One of the reasons I left BEA was because I was tired of the big-company atmosphere.  Tired of the bureaucracy, of just being a number, of the corporate politics, and all the cons that come along with the positives of working for a large organization.  All in all, I felt like being at BEA was just kind of blah.  There wasn’t any corporate culture, and I didn’t identify with the company.  Maybe these things aren’t that important, but I think they are.  And it’s something we’re cognizant of at Function1: corporate culture and identity matter.  It’s an interesting challenge to build a consulting company in which employees feel part of a bigger whole, and not just off by themselves in Anytown, USA billing hours.  Likewise, deciding how you present your company to the outside world is an intriguing question to ponder.  How do you differentiate yourself from the approximately 1.27 gazillion other nameless consulting companies out there?  How do you want customers, partners, potential hires, and the general public to perceive your company?  Hard questions to answer, but my gut tells me that the best answer is to present your company honestly, as you are.

Which brings us to the crux of today’s post.  There’s been a long-standing on again/off again discussion amongst our circle of professional friends about the style and tone of the Function1 blog.  Some people like it, and some people think it’s not professional enough.  My take is this: other than our people,  this blog is the most consistent public-facing component of Function1.  And it’s an honest reflection of who we are.  We’re a small company that’s damn good at what we do, and we have fun doing it.  We work hard for our customers and ourselves, but we don’t take ourselves so seriously that we can’t have a good time.

Look, in the grand scheme of things, I don’t know if it’s right or wrong that we have mustache growing contests and embed random videos in our corporate blog, but it sure seems better than being just another faceless consulting company.  That said, I’ve been wrong in the past, so what do you think?  Handy poll included below for your convenience, but we also welcome comments with thoughts, feedback, and constructive criticism.

Please join us in welcoming Spheric to the Function1 family. This acquisition increases the value we deliver to customers and partners by leveraging the combined experience and expertise of both the Spheric and Function1 teams. We know many of you are wondering what this means, so please read on for more information.

Who is Function1?
Function1 is a premier solutions provider that takes a customer-centric approach towards developing usable, functional, and scalable solutions for enterprise customers. In addition to providing Oracle WebCenter professional services, Function1 offers packaged enterprise software, remote support, and hosting solutions to customers across the public and private sectors.

What does this mean for Spheric customers?
Current Spheric customers now have a bigger support system to lean on for help with their WebCenter deployments and development projects. Here at Function1, we have a great group of consultants and developers that together with the Spheric team will help you get the most value out of your portal investment.

What does this mean for current Function1 customers?
Current Function1 customers should look forward to new products and services that come from the combined team. We also have new service offerings and products related to Oracle’s Webcenter 11g release coming your way.

We’re thrilled to have Spheric as a part of the Function1 team.  Keep up on the latest at Function1 by visiting our blog and following us on Twitter. Please contact us at info@function1.com with any questions – we look forward to hearing from you.

Look, I think we can all agree that The Godfather III sucked, and was a black mark on an otherwise amazing trilogy. The one (and probably only) highlight of the movie was Pacino giving us the sound-bite, “Just when I thought I was out, The pull me back in!”. And so we welcome Dave Paroulek to the Function1 team.

As you may or may not know, the WCI professional services world isn’t all that big. Your options for finding quality consultants are pretty much either: Oracle (for an un-godly hourly tab), us, or a couple of other firms with WCI expertise. The small resource pool of qualified WCI consultants means that when we’re looking to bring new folks on board, we start by talking to people we’ve worked with in the past (usually at Plumtree/BEA/Oracle). These folks are a know quantity, and we know they’ll represent Function1 well and make our customers happy. Such is the case with Dave. Dave is another long-time Plumtree->BEA->Oracle guy who took a little different career path than the rest of the Plumtree alumni at Function1. He put his time in working for Plumtree Public Sector professional services, and then moved onto the BEA Services Engineering team. In this capacity, Dave was focused on designing, developing, and delivering WCI add-on software directly to customers. But his development experience doesn’t stop there. About a year and a half or so ago, Dave left the mothership and took a full-time gig doing software development (specifically, playing around with GWT).

