WebCenter Team's Blog

There are several benefits of leveraging Oracle WebCenter Framework (WebCenter Services or WebCenter Suite) with Oracle ADF.

While it is true that WebCenter Framework uses ADF, WebCenter brings several additional capabilities that are extremely important for Application Customers.

1. Web 2.0 Services: More and more application customers are asking for services like Wiki, Discussions, Internet Messaging, VOIP, etc to be surfaced in context with the task that they are performing.

2. One of the reason application customers prefer WebCenter is its capability to re-use existing user interfaces and interlace them with new ADF task flows and Web 2.0 services to create a composite application user interface. WebCenter allows reuse of existing application UI from Oracle eBusiness Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel as well as our Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition dashboards. Leveraging Portlet standards and Mashup tools like Ensemble, WebCenter can surface UI for several other applications. This is a big reason by why customers chose WebCenter, because, not only does it bring in the rich UI capabilities of ADF, but it is also an extremely extensible and flexible Portal platform.

3. Surface content in context with the application: Several customers who have already gone live with WebCenter are using it to surface relevant content (documents, pdfs, collateral, etc) in the context of the task being performed. Both Wind River and Alcatel-Lucent decided to use WebCenter instead of a ADF only approach due to WebCenter's capability of tying in content and search (and several other artifacts as discussed below) together with the applications. WebCenter Suite provides them a single package that brings in all this capability together in a single suite.

4. Provide end users the capability to personalize and customize the page: In addition to surfacing content from several applications, one of the main differentiators for WebCenter is it ability to provide a runtime customization and personalization framework, enabling *business users* to create and modify pages.

5. Business Process Integration: More and more application customers are using now focusing on their Business Processes and demand complete end-to-end visibility into these processes from the same user interfaces from where they are performing their daily tasks. WebCenter provides out-of-the-box integration into BPEL process manager with views into an individuals or a groups work lists and enables them to take actions right in the context of the larger business process, rather than switching context through multiple applications to tie in the different fragments of information that are required to make a meaningful decision.

6. Spawning dynamic communities to collaborate on the task at hand: Another use-case that often comes up is the ability to spawn dynamic communities right from the application context. These communities need to have the same look and feel as the application and need to have strong security integration with the application in question. WebCenter Spaces is the solution for this.

These are just some of the many reasons why customers prefer WebCenter framework. We need to clearly evaluate what the customers want. If their long term vision is to create a more dynamic, collaborative application workspace, WebCenter is clearly the direction that they should choose.

Towards the beginning of July, Forrester reviewed the new WebCenter 11g Suite. The title of the report is: Oracle WebCenter Jumps Into The Information Workplace Fray. It's a very good review of where the current product leads, some of the integrations across Fusion Middleware, and a peak at general directions. Overall, a very good report. I highly recommend it.

There was one point within the report that I wanted to add a little more detail around. It had to do with existing portal products and the BEA portal products in particular. We had demonstrated a set of upgrade scripts the showed how different elements can be upgraded to WebCenter Spaces and Framework. For example, we demonstrated an upgrade utility (that we will make available on OTN towards the end of the year) to move WebCenter Interaction Collaboration projects directly to WebCenter Spaces. A simple upgrade with all information moving into a managed set of back end systems for higher scalability and manageability. But this didn't mean that all of WCI was going away. It just simply allows anyone that wants to upgrade the team communities a quick way when the time is right. By the way, we also demonstrated the same upgrade utility for MS Sharepoint. This would allow customers that wanted a more scalable enterprise soltuion to easily move up to a more manageable solution as well.

Again, these are utilities that are meant to be leveraged when the time is right. We do still have plans for new releases of WebLogic Portal and WebCenter Interaction, we just didn't demonstrate these during the 11g launch activities. There will be more public information about these new releases soon.

But again, I wanted to point out that the report is a very good read. In addition, you should have a look at the Forrester paper titled: "With 11g, Oracle Steps out of IBM's Middelware Shadow". The subtitle is: New release, will also blast past SAP Netweaver and challenge Microsoft."

