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.
