WebCenter Team's Blog

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.

There's been quite a bit of FUD passed out by some competitors that know very little about Oracle's strategic directions and the futures of these two very strong products.  But if you think about it, you'd want to spread these rumors as a means to stay competitive.

To be extremely clear, there is a bright future for both products.  Oracle Portal (with 10.1.4) had a significant upgrade and there are similarly significant upgrades planned for the 11g release as well.  Oracle WebCenter has shown strong customer interest over the past few months.  And there are a huge set of new services to foster Social Networks and enable users to shape information into the context of their business tasks.  Each of these services have been constructured to be easily consumed in Oracle Portal.  We don't mean a future version of Oracle Portal, we mean 10.1.4 today.

Over the next few weeks, we'll keep updating this blog to provide more details on which product to choose and discuss some of the exciting new features coming for both products.

So be careful what you read, especially if you get it from a company that competes with Oracle!

Where can I find more information?

• Oracle WebCenter on OTN

Oracle WebCenter Suite, a component of
Oracle Fusion Middleware, combines the standards-based, declarative development
of JavaServer Faces, the flexibility and power of portlets and runtime
customization, and a set of integrated Web 2.0 services for developing
context-centric, composite applications.

Oracle WebCenter Suite offers
the following key features:

• Enhanced support for standards-based portlet creation
  
• Expanded portlet consumption support for WSRP 1.0 and a preliminary version
  of WSRP 2.0
  
• JSF portlet bridge to expose JSF applications as WSRP portlets
  
• Content integration using JCR/JSR 170
  
• Runtime customization of JSF applications
  
• Leveraging of metadata management services
  
• Visual development environment integrated into JDeveloper
  
• One-click install

Build context-rich, customizable applications
with Oracle WebCenter Framework

WebCenter Framework supports the
creation and execution of context-rich applications. To achieve this, WebCenter
Framework augments the JavaServer Faces (JSF) environment by providing
additional components, integration, and runtime options. In essence, the
WebCenter Framework integrates capabilities historically included in portal
products directly into the 'fabric' of the JSF environment - especially, 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
controls built to the JCR/JSR 170 standard. Content repositories supporting the
JCR standard can be configured and adapters are available for Oracle Content
Database, Oracle Portal, file systems, and leading third party content
management systems. In addition, Oracle JDeveloper provides a unified
development environment for all of the framework pieces to simplify building
your applications.

Embed Web 2.0 into applications with WebCenter
Services

WebCenter Services include a complete set of Web 2.0
content, search,
collaboration, and communication services that can be
embedded directly into applications built with the WebCenter Framework. These
services include:

• A content management solution for storing and managing files and documents
  (Oracle Content Database)
  
• A secure enterprise search application for locating and accessing
  data
  and documents stored within the enterprise (Oracle Secure
  Enterprise Search)
  
• A presence server and instant messaging service that enable users to see who
  is online and initiate communication via text, voice, or video*
  
• A voice option, offering a rich set of telephony infrastructure components*
  
• A discussion forum application for online, topical community
  discussions*
  
• A wiki/blog server for collaborative authoring of documents and sharing of
  ideas*

* Note: These features will be released shortly after general
availability of Oracle WebCenter Suite 10g Release 3.

Where can I find
more information?

• Oracle WebCenter Suite on OTN