World of WebCenter Interaction

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.