World of WebCenter Interaction

As I am sure most of you are aware, Oracle's OpenWorld 2009 conference is coming up next week. For those of you are that are planning on attending, you may be wondering what is going to be happening for you the owners and implementers of WCI/ALUI.

First of all, to answer the simple question, I will absolutely be attending and participating in OpenWorld. Here is a nice listing for you to give you an idea of what kind of information I will be providing:

S309879-Getting Up to Speed with Oracle WebCenter Interaction
Presentation
Tuesday 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM
Moscone South - Room 252

This presentation will be a discussion of where WCI is today and what the roadmap is looking like for the future. Some of you will already have seen this content, but to a lot of you, it might be exciting to hear about the new features that the development teams have been working on.

S311711-Seamlessly Integrate Enterprise 2.0 into Oracle WebCenter Interaction
Hands-On Lab
Wednesday 11:45 AM -12:45 PM
Marriott Hotel - Golden Gate A2

This is a hands-on lab where the students will be learning about how we are planning on integrating and consuming Enterprise 2.0 services. The students will actually walk through the configuration and consumption of some specific services to get a good understanding of how we will be doing it for the future.

Demo Pod W-154
All Day M-W

I will also have a Demo Pod setup within the Exhibition Hall so that I can show off some of the new features that the development team has been working on. Not all of the features will be ready to show, but we will definitely be able to show quite a few of them. I will also have some integrations points as part of the demo so that we can show and talk about how we will be integrating with products like UCM and WebCenter Services.

WCI Customer Advisory Board (CAB) Meeting
Thursday 2:30 PM - 4 PM
W-Hotel, 181 3rd St., Workroom-1

This should give you a good idea of what you can expect as a WCI customer for the conference as a whole. Along with what is scheduled, I will be available to talk with any customers one on one, you will just need to get get it on my schedule. Hope to see and talk with all of you there.

There is new page on OTN that focuses on WebCenter and Portal at OOW 2009. You can access it from any of the home pages for WebCenter Suite, Oracle Portal, WLP, and WCI. You can download the 'Focus On Guide' as well as gather information about our:

• DEMOgrounds
• Keynotes
• Conference Sessions
• Session Details
• CABs

I am pleased to announce the release of WebCenter Interaction and Collaboration version 10.3.0.1, a patch release for the 10gR3 versions of each product. These patch releases contain a set of bug fixes related to each product as well as a new Desktop Integration feature for Collaboration called the Office Task Bar Panel. Each of the bugs that have been fixed are listed and summarized within the Release Notes for each product. Links to each can be found below:

WCI 10.3.0.1 Release Notes: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E13158_01/alui/wci/docs103/relnotes/Release_Notes_Oracle_WebCenter_Interaction_v10-3-0-1-0.htm

WebCenter Collaboration 10.3.0.1 Release Notes: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E13158_01/alui/collaboration/docs103/relnotes/Release_Notes_Oracle_WebCenter_Collaboration_v10-3-0-1.htm

All packages for the products can be found on the Oracle Support site. Customers can log into Metalink, go into the Patches & Updates tab, and do a Simple Search for patch number 8935278 (WCI) or 8935708 (WCC) and you can download the patch.

NOTE: An installation of either WCI 10gR3 or WebCenter Collaboration 10gR3 will be required before these patches can be installed.

I get asked a lot whether customers should consider upgrading to WCI 10gR3 if they are already on ALUI 6.5 MP1. It is a very logical question being that we have stated many times that WCI 10gR3 can be considered as a MP2 of ALUI 6.5. Hopefully I can help you understand what the differences are between the two versions to help you make a more informed upgrade decision.

Here is a set of bullet points for what was done in the 10gR3 release beyond 6.5 MP1:

• Oracle Branding
• Removal of all BEA License Keys
• Addition of WLS 10gR3 and JDK 1.6 support
• Bug Fixes
• New Experience Rule based on HTTP Headers
• New iPhone based Adaptive Layout templates

For customers that are already on 6.5 MP1, there isn't a lot of reason based on the list above to move to 10gR3 by itself. However if you would like to get access to some of the other products within WebCenter Suite, then upgrading to the latest version and migrating to WebCenter Suite licensing does make sense. It all depends on what you have planned for your portal implementation.

I have a number of announcements that I would like to make to you as I have really been working hard to get new information and functionality out to you. As such, I have been working with other members of the Product Management team to make some changes to the WebCenter Interaction page that all of you can find on the Oracle Technology Network. This page can be found at the following URL:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/webcenter/interaction/index.html

On this page you will find many presentations that we have put together for informational purposes or that I have given at the Collaborate 09 conference earlier this year. You will also find a couple of new white papers for you as customers; one that talks about how to integrate ADF applications into WCI as portlets using Ensemble and then one that talks about tuning and performance of your WCI implementation.

