Each of these products are in separate but connected markets. 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 together 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. Oracle WebCenter is targeted at enterprise and larger 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 made a particular effort to integrate WebCenter into its leading 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,[1] this is the strategic portal product, eventually replacing Oracle Portal as well as the portal products acquired from BEA.
WebCenter 11gR1 PS8 (11.1.1.9.0) – released May 2014
WebCenter 11gR1 PS7 (11.1.1.8.0) – released Aug 2013
WebCenter 11gR1 PS6 (11.1.1.7.0) – released Apr 2013
WebCenter 11gR1 PS5 (11.1.1.6.0) – released Feb 2012
WebCenter 11gR1 PS4 (11.1.1.5.0) – released May 2011
WebCenter 11gR1 PS3 (11.1.1.4.0) – released Jan 2011
WebCenter 11gR1 PS2 (11.1.1.3.0) – released Apr 2010
WebCenter 11gR1 PS1 (11.1.1.2.0) – released Nov 2009
WebCenter 11gR1 (11.1.1.1.0) – released July 2, 2009
WebCenter 10g (10.1.3.2.0) – released January 2007
Cost
The product costs $70,000 per CPU for the WebCenter Services, and $125,000 per CPU for WebCenter Suite.[2] In a production installation, users can expect to deploy at least 4 CPUs as a base system, with likely additional CPUs for development and testing. WebCenter includes embedded US licenses of Oracle Secure Enterprise Search, Oracle Universal Content Management, and Oracle BPEL Process Manager. In addition, WebCenter needs a database to store information: any supported and licensed database such as Oracle database, MS SQL Server or IBM Db2 will work.
WebCenter product stack
This section's factual accuracy may be compromised due to out-of-date information. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information.(September 2014)
There are three major products in the WebCenter product stack.[3]
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 (called Taskflows) 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 (a distributed caching mechanism which stores and assembles "pagelets," or elements of output),[4] WebCenter Universal Content Management. Seven WebCenter Adapters and one WCE Management are available.[5]
WebCenter services capabilities
Social Networking Services - Enables users to maximize productivity through collaboration.[citation needed]
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.[6]
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.
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 (formerly known as Universal Content Management).
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 calendaring 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.
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 (SES) 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:
On 22 February 2012 Oracle released WebCenter 11g Release 1 Patch Set 5.[7] 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.[citation needed]
WebCenter Framework and Services lacks support for these notable technologies:
Jakarta EE, formerly Java Platform, Enterprise Edition and Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), is a set of specifications, extending Java SE with specifications for enterprise features such as distributed computing and web services. Jakarta EE applications are run on reference runtimes, that can be microservices or application servers, which handle transactions, security, scalability, concurrency and management of the components it is deploying.
A web portal is a specially designed website that brings information from diverse sources, like emails, online forums and search engines, together in a uniform way. Usually, each information source gets its dedicated area on the page for displaying information ; often, the user can configure which ones to display. Variants of portals include mashups and intranet "dashboards" for executives and managers. The extent to which content is displayed in a "uniform way" may depend on the intended user and the intended purpose, as well as the diversity of the content. Very often design emphasis is on a certain "metaphor" for configuring and customizing the presentation of the content and the chosen implementation framework or code libraries. In addition, the role of the user in an organization may determine which content can be added to the portal or deleted from the portal configuration.
PeopleSoft, Inc. is a company that provides human resource management systems (HRMS), Financial Management Solutions (FMS), supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), and enterprise performance management (EPM) software, as well as software for manufacturing, and student administration to large corporations, governments, and organizations. It existed as an independent corporation until its acquisition by Oracle Corporation in 2005. The PeopleSoft name and product line are now marketed by Oracle.
BEA Systems, Inc. was a company that specialized in enterprise infrastructure software products, which was wholly acquired by Oracle Corporation on April 29, 2008.
Jakarta Faces, formerly Jakarta Server Faces and JavaServer Faces (JSF) is a Java specification for building component-based user interfaces for web applications and was formalized as a standard through the Java Community Process being part of the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition. It is also an MVC web framework that simplifies the construction of user interfaces (UI) for server-based applications by using reusable UI components in a page.
Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) is an OASIS-approved network protocol standard designed for communications with remote portlets.
JDeveloper is a freeware IDE supplied by Oracle Corporation. It offers features for development in Java, XML, SQL and PL/SQL, HTML, JavaScript, BPEL and PHP. JDeveloper covers the full development lifecycle from design through coding, debugging, optimization and profiling to deploying.
In computing, Oracle Application Development Framework, usually called Oracle ADF, provides a Java framework for building enterprise applications. It provides visual and declarative approaches to Java EE development. It supports rapid application development based on ready-to-use design patterns, metadata-driven and visual tools.
The Java Portlet Specification defines a contract between the portlet container and portlets and provides a convenient programming model for Java portlet developers.
Plumtree Software is a former software company founded in 1996 by product managers and engineers from Oracle and Informix with funding from Sequoia Capital. The company was a pioneer of extending the portal concept popularized by Yahoo! from the web to enterprise computing. BEA Systems acquired Plumtree on October 20, 2005, and Oracle subsequently acquired BEA. Plumtree's former portal product continues as part of Oracle's product line.
Oracle Fusion Middleware consists of several software products from Oracle Corporation. FMW spans multiple services, including Java EE and developer tools, integration services, business intelligence, collaboration, and content management. FMW depends on open standards such as BPEL, SOAP, XML and JMS.
An enterprise portal, also known as an enterprise information portal (EIP), is a framework for integrating information, people and processes across organizational boundaries in a manner similar to the more general web portals. Enterprise portals provide a secure unified access point, often in the form of a web-based user interface, and are designed to aggregate and personalize information through application-specific portlets.
Apache MyFaces is an Apache Software Foundation project that creates and maintains an open-source JavaServer Faces implementation, along with several libraries of JSF components that can be deployed on the core implementation. The project is divided into several sub-projects:
Oracle XML Publisher (XMLP) is Oracle Corporation's latest reporting technology. It was originally developed to solve the reporting problems faced by Oracle Applications. Osama Elkady from the Applications Technology Group and Tim Dexter from the Financials Group were the main drivers for the product. It was first released with Oracle E-Business Suite 11.5.10 in 2003. Since then it has been integrated into most of Oracle Products including JD Edwards EnterpriseOne application 8.12 and PeopleSoft Enterprise 9, and as a standalone version, XML Publisher Enterprise with no dependency on Oracle Applications. When XML Publisher became part of the Oracle BI Enterprise Edition Suite it was re-branded as Oracle BI Publisher.
The Sun Java System Portal Server is a component of the Sun Java Platform, Enterprise Edition, a software system that supports a wide range of enterprise computing needs.
SharePoint is a web-based collaborative platform that integrates natively with Microsoft Office. Launched in 2001, SharePoint is primarily sold as a document management and storage system, but the product is highly configurable and its usage varies substantially among organizations.
WebSphere Portal is an enterprise software used to build and manage web portals. It provides access to web content and applications, while delivering personalized experiences for users.
OpenAM is an open-source access management, entitlements and federation server platform. Now it is supported by Open Identity Platform Community.
Oracle Application Testing Suite is a comprehensive, integrated testing solution for Web applications, Web Services, packaged Oracle Applications and Oracle Databases.
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