Portal and WebCenter: How to choose?
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.
