WebCenter Team's Blog

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.

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.