Oracle Portal Product Strategy & Roadmap Web Casts

We have a series of web casts in November discussing our overall portal strategy and roadmap going forward. The webcasts will address feature updates, integrations, and certifications – as well as other news relevant to WebLogic Portal, WebCenter Interaction, and Oracle Portal customers.

Oracle Portal Products Strategy & Roadmap Update: WebLogic Portal
November 13, 2008
10:00 a.m. PT/1:00 p.m. ET

Oracle Portal Products Strategy & Roadmap Update: WebCenter Interaction (formerly AquaLogic User Interaction)
November 19, 2008
10:00 a.m. PT/1:00 p.m. ET

Oracle Portal Products Strategy & Roadmap Update: Oracle Portal
November 20, 2008
10:00 a.m. PT/1:00 p.m. ET

Go to the announcement on oracle.com to register for these web casts.

I Have Oracle Portal – What Can I Do with It?

The simple answer is: enjoy it!

The all new, upcoming release of Oracle Portal will be part of Fusion Middleware 11g. One of our key focus areas in the WebCenter development team is making sure that the investment you made into Oracle Portal (and other portal products in the offering) is safe and can be leveraged by WebCenter, if/when you decide to give WebCenter a try.

So what are the interoperability corner stones:

• Portlets: WebCenter can consume all your remote portlets deployed to Oracle Portal. This includes standards-based portlets (JSR 168/WSRP), as well as PDK-Java portlets, including OmniPortlet and WebClipping. On top of this, you can also consume local PL/SQL portlets that are remoted through the Federated Portal Adapter (FPA).
  
• Content: WebCenter supports a wide variety of back-end content management systems, one of them being Oracle Portal. The WebCenter Developer’s Guide provides detailed information about how you can expose content in your WebCenter applications from Oracle Portal’s lightweight content managemet system.
  
• Pages: You can also expose Oracle Portal pages in your WebCenter applications. The key is that you have to turn the pages into portlets (page portlets), and use the aforementioned Federated Portal Adapter (see Portlets).
  
• JSF Portlet Bridge: We’ve seen many customers using the above techniques successfully in environments where Oracle Portal and Oracle WebCenter live side-by-side. For those of you interested in enhancing the Oracle Portal environment  and inject some new technology into your pages, you can use the JSF Portlet Bridge to build JSF/ADF portlets or “portletize” JSF/ADF applications. The ultimate promise of the JSF Portlet Bridge is to leverage the WebCenter Enterprise 2.0 services, such as Discussion or Document Library task flows (coming in R11) in Oracle Portal.
  

Oracle Portal is unique in the market place by giving a lot of power in the hands of techy and not that techy business users. Have fun with it with or without WebCenter!