Since Oracle’s acquisition of BEA last year, Oracle Portal has been working through its strategy and messaging. Things have become clearer over the last 12+ months. As I mentioned in a recent post, WebCenter Spaces was released in early July of this year. Now, the general marketing push is behind WebCenter Spaces and WebCenter Framework.
The other, older portal technologies are fading from marketing view, but they are far from dead. These include Oracle Portal, WebLogic Portal, and WebCenter Interaction (formerly ALUI). It’s clear that Oracle’s preference is for new initiatives to be built on either of the WebCenter strategic offerings. It’s easy to see how to create an intranet or a custom application with those, but the best fit for the large-scale, transactional, extranet site is probably still WebLogic Portal. Additionally, those who have a large investment in WebCenter Interaction can still get a lot of value of continuing with that product.
Oracle is making wise decisions in releasing new functionality as services that all of the portal front-ends can consume. This allows the “strategic” (WCF and WCS) products to move forward, but keeps those on the “continue and converge” track (WLP, WCI, and Oracle Portal) from falling behind. It’s nice to see that Oracle is not forcing anyone to migrate, but instead doing a lot of work to make the strategic products compelling enough that a future migration is worth the effort.
