WCI (ALUI / Plumtree) vs Webcenter Spaces

Posted on February 11, 2011 by Robert Herrera

This post will describe some of the differences between Webcenter Interaction and Webcenter Spaces. It is meant to be used as an informal guide to the choices available within Webcenter Suite and future paths for those who may already be invested in the Webcenter Interaction product. Before we get too much further we should first define some of the products and terms used in connection with Webcenter Suite.

Webcenter Suite is an enterprise portal platform made up of many products including 3 portal products, Webcenter services and the Webcenter development framework. Also included is limited-use licensing for Universal Content Management, Secure Enterprise Search and Presence and Communications Services.
Webcenter Interaction refers to the cross-platform portal product and services previously known as Plumtree and BEA’s Aqualogic Interaction. It has portal versions native to both .net and Java.
Webcenter Services is a set of Enterprise ready social services that can be integrated with existing portals as well as custom applications. It includes products for wikis, blogs, RSS, activity streams, discussions, tags and links.
Webcenter Spaces is the portal application that provides the UI and administration layer to the products that make up Webcenter Suite. It has out of the box features that closely match the features provided with Webcenter Interaction’s portal. It is the product with the highest level of integration to Webcenter Services, Fusion Middleware and other Oracle products.
So what are the differences?

To understand the differences it is good to know the history of the products. Webcenter Interaction grew up as a pure play portal product. This meant that the product was originally meant to be a top layer portal product that did not care too much about the backing technologies that needed to be surfaced. That being said, many of WCI’s components were built using Java and only the core portal product was ‘jumped’ to .net using a java to .net conversion technology. Also, most of WCI’s add-on products and services are black box java apps that run on packaged tomcat or JBoss app servers. Development against WCI can be done using your IDE of choice depending on the technology you are using (.net,java,php,rails or any html emitting technology) and the functionality or product you are surfacing. An SDK and API web services are used for writing portlets and composite applications that take advantage of portal services and intrinsic functionality. Exposing and consuming JSR 168 and WSRP 1.0 compliant portlets is also possible with WCI.
Webcenter Spaces, on the other hand is a pure java based application that is supported for deployment to Weblogic Application Server. It was built to be the presentation layer to the Fusion Middleware product line. Customizing and developing for Spaces involves the use of Oracle’s Jdeveloper IDE. You can use another Java IDE but that would be painful. Jdeveloper has deep integration not only with the Webcenter stack but with ADF development and fusion middleware overall. The Webcenter framework used with Spaces allows for consumption of JSR 168 as well as WSRP 1 and 2 compliant portlets. Additionally, ADF taskflows can be exposed as JSR 168 portlets using the portlet bridge available as part of the framework.
Which do I go with?
If you are in the process of deciding on a portal suite and framework be assured that the Webcenter Suite provides everything you need to stand up an enterprise strength portal with many out of the box features. Enterprise 2.0 functions come out of the box for both Spaces and WCI. For WCI the integration levels range from simple installation/configuration to custom integration work or even the dreaded iframe. If you have not yet decided on the portal product to use also be assured that Webcenter Interaction and Webcenter Spaces both provide enterprise strength portal functionality and customization capabilities.
With the 11g release of Spaces there is no longer much that Spaces lacks in comparison with WCI. Both products are fully supported by Oracle. Both portal products have or will have 11g versions and future versions/enhancements. Going forward, though, pieces of WCI functionality will be replaced by Webcenter services and other Oracle solutions as consolidation and convergence happens with the Webcenter products and shared services. This may be the biggest reason to choose Spaces as the portal of choice if you are not invested in either portal yet and if you are not absolutely tied to the .net development environment. Even if your preference is to develop using .net you can wrap .net apps with WSRP 2.0 and maintain functionality within Spaces.
My experience has been that most companies have a blend of technologies in the enterprise and either have teams that know both technologies or have separate teams to handle .net or java development. In either of these two situations you might be better served to go with Webcenter Spaces as your choice of portal product since integration is tighter with the other Webcenter pieces and Spaces will only be enhanced while the WCI product may have some functionality replaced with newer Oracle products or services.
What if you are already invested in Webcenter Interaction?
If you are already on the Webcenter Interaction product stack you have your choice of paths. The decision on whether to move to Webcenter Spaces is dependent on a longer list of decision points than we can discuss here. So what kinds of paths might you take to transition to Spaces from Webcenter Interaction portal?
Stay with the product for the foreseeable future. If you are heavily invested in the WCI product set and are only interested in modest changes for the foreseeable future you can certainly stay with WCI. You can augment functionality with Webcenter Services and integration with UCM. These integrations are not yet mature but they will be soon.
Start a piecemeal migration. You can stay with the core portal product and start smaller migrations of functionality. For example, you can migrate from Publisher to UCM or start migrating portlets or apps to be exposed via JSR 168 or WSRP and surfaced through Spaces.
Yank the band-aid and start a full migration effort. Knowing that the Spaces product is fairly mature should help if you decide to make the full blown migration effort. Depending on the size of your user base, app/portlet inventory and points of integration a migration effort might take a few months to a year or more. Just remember that the effort will put you on the latest version of Spaces and in the middle of the best of breed products and services that make up the Webcenter Suite offering.
In future posts we will take a look at specific mappings of functionality between WCI and Webcenter Spaces.