Back from the dual launch events in both DC and London, we're starting to hear some extremely interesting reviews around WebCenter. You should check out Forrester's site for a new overview of WebCenter 11g. It's quite good and focuses in on some key areas of the entire product stack.

In addition, Craig Roth also had some very perceptive comments around how we integrate directly with other products. Coexistence with Sharepoint is a requirement these days, however, we also can help inoculate customers from this Sharepoint virus with a more scalable, more dynamic, more customizable, easier to use solution with WebCenter Spaces.

A key element of the WebCenter Spaces architecture makes it unique to what others are providing. At the heart, it provides a rich model of social computing services to help make teams and departments collectively more intelligent. This is done through a set of common Web 2.0 technologies that are tied into enterprise actions and user tasks. The goal is to make it simple for users to project what they know to everyone else when they need it. For developers and ISVs, this means that they can easily deliver templates to provide new value or embed Spaces directly into their application, portal, or solution and skin it to make it look exactly right. I've included an architecture diagram to give some internal details of the foundation of WebCenter Spaces.

I'll highlight a couple of key areas and then spend some more time next posting describing other elements.

On the left, we've focused on how different types of users can access this information: Business Users can leverage the Spaces application in a browser with any custom look and feel that is required. Business Analysts can leverage Composer to create new pages, create templates based on information coming out of the Business Dictionary. Developers can leverage JDeveloper to create any custom look and customize any part of the environment directly. These customizations are stored as layers on top of the base application and then housed in Oracle's Metadata Services (MDS). MDS is a powerful engine that manages, shreds, assembles, and compiles JSF pages on the fly to deliver complete extensibility.

On the right, Oracle WebCenter Analytics can be used to determine overall traffic of the site, pages, and services. Oracle Enterprise Manager or alternatively any Java Console can be used to manage the entire deployment, the services, the connections, and customizations. It provides a single place to manage the entire environment. No other product provides this type of integrated management console that includes all the Social Computing Services included with WebCenter Spaces.

In the middle, from the bottom up. The Metadata Services (MDS) engine can store customizations on the file system (for fast deployment options) and in any database. We're in the process of certifying other non-Oracle databases now. I'll post a more detailed description of MDS a bit later.

Next, Oracle has made sure that the framework is based on a core JSF engine that has a set of rich, declarative components to speed development. Importantly, in this layer, there is a concept we call Task Flows. These are extremely powerful and I encourage you to learn more.

In the middle, the Resource Catalog or Business Dictionary is key to allow business users or any user to gain a role based view of resources available to them. This then delivers all the rich Social Computing Services that are part of Oracle WebCenter. All of these services can be plugged in to any portal via JSR-301 and we've orchestrated all of them to work together inside of WebCenter Spaces. These services have a switching architecture to make sure it works with non-Oracle products as well as the out of the box services included with WebCenter.

On the top, there are a whole set of unique services that leverage core identity stores and bring in enterprise roles within the environment.

The important part to remember is that the entire stack of technology is available individually to be used by developers and that the entire collection can be customized and embedded in any solution directly. This is exactly what Oracle Fusion Applications developers are building out today.

Now, you have a bit more detail on why there is so much interest around WebCenter 11g!

As part of today’s Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g launch, Oracle announces the general availability of Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g – the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise portal platform designed for business users and IT and unified with business applications, Enterprise 2.0 services and social communities. Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g delivers significant new features including:

• WebCenter Spaces – Out-of-the-box personal and team work environment for business users to create online communities pre-integrated with WebCenter Services and with familiar tools such as MS Office.

• WebCenter Services – New social computing services such as tags, links, RSS, ratings, people connections, activity feeds, recent activities, tasks and improved wikis, blogs and discussions.

• Oracle Composer, Business Dictionary and Common Metadata Management – New visual customization tool that enables end users to personalize their portals and create mashups on-the-fly, storing all personalizations in a metadata layer on top of the base application. Users add content from a role-based Business Dictionary of pre-integrated components from enterprise applications, business processes, content sources, WebCenter Services and more.