UCM CWS Sample

The second piece to this announcement is in reference to a new piece of sample code that I would like to make available to the WCI customer base. By scrolling to the bottom of the below URL, you will find a new Crawler Web Service that will allow you to crawl and index UCM based content within a WCI Knowledge Directory.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/webcenter/owcs_10132_demos.html

This CWS is a fully functioning crawler that I wanted to make available to help bridge the gap between WCI and UCM. It is hopefully just the first piece of a much larger integration story between the two products. A full set of installation instructions and description of the sample code can be found in the zip package that is available for download.

For those who are not aware, if you scroll up slightly from the UCM CWS sample, you will notice that there are WCI sample portlets available for the Wiki/Blog/Discussions functionality within the WebCenter Services product, so please feel to try these as well especially if you are interested in that functionality. Please remember that all of this is currently sample code, but I do appreciate any feedback that you might have.

Please keep an eye on both the main WCI OTN page and the WebCenter Suite 10gR3 sample page, because I hope to be making more additions in the future.

As new versions of different pieces of the WCI architecture are made available and supported, you as customers will inevitably start moving to these new versions. In this particular case, I am referring to the latest Oracle DB version that is supported which is 11.1.0.6 and above. Unfortunately, I have received a number of emails recently where different people have run into problems trying to deploy WCI on this version of the DB.

To hopefully clear some things up for other customer deployments, I thought it would be beneficial to make you aware of some known changes that need to be made before starting up the database instance and therefore before running WCI for the first time.

In the release notes for WCI 10gR3, there is a note at the bottom of the supported platform listing that mentions a couple of changes that need to be made within the initPLUM10.ora file when using Oracle DB 11g. Here is the exact note at it exists within the release notes:

NOTE: When running WCI with Oracle 11g with the provided initPLUM10.ora file, make the following modification: Change 'compatible = 10.2.0.0.0' to 'compatible = 11.0.0'. Also, to prevent problems with "group by" optimizations when using WCI with Oracle 11g you must add the following configuration to the bottom of your init$ORACLE_SID.ora file: _optimizer_group_by_placement=false.

If you do not make these necessary changes, then the portal will not startup properly and you will never get to see a login page. Hopefully this information will help some of you prevent this problem in the future.

In the six to nine months that I have been in the Product Manager position, I have gotten a number of questions around the strategy behind what we are going to do with Publisher and Studio being that they are not being moved forward as products. The story is pretty similar for both products, but of course where the functionality might be coming from is going to be different for each. For this particular blog entry, let's focus on AquaLogic Studio and then in a later blog we can talk about how the migration will be handled for Publisher.

The Studio product was created as a way to easily create portlets without the need for developers, however it really only provides three different kinds of portlet functionality:

• Polls/Surveys
• Calendaring
• Record Browsing/Submission

For a true migration to work there needs to be both replacement pieces of functionality as well a plan for the migration of existing data. This is the only way that our WCI customer base can be truly happy and not lose anything that they currently have.

In the case of Studio, I do have a clear vision of where each piece of the above functionality is going to come from and is the case with any new functionality for WCI customers; this will be available in the 11g timeframe.

Calendaring - This will coming from WebCenter Collaboration as the functionality between the two systems is almost identical.

Polls/Surveys - This functionality is currently under development by members of the WebCenter Services Product Development team and will be a part of the WebCenter Services product. WCI Customers will then take advantage of this functionality through a set of portlets in much the same way as they can with Wikis, Blogs, & Discussions that are part of WebCenter Services today.

Record Browsing/Submission - This functionality will be replaced with a task flow that is currently part of the WebCenter Framework called Lists. This provides all of the same functionality that they Studio portlets provided, but within the scope of one portlet.

Once all of the replacement pieces of functionality are in place, we will then need to create a migration utility that can move existing data from Studio into the new environments. This is going to be very important, because there are a number of customers that are going to be want access to their historic data, especially in the case of Polls and Surveys.

Everything mentioned above has already been started with the exception of the migration utility and the majority of it will be available in the WCI 11g timeframe. However, we do not expect to have all of the new replacement functionality and the migration wizard completed in time, so we do plan on certifying Studio 2.2 with WCI 11g so that customers do not have to worry about migrating immediately upon upgrading. This means that you can expect to see a white paper along with the migration utility, once it is completed sometime after the release of WCI 11g and this white paper will walk you the customer through how you can use the new functionality and move your existing data into those services.

