World of WebCenter Interaction

Have you been frustrated by how difficult it is to navigate the My Oracle Support "Product Tree" when searching for WebCenter Interaction knowledge articles?

Do you find yourself confused by the number of articles returned from your keyword searches for knowledge that have absolutely nothing to do with WCI Products?

Is there really any knowledge base for WCI products at all?

The answer is yes! In fact it's very healthy and getting healthier every day. Across the breadth of the the WCI Products (Portal, Collab, Publisher, Analytics...etc.) there are hundreds of current and updated knowledge articles available on MOS. New knowledge is created from almost every support case where the issue was not otherwise solved by existing knowledge or documentation. The Support Team is reviewing and publishing an average of 20 new articles a month, each of them solutions culled from actual customer engagements.

We recognize that it can be difficult to navigate the "product tree" to narrow the scope of your search results to ensure it's limited to the knowledge created specifically for the WCI products.
To help make it easier for WCI customers to get to the right knowledge as quickly as possible we've created a valuable link to use anytime you want to search MOS for
WCI product knowledge. The link will limit your search to only the products in the WCI family.

Click this link: WCI Search

The link should take you right to the WCI KM search section on MOS (after you log in) and all you need do from there is enter your key words and "Search". We encourage you to review the articles here.

Let Us Know How We're Doing

Did an article help you resolve your issue and avoid having to log a service request?

Was the article perfectly written and exactly what you needed?

Was the article more complicated than it should have been or somehow incomplete?

Make sure you "rate" the article after you've viewed it and feel free to make comments that might help us improve an article. Look for the "Rate This Document" icon at the bottom of the view window for the article and click there. The feedback goes directly to the team that created the article is actively reviewed in an effort to improve on the knowledge already provided
or to help generate new knowledge as needed. The Support Team is striving to ensure that the right information is available at the right time.

Hey there all you WCI crazy people. I know that it has been a while since you heard from me, but with OpenWorld and then the holidays, there really wasn't much for me to talk about. This is now going to change, so you can expect to see more from this blog over the next few months.To kick things off, I have an announcement to make to all of you:

What are the best practices for implementing an SSO tool with the WebCenter Interaction (formerly "ALUI") Portal Application?

What specific requirements for configuring the WCI Portal to accept and integrate standard SSO Cookies from any vendor's application?

What are some of the known pitfalls to avoid when configuring the Portal to work with an SSO tool?

These are just some of the main areas that will be covered in this one hour webinar which will demonstrate the SSO / Portal configuration in action.
Our demonstration will focus on areas where Technical Support sees the largest numbers of customer questions become support incidents in an effort to
help avoid the need to create an incident to get the configuration working properly in the customer environment. The SSO tool we will use in this demonstration will be
Oracle's OAM tool (10.1.4.0.1 Webgate), but we will highlight important points for integrating any vendor's SSO tool. Please join us for what we think will be
a valuable and relevant learning session.

Webinar information:

Conference Title WCI SSO Integration
Conference ID 6192555
Date and Time 10-Feb-2010 11:00 AM
Duration 1 Hour
Timezone (UTC-08:00) US Pacific Time

Dial-in Number 1-866-682-4770

Conference Code: 5256472 Security Code: 6472525


Direct Link to the conference: https://strtc.oracle.com/imtapp/app/sch_mtg_details.uix?mID=6192555

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.