• Developer Task Flows – over 50 pre-built components available as portlets and further customizable, enabling developers to quickly reuse and combine these components into portals and applications.

For more information on WebCenter Suite 11g including downloads, please check out the WebCenter Suite 11g page on OTN.

I realize there's a little gap in time from my last blog post but there was a little merger...

In any case, I wanted to discuss a conversation that seems to be on every customer's mind when we discuss some of the new Enterprise 2.0 capabilities. Most start the conversation this way:

"With the current economic climate, I either need to generate more business or service my existing customers better. It's very difficult to justify any new Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 projects that don't fit into one of these two categories. What do I do?"

So here's some strategies that resonate well with many customers. First of all, everything (good and bad) needs to be measured in some way. If it's good, you want to know how good. If the project is bad, then you want to know as soon as possible so you don't waste resources supporting something that adds no value.

Great, measure how good the stuff is. But what should should I measure? In many case when vendors talk about productivity, they are talking about very subjective areas. However, there are specific things that can be measured. Then a cost can be associated with the measurements depending on which users are impacted.

Here's my two places to start:
1. Find a Business Owner for the project that can describe their specific pain point and what they think might help solve the problem.
2. Make the measurement as concrete as possible. You're going to need the information to justify opening the company's wallet. So make sure they are things that should be measured.

So let's start with Wikis as an example of shopping technology around and we do another service in following posts. (I want to point out that it makes more sense to work on the business problem and then decide on technology vs finding a cool piece of technology and then trying to find where it fits.)

A simple measurement is how much time is lost by a specific user updating different documents that are attached to email. If you have two authors on one document, it might not be large enough to measure. But if you have ten people contributing to a document and they have roughly 5 edits per page and it takes a person 2 minutes to integrate each comment. You can quickly see that for each iteration of the document, they will end up "losing" (10 people x 5 edits x 2 minutes =) 100 minutes per page for one person. But you haven't finished yet, if it is attached to an email, then a subset of users will each spend a few minutes reviewing the different renditions that are sent around. So there is a follow-on number to calculate as well, if the first number doesn't have a big enough impact.

So when you think about adding these services into the organization, again find a specific metric. We'll talk about blogs, discussions, content, and others...

Over the last couple of months there has been a lot of work done by the teams at Oracle to make sure we have a solid foundation and core integration between all the products in Oracle's Enterprise 2.0 stable of products and more importantly around Oracle's Portal Solutions.

Clearly, there will be some challenges with communicating this information out as broadly as possible. And our direct competitors just love to twist our words to make customers believe that their current products are going away.

Let me start here. Oracle has clearly stated that Oracle Portal, Oracle WebLogic Portal, and Oracle WebCenter Interaction & Collaboration (formerly ALUI) will continue to be developed and supported for at the MINIMUM of 9 years. This means that there will be both major and minor releases of these products going forward. And when we get close to this 9 year time horizon, as we do for every product, we'll survey the customers and extend the time if that's their recommendation. At Oracle, we have a strong track record with doing that with other products ranging for Oracle Forms, Oracle Reports, Oracle RdB, Oracle PeopleSoft, Oracle Siebel, and the list goes on. While the original acquisition of these products, by all accounts from our competitors, signaled the end of these products, they have lead a strong and prosperous roadmap with no end in sight.

To be clear, we have dedicated development teams for each of the products in our Enterprise 2.0 family. Their charter is to make sure their product clearly continues to surpass the competition in all ways possible. Some of these leading edge features and capabilities will be shared services that will work across all products. I'll detail this information for you over the coming blog posts. And this is what is so worrisome to our competitors. Oracle and BEA no longer have parallel teams competing against each other, but we have a larger pool of clear development leaders working together to push the competition further behind.

