Oracle held a customer briefing today, March 26, 2012 highlighting updates to the WebCenter suite of products. If you are not familiar with WebCenter, it has four main components: Sites, Portal, Content and Social. I posted a blog in November 2011 titled Oracle Web Center Explained! with details about WebCenter.
This briefing covered the 11g R1 updates to WebCenter Portal and Content.
WebCenter Portal 11g R1 Update
Richard Maldonado spoke about the Portal enhancements. The new features are grouped into the following themes:
Quality and Performance
- Optimized integration with LDAP by removing unnecessary calls
- Reduced the page download size for core runtime (450k -> 250k)
- 30% improvement in avg response time
- Oracle’s internal implementation improved by 58%
Targeted Usability Improvements
- Improved pagination/scrollbars
- Upload multiple documents with drag/drop
- Can categorize events and subscribe to events, which can make them show up in the calendar
- Membership UI is improved
- Space creation is streamlined
Critical New Features
- Search improvements to provide better control of search results
- Uses entitlement server to have rule-based role definitions to control access and personalization
- MS Lync 2010 can be be use for presence and instant messaging
- Pagelet producer (mashup feature) can consume WSRP 2.0 and JPDK portlets plus other enhancements
- Content Presenter – content contributors can approve/reject content items in the workflow directly
- Added activity stream, mail, document manager, and tag cloud pagelets from ensemble
Certifications
- Supporting WebSphere App Server 7
- Office 2010 integration
- Various browser support – IE9, FF5+, Chrome 12+
WebCenter Content 11g R1 Update
Joe Golemba spoke about WebCenter Content 11g. He spoke mainly about patch updates for WebCenter Content. 11gR1 (11.1.1.6) was issued in February 2012, so its fairly recent.
The main improvements are grouped around the foliowing focus areas:
User Focused Enhancements:
- There is a new folding infrastructure that allows for personal folders and includes support for integration with the desktop.
- The desktop client has been improved to work with folders, more document management capabilities, and the ability to use documents offline.
- Includes electronic signatures to meet more regulatory compliance features
- Retention management has been improved with better rules
- Supports more file formats for Office 2010 and Adobe Creative Suite.
- Improved imaging and managing attachments
- Certified adapters for more Oracle applications, such as PeopleSoft 8.51, Siebel 8.2, etc.
- Introduces an Enterprise Application Adapter Framework to enable 3rd party application integration via SOAP interfaces
- Now supports deployment to WebSphere Application Server v7
- Supports SAM/QFS for a robust file system, which can be clustered
Oracle Social Network
Rachel Hunter presented some forward looking direction for the social product direction. This was couched in the standard disclaimer that things may change and some features may not make the final product.
Oracle’s goal is to bring all the tools together into a secure collaboration tool that will engage, inform, drive and extend the social network. There are four pillars:
- Conversations – start as easily as IM and gracefully escalate the scope to broader range tools such as email. This also includes the ability to add documents to the conversion
- Social objects – enables collaboration with others and between objects
- Content – real time annotation, editing; start conversations right in the content; enable the flow of content, documents, media, etc.
- Activity Streams – provides the summary of activities but allow filtering and facet information to provide context; you can see how many people are involved in a conversation that shows up in the activity stream
