Archive for the ‘WebCenter Interaction’ Category
Wednesday, October 19th, 2011
I don’t know whether to file this one under “obvious” or not. On one hand, I guess most people have always known this. But on the other, it’s such an under-used feature it bears repeating: Web Crawlers in Webcenter Interaction (and even back in the ALUI days) aren’t just for web sites – they can crawl RSS feeds too.
Configuration is identical to creating a Web Crawler. In administration, select “Create Object: Content Crawler – WWW” and choose the “World Wide Web” Content Source:
Here, instead of entering a web site, just provide the URL of the RSS feed:
Once the job runs, a card is created for each article in the feed:
Note the created date shows when the feed was crawled, not when the original articles were written. And in this example, only 11 cards have been created because that’s all that’s being provided on the Integryst RSS Feed. Both of these problems can be resolved by running your crawler job regularly, so that the dates are closer to when the posts are written, and the cards stick around after they’ve “left the feed”.
Tags: crawler, Knowledge Directory, RSS, WCI
Posted in Crawler, WebCenter Interaction | Comments Off
Tuesday, October 4th, 2011
While we may eventually see the new version of WebCenter Interaction (code name: Neo) this year, we’ve been hearing about it for what seems like years now. Neo will be more of a patch release – say, 10gR4 or 10.3.3 – rather than a new major revision. Pre-release versions have been out there for some time now; see Jeremy’s excellent post for some idea of what to expect with this build.
Whatever it ends up being called, Neo is largely a refresh to get additional platform support (64-bit, IIS7, Windows 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2010). The pre-release version that we’ve been working with has a couple of interesting new features – especially around Collaboration – but it remains to be seen whether these make the final cut. This will certainly be the last significant WebCenter Interaction release, and it’s time to start thinking about what happens next.
The support clock is ticking:
Oracle wants you on WebCenter suite, but you have choices. At Integryst, we spend a lot of time discussing the “Post-WCI World“, and the choices faced by our clients when deciding whether to remain on the Oracle stack or move to a different platform entirely.
Either way, we’ve got you covered. As always, stay tuned to this blog to read the latest coverage of new and noteworthy tips and tricks for WCI. But, in the coming weeks and months, you’ll start seeing more posts discussing alternate portal-type technologies, including Atlassian Confluence (wiki), Alfresco (document management), Frevvo (forms/workflow) and Drupal (Content Management, Collaboration).
Tags: Neo, post-WCI, support, WCI, webcenter
Posted in WebCenter Interaction, WebCenter Spaces | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, March 30th, 2011
When you configure SSO (Single Sign-On) in the WCI portal, you’re basically telling the portal to redirect to the /portal/sso/SSOLogin.aspx page, and configuring your SSO product to “protect” that page. I could write volumes about this topic – and probably will at some point – but for this post let’s consider Windows Integrated Authentication (WIA).
The trick to configuring Windows Integrated Authentication for the portal is to enable Integrated Windows authentication on the “sso” folder like this:
This allows IIS to authenticate the user and pass the username to the portal through the portal session. But, if the user can’t authenticate for some reason, they may see a screen like this:
While I’ll call out a portal bug any day of the week, this isn’t one of them: the portal is doing exactly what it’s supposed to, and in this case that is NOTHING. The above error comes from IIS, and the portal never even sees the request to take action on it. [side note: in my last post, I mentioned working on a WebDav fix for Collab; it's looking like the problems with Windows 7/Office 2010 aren't Collab's "fault", but - like this issue - are the fault of the application server handling the requests.]
Now that we’ve established the issue is with IIS and not the portal, the “fix” is pretty straight-forward. Just craft a custom HTML error page that redirects the browser back to the portal with this code:
<script>window.location='/portal/server.pt'</script>
… then, configure IIS to use that error page when the unauthorized message is generated:
This way, if IIS can’t authenticate the user, instead of presenting the error page, it’ll send a redirect to the browser to bounce back to the portal – which will know that it’s already attempted SSO and just present the user with the forms-based login.
Tags: Portal Authenticaion, sso, webcenter
Posted in WebCenter Interaction | Comments Off
Sunday, March 6th, 2011
A year ago (wow – time flies!) I promised to elaborate on some other causes of the “Error displaying Dropdown menu tabs” error in WebCenter Interaction headers (which didn’t seem to affect the Plumtree or ALUI versions that predated it).
Well, it’s time to do some more ‘splaining: In most cases I’ve seen, this has to do with the fact that the current user (guest or authenticated) doesn’t have at least SELECT access to the header portlet. So, if you’re just looking for the executive summary of this post, the first thing to check is whether EVERYONE has at least SELECT access to the header portlet.
Ms. Cooper (my made-up 8th grade algebra teacher) always told me: “Show your work“. Hell, even if I got the right answer the old bag would still dock me points if I didn’t. [Before you get offended, note that I can say that because Ms. Cooper is a figment of my imagination - I have great respect for the entire teaching profession and especially every teacher I've ever had that wasn't made up. I would never refer to any of them as an "old bag".]
So, let’s show the work:
(more…)
Tags: Bug, header, Security
Posted in Bug, WebCenter Interaction | Comments Off
Friday, February 18th, 2011
Sorry if the title got your hopes up, folks: “living” is not the same thing as “growing and thriving”.
We all know Oracle’s stated direction on WebCenter Interaction, a.k.a Plumtree, a.k.a. ALUI, a.k.a WCI: While it’s had some promising adoption news within Oracle, it’s pretty clear “the ‘tree” is on its way out in favor of the WebCenter Suite.
If you need any further evidence that WCI is not long for this world, take a look at the just-released webinar that Oracle gave this week: Oracle WebCenter Suite – Giving Users a Modern Experience.
Now for the good news (and the crux of this post’s title): We are not a forgotten user community:
… and, as Oracle stated in that webinar, the long-promised Oracle 10.3.3 patch release is coming soon. No formal release date, but it seems we aren’t going to be left completely in the cold; this patch release focuses mostly on integrating with the rest of the Oracle stack to make the transition less painful – if you choose to continue drinking the Oracle Kool-Aid.
Any way you cut it, this transition isn’t going to be easy, and is likely going to feel like “starting over”. I mean, how many times did we hear Oracle emphasize how long it would take their own services group to make the transition in that webinar? A LOT – I counted them (no, I didn’t): there were at least eleventy-two.
Tags: Neo, Oracle, WCI, webcenter
Posted in Oracle, WebCenter Interaction | 1 Comment »
Saturday, January 22nd, 2011
When BEA acquired Plumtree and repositioned everything under the Aqualogic User Interaction brand, they made a decision that few of us consultants thought was incredibly logical: they kept the Plumtree product line separate from the BEA product line. We commonly heard stories where a “BEA Classic” salesperson and “Plumtree” salesperson were calling the same customer prospect, one touting the virtues of the Weblogic Portal and the other touting the Plumtree Portal. Of course, this was odd since at that point we all worked for the same company, and in my opinion, they never were really even the same product: WebLogic Portal was a set of APIs for developing a portal; Plumtree Portal was an out-of-the-box product that you largely configured rather than programmed. So if you were a Java shop and/or had developers who could code and compile web apps, you should be using WLP. If you were a .NET shop and/or didn’t have a development team, ALUI was the way to go.
Since Oracle now owns these product stacks, there are three “portal” offerings – and, if you buy the Oracle WebCenter Suite, you own them all:
- Weblogic Portal. Built as a set of APIs that allowed developers to create portal applications in Eclipse on top of WebLogic Server, this was a powerful set of libraries that provided a great environment for Java shops to code their web interfaces to back-end applications.
- AquaLogic User Interaction (aka WebCenter Interaction). Built as an out-of-the-box portal, the Plumtree application was designed to be open and flexible, but more for mixed (.NET/Java, Oracle/SQL Server) shops to configure the web interfaces to their applications.
- WebCenter Spaces. This is basically Oracle’s “portal”, which provides a web-based UI to access various social networking and personal productivity (read: Blogs, Wikis, Social Networking) features provided by WebCenter Services.
I can’t profess to know the exact plans that Oracle has here, but it seems pretty clear to most outside observers (and most insiders I’ve spoken to): WebLogic Portal and WebCenter Interaction will continue to be supported for years to come, but Oracle is throwing its weight behind WebCenter Spaces. This has a couple of implications for legacy Plumtree customers:
- Oracle is going down the path that the Weblogic Portal took – while a lot of the functionality you need (such as Collaborative and Social tools) will be available out of the box through WebCenter Services, you will be doing most of your customizations with Java in jDeveloper.
- If you’re a .NET shop, you need to brace yourself for a huge learning curve, or consider looking at other platforms, such as SharePoint, or a hybrid solution using tools like Confluence, WordPress, and some glue that holds the pieces together.
- There still is no formal migration plan for getting from WCI to Spaces. Although Oracle has promised it for some time, a migration will not be a one-click process, so when you’re evaluating what to do “after WCI” – whether you’re Java or .NET – consider ALL available options, as a migration from WCI to Spaces could be as complicated as just “starting over”.
- Each of the individual products in the stack has its own migration path. For example, WCI configurations will need to be migrated to WebCenter Spaces, Publisher content will need to be