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Its Official: Oracle UCM Blogs and Wikis are Supported on 10gr3

September 10, 2008 - 11:30am — bex

In case you missed today's Oracle ECM Quarterly Community Call, you also missed this fun fact:

The Blog and Wiki Samples from Stellent 7.5 are now officially supported in Oracle UCM 10gr3! Details are sketchy, but in theory the new versions will be available for download on the standard OTN page for UCM.

UPDATE: The blogs and wikis are now available on Metalink as patch number 7504090. You may also need patch number 7007799 for Site Studio to make things work properly.

Way back in 2006, I formalized some blog and wiki samples that Andy MacMillan initially sketched out, and Stellent released them to the public with much fanfare... This made us the first major ECM player to support blogs, wikis, and RSS feeds. The buzz was quite surprising...

Unfortunately, I left the company soon afterward, and nobody had time to take over that project, so it languished. They were left as unsupported "samples," that only worked on UCM version 7.5. I had always intended on upgrading those samples to 10gr3 myself -- once I finished writing this dang ECM book -- but I'm even happier that Oracle did it themselves, so that they will be officially supported "Extras."

Oracle tweaked them up a bit to support the new 10gr3 Site Studio Contributor in the wiki... but they left my "inline editor" alone for the blog interface. They'll probably replace my blog editor with the standard Site Studio contributor eventually... or they might just wait until Open WCM is released, and use its inline editor instead.

This of course raises the question, should you use WebCenter or Stellent for blogs/wikis/rss? I hear that question a lot, and unfortunately its usually the wrong question to ask. It's not an either/or question, its a what works best for you kind of question. My advice is this:

  • RSS Feeds: Frankly, every application should support RSS Feeds. They aren't tough to make, and despite massive limitations, they usually add value. Use Stellent if you need content-based RSS feeds. Use WebCenter if you need to generate a feed from an enterprise application that doesn't yet support RSS. Of course, as soon as RSS gets off the ground, everybody will demand Atom feeds... but nevermind.
  • Blogs: When it comes to blogs, WebCenter is meant to be the user interaction layer for blog content, and Stellent is the repository. Of course, Stellent already has a built-in user interaction layer for blogs... its called Site Studio. But again, if you want to display blog content along with data from other enterprise applications, you'll find value with the pre-existing plug ins that WebCenter offers.
  • Wikis: Same as with blogs. WebCenter for user interaction, Stellent for storage. If Stellent's presentation layer is fine with you, then just use that. If you want the wiki displayed in a portal, integrated with data from other systems, then you might find value with WebCenter.

As usual, the archived community calls are available to Oracle customers up on Metalink.

Comments

September 17, 2008 - 10:06am — Nardev (not verified)

Sample Blogs

First app i ever did for UCM was to build on top of Sample Blogs...i gotta tell you that's not the way to start!!! But it ended up being quite a rewarding learning experience. However it has a major flaw in the desing IMO...ucm (site studio) gives us a cool way to read xml (btw...data islands are not cool) all one would need is a method to easily write xml and that would complete the circle. With this an average programer such as i would have a fun time instead of a nasty time tweaking SampleBlogs to his needs! Read XML + Write XML = success. Thinking about it, but you have a better grasp of things and am wondering what you think on this? Imagine how easy it would be to create whatever kind of forums one wishes to make - it would be up to the programmer to decide how this XML will look like (title, contents, attachments, timestamp, edit, remove - whatever is needed). Now, i've done writing of XML to UCM, but it's not pretty nor easy...All in all i think this is one major thing that is missing from the development perspective. But then i guess it would be too easy?$ ;)

September 17, 2008 - 2:42pm — bex

That's in the OpenWCM API

Yes, this is a limitation... but I believe the fixed most of that in the OpenWCM product. That's the next generation of Site STudio. Its been in development for some time now, and hopefully it will be out in 2009.

September 22, 2008 - 3:03pm — Visitor (not verified)

What is this OpenWCM you speak of ?

Not a lot on the web but one PPT shows "it" coming in '09.

We're looking at selecting WebCenter/UCM by EOY '08 . Would this be "bad" ?

September 23, 2008 - 4:34pm — bex

not necessarilly...

WebCenter already has a Stellent connector that is similar to OpenWCM... if you do an integration now, you'll want to be mindful about designing it in such a way that upgrading to OpenWCM would be as simple as possible.

Make sure your implementers know how OpenWCM will behave, so they will do a similar design for a near-term project.

November 20, 2008 - 2:26pm — Scott Conroy (not verified)

WebCenter wiki vs. UCM wiki

Hi Bex! Despite your "which one" comment, Oracle's strategy still seems convoluted to me. As far as I know, the wiki included with WebCenter Services is based on the open source jzwiki engine. I don't believe that engine leverages the UCM as its repository, but I may be wrong. I'm not sure if the UCM wiki is based on another engine, but your comment tends to indicate that it's custom.

I don't think that Oracle should stop offering/supporting either offering, but I do think that one of them should be declared the strategic direction. That declaration might have happened, but I missed it...

November 21, 2008 - 3:46pm — bex

not yet...

Oracle has 2 wikis...

One, as you said, has its back-end engine based on jzwiki, and its front-end engine based on WebCenter. The other, has its back-end engine based on UCM, and its front-end engine based on Site Studio.

The "strategic direction" as of yet is not decided... and I'm constantly baffled why.

December 2, 2008 - 7:18pm — mikeyc

what's changed?

I'm already using the older Wiki component in 10gR3. It's working fine... any reason why I should upgrade? The readme files in the components do not list any changelogs since the older versions... is there any new functionality for the Wikis or the Blogs?

December 2, 2008 - 9:10pm — bex

three things...

firstly, its officially supported, which means people don't have to fear it going away... upgrading means getting support when it breaks.

secondly, its using the new 10gr3 editor in the wiki. Its still using the original FckEditor for the blogs, tho.

lastly, it now says "Oracle" instead of "Stellent."

Other than that, not much... although I am in contact with them about what else should be included.

December 4, 2008 - 4:00pm — Dawn (not verified)

creating a blog site using site designer

ok so I've never created a blog site but our company is toying with the idea of creating one (for members only) for a specific group of people in our company. Just how easy is it to create one using Site Designer? I'm new to all of this.. We are still on 7.5.2 but are in the process of preparing to upgrade to the latest version of everything. I can't find any "how to's" on how to do this using Site Designer.
If I have to wait to upgrade that's fine but I need to know how easy this really is to do so I can report back on the timeframe of getting this implemented.

Thanks for any advice you can give.

Dawn Robb
ANPAC
Springfield, MO
dawn.robb@anpac.com

December 4, 2008 - 11:34pm — bex

blogs on 7.5 are unsupported

I have an old sample on my website that was the original blogs and wikis for UCM:

http://bezzotech.com/library

That works on 7.5.2, but it is technically unsupported. However, its pretty much the same thing as the 10g version... and it comes with documentation.

January 23, 2009 - 1:50pm — Fernando Santa Rosa (not verified)

UCM TRAINNING

What is the best course about UCM Oracle?? How i can do this course?? Have costs?? Thank you

September 9, 2009 - 12:20pm — Visitor

Hi, I configured Sample

Hi,

I configured Sample Blogs in site studio.. Really like it....
But after publishing through SSPU, these blogs wont work .... :(

September 9, 2009 - 1:12pm — bex

Re: Hi, I configured Sample

Not surprising... it was never tested with SSPU. Sites usually need some tweaking in order for SSPU to work with them.

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