We do have concrete plans for releases for each of these products coming out in the next few months and we'll detail these plans at the upcoming OpenWorld show starting on September 21st. Rest assured that if you can't attend OpenWorld, we'll make sure to post the content on http://webcenter.oracle.com. In addition, we have feature, coexistence and integration plans for additional releases that we'll share as much as we are legally allowed.

I'd encourage any existing customers that have been given an interpretation of our strategy from our competitors to contact me directly or my team and we are more than willing to show you the error in their ways. I'm at vince.casarez@oracle.com.

While traveling through Europe this week, I had the occassion to meet with no less than 7 differnt groups of customers and partners in 5 different countries. They span a few different industries and were both in the private and public sectors. And the consistent question was: should I use Oracle Portal or Oracle WebCenter for what I want to do. So in a few short paragraphs, I'll give you my take and tally the scores.

Oracle Portal: 0

Oracle WebCenter: 0

First, in Rome, the conversation came from a company that wanted to provide a new face for a set of CRM applications and CRM services. There was/is a clear need to leverage SOA-based services to tie thes enterprise application information into other application services and orchestrate the information for the user. Clearly, mashups or Enterprise Mashups can help in this space but they do have a good amount of Java expertise. And they want to run on more than just the Oracle Application Server. Given these basics and knowing that Oracle Portal only runs on Oracle Application Server and Oracle WebCenter will be certified to run on any (WebSphere, WebLogic, and JBoss), it was a clear choice to use Oracle WebCenter.

Oracle Portal: 0

Oracle WebCenter: 1

Next stop, Zurich. There I had the chance to meet and discuss Enterprise 2.0 requirements with a very large financial institution. They want to pull together HR information and provide a collaborative platform for all their employees. They want a rich user experience that provides a social network that ties into their corporate initiatives and can adhere to all the regulatory procedures within their industry. With a solid dose of expertise in the Java space and a requirement to run on other application servers, again the choice was very simple: Oracle WebCenter.

Oracle Portal: 0

Oracle WebCenter: 2

Making my way to Athens, I had the chance to meet with an exceptional partner that had won the selection process to supply a Citizen Portal that pulls together all types of services from many different ministries and them provides an easy way to manage the content to enable citizens to fill out applications and submit them for approvals or take them into the different offices/departments directly. They key concern was that they have an aggressive schedule and they wanted to be one of the first EU countries to deploy a solution that sets the foundation for their future. Also, they did not want to be on the bleeding edge of the technology curve and wanted to follow in the footsteps of other successful portal efforts. Both the partner and the ministry made the right choice in my mind, they chose: Oracle Portal. Platform wasn't the issue, ease of use, speed of deployment, integration of other services from a portlet based approach, and over 6,000 customers that have implemented Oracle Portal sealed the decision.

Oracle Portal: 1

Oracle WebCenter: 2

On to Madrid which brought a whole new set of conversations. First there were a whole set of partners looking to decide and understand strategic platforms for their new Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 projects along with enabling customizations and personalizations to a deployed application. They had plenty of Java experience and wanted to make sure that the components they used ran on any platform as they often walked in to client implementations that had already selected an application server platform. In this case, WebCenter was a big hit for them. They even wanted to understand where they could get the software so they could start immediately. I directed them to the Technology Preview 3 at http://webcenter.oracle.com. Then, I had the chance to discuss with a set of customers what their views were on Web 2.0 within their enterprise. Again, the coversations were quite exciting in both the public and private sector. And the choice again was clear, WebCenter was the best way to get started. So in this case, 2 more votes for WebCenter.

Oracle Portal: 1

Oracle WebCenter: 4

My final destination on the trip took me to Lisbon. In this case, we ment with a public sector group looking to provide a citizen Portal for many different ministries and also a Portal for all the public schools to leverage as well. A very ambitious project with very strong leaders in place to make it successful. Their added requirements came around the need to leverage content stored in Sharepoint as well as other MS technologies. In this case, products from our Universal Content Management Suite (like Records Management, Document Sealing, and Document Cleansing) can add core features to those existing Sharepoint deployments. In addition, the WebCenter components using JCR will also allow them to pull in content from sharepoint into their new portal. But with the added requirement of needing to have parents, teachers, and students personalize the site and that they wanted the effort to start immediately, it wasn't a slam dunk for just one User Interaction product. In this case, Oracle Portal can provide some required self-service capabilities for each of the schools and Oracle WebCenter can do all the heavy lifting for bringing the applications, Sharepoint content, and SOA services together (with the SOA Suite) from all the ministries. Along with the Oracle UCM providing the regulatory and security features around their Sharepoint deployments.

