Owned by Oracle, Oracle WebCenter is a product built on top of the JSF based Oracle Application Development Framework. It contains a set of components for building rich web applications, portals, and team collaboration/social sites. Oracle WebCenter is targeted at both the development community and business users, delivering 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.
Contents |
The product costs $70,000 per CPU for the WebCenter Services, and $125,000 per CPU for WebCenter Suite [2]. In a production install, expect to deploy at least 4 CPUs as a base system and likely additional CPUs in dev & test. 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: a licenses for any supported database like Oracle database, MS SQL Server or IBM DB2 will work.
There are three major products in the WebCenter product stack.
The base WebCenter Framework allows you to embed portlets, ADF Taskflows, content, and customizable components in your Oracle ADF application. All Framework pieces are integrated into the Oracle JDeveloper IDE, providing access to these resources as you build your applications.
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. It is featured in an Accenture Enterprise 2.0 video[3].
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.
Social Networking Services - Enables users to maximize productivity through collaboration.
Shared Services - Provides features for both social networking and personal productivity.
Personal Productivity Services - Focuses on the requirements of an individual, rather than a group.
WebCenter Framework supports the following standards:
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 :
The Oracle customer reference site[8] generally uses the WebCenter Suite label for all portal customers.
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