Clarification on Forrester's Review of WebCenter Suite
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."