Finally tally:

Oracle Portal: 2

Oracle WebCenter: 5

Overall, a very successful trip in some beautiful countries that lead me to have a whole set of detailed conversations with visionaries in both the public and private sectors.

While this could be considered heresy to suggest that not everyone in the connected world will prefer to create a mashup, it is clear that mashups are helpful to many. There is a key need to be able to pull information together and shape it around a specific task. When I approve budget expenses, I'd like to see what I've approved in the past, the pending approvals, and the committed expenses as well. Alas, this information comes from many different sources (BI Analytics, transactional systems, spreadsheets, etc.). So I'd like to easily pull this information together. This is what we like to call Enterprise Mashups. It's more than just a regular mashup because to date every example primarily is tied to or includes a map in some way. We know that business users often times need to combine information together that doesn't strictly rely on location based information.

Ok, so now that we've coved a brief view on mashups, why can't anyone use them? Everyone can use them, but everyone won't use them. This is due to two reasons: ease of use and myopic views of the task at hand. For the first one, we've done a lot of work with the Internet Portal provides and they have hundreds of millions of users every day using their sites. They even make it extremely simple to add components to an existing page. Look at My Yahoo! for example. The way to add a component to a page is by clicking the edit link then checking off a couple of boxes, and viola, the page is personalized to exactly what the user wants. However, only about 15% of all users personalize their page and the UI doesn't get much simpler than this!

Second, most users don't troll around the systems they use every day to see if there's something more it can do for them. They simple get in, perform a specific task, and then move on. They don't have this surplus of time to find new capabilities and information.

An answer to both of these issues needs to be that the enterprise mashup system needs to "advertise" the new components that are relevant to the user. And then it has to provide the user with an easy way to add the component to the page. Without these two elements, any enterprise mashup or mashup in general is destined to be underutilized.

Over the past few months, this question seems to keep coming up.  So I figured that I'd spend a little time time discussing targets for the two products.  Then in the future, I can lay out directions.  The important point for everyone to understand is that both Portal and WebCenter have a large set of planned new capabilities for our 11g release as well as a new set of integration points.  But that will be for a later conversation.

Let's start with their sweet spots.  In a quick summary, Oracle Portal is an incredible product that is exceptional at delivering content centric or federated portal implementations from a single integrated architecture.  Oracle WebCenter is revolutionary in the way it approaches delivering composite applications into a hot pluggable architecture.

We've spent a large amount of resources pulling together all the components of large federated portals by directly integrating a WebCache and J2EE server, along with tight integration with Oracle Internet Directory, embedded content repository with process management for a simpler user experience.  Customers don't require dedicated implementators to provide customizations and personalizations across this entire integrated stack.  In addition, for basic configurations, users are able to get the product installed and running in just a couple of hours.  And Gartner by their own admission suggest that 40% to 45% of all portal inquiries are targeted at content centric portals.  There are pre-defined integration points for each of these infrastructure components but often times it requires a proxy approach through these embedded component to reach the corporate sytems.

WebCenter on the other hand provides direct standards-based integration with these different components.  For example, WebCenter leverages JAAS and JAZN to talk to whatever directory customers want to deploy.  Through Oracle's Virtual Directory product, WebCenter apps can directly access their users and roles from any supported backend system with no need to run through a proxy approach.  This is also true for content integration.  WebCenter includes an embedded use license of Oracle Content Database Suite (they can use either CDB or Stellent, whichever they choose) for a default content repository.  But this is through the implementation of JCR 1.0 (formerly JSR-170) so that whatever type of app is created, the backend content repository can be switched at runtime or deployment time.  In fact, Oracle has released a set of adapters for Documentum, Sharepoint, and Lotus notes.  And for additional adapters, Oracle's partnership with Day Software allows customers to connect to a wide variety of content stores.  There are many more components within the WebCenter framework, but the important element is that WebCenter is designed to plug into a customers existing infrastructure and use whatever system is in place.

