WebCenter Team's Blog

Oracle WebCenter 11g is designed to facilitate the development of modern Portals & Business Applications with significant innovations in the following five important ways:

• Oracle WebCenter Framework 11gR1 is a modern Portal Framework that extends the capabilities of traditional Enterprise Portals in a variety of ways - four important examples are:
  
  
  
  1. Its new capabilities around Themes and Skins provide powerful facilities to tailor the look and feel of the site in a tiered way - for an entire site, for portions of a site associated with a department, and/or for an individual - enabling consistency in look and feel while consolidating deployment;
  
  
  2. Advanced Personalization Framework provides the ability to further tailor the usage of the Portal and the information delivered to the Portal based on activity graphs;
  
  
  3. Mashups - its powerful mashup capability allows the business user to further personalize the information he or she wants to see by creating mashups - it is unmatched in the industry in its facilities to source Enterprise Information securely into mashups;
  
  
  4. Common Enterprise Metadata services (aka Oracle MDS)provide a revolutionary way to store all portal look and feel changes, personalizations, and mashups in one shared location which enables rapid analysis of the impact of any changes to the site. Portals built with WebCenter Framework 11gR1 therefore are ideally suited for all forms of information delivery within the enterprise and across enterprises.
  
  
  
  
• Oracle Composer and Business Dictionary provides powerful role based facilities to enable business users to seamlessly unify many corporate Information assets with Enterprise Portals. These include:
  
  
  
  1. Pre-Packaged Enterprise Application Integration via the Application Library with SAP, e-Business Suite, Peoplesoft, JD Edwards, Siebel, Hyperion, BI Applications, and Oracle's Industry Applications delivered as packaged Portlets;
  
  
  2. Pre-Packaged Enterprise Content Integration via the Document Library from Oracle Content Management and a variety of other virtual content stores across the Enterprise;
  
  
  3. Enterprise Business Process Integration via its embedded use in Oracle BPM Suite deliving Process Portals which unifies the end-user's Worklist, the Composite User Interfaces for the Applications being integrated into Business Processes, the Business Process Console and Process Intelligence via a pre-packaged Business Process Library;
  
  
  4. Enterprise Business Intelligence via its integration with Oracle Business Intelligence and Enterprise Performance Management products making the Enterprise Portal both an Executive Intelligence Cockpit and also enabling personalized collaboration around Business Intelligence.
  
  
  
  
• Oracle WebCenter Spaces or Business Communities introduces powerful new facilities to enable formal and informal Social Communities within an Enterprise and across Enterprises. These Social Communities include facilities
  
  
  
  1. For business users to create team sites or Online Communities dynamically within a browser or from their familiar personal productivity tools;
  
  
  2. To integrate these communities with Pre-Packaged Information Resources from a variety of enterprise sources - Applications, Documents, Content and Multi-Media, Business Processes, and Business Intelligence;
  
  
  3. To deliver information from the community that a user is interacting with seamlessly into their Personal Productivity tools - Office, Outlook, Mobile; and
  
  
  4. It's unique Embedded Enterprise Communities provides a powerful capability to embed business communities directly within Enterprise Applications eliminating information duplication and bringing Social Computing facilities to capture unstructured interactions directly into Business Applications.
  
  
  
  
• Oracle WebCenter Social Computing Services make it easy to integrate new social computing tools with enterprise information and Business Processes. There are three important new capabilities:
  
  
  
  1. Pre-Packaged Catalog of Social Computing Tools - Oracle WebCenter provides an ever-expanding list of social computing tools such as wikis, blogs, RSS, lists, discussions, search that are seamlessly integrated as a resource library within the framework making drag-and-drop addition to business applications easy.
  
  
  2. Modeling resources and relationships to people - Oracle WebCenter provides the ability to model the relationships between Business Resources that are integrated within the Enterprise Portal and the people accessing those resources to enable the creation of both formal and information social networks;
  
  
  3. Activity Graphs - Oracle WebCenter's activity graphs provide facilities to derive valuable but non-obvious social relationships based on information access patterns between people, content, and enterprise application activities.
  