And now he’s back in the fold. Absence makes the heart grow fonder I suppose, and when we talked to Dave about coming on board at Function1, he was all about it. Dave comes to Function1 helping us codify our software development practices and expertise, and continue on our quest to take over the world, err, provide world class services and software to customers everywhere. We’re tickled pink to have Dave with us: be on the lookout for more kick-ass blog posts on software development tips and best practices from him soon.

In 2006, the famous (infamous? I can never get those two words straight) street artist Banksy put on a show in an LA warehouse named, “Barely Legal”.  The centerpiece of the show was “The Elephant In The Room”, a painted live elephant that seemed like, IMO,  a pretty blase metaphor all dressed up in shock and awe.  But I’m sure there was deeper meaning that I was missing…what do I know about art anyways?  In any case, it’s a new decade now, and I don’t need to literally paint an elephant to point out that there’s an elephant in the room for WCI customers: Oracle WebCenter 11g.  I’m sure you’ve all seen some of the marketing around Oracle’s new portal platform, and maybe even seen a demo or two.  But here at Function1, we’ve been spent a lot of time and effort digging past the marketing material to try to understand the real value proposition of WebCenter 11g, both for new portal customers, and for existing WCI customers.  So, without further adieu, a gentle introduction to WebCenter 11g for WCI customers.

Since marketing people seem to like to give similar names to completely different things, let’s start with some terminology :

• WebCenter Interaction (WCI) – The Plumtree->BEA Product Stack that you’re probably running now
• WebCenter Suite 11g - Oracle owns 3 portal products:  WCI (Plumtree->BEA acquisition), BEA Portal (BEA acquisition), and WebCenter (Oracle Organic product).  WebCenter Suite is the blanket license you can buy to acquire all three of these portal products.
• WebCenter Framework – A set of ADF components and APIs that let developers tap into the Oracle product stack
• WebCenter Services – A set of pre-built business components (Blogs, Wikis, Social Graph, etc) that developers can utilize to build applications.  These are essentially out of the box portlets
• WebCenter Spaces – The homegrown out of the box Oracle portal product
• WebCenter 11g - The term used for collectively referring to Oracle WebCenter Spaces, WebCenter Services, and WebCenter Framework

The rest of this post will focus on WebCenter 11g, and the components that comprise it.  So what is Oracle WebCenter 11g?

At heart, WebCenter is a development platform

If you take nothing else away from reading this, remember that WebCenter is a development platform first.  Specifically, WebCenter is an integrated, end-to-end Java development solution for delivering enterprise applications.  This differs dramatically from the WCI approach.  In the WCI world, product is first, and development is second.  The focus of WCI is to provide a configurable, out of the box portal experience for users.  WebCenter, on the other hand, is geared towards providing developers a set of components and APIs that can be pieced together to build and deliver enterprise applications.  The addition of WebCenter Spaces (the WebCenter Portal) to the stack is just one method to surface custom WebCenter apps.

WebCenter makes sense for customers with a heavy investment in Java and Oracle

If you’re a .NET shop thinking about replacing WCI, you should probably stop reading now and start thinking about Sharepoint (We’ll have a similar intro to Sharepoint for WCI users post up soon).  Sure, WebCenter is committed to open development standards, which means you can write .NET portlets and wrap them in WSRP so that they get consumed through WebCenter Spaces.  But going down this road is kind of like putting ketchup on a nice steak.  Yeah, you can do it, but why would you want to?  At the end of the day you’re just wasting time and money.  If you wanted something to put ketchup on, you should have just had the burger for dinner.  If you’re going to eat steak; eat steak.  If you’re a Microsoft shop, let your developers build their stuff in Visual Studio and take advantage of the tight integration with the Sharepoint platform.  If you’re an Oracle shop, let your developers build their code in JDeveloper and take advantage of the tight integration with the Weblogic App server and the rest of the WebCenter/Oracle platform.

