extend this application. It is featured in an Accenture Enterprise 2.0 video^[3].

Note that there is a product called WebCenter Interaction which is not built on the core WebCenter stack - it is the former Plumtree portal product. Also, all Oracle portal products at Oracle are included in the WebCenter Suite, which is an umbrella of products. Products can be included in the suite regardless of whether they are built on the ADF based WebCenter Framework.

WebCenter services capabilities

Social Networking Services - Enables users to maximize productivity through collaboration.

• People Connection – Enables users to assemble their business networks like linked-in
• Discussions - Provides the ability to create and participate in threaded discussion. This is an embedded version of Forums provided by Jive Software.^[4]
• Announcements - Enables users to post, personalize, and manage announcements.
• Instant Messaging and Presence (IMP) - Provides the ability to observe the online presence status of other authenticated users (whether online, offline, busy, or idle) and to contact them.
• Blog - Enables blogging functionality within the context of an application. This feature comes from an embedded version of open source package jzWiki.^[5]
• Wiki - Self-service, community, oriented-content publishing and sharing. This is an embedded version of open source package jzWiki.^[6]

Shared Services - Provides features for both social networking and personal productivity.

• Documents - Provides content management and storage capabilities, including content upload, file and folder creation and management, file check out, versioning, and so on. This functionality requires licensing of a JCR (JSR-170) compliant document repository product.
• Links - Provides the ability to view, access, and associate related information; for example, you can link to a solution document from a discussion thread.
• Lists - Enables users to create, publish, and manage lists. (Available only in WebCenter Spaces)
• Page - Provides the ability to create and manage pages at run time.
• Tags - Provides the ability to assign one or more personally relevant keywords to a given page or document. This feature is similar to the del.cio.us website.
• Events -Provides group calendars, which users can use to schedule meetings, appointments, and any other type of team get-together. This feature requires deployment of a separate calendering server, which may be Oracle Beehive or Microsoft Exchange. (Available only in WebCenter Spaces)

Personal Productivity Services - Focuses on the requirements of an individual, rather than a group.

• Mail - Provides integration with IMAP and SMTP mail servers to enable users to perform simple mail functions such as viewing, reading, creating, and deleting messages, creating messages with attachments, and replying to or forwarding existing messages.
• Notes - Provides the ability to "jot down" and retain quick bits of personally relevant information. (Available only in WebCenter Spaces)
• Recent Activities - Provides a summary view of recent changes to documents, discussions, and announcements.
• RSS - Provides the ability to publish content from WebCenter Web 2.0 Services as news feeds in RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 formats. In addition, the RSS service enables you to publish news feeds from external sources on your application pages.
• Search - Provides the ability to search tags, services, an application, or an entire site. This makes use of a license limited version of Oracle's search product.
• Worklist - Provides a personal, at-a-glance view of business processes that require attention. These can include a request for document review and other types of business process that come directly from enterprise applications.

Official and de facto standards support

WebCenter Framework supports the following standards:

• J2EE 1.4 and above (Java EE)
• JSR 168 and JSR 286
• WSRP 1.0 and 2.0
• JCR 1.0
• JSF
• JSR 116

Release of WebCenter 11g R1 Patch Set 3 (PS3)

In January 2011 Oracle released WebCenter 11g Release 1 Patch Set 3. As the converged portal platform, this is a major new release with many features integrated from previously-acquired portal products, including a greatly improved and flexible portal framework, improved GUI, personalization server, brand new navigation model, support for hierarchical pages and spaces, JSR 286, improved performance, and more.^{[citation needed]}

WebCenter Framework and Services lacks support for these notable technologies :

• Internet Explorer 6.0^[7]
• Eclipse (software) IDE but Oracle JDeveloper is provided as part of the suite of tools.

Customers

The Oracle customer reference site^[8] generally uses the WebCenter Suite label for all portal customers.

Notable competitors

WebCenter Framework plays in the Enterprise portal space, and WebCenter Services/Spaces plays in the Collaboration Workspace space. There are many competitors in each. Notable solutions include:

Enterprise Portal

• IBM WebSphere Portal
• JBoss Enterprise Portal
• Liferay Portal
• Microsoft SharePoint

Collaboration

• Microsoft SharePoint

External links

• WebCenter Official Home
• Oracle WebCenter 11g Handbook
• Peter Moskovits' WebCenter Blog
• Oracle Application Server
• Oracle WebCenter page on the Oracle Wiki
• Oracle WebCenter 11g Handbook: Build Rich, Customizable Enterprise 2.0 Applications - Amazon | McGraw Hill

Notes

1. ^ Oracle Fusion Middleware Update, Enterprise 2.0: User Interaction and Portals
2. ^ http://wiki.oracle.com/page/Oracle+WebCenter
3. ^ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTUCThJvAMQ
4. ^ http://tardate.blogspot.com/2008/01/backup-your-webcenter-wiki-yikes.html
5. ^ http://tardate.blogspot.com/2008/01/backup-your-webcenter-wiki-yikes.html
6. ^ http://tardate.blogspot.com/2008/01/backup-your-webcenter-wiki-yikes.html
7. ^ http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=833866
8. ^ http://www.oracle.com/customers/products/portal.html