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.

Oracle Combined with BEA Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant

Here you can take a look at Gartner’s 2008 analysis of the horizontal portal market space. The combined Oracle-BEA solutions are in the leader’s quadrant.

Here are Oracle’s strength called out by Gartner:

• Oracle plans to incorporate much of BEA’s most-interesting technology into its strategic portal and user interaction platform offerings, including functionality found in the former BEA Ensemble, Pathways and Analytics offerings, as well as the .NET Accelerator. Although none of these will be available as individual products, the incorporation of this functionality into WebCenter Services and WebCenter Suite will interest prospects looking for mashup functionality; portal analytics capability; social-computing features, such as social networking; and simplified integration of .NET applications with Java-based portals.
• By continuing to offer the WebLogic Portal products, Oracle gains a credible, proven offering for high-volume, large-scale, customer-facing portals.
• Oracle can provide users with portal and enterprise content management (ECM) capabilities (Universal Content Management), although the integration available with Universal Content Management depends on which of Oracle’s portal offerings is also leveraged.
• Oracle is an aggressive adopter of portlet-related standards and is an early adopter of JSR 286 (Portlet 2.0) and WSRPv2.

For Gartner’s cautions and their thoughts on other vendors, visit http://gartner.com.

What Container Does WebCenter Run on: WebLogic or OC4J?

I’ve been getting this question more and more often lately: which application server does WebCenter run on? WebLogic Server, acquired from BEA, or Oracle’s own OC4J?

The answer is very short and simple: WebCenter 10g runs on OC4J, WebCenter 11g runs (read: will run) on WebLogic Server.

The explanation is easy and straight forward too: in the 10g times the only Java EE container Oracle had, was OC4J. No problem there. When the 11g version ships, the entire Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, including WebCenter will run on WebLogic Server.

Do I have to worry about migration, then?
No. You, as an application developer, see very little from the underlying container changes. In a nutshell, this is how you migrate an application built using JDeveloper 10.x: Open your workspace or project in JDeveloper 11g, and the automatically invoked migration tools will migrate your application, so it can run on the 11g WebLogic Server.

If there’s interest, as we get closer to the 11g release, I’ll be happy to post about the migration process as well. Just let me know… 😉

Competitors, FUD, and the Future

The other day, Vince Casarez, Vice President for Product Management, responsible for the portal products at Oracle, published a post on the official WebCenter blog, http://blogs.oracle.com/webcenter. In the note, titled You can tell how worried a competitor is by how much FUD they spread… Vince makes it clear what we mean by developing and supporting the acquired portal products for at least another 9 years. Then, he goes into details about the products in our Enterprise 2.0 family.

If you’re a WebLogic Portal, Aqualogic User Interaction (WebCenter Interaction), or Oracle Portal customer, this post is for you. Here’s an excerpt:

Let me start here. Oracle has clearly stated that Oracle Portal, Oracle WebLogic Portal, and Oracle WebCenter Interaction & Collaboration (formerly ALUI) will continue to be developed and supported for at the MINIMUM of 9 years. This means that there will be both major and minor releases of these products going forward. And when we get close to this 9 year time horizon, as we do for every product, we’ll survey the customers and extend the time if that’s their recommendation.

And again, if you’re fortunate enough and you’re coming to Oracle OpenWorld to San Francisco next week, you can talk to Vince as well as the experts of each of these products directly.

Product Roadmap For Enterprise 2.0 After BEA Acquisition

On July 1, 2008 Charles Phillips, President, and Thomas Kurian, SVP for Fusion Middleware, gave an online briefing about Oracle’s Middleware Strategy. Here are some highlights relevant to the Enterprise 2.0 and Portal space.

The level of future support is divided into three categories:

• Strategic Products: Oracle Universal Content Management, Oracle WebCenter Framework, Oracle WebCenter Spaces, BEA Ensemble and Pathways
  • BEA Products being adopted immediately with limited re-design into Oracle Fusion Middleware
  • No corresponding Oracle Products exist in majority of cases
  • Corresponding Oracle Products converge with BEA Products with rapid integration over 12-18 months

• Continue & Converge Products: Oracle Portal, BEA WebLogic Portal (aka: Oracle WebLogic Portal), BEA AquaLogic User Interaction (aka: Oracle WebCenter Interaction)
  • BEA Products being incrementally re-designed to integrate with Oracle Fusion Middleware
  • Gradual integration with existing Oracle Fusion Middleware Technology to broaden features with automated upgrades
  • Continued development & maintenance for at least 9 years

• Maintenance Products: Commerce Services and Collabra
  • BEA had EOL’d due to limited adoption prior to Oracle M&A
  • Continued Maintenance with appropriate fixes for 5 years

One of the key areas our product teams are working on is to ensure the interoperability across these products. The key interoperability vehicle being WSRP 1.0 and 2.0, thus enabling WLP and Interaction to consume WebCenter services, such as the Document Library, Discussions, and Email task flows. On the flip side, it will allow WebCenter applications to consume portlets from WLP and Interaction as well.