WebCenter is a way to surface Oracle’s Fusion Middleware stack

Oracle is probably happy that you pony up the cash to use WebCenter, but they really want you to run your enterprise on Oracle software.  Not coincidentally, there are APIs and components built into the WebCenter Framework that allow you to nicely integrate and surface Fusion middleware components.  Things like their BPEL engine, SOA suite, etc.  If you’ve invested in Fusion, the addition of WebCenter might be a nice way for you to tie a bunch of disparate middleware components together.

OK, so what do I get out of the box?

Just because WebCenter is targeted at development shops doesn’t mean that Oracle left you high and dry if you just want to install products and get going.  Out of the box, you get a portal environment in WebCenter Spaces.  The portal provides you Group Spaces (i.e. WCI communities), Personal Spaces (i.e. WCI my pages), user customization, and a security model.  The user security model is built on top of Weblogic Server security.  This means that, out of the box, your users are going to be stored in the LDAP user store embedded in WebLogic.  You can, however, delegate security out to your corporate LDAP/AD, or integrate with an SSO solution.  In addition, you get the functionality (i.e. pre-built portlets) of WebCenter Services.  These services include Document Collaboration, Blogs, Wikis, Tasklists, Tagging, Search, Activity Streams, Calendaring, and more.  You also get a limited use license for Oracle Universal Content Management (UCM).  UCM is the Oracle branding for their Stellent acquisition, and the product is actually quite mature and worthwhile as an enterprise content management solution.  For more info on UCM, take a look here.

Great, so what do I have to install and manage to make this stuff work?

This is kind of a loaded question, as the answer changes depending on how much Oracle functionality you want to expose through WebCenter.  At a bare minimum, however, you’re probably going to have the following components in your WebCenter environment.

• JDK 1.6 – Yep.  It’s the JDK.  You’re running Java, so you need the Java runtime and associated toolkits
• Weblogic Server – Oracle’s J2EE app server of choice since the BEA acquisition.  Note that Weblogic Server licenses are an additional cost in the procurement of WebCenter
• Database – WebCenter has support for both Oracle and SQL Server databases.  Not sure why you’d be running SQL Server if you have so much other Oracle product, but you can if you want to.  There are several schemas that get installed as part of the WebCenter installation to manage meta-data for the various applications in the stack.
• UCM – With the release of UCM 11g this summer, things will change a bit and UCM will just be another WAR/EAR that you deploy to Weblogic server.  For the time being however, plan on installing a standalone Java server that runs the UCM application.
• WebCenter WAR files - Deployed and manged in Weblogic server are various WAR files for running WebCenter components (Spaces, Services, etc)
• Apache – You probably don’t really need Apache, but everybody seems to like to stick it in front of Weblogic for serving up static HTML content.
• JDeveloper – Like it or not, it’s the IDE your developers are going to be using for composing WebCenter applications.

And what if I’m concerned about things like scalability and high availability?

This is one area where I’m personally quite happy with the way Oracle did things.  Because everything is deployed to a J2EE container, you can architect your solution as a traditional 3-tier web application.  Install a hardware load balancer for web request distribution and fail over.  Scale out your web tier horizontally as needed for load and high availability.  Cluster your app servers.  And use your Database vendor’s replication solution of choice (Oracle RAC, etc).  One item of note here is that we’ve found WebCenter applications to be quite RAM intensive (moreso than even most Java Apps).  Luckily, like talk, RAM is cheap.  So plan on loading up your servers with a bunch of RAM to avoid a painful user experience.  Also, consider how you’re licensing WebCenter.  If you’re paying by Server/CPU/Power Unit/whatever term they use these days, building out a large fault tolerant environment can get pretty costly, and you might be better served to just look into an ELA/all you can eat model.