I hope that this helps you better understand what we are thinking when it comes to AquaLogic Studio and what we are planning for the future in respect to its functionality and data. Please feel free to provide me with any feedback and comments about our strategy and look forward in the upcoming weeks for our Publisher strategy.

I know that not many of our WCI customers are currently using Ensemble, but I believe that that will change over time. Ensemble is becoming a very strategic product within the scope of the WebCenter Suite of products. It was originally designed as a mashup engine for WCI so that you could pull many different types of web applications into WCI as portlets or vice versa, inject WCI portlets into other external web applications as pagelets.

We are expanding on that to make Ensemble the premier engine for the injection of web applications into any other web application, but more specifically into any of the WebCenter portals: Spaces, WCI, or WLP. We are also using Ensemble as a way to disseminate those web applications in a standard way, but that is for the future.

So that our WCI customers could get up to speed on Ensemble and be aware that I will probably recommending it to solve problems in the future, I wanted to let you all know about the new patch release that just came out. This is the announcement that the PM Tom Quigley just made last week.

"I am pleased to announce the release of WebCenter Ensemble 10.3.0.1.0, a patch to Ensemble 10.3. The patch provides support for ADF as well as bug fixes. Also, the patch certifies the use of WebCenter 11g Services in WebCenter Interaction. This is an important patch because it enables WCI customers to consume ADF taskflows as portlets. The patch can be downloaded from metalink. Do a search for 8653971."

For more information about Ensemble, please take a look at the Ensemble page on OTN at: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/webcenter/ensemble/index.html

Refer to the release notes for more information.

Let’s try and finish up the discussion around sizing by talking about the Collaboration and Analytics server products. As a quick reminder, these products are not required in anyway within a WCI implementation, but there are a lot of customers who use them. There are also a number of customers who depend on them as part of their business. As such, I do get asked a lot how customers can size these specific products.

When thinking about the sizing for Collaboration and Analytics, the question has to be asked: How is this customer going to be using Collaboration and/or Analytics within the scope of their WCI implementation? Let’s take a look at each one individually.

Collaboration

Aside from the portal itself, Collaboration is one of the most heavily used components within the WCI architecture, however not all customers use it. Going back to our customer example, we know that the customer is planning on using their Collaboration environment for project management purposes within many of their internal departments. They are expecting as many as 200 different projects to be managed through Collaboration with as many 1000 users working on those projects at any given time.

This does not mean that all of those users will be working within Collaboration at the same time, but there is the potential for that. Collaboration is going to be a very important piece of this customer’s implementation.

Collaboration on average can handle about 400-500 concurrent users at a time depending on the types of activities the customer might be performing. With this as a gauge, we can see that we will need at least two Collaboration servers to support the 1000 potential users that will be working on their respective projects.

RECOMMENDATION: When working with multiple Collaboration servers, you might want to think about how the application is installed and deployed. Due to the fact that Collaboration is a Java based web application, there are a number of ways that it can be deployed. The default installation includes a black-box deployment of Tomcat which Collaboration then gets deployed into. When working with multiple servers though, it is best to deploy Collaboration within a WebLogic application server, so that web application clustering can be used to manage the user session across the two available servers. This is not a requirement, because hardware based load balancing could be used with the Tomcat deployments, just a recommendation.

Analytics

Analytics is a different type of component that can be used within the scope of WCI architecture. It has both a backend component that runs behind to scenes to collect all of the data that is used to determine how a WCI architecture is being used. It also has a web application front-end that can display the aggregation of the collected data into a set of portlets.

In our customer example, the customer is using Analytics to track what communities and portlets are being used the most, as well as what search terms users are supplying. This will help them better determine how the WCI implementation should evolve. However, our customer is using a Business Intelligence tool like Hyperion from Oracle to massage and view the collected data rather than using the OOTB portlets, although some community managers do use the portlets.

Because of the amount of activity the Analytics server is processing, it is best to have Analytics on a server by itself, but it does not appear that there is a need to go beyond the single server.

Conclusion

Using our customer example and all of our previous sizing blog entries, we have the following within our architecture:

• 4 x Windows based Portal Servers
• 2 x Windows based Image Servers
• 2 x Windows based Automation Servers
• 2 x Windows based Search Servers
• 2 x Collaboration Servers
• 1 x Analytics Server
• 1 x Windows based Database Server

IMPORTANT: I am sure that a lot of people are going to read this and think that this seems like a lot of servers, but please remember that all recommendations above were brought together as a set of guidelines and not as a definitive architecture for all customer implementations. The number of servers suggested was based on a Windows installation and the types of hardware that are available for that type of environment. Because of the differences in hardware and operating system, the numbers could be very different if the platform were either a flavor of UNIX or Linux.

