Who says you can’t teach an old elephant new tricks?  In an effort to offer the best portal services available, Function1 has been spending a lot of time with Microsoft Office SharePoint server. Microsoft is a traditional market leader and its most recent incarnation of SharePoint has the technology baked-in to live up to the hype. Instead of just taking Microsoft’s word for how totally radical the software is, we did our own digging into the benefits and problems SharePoint has had over the years. We’ve been quite impressed by the integration of server and client side software, and by the general architecture of the MOSS solution. So much so, we believe the most recent SharePoint release is a viable contender for customers who want to migrate away from WCI to another  enterprise portal solution.

Before we get started, some terminology:

• WebCenter Interaction (WCI) – The Plumtree->BEA Product Stack that you’re probably running now.
• WSS (Windows SharePoint Services) – The foundation of the SharePoint server platform. This is also the gateway for developers to interact with SharePoint behind the scenes.
• MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) – The presentation layer and pre-built components that make up the portal aspect of SharePoint.
• Web Parts – The individual components that make up a Sharepoint site.  For WCI users, these are portlets.
• Web Sites – The areas of pages and web parts that combine to create a portal. For WCI users, this is the equivalent of a community.

From here on, I’ll refer to MOSS as simply SharePoint.

The History, Myth, and Legend

SharePoint has been competing in the portal space for a long time. SharePoint 2001 was Microsoft’s first endeavor in portal technology and was primarily a document storage solution. SharePoint 2003 built on this technology, but was plagued with scalability and usability issues. By the time 2007 rolled around, Microsoft had already been given a bad wrap for their portal technology and the myths surrounding the product became legend.  But the Sharepoint 2007 release went a long way to discrediting Microsoft’s critics.  With the 2007 release, in our opinion, Microsoft made the jump from “departmental document sharing sites” to “ready-for-primetime enterprise solution”.

SharePoint makes sense for customers with a heavy investment in Microsoft technology (Server, .Net Framework, SQL Server, and Office)

Microsoft was not at the forefront of Portal technology in 2003, but this gave the company the late adopter advantage of learning from other company’s mistakes. Instead of reinventing the wheel, Microsoft took the very best of portal technology from competing products and created a fully integrated suite of tools. Tight integration has been built from the Web to the Desktop through Office Tools, and from the Web to the Developer’s desktop through Visual Studio and SharePoint Designer. There’s also WEB 2.0 goodies like blogs and wikis, as well as a workflow and document management solution right out of the box.

What you need to install to get started

The reasoning for integrating middleware is similar for both Oracle and Microsoft. If you buy the portal product, life will be so much easier if you just buy all their connecting products too. Microsoft SharePoint is no exception with tight integration in Microsoft Office, Exchange, and Developer tools.

There are a few moving parts needed for for a basic SharePoint installation.

• Microsoft Server 2003/2008 – This is self-explanatory, but the point we’d like to make is that you can use 32 or 64bit flavors of the server software. This is something we’ve been missing from Oracle WCI 10gR3.
• Active Directory – Although not required for a SharePoint installation, many of the security features and some of the add-ons require an AD source.
• IIS (Internet Information Services) – Microsoft’s web hosting platform handles application pools, memory management, and the .NET framework. SharePoint plugs right into existing IIS environments as a new website.
• SQL Server – Continuing on the theme of one company to rule them all, the database needs to be a SQL Server flavor. There are no alternatives to this, unlike WCI 10gR3 which had a number of database options.
• .NET Framework – Microsoft’s development container (it actually contains a number of languages) for the development of custom applications. Also the development base for WSS and MOSS.
• WSS (Windows Shared Services) – The nuts and bolts of any SharePoint deployment. This set of services includes web farm management, a persistence layer, workflow, content management, and search.
• MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) – The interface, websites, and web parts that make up the user experience. Also includes integration with Office tools and SharePoint Designer.
• Visual Studio 2008 – Although not a requirement to get started, any development with the .NET framework will include Visual Studio. If you’d like a solution that includes source control, we suggest the team edition.

A Familiar Face

One of the benefits to having a Microsoft development team working on a portal product is the common user interface found in the SharePoint administrator and user experiences. Many of the menus are “office-like” and have been made even more so in SharePoint 2010 where the ribbon style interface has been employed. Behind the scenes, SharePoint employs AJAX and rich-text editing throughout the SharePoint experience. What Microsoft lacks in cutting-edge portal technology, it makes up for in robust engineering of the portal components.

Scalability and Availability

In the past, the weakest link in SharePoint deployments has been the limited amount of scalability and availability options for a systems administrator. SharePoint 2007 changes all that. With the 2007 release, Microsoft dismantled the SharePoint solution into a number of independent services that can be deployed on clustered, distributed, and virtual machines. Services communicate through the common WSS interface allowing for stateless services across a server farm. For smaller organizations, we found scalability goes both ways. SharePoint can actually run on a single computer (although highly frowned upon). Resource usage for a small organization is nominal compared to Oracle’s WebCenter 11g base deployment. Microsoft has also allowed organizations to expand on an existing SharePoint installation by reconfiguring and adding to server farms as needed.

On the availability front, load balancing can be employed through a hardware device or Microsoft’s load balancing software solution. SQL Server contains Mirroring capabilities, and content can be distributed between multiple data stores to maximize server hardware.

Thank Goodness for Documentation

Plumtree Portal/ALUI/WCI  has never been credited to have a broad base of documentation, knowledgebase articles, examples, and blogs from users. As a former BEA consultant, I have felt the pain customer’s go through when trying to troubleshoot an undocumented problem. Oracle, similarly, has little documentation from real world WebCenter 11g users, because the product is so new to the market. SharePoint, on the other hand, has been widely used in various industries and there is a ton of documentation out there to support a SharePoint shop. From developer examples to 3rd party add-ons to UI Themes, the SharePoint community is verbose.

I’m sold, lets get on the SharePoint train!

Not so fast. Much like Oracle WebCenter 11g, there is no real clear path on migrating content from WCI to SharePoint. Although the technologies have similar portal components, SharePoint is a database driven solution whereas WCI was split between databases and file system storage. Don’t expect a migration plan from Microsoft’s rival, but that’s where we are hoping to help. As portal experts, we have the tools and knowledge to help you make the move from WCI to SharePoint. No, we haven’t received payola from Microsoft, we just want our customers to have the best solution for their investment. If you’re thinking about moving from WCI to SharePoint, or are just interested in more information about SharePoint Server in general, contact us. We’re happy to get you up to speed on your options.

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.

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