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The Power of Search

Posted on October 1, 2009 by Robert Herrera

I have decided to make a concerted effort via reminders and automated pokes to keep my blog updated more often. To jumpstart that effort i have decided to post a short speech that i wrote for a speaking class back in 2000. The speech was about search. At the time, search was widely on a pay-per-ranking model and google was the only real relevant search engine. Nobody had really heard of google at this time as it had very little market share, was pre-ipo and was generally not widely used.

I could see the need for relevancy in search even at that time. The speech might seem a little dated but the piece that is not dated are the statistics on the growth of knowledge in general. This exponential growth also applies to knowledge bits in the enterprise whether they be documents, blog posts, IM threads or just enterprise facts stuck in the head of a knowledge worker.

We can manage these types of knowledge in their own taxonomies that are best suited for each type but in the end the power to search for these, either by full text relavancy, tag clouds or other types of search, is what makes them of value to the enterprise. Ok enough of an introduction here is the speech in full. Remember it was given way back yonder in 2000. :)

The sum total of humankind’s knowledge doubled from 1750-1900. It doubled again from 1900-1950. Again from 1960-1965. It has been estimated that the sum total of humankind’s knowledge has doubled at least once every 5 years since then. It has been further projected that by the year 2020, knowledge will double every 73 days. This statement was made by Patricia Breinik in her book Student Learning in the Information Age. As the information available on the internet increases exponentially over time, so will the value of search and particularly search engines. Learning how to search for answers is important for all of us, whether we do it as students, workers, parents or just for the love of knowledge. I have literally spent years trying out different search engines and watching them evolve since the inception of the internet as we know it today. Our discussion on search engines will center around the types of search engines as represented by their business models, the one type of search engine that has proved to be a search engine in the purest sense and a look at a successful business model of this search type. But first, what types of search engines are there?

Well, search engines can be classified into two major categories or types of searches. These categories are the paid search rank and the relevant search rank. The paid search rank is where advertisers pay to be seen at the top of a search query. The company that pays the most for the position will receive the number one ranking and so will have a better chance of having someone click through to their site. This serves the purpose of generating cash flow for the company who owns the search engine as well as for those that pay to have their websites ranked high on a search query result as they will receive greater traffic than they could generate on their own. Many portals or (definition here) started off with this business model and eventually became hubs of links know as portals such as yahoo, excite and alta vista all of whom are now portals giving users a massive starting point of links based on various subjects.

The second type of search is the relevance search. This is a search that bases its results on the relevancy of a pages answer to your query. (quote from cnet news.com here) With this method, pages are ranked according to the relevance to words, content and links to other sites. A voting method is employed in which a web page or site receive points when other sites link to it. Those other pages are voting that the page they are linking to has value. An example of the difference between the two types of engines is the query of “Canada”. Entered at a paid search site you would receive the first five pages filled with travel agency links promising the best airfare prices to Canada. Enter your search term of Canada at a site that judges relevance and the first return would be Canada.gov, the official site of Canada the country. Can you see the difference?

Well, what types of engines are out there that employ relevance as a search model? One of the most comprehensive relevant search engines is Google.com. They invented and patented their own brand of relevant searching called PageRank which was described earlier. Google conducts 150 million searches a day for users. The google search engine is an index of over 2 billion web pages and is updated constantly. The search engine that indexes the next larges number only indexes 7% of the number of pages that Google does. The engine is available in 35 languages and is so good at language translation that if there is a relevant site to your search in another language or country, you can choose to have the page translated for you on the fly. Google is profitable, debt free and privately held, a testament to its business model of paid keyword adds that are viewable down the side of the page but do not count towards page ranking.

As we have seen, the value of search cannot be underrated. Considering the types of search engines and the business models behind them can help us make the right choice. The value of search comes down to relevance. Do you want to be sold a product or are you after the results that best match your search query? Search is the filtering of knowledge…and knowledge is power. Ask yourself this question. When the sum total of humankinds knowledge doubles every 73 days, will you have the power to harness it?