So, what kind of skillsets should I have on my team?

IMO, you’re going to want some number of the following resources on your team to run a WebCenter project successfully:

• Java developers- You’ll want these guys to be familiar with J2EE and JSF.  If you’re really lucky, they’ll know all about Oracle ADF (Oracle’s proprietary extension to JSF) as the ADF learning curve is non-trivial.  It would probably also be good if they have experience developing in JDeveloper.
• System Architect – Somebody who can plan your hosting environment for you and knows how all the pieces fit together.  i.e. somebody who understands your network topology and can tell you which segment of the network to stick servers in.  Somebody who can implement a highly available solution.  Somebody who can tell you how much horsepower you’re going to need to run your environment, and, additionally, how you can scale to meet increased demand.
• Weblogic Expert – The vast majority of the components you use, and the code you write, is going to get deployed to Weblogic Server.  Having production support who know the in’s and out’s of Weblogic is a good idea.
• Functional People – These are the same functional folks that you’d have for any portal project.  They’re going to help define governance, drive development, and generally take care of the important stuff that your tech guys don’t want anything to do with.

I’m sold, how do I migrate?

This is, literally, the million dollar question.  Your first step towards migration is moving your licenses over from WCI to WebCenter Suite.  Once you’ve gotten over the sticker shock of doing so, the world is your oyster.  Except…uh…there’s no migration plan from Oracle; no real roadmap to help you get from point A to point B.  And that’s where we hope to fit into the equation.  Function1 understands both the WCI and WebCenter environments.  We can help you get the most out of your WebCenter installation, without completely throwing away your investment in WCI and starting from scratch.  If you’re thinking about moving from WCI to WebCenter, or are just interested in more information about WebCenter in general, give us a ring or drop us a line.  We’re happy to come out and talk to you.

Oh, and one other thing…

Some of us on the Function1 team delivered a much more detailed deep dive presentation on WebCenter recently.  As a show of team unity, we all decided to grow moustaches.  As a thanks for reading this whole post, here’s a picture of our best ’stache.

Sadly, he has nothing on this guy.

]]> http://www.function1.com/2010/01/the-elephant-in-the-room-a-gentle-intro-to-webcenter-11g-for-wcialui-customers/feed/ 1 http://www.function1.com/2010/01/welcome-to-2010/ http://www.function1.com/2010/01/welcome-to-2010/#comments Mon, 11 Jan 2010 18:15:19 +0000 Brian Hak http://www.function1.com/?p=481 Howdy all, and welcome to to the new decade.  To kick off the new year in style, you may have noticed that we re-branded our website.  New look and feel, new content, and new back-end engine:  we swapped Movable Type out in favor of Wordpress.  So what do you think?  Like it?  Love it?  Hate it?  Doesn’t make all that much of a difference in your life?  Leave a comment and let us know.

As a company, Function1 is pretty excited about the opportunity that 2010 brings.  While continuing our focus on WCI, we’ve also been investing in new technologies to the company (namely, WebCenter Suite and Sharepoint), and spending time developing kick-ass software.  Stay tuned for more info about our software offerings and musings about WebCenter and Sharepoint in the coming months.

As always, thanks for reading…we hope the new year finds you happy, healthy, and prosperous.

Most of the upgrade was fine, but one of the servers in this test environment had both Publisher 6.4 and Search Server (10gR3) on the same machine.  Publisher was not upgraded, but after upgrading search server to 10.3.0 , Publisher reported errors while connecting to the search server on its diagnotics page:

Other components, such as the portal and Collaboration server, were able to connect to the upgraded Search Server without any issues.  Since only Publisher was having this problem, we decided to look at the publisher log files next.  During the startup process, publisher was reporting the following error:

INFO   | jvm 1    | 2009/08/12 11:19:40 | 11:19:40,130 INFO  Initializing Search Server API with inxight = “/opt/oracle/portal/common/inxight/3.7.6/lang” and doc2text = “/opt/oracle/portal/ptcs/6.4/bin/native/doc2text”
INFO   | jvm 1    | 2009/08/12 11:19:40 | 11:19:40,366 ERROR BEA ALI Publisher startup failed
INFO   | jvm 1    | 2009/08/12 11:19:40 | java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: Native library openkernelsearch_4-2j cannot be loaded.  Either the library or its dependencies cannot be found, or all copies of the library have been loaded already:
INFO   | jvm 1    | 2009/08/12 11:19:40 | [attempt 1]: /opt/oracle/portal/ptcs/6.4/lib/native/libopenkernelsearch_4-2j_0.so: ld.so.1: java: fatal: /opt/oracle/portal/common/icu/2.6/lib/native/libicuuc.so.26: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64

Ahahh!  The ELF class error indicates that the ICU (internationization) library was built as a 64-bit native library, but Publisher runs in a 32-bit JVM which will not load the 64-bit libraries. Looking at the timestamps on those libraries, it was apparent that these libraries were overwritten during the upgrade of search server, which does run in 64-bit mode.

After considering several options to fix this, we decided to use the previous versions of the common libraries that Publisher expects.  Luckily, we had followed the best practice of creating a backup of the pre-upgrade version of the portal directory.  We chose to restore the ‘common’ directory from the backup to a directory under the Publisher folder to end up with:

  <PORTAL_HOME>/ptcs/6.4/common

Then we needed to update the references in the publisher configuration to change the location of the common libraries.  This is configured in the following file:

  <PORTAL_HOME>/ptcs/6.4/settings/config/service.conf

So we edited this file and changed the location of the common libraries at the following line:

set.LD_LIBRARY_PATH=<PORTAL_HOME>/ptcs/6.4/common/inxight/3.7.6/lib/native:<PORTAL_HOME>/ptcs/6.4/common/outsidein/8.1.5/lib/native:<PORTAL_HOME>/ptcs/6.4/common/icu/2.6/lib/native:/<PORTAL_HOME>/ptcs/6.4/common/pthreads/2002.11.04/bin/native:<PORTAL_HOME>/ptcs/6.4/lib/native

Eventhough, it was just the ICU library that was conflicting, note that all the libraries were updated just to be consistent.   After saving the changes to service.conf and restarting Publisher, all was well again with the search server connection.  And we were merrily on our way to upgrading other portal components!

There are other components that run in a 32-bit JVM, so I would imagine that this would happen for any of those if they coexist with an upgraded Search Server.  Please share if you’ve experienced this issue with Publisher or other components with an upgrade.  If there are a lot of similar cases, this may be justification for a patch from Oracle.

• Hugh Jackman, with his Adamantium skeleton and rugged good looks, stole our hearts on the silver screen as everyone’s favorite X-Man
• Vegemite can be found on shelves of at least 2 grocery stores nationwide
• Outback Steakhouse has tamed the belly’s of budget-minded steak aficionados everywhere (Sure Outback is fake-Australian, but work with us: It was either Outback, or a Crocodile Dundee reference. Editor’s Note: Watching the linked Crocodile Dundee clip will likely make you wax poetic about how the 80’s were a simpler time)

Today, Function1 continues in the storied tradition of cherishing everything Australian as we welcome our very own export from Down Under: Jeremy Ehrmann. We asked Jeremy to write his own intro. blog post, but were left scratching our heads when he sent the following:

Rather than looking for a Babelfish Australian Slang->English translator, we decided it would be easier to just let you know the following:

Jeremy brings over 12 years of Fortune 500 IT experience in to Function1. For the past three years, Jeremy has worked for BEA->Oracle, focusing on Aqualogic/WCI product stack. He also has a long list of programming languages under his belt with specialization in .Net C# and Windows server administration.

Jeremy has an Undergraduate in Computer Science from Regis University and a Masters in Business from the Florida Institute of Technology.

Please join us in welcoming Jeremy to the Function1 team.