Please see the WCI certification matrix for all supported platforms: WCI Certification Worksheet

One question that I am sure a lot of people are going to be thinking after reading through this last of the sizing blogs is: “What about Publisher, Pathways, and Studio?” I am not going to be covering these products, because they are essentially in retirement. They are certified and supported with WCI 10gR3 and they will continue to be certified with WCI 11g, but we are not doing any new development on either of these products. Each of them has a different story for what will be happening to them long-term and I will be happy to talk with any customer about that, but from a general perspective, we will not be doing any further enhancements on the products.

First of all, let me apologize for taking so long to come back with a new blog entry. Things have been pretty busy over the last few weeks and that has prevented me from getting a new content out to you.

I want to once again step away from the sizing discussion for a second and talk about something that I get asked about all the time. Since the Oracle acquisition, I get asked all the time whether a customer should upgrade to WCI 10gR3 and if so, then how long should it take. Like a lot of questions that I get asked, the answer is not extremely straight forward. So let’s look at both pieces of the question.

Should I Upgrade to WCI 10gR3?

Surprisingly, this is not an easy question to answer. If you are currently running a version of ALUI 6.5, then there is truly not a great reason for upgrading, because there were not a lot of changes made between ALUI 6.5 MP1 and WCI 10gR3. In fact, we essentially think of WCI 10gR3 as ALUI 6.5 MP2. Here is a list of the primary changes that were made to create WCI 10gR3:

• New Adaptive Layouts for iPhone
• New Experience Rule for IP addresses
• Oracle Branding
• Removal of license key requirements
• A few bug fixes across different areas of the products

If one or more of the above items are important, then there may be a good reason to upgrade to WCI 10gR3. However, if the above items are not important, then maybe it isn’t important for you to upgrade quite yet.

On the other hand, if you are currently running a version of ALUI 6.x prior to 6.5, then there are a lot of great reasons for upgrading because there were a lot of new features added between 6.x and WCI 10gR3. The new UI engine called Adaptive Layouts is definitely a very significant improvement as well as the availability of the new Friendly URLs feature. In almost every instance, I would recommend that a ALUI 6.0 or 6.1 customer upgrade to WCI 10gR3.

How long will it take to upgrade?

There is actually no definitive answer to this question that can be given to every single customer. Every customer is going to have different testing requirements. Those testing requirements are also going to be different based on the type of deployment that the customer has. Even though I can’t provide a definitive timeframe, there are some pointers that I can provide for what areas should be focused on prior to the actual performance of the upgrade.

1. Database – This along with the running of the installer is probably the only required piece that all customers will need to look at because there is definitely a set of scripts that you will have to run. Once the product has been installed, a set of database scripts will be available in the sql folder for your environment. Depending on what version you are upgrading from, you may have more than one script to run through, but the good news that this is the easiest part of the upgrade.

2. Installer – This is obviously required for any upgrade, because it is the only way that you will get the latest version of the web application. Make sure that you have the portal completely shutdown prior to running the installer, this means all backend services and all application server services so that there are no locks on any of the files being upgraded. This should only take an hour or so per server to run through as long as you have all the form field entries written down and available.

3. UI – If you have created any kind of custom UI, either through the older Navigation APIs and UI MVC paradigm or using a header type of navigation, this is definitely something that you should look at prior to the upgrade. You may want to move to the new Adaptive Layouts and this could require quite a bit of work or at the very least you may need to recompile your UI libraries so that will definitely work after the upgrade.

4. Portlets – Depending on the portlets that you have developed, you may need to take a look at these and verify that they will work properly within the scope of the new version. Maybe you will need to recompile them because of a new version of the IDK or because you are using a native library and that library is being updated. You should definitely make sure that you run through your inventory and do some verification.

At the end of the day though, make sure that you have a lot of testing in your upgrade plan. You may even want to run through a mock upgrade within a development or testing environment prior to trying the upgrade in production, just so that you can be sure of all the gotchas.

The WCI upgrade is not meant to scare you as a customer, but it isn’t meant to be trivial either. We are trying to provide as many new features and bug fixes as we can in each new release. If you are concerned about your upgrade, then you should definitely speak with Oracle Consulting and they will be more than happy to help you out. They have a lot of experience with the upgrade process and as a former member of the consulting organization, I can definitely attest to that.