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Oracle WebCenter

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Owned by Oracle, Oracle WebCenter is a product built on top of the proprietary Oracle Application Development Framework. It contains a set of components for building rich web applications. Oracle WebCenter is targeted at the development community, delivering a 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.

Versions

  • WebCenter 11g Release 1 - released July 2, 2009
  • WebCenter 10g (10.1.3.2.0) - released January 2007

Cost

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.

Capabilities

The WebCenter Framework allows you to embed portlets, ADF Taskflows, 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 components such as content, collaboration, and communication services that can be embedded directly into applications via ADF Taskflows. 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:

Finally, WebCenter Spaces is a closed source application built on WebCenter Framework and Services that offers a prebuilt project collaboration solution. It can be compared with solutions like Microsoft Sharepoint and Atlassian Confluence. There are limited mechanisms to extend this application. It is featured in an Accenture Enterprise 2.0 video[3].

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.[4]
  • 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. [5]
  • Wiki - Self-service, community, oriented-content publishing and sharing. This is an embedded version of open source package jzWiki. [6]


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 similar 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.

Offical and De Facto Standards Support

WebCenter Framework supports the following standards:

WebCenter Framework and Services lacks support for these notable technologies:

Customers

When looking for customer references for the ADF based WebCenter Framework and/or Services, be aware 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).

It is therefore difficult to determine actual customers of the WebCenter Framework. The Oracle customer reference site[8] generally uses the WebCenter Suite label for all portal customers. However, few if any of those references use the WebCenter Framework.

While the WebCenter Framework has been available since 2007, there is only one publicly known installation:

  • Université Laval[9]

Notable Competitors

WebCenter Framework plays in the Enterprise portal space, and WebCenter Services/Spaces plays in the Collaboration Workspace space. There are many competitors in each. Notable solutions include:

Enterprise Portal

Collaboration


Notes

  1. ^ Oracle Fusion Middleware Update, Enterprise 2.0: User Interaction and Portals
  2. ^ http://wiki.oracle.com/page/Oracle+WebCenter
  3. ^ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTUCThJvAMQ
  4. ^ http://tardate.blogspot.com/2008/01/backup-your-webcenter-wiki-yikes.html
  5. ^ http://tardate.blogspot.com/2008/01/backup-your-webcenter-wiki-yikes.html
  6. ^ http://tardate.blogspot.com/2008/01/backup-your-webcenter-wiki-yikes.html
  7. ^ http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=833866
  8. ^ http://www.oracle.com/customers/products/portal.html
  9. ^ http://www.vesterli.com/2008/06/09/portal-and-webcenter-at-oracle-openworld/
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