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Twitter Portlet / Gadget for Webcenter Interaction (ALUI) Part 2

Posted on September 3, 2008 by Robert Herrera

This is the second part of a two part post on a Twitter portlet for Webcenter Interaction. The first part dealt with possible use cases for the portlet. So I have been trying to find time to write a portlet that lets you post to Twitter and read your timeline. I’m not big on not very good at interfaces so i’m still looking at other interfaces before i decide on the right XSL to use. It turns out that I should have done this 4 months ago instead of waiting thinking this was going to be a highly complex task.

Being unfamiliar with REST’ful applications(or so i thought till i read that this is just a new name for something we’ve been doing all along..like ajax), I had decided that I would probably be writing some kind of wrapping class for the twitter calls. Enter the yedda api’s that are freely available here. I had discovered them some months back and had simply moved them to a todo folder. Little did i realize that when it came down to it I only need to write a few lines of code to use the api to get a simple portlet to post to my twitter timeline.

I plan on using something like the accordian slide from mootools demo’ed here to switch between submitting tweets, viewing timelines, etc. For now though all i have to offer is a cheesy textbox that submits to a timeline. I jinged it below ( i think you can pop it out to a full window if its tiny). Basically all i did was take the yedda dll and start making references. For the demo below all it took was 2 lines of code so you can concentrate on what you want to do with the portlet and how you want it to look. You can also make it wsrp or jsr compliant or create a web service out of it easily. All of this thanks to yedda which is by the way a pretty cool site.

Happy twittering and remember, not every company has an sms gateway lying around so a twitter interface just might do the trick if they want to start going mobile.

Cheesy Twitter portlet demo:
You can view the full resolution version at screencast.com.

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Google Chrome Released

Posted on September 2, 2008 by Robert Herrera

Not to rehash what is already out there but google chrome is very snappy. download it at http://www.google.com/chrome and see for yourself. The most interesting part about google chrome is the technology behind it. It may mean a new direction in web application development; certainly not right away but the wheels are now in motion. Snappier, a new formidable layer of security via the “sandbox” pattern, and open source. Me likes!

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Twitter Portlet For Webcenter Interaction (ALUI) Part 1

Posted on August 27, 2008 by Robert Herrera

I’ve decided to make this a two part post as blog entries are supposed to be short bursts of information or so i’ve been told. I have been wanting to write a portlet that posts to twitter and have had it on my todo list for a few months now. We’ll first go over a use case or two for having a twitter portlet and the next post will have the code. So whats the use in being able to post to twitter from an enterprise portal?

First, the more that I work with the 6.5 version of Aqualogic User Interaction (now called Webcenter Interaction) the more I see opportunities for social applications within the Enterprise in general. The Aqualogic portal has always been community centric and social to some extent but as more and more everyday users delve into the social computing world outside of work we are seeing more socially based solutions thought up for common use cases. This is the result of users experiencing new constructs to solve problems. For example, if someone’s main form of communication is email and they are familiar with little else they are more inclined to think of an email-ly solution to a use case around communication like support@blah.com. For those who wander into the social computing world outside of work they gain new constructs to solve issues using contructs like sms, rss, activity feeds, etc.

One such use case comes from a governent agency I had the pleasure of visiting in western Australia earlier this year. I was onsite for a two week workshop for estimating level of effort for migrating onto the ALUI portal platform. Part of the workshop involved “gotta haves” while part of the workshop involved “nice to haves”.

One of the use cases that they brought up was the need to communicate to non-employees. This agency runs a very large apprentice program so that students who have recently graduated from high school but who will not be attending college can learn a skill or trade. This large group of apprentices is placed through the agency but does not work directly for the agency. They do however have to be communicated to both en masse as well as individually. Many of the locations that the apprentices work at do not have an internet connection or computer at all so there is no way for these users to log in and check email or to log into a portal. We kicked around the idea of using an sms gateway to send activity feeds or one off messages to the group but as a quick hit i mentioned twitter.

One person in the group was semi-familiar with Twitter and had a construct for understanding the concepts. I did a quick POC to introduce the group to twitter. I had them all sms “follow blahblah” to 40404 which registered their phone for the twitter feed. From then on you can post to blahblah timeline and everyone who chooses to follow receives the feed via sms. The simple steps would be to send out a communication (whatever their current method was) that asked all apprentices (vast majority having cell phones with sms capability) to follow the corporate username on Twitter. A portlet would be written that posts timeline entries to the Twitter account and uses Twitter’s sms gateway to handle the sms blast to the apprentice group.

As I pretty up the portlet I’ll post other use cases that I’ve seen that lend themselves to some sort of Twitter-like solution. Certainly just in the realm of Enterprise 2.0 facebook-y apps having a way to post to and read from your twitter timeline would be useful. The next post will deal with the portlet itself.

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