Oracle WebCenter
Owned by Oracle, Oracle WebCenter is an option on top of Oracle Application Server containing a suite of components for building rich user interactive applications. Oracle WebCenter is targeted at the development community, delivering a rapid development environment that includes WebCenter Framework and WebCenter Services. According to Oracle[1], this is the strategic portal product, eventually replacing Oracle Portal as well as the portal products acquired from BEA.
The product costs $80,000 per CPU for the basic edition, and $125,000 per CPU for the full edition [2]. In a production install, expect to deploy at least 8 CPUs as a base system. In addition, WebCenter requires licenses for Oracle database.
Versions
- WebCenter 11g Release 1 - released July 2, 2009
- WebCenter 10g (10.1.3.2.0) - released January 2007
Capabilities
The WebCenter Framework allows you to embed portlets, content, and customizable components in your application. All Framework pieces are integrated into the Oracle JDeveloper IDE, providing access to these resources as you build your applications. Other IDEs such as Eclipse (software) or IntelliJ are not supported.
WebCenter 11G Services incorporates Web 2.0 content, collaboration, and communication services that can be embedded directly into applications via portlets. In addition, APIs can be utilized in the Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) to create custom declarative UIs and to integrate some of these services into business processes and application features. Services include:
Social Networking Services - Enables users to maximize productivity through collaboration.
- People Connection – Enables users to assemble their business networks like linked-in
- Discussions - Provides the ability to create and participate in threaded discussion. This is an embedded version of Forums provided by Jive Software.[3]
- Announcements - Enables users to post, personalize, and manage announcements.
- Instant Messaging and Presence (IMP) - Provides the ability to observe the online presence status of other authenticated users (whether online, offline, busy, or idle) and to contact them.
- Blog - Enables blogging functionality within the context of an application. This feature comes from an embedded version of open source package jzWiki. [4]
- Wiki - Self-service, community, oriented-content publishing and sharing. This is an embedded version of open source package jzWiki. [5]
Shared Services - Provides features for both social networking and personal productivity.
- Documents - Provides content management and storage capabilities, including content upload, file and folder creation and management, file check out, versioning, and so on. This functionality requires licensing of a JCR (JSR-170) compliant document repository product.
- Links - Provides the ability to view, access, and associate related information; for example, you can link to a solution document from a discussion thread.
- Lists - Enables users to create, publish, and manage lists. (Available only in WebCenter Spaces)
- Page - Provides the ability to create and manage pages at run time.
- Tags - Provides the ability to assign one or more personally relevant keywords to a given page or document. This feature is similiar to the del.cio.us website.
- Events -Provides group calendars, which users can use to schedule meetings, appointments, and any other type of team get-together. This feature requires deployment of a separate calendering server, which may be Oracle Beehive or Microsoft Exchange. (Available only in WebCenter Spaces)
Personal Productivity Services - Focuses on the requirements of an individual, rather than a group.
- Mail - Provides integration with IMAP and SMTP mail servers to enable users to perform simple mail functions such as viewing, reading, creating, and deleting messages, creating messages with attachments, and replying to or forwarding existing messages.
- Notes - Provides the ability to "jot down" and retain quick bits of personally relevant information. (Available only in WebCenter Spaces)
- Recent Activities - Provides a summary view of recent changes to documents, discussions, and announcements.
- RSS - Provides the ability to publish content from WebCenter Web 2.0 Services as news feeds in RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 formats. In addition, the RSS service enables you to publish news feeds from external sources on your application pages.
- Search - Provides the ability to search tags, services, an application, or an entire site. This makes use of a license limited version of Oracle's search product.
- Worklist - Provides a personal, at-a-glance view of business processes that require attention. These can include a request for document review and other types of business process that come directly from enterprise applications.
Supported Open Standards
- J2EE 1.4 and above (Java EE)
- JSR 168
- WS-Security
- WSRP 1.0 and 2.0
- JCR 1.0
- JSF
- JSR 116
Customers
When looking for customer references for the ADF based WebCenter Framework and/or Services, note that Oracle has branded its entire portfolio of portal products as 'WebCenter Suite'. Included in the WebCenter Suite are products that aren't related to the WebCenter Framework, such as acquired BEA products WebLogic Portal and WebCenter Interaction (the former Plumtree product). The Oracle portal customer references[6] generally use the WebCenter Suite label, but generally refer to the acquired products.
While the WebCenter Framework has been available since 2007, there is only one publicly known installation:
- Université Laval[7]
External links
- WebCenter Official Home
- Oracle WebCenter 11g Handbook
- Peter Moskovits' WebCenter Blog
- Oracle Application Server
- Oracle WebCenter page on the Oracle Wiki
- Oracle WebCenter 11g Handbook: Build Rich, Customizable Enterprise 2.0 Applications - Amazon | McGraw Hill
Notes
- ^ Oracle Fusion Middleware Update, Enterprise 2.0: User Interaction and Portals
- ^ http://wiki.oracle.com/page/Oracle+WebCenter
- ^ http://tardate.blogspot.com/2008/01/backup-your-webcenter-wiki-yikes.html
- ^ http://tardate.blogspot.com/2008/01/backup-your-webcenter-wiki-yikes.html
- ^ http://tardate.blogspot.com/2008/01/backup-your-webcenter-wiki-yikes.html
- ^ http://www.oracle.com/customers/products/portal.html
- ^ http://www.vesterli.com/2008/06/09/portal-and-webcenter-at-oracle-openworld/