The important thing to note is that these two products aren't isolated choices.  They already have direct integration and coexistence capabilities.  WebCenter can be used to produce portlets that get plugged directly into Oracle Portal.  In addition, they can leverage the same identity store.  There is a content adapter available for Oracle Portal so that content can be fed directly into a WebCenter application.  And through Oracle Portal's federated portal adapter, Portal pages can be exposed as a portlet and added directly to a WebCenter application.  All of these integrations are available today and we have more coming.

So don't believe everything you read when it comes from a competitor and take what you hear from the analyst community with a grain of salt.  By nature, their role is to pick holes in products to sell their services and my team is in the business of delivering real products with real vision and tight integration.

As you make it back into your offices after the year end holiday, we've provided one more package for you to open up.  We've taken all the new functionality that we've been discussing with Oracle WebCenter and bundled it together in the Oracle JDeveloper 11g Technology Preview 3.  There's a complete listing of services and capabilities here.

All you need to get started with the technical preview is Oracle JDeveloper, which includes the WebCenter Framework and Web 2.0 services such as Tagging, Links, Composer, Portlets, Search, and Document Library. Some services (Tagging and Links, for example) also require an Oracle database. You can begin by following the steps in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Tutorial for WebCenter Developers. Download the tutorial sample files here.

There's three key areas with this Tech Preview that we believe you'll find unmatched in the industry.  They are:

Oracle WebCenter Framework  breaks down the boundaries between Web-based portals and enterprise applications.  In essence, the WebCenter Framework integrates capabilities historically included in portal products directly into the fabric of the JSF environment, specifically, the ability to bind portlets and customize the application at runtime.  A complete, standards-based portlet development environment and business user tools support rapid creation of JSR 168-based portlets and deployment of WSRP 2.0-based portlet producers.  Content is easily integrated and published using data contronls built to the JCR/JSR 170 standard.  JCR adapaters provided for Oracle Content Database, Oracle Portal, and the file system, and optionally available for Documentum, Sharepoint, and Lotus.  In addition, all of the framework pieces are integrated into Oracle JDeveloper and implemented as an extension, providing unified access to the components as the application is being built.

With Oracle Composer,  information workers can easily create, share, and personalize pages in the running application.  Several page templates are provided out of the box to make the creation process easy and quick.  After creation, users can easily modify the pages by rearranging components through drag and drop and by editing components in place as indicated by visual clues.  The layered customization model for Oracle Composer separates metadata from code.  This means that a company can build a single foundational application that individuals, departments, and organizations throughout the company can customize without changing the core application.  Subsequently, the core application can be patched and upgraded without any loss of customizations.

Oracle WebCenter Services provides a set of Web 2.0 services that are delivered as resuable, out-of-the-box components.  Recognizing the requirements for users in an organization to collaborate, communicate, and share information online, Oracle has extended the number and range of services in WebCenter Release 11 to provide a complete set of leading services that are engineered to work together within a custom application.  The level of integration is unique and compelling and allows the services to be accessible in the context of the task or business flow.  These reusable components are available during development (JDeveloper) and at runtime (Composer) to create and extend your application.  The services available in Tech Preview 3 include: Document Library (file system only), Tagging, Links, Search (withing WebCenter only), and Portlets.  The following WebCenter Services are not available in Tech Preview 3, but will be included in Release 11: Forums, Wiki, Announcements, Presence, Tasks, and Worklists.

So welcome back from the holidays and let us know what you think about this exciting new version.  We'll post more information here and on the discussion boards to help developers get the most out of the Tech Preview 3 at this location.