  


• Recognizing that as more information resources in an organization are integrated with Enterprise Portals, the need to have that information delivered pervasively to users becomes ever more important, Oracle WebCenter's Pervasive Delivery facilities, marketed as WebCenter Anywhere, provide five important new capabilities:
  
  
  
  1. The ability to deliver the information that the user needs into all the personal productivity tools - Office, Outlook, Browser, Mobile - that the user might access while maintaining the user's context;
  
  
  2. To seamlessly embed the Portal and its information in a "headless" form via its powerful REST capabilities into departmental web sites and applications;
  
  
  3. Via its integration with WSRP 2.0 to be able to embed information surfaced in WebCenter into other Portals within the enterprise as well as consuming Sharepoint WebParts directly;
  
  
  4. Via its Ensemble capability to provide a lightweight deployment environment within a firewall or DMZ or for departmental and branch-office access; and
  
  
  5. Leveraging WebCenter Analytics to deliver usage based information on the impact of the portal and all its content to better target and deliver information to all users.
  
  

And now it might be easy to understand why a question like "What is WebCenter?" comes up on a frequent basis. We've designed the system to address a whole set of modern portal issues that go far beyond just the original definition of a portal. They stretch into enterprise applications, social networking sites, web sites, and composites.

Since an essential element of modern Portals and Business Applications is that they are designed to be evolved by Business Users after they have been built, a critical part of the software infrastructure for Business Applications is that it must make it easy for users to get the information they need and to work with others to make the necessary changes to business applications and processes. Traditionally organizations have used Enterprise Portals for this purpose but Portals, however, require new software infrastructure facilities to meet these new requirements:

• Unified, Standards-based Portal Framework: First, modern Portals need to be developed with a framework that meets three important requirements:
  
  
  
  1. It supports in a single framework the development of all styles of Web Sites, Portals and composite applications;
  
  
  2. It provides the ability for users and site administrators to highly personalize the behavior and look and feel of the Portal to meet user requirements while insulating them from future upgrades;
  
  
  3. It delivers an adaptable service model that follows what SOA has done for Enterprise Applications and enables delivery of reusable, customizable, and personalizable Social Computing services.
  
  


• Enterprise Business Dictionary and Integration Framework: Second, since users need to interact through the Enterprise Portal with all the resources in the Enterprise, Portals must integrate a Business Dictionary and provide pre-packaged integration with Applications, Content and Rich Media, Business Processes, and Business Intelligence in a role specific way to speed user awareness of these critical resources.


• Dynamic Online Communities or Team Sites: Third, since much of the work of dynamically changing Business Applications and Processes will be done by groups of people working with each other, Enterprise Portals must host dynamic online business communities with which users can interact with their familiar personal productivity tools.


• Social Computing Services: Fourth, these Enterprise Communities must also provide Social Computing Services to allow online users to find others in the organization and to exploit the tools to communicate and share information with them quickly and easily.


• Pervasive Access and Information Delivery: Fifth and finally, since users will need to access information from the Enterprise Portal pervasively, modern Portals need to provide the ability to bring this information to users pervasively.

In the next post, I'll provide the core design points for WebCenter 11g.

I've seen a set of posts recently where users are trying to come up with an easy way to describe WebCenter Suite (and more specifically WebCenter Framework & Spaces), how it can be used, and different customer use cases. So I'll provide a series of posts starting at the top level and then drilling down to each of these other areas. Here goes...

I want to first start with Oracle's overall vision and direction around Fusion Middleware 11g to set the context for Oracle WebCenter, User Interaction, and Portals.

There are three strategic elements to Oracle's vision and products strategy for Fusion Middleware 11g:

1. First, as Enterprise Applications and Business Processes are deployed on an Internet architecture, organizations continue to demand a unified and standards-based Middleware infrastructure on which to develop and deploy these Applications and Portals.

Oracle Fusion Middleware 11gR1 further extends Oracle's vision of delivering a complete, integrated, hot pluggable and best of breed Middleware Suite.

2. Second, organizations continue to want greater agility and adaptability in their Enterprise Applications. "First Generation" SOA was primarily focused on modularizing applications to allow more modular functionality to be more easily adapted to business needs and to enable interoperability between the modules. However, "first generation" SOA failed to address the other important aspects of application design and middleware infrastructure that are required to support Business Applications that can truly adapt to business conditions.

Oracle Fusion Middleware 11gR1 further extends Oracle's vision of agile and adaptive Business Applications by:

• Providing a unified and declarative toolset with which Business Users and developers can work together to develop Business Applications and capture the behavior of the applications in metadata;
• Providing a unified Business Process Platform with which to orchestrate humans, applications, and information into processes that can be monitored and optimized in real time;
• Providing a common Enterprise Portal through which people can find the enterprise resources they need, to share them with others through personal productivity and social computing tools;
• Using the information they gather to quickly and easily adapt Business Applications to their changing needs; and
• Providing visibility, controls and analytics to govern how services and processes are deployed, re-used and changed across their entire lifecycle.

3. Third, organizations continue to want data centers that use hardware, software, and people resources more efficiently. Several new hardware and software technologies such as multi-core processors, 64-bit addressable memory, RAM-based storage, 10GB Ethernet systems, and virtualization are now emerging. They allow large sets of compute capacity and memory to be pooled together into virtualized grids or "clouds" that are lower cost, easier to manage with more flexible capacity to respond to business needs. However, existing middleware products do not have the necessary capabilities to exploit these technologies to more efficiently deploy and manage Business Applications on such infrastructure.

   Oracle Fusion Middleware 11gR1 further extends Oracle's vision of the Application Grid by:

   • Exploiting new hardware technologies such as multi-core processors, 64-bit addressable memory, RAM-based storage, and 10GB Ethernet systems to run Business Applications more efficiently;
   • Exploiting new software technologies for resource virtualization and management to make Business Applications lower cost to provision dynamically, easier to monitor and troubleshoot, and to manage application workloads more efficiently;
   • Providing new Identity Management and Security technology to consolidate how users, their identities, and entitlements are managed, audited, and controlled to lower costs and improve security on Application Grids.

This gives you some of the design starting points for WebCenter Suite 11g. In the next post, I'll detail the strategy elements around providing a common Enterprise Portal through which people can find the Enterprise resources they need, to share them with others through personal productivity and social computing tools, and to use the information they gather to quickly and easily adapt Business Applications to changing needs.

However, if you are a speed reader and just want to know what Oracle WebCenter is, take a look at http://webcenter.oracle.com. Oracle WebCenter is composed of four key elements:

1. Oracle WebCenter Framework: a modern portal framework to build and deliver any solution that might be considered a portal, composite app, social community, or web site. It includes core metadata management services in combination with a portlet runtime engine to change the way applications and portals are delivered and managed over their entire lifecycle.
   


2. Oracle WebCenter Services: a prebuilt set of services that can be used to add social and personal productivity services to your application or portal. They include analytics and mashup capabilities to quickly add new features into existing portal deployments.
   


3. Oracle Business Dictionary and Oracle Composer: a role-based view of all the enterprise resources that can be mashed up on a page including pre-built capabilities to add pages to any portal or application after it has been deployed.
   


4. Oracle WebCenter Spaces: a pre-built application leveraging the previous three areas to deliver dynamic online business communites and social sites for all teams and companies.
   

Don't get me wrong, I think for connecting with friends, family, and old school chums, there's nothing better today. But when it comes to providing employees or partners within your company, do you really want them checking out your latest family vacation pictures?

I know that Facebook has recently added a whole slew of permission based capabilities to shield you from this pending embarassment, but security isn't the issue. The question is: does your company really need another website where your employees can be distracted from their daily tasks? I do understand the need for employees to be engaged at the office and that they need a "break" every now and then, but if you are driving employees to yet another destination in the company, then where should they go to get their job done? And more importantly, what are new employees to do?

I think the promise of enterprise portals has always been a bit of a holy grail. It is supposed to be the single place where employees go to get everything they need to know. At Oracle, we've seen this morph into more of a destination for employees to go to get work done. They obviously need to get access to the processes and tasks that they do on a daily, weekly basis. But they also want it to be a destination where their personal interests are addressed. This is where things like Mashups come in. Users that choose to should be able to add elements, gadgets, portlets, components, or widgets directly to their page. And we are now seeing a distinct need to allow them to develop their personal/professional network of experts within the Portal as well.

We don't believe it needs to be another destination to drive them away from their work tasks. We believe it should be another feature or element that pulls them in to the portal and delivers the information, experts, processes, and support to get their jobs done.

Let's face it, if you need a distraction, they are out there. But if you need to get your work done, the last thing you want to do is to navigate to ten different sites to find the needle in the haystacks. When you really need to find that needle, you want to search through one haystack if possible.

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.