Oracle WebCenter


Oracle WebCenter is Oracle's portfolio of user engagement software products built on top of the JSF-based Oracle Application Development Framework. There are three main products that make up the WebCenter portfolio, and they can be purchased together as a suite or individually:
  • Oracle WebCenter Content
  • Oracle WebCenter Sites
  • Oracle WebCenter Portal
Each of these products are in separate markets, but are connected in some way. WebCenter Content competes in the Enterprise Content Management market, WebCenter Sites competes in the Web Experience Management market, and WebCenter Portal competes in the self-service portal and content delivery market space. Different combinations of these products are frequently used together, so Oracle has bundled them within the same WebCenter product family.
Oracle WebCenter contains a set of components for building rich web applications, portals, and team collaboration and social sites. It is targeted at enterprise and large accounts that have significant content management requirements and the need to deliver that information with internal or external portals, customer-facing websites, or within integrated business applications. Oracle has integrated WebCenter into its business applications such as E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards so that content can be centrally managed in one location and shared across multiple applications. For the development community and advanced business users, WebCenter provides a development environment that includes WebCenter Framework and WebCenter Services, along with an out-of-the-box application for team collaboration and enterprise social networking. According to Oracle, this is the strategic portal product, eventually replacing Oracle Portal as well as the portal products acquired from BEA.

Cost

The product costs US$70,000 per CPU for WebCenter Services and US$125,000 per CPU for WebCenter Suite. In a production installation, users can expect to deploy at least four CPUs as a base system, with likely additional CPUs for development and testing. WebCenter includes embedded U.S. licenses of Oracle Secure Enterprise Search, Oracle Universal Content Management, and Oracle BPEL Process Manager. In addition, WebCenter requires a database to store information; any supported and licensed database such as Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server, or IBM Db2 will work.

WebCenter product stack

There are three major products in the WebCenter product stack.
The base WebCenter Framework allows a user to embed portlets, ADF Taskflows and Pages, content, and customizable components in an Oracle ADF application. All Framework pieces are integrated into the Oracle JDeveloper IDE, providing access to these resources.
WebCenter Services are a set of independently deployable collaboration services. It incorporates Web 2.0 components such as content, collaboration, and communication services the full list is provided below. WebCenter Services includes Oracle ADF user interface components that can be embedded directly into ADF applications. In addition, APIs can be utilized to create custom UIs and to integrate some of these services into non-ADF applications.
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.
Note that there is a product called WebCenter Interaction which is not built on the core WebCenter stack it is the former Plumtree portal product. Also, all Oracle portal products at Oracle are included in the WebCenter Suite, which is an umbrella of products. Products can be included in the suite regardless of whether they are built on the ADF based WebCenter Framework.
WebCenter comprises furthermore several editions, among others WebCenter Suite Plus, WebCenter Portal, WebCenter Content, WebCenter Sites, WebCenter Sites Satellite Server, WebCenter Universal Content Management. Seven WebCenter Adapters and one WCE Management are available.

WebCenter services capabilities

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.
  • Announcements Enables users to post, personalize, and manage announcements.
  • Instant Messaging and Presence Provides the ability to observe the online presence status of other authenticated users and to contact them.
  • Blog Enables blogging functionality within the context of an application.
  • Wiki Self-service, community, oriented-content publishing and sharing.
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. WebCenter Portal includes a restricted-use license of Oracle's enterprise content management product called WebCenter Content.
  • 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..
  • 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 calendaring server, which may be Oracle Beehive or Microsoft Exchange.
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.
  • 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.
  • 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 Secure Enterprise 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.

    Official and de facto standards support

WebCenter Framework supports the following standards:
  • J2EE 1.4 and above
  • JSR 168 and JSR 286
  • WSRP 1.0 and 2.0
  • JCR 1.0
  • JSF
  • JSR 116

    Release of WebCenter 11g R1 Patch Set 5 (PS5)

On 22 February 2012 Oracle released WebCenter 11g Release 1 Patch Set 5. It includes many bug fixes in addition to several new enhancements. This patch set is mainly targeted at releasing customer bug fixes.

Release of WebCenter 11g R1 Patch Set 3 (PS3)

In January 2011 Oracle released WebCenter 11g Release 1 Patch Set 3. As the converged portal platform, this is a major new release with many features integrated from previously acquired portal products, including a greatly improved and flexible portal framework, improved GUI, personalization server, brand new navigation model, support for hierarchical pages and spaces, JSR 286, improved performance, and more.
WebCenter Framework and Services lacks support for these notable technologies:
  • Internet Explorer 6.0
  • Eclipse IDE but Oracle JDeveloper is provided as part of the suite of tools.