Blog

It is a thrill being a team member on a project that includes creative team members who aren’t shy of exploring unique avenues to achieve the project’s objectives.  Don’t get me wrong, we aren’t taking elusive risks with potential greater expense just to plug in our resumes that we ventured into bleeding edge technologies.  The team’s objective is to push the Oracle WebCenter Interaction technology to its fullest potential to meet the project’s requirements.  So what are we trying to do?  Well, since this blog site is, for the most part, about Oracle WebCenter Interaction (you didn’t expect me to blog on the perils of global warming are you?) And since you have this blog in your RSS feed, then odds are you’ve been using WCI since its glorious days when Plumtree was comfortably sitting in Gartner’s prestigious leaders quadrant in the portal world and it isn’t news that WCI is lifeless in the wiki and blogging department (sorry Oracle folks) and we might need to wait for WCI 15g before we get adequate wiki and blog coverage.  Yet, today’s customer base needs wiki and blog features beside its portal infrastructure.

So what we are trying to do here is use WCI as the façade for the wiki and blog technologies (Confluence and Word Press respectively as these are well respected technologies in their domains) and then integrate wiki pages and blog sites using custom crawlers in the portal’s knowledge directory then dress WCI, Confluence and Word Press with a common uniform (headers, footers, CSS, etc.)  The intent with the crawled approach is to use a single search and index engine, WCI’s, to fetch content from the portal, Confluence and Word Press.  Once these technologies are integrated under one roof, we are then using PEIs and the WCI Activity Stream API to send updates to the users’ activity space.

There are still challenges with authentication and authorization among these technologies (we don’t want the user to use three different credentials to login to these systems) and we are exploring Crowd as a single sign-on directory to consolidate all of the users’ logins down to a single username and password and the outcome is positive.

As seen, there are many moving parts and the team lead on the project has a clear vision of the target solution.  But, in my view, once the puzzle pieces are matched and fitting correctly, the final picture will be some neat WCI integration project.

Thanks.

Hani