OOW13: Meeting Oracle Cloud Document Service – Enterprise Grade Dropbox?

As I was wandering (and wondering) around the demo grounds at Oracle OpenWorld, I bumped into a booth demonstrating the upcoming Oracle Cloud Document Service. This service is yet to be announced sometime later this week. It is a SaaS solution that can be used stand alone or can be integrated with other services. Edit: by now the Oracle Document Cloud Service has been announced in Thomas Kurian’s keynote seesion:

The core of this offering is the ability to store in and expose documents from a cloud based content system. Through a web (browser) based interface, a native app for Android and iOS and a desktop client (agent) – very similar to Dropbox or Box.com – documents can be uploaded, downloaded, searched for and versioned. A version history is kept for documents and older versions can be accessed. Documents are associated with access privileges – at various levels. Public links to individual documents (and folders?) can be handed out. The desktop client can synchronize all content or selected folders.

Some capabilities will be provided to synchronize between an on premise WebCenter Content repository and the cloud based Document Service.

The underlying infrastructure for this cloud service is WebCenter Content. Currently the final details for a multi-tenant set up of WCC are being ironed out. Some of the capabilities of WCC are not yet exposed in the Document Service – such as conversion between formats and guarding of retention time times. In the longer term it seems likely that these features will be added, given that the underlying technology already has them and only the UI needs to expose them.

The Document Service will be integrated with other SaaS offerings such as Fusion Applications modules. At the moment, there is no integration [planned?] between Oracle Social Network (which supports creating enterprise ‘conversations’ that can include documents) and the Document Service (though further down the road such integration seems likely). The mobile app recently released for (on premise) WebCenter Content is a different one from the app provided for the Document Service. Again, in the longer run it seems likely that these two will come together as well.

Note that no release date has been set (or at least revealed) for the DocumentService. Sometime CY 14 would be my guess. No pricing details are available either at this point.

Some early screenshots: