Weblog for the AMIS Technology corner
Posts tagged collaboration
Book Review: Oracle WebCenter 11g PS3 Administration Cookbook by Yannick Ongena
Nov 13th
A few months back, in August, I received an electronic copy of the book: “Oracle WebCenter 11g PS3 Administration Cookbook” by Yannick Ongena (Packt Publishing, 2011). I promised you then you write a review on it and now I finally deliver on that promise.
Main conclusion: if you want to get started with WebCenter 11g, this book will help you take your first steps on many of the most important areas of Web Center (Portal). The recipes in the book provide clear instructions on getting things going. Where the Web Center documentation can be a little overwhelming – the Web Center Developer’s Guide has 69 chapters and presumably over 1500 pages of content – Yannick’s book is clear, straightforward and easy to follow.
I am not exactly sure about the intended reader for the book. The title and Yannick’s introduction mention Administration and a technical person responsible for administration. Many recipes however discusses topics and tasks I would associate with developers. So presumably both administrators and developers will benefit from the book. Note that the traditional roles of developer, administrator and end user are not as clearly defined with Web Center Portal: business or end users can take a lot of control over the portalat run time, potentially performing tasks traditionally associated only with developers. However, many run time activities are probably to complex for ordinary business users – so a technically skilled person who is typically active at run time in the run time environment is looked at to help out. In comes the administrator. Even though that may not be the usual Middleware Administrator turned DBA but more of a portal & content administrator. Well, that is for each organization itself to figure out. The persons responsible for creating the WebCenter portal, editing it at run time and taking care of its infrastructure and environment will all benefit from this book.
Oracle WebCenter 11g – Foundation for Oracle Fusion Applications and possibly your ADF applications or Enterprise 2.0 Portal as well
Jun 24th
I have had a sweet spot for Oracle WebCenter for quite some time now. As early as 2007 I already did a presentation at ODTUG on WebCenter (10g). One of my main conclusion at the time was that while the product showed a lot of potential, it was certainly not ready for prime time. After that presentation, a guy came up to me, thanked me for the presentation then told me he was a product manager for WebCenter – and agreed with most of the things I had said. That was my first encounter with Peter Moskovits. Today, two years later, the situation has changed quite dramatically. WebCenter has evolved, as had ADF which is the foundation for WebCenter, and WC is now one of the cornerstones for Oracle Fusion Applications. WebCenter 11g is like the swan that started out as the ugly duckling. Well worth a look.
I was in a presentation today by Peter Moskovits and Christina Kolotouros, titled: A Marriage Made in Heaven – Enterprise 2.0 and ADF. They touted it as Part 2 of Steve Miranda’s talk on how Fusion Applications were built (see: http://technology.amis.nl/blog/5645/oracle-fusion-applications-it-is-for-real-and-impressive-too ). In this presentation, they explained the architecture of WebCenter, demonstrated the use of some of the essential facilities and clarified how the product can be incorporated in your own ADF development efforts.
WebCenter implements the (runtime) customization & personalization requirements, allows consumption of 3rd party external portlets (that also bridge technologies), provides many Web 2.0/E2.0 Services (Blog, Wiki, Content Integration, Tagging, Linking, Email/VOIP/IM integration, …) and Community Workspaces; Search and Recent Activities.
WebCenter lives on top of ADF which in turn adds productivity to ‘plain’ JSF – through rich components, declarative and visual development and especially the data controls and complex databindings they provide to tie business services based on various technologies to the rich components. It adds functionality in a number of steps to the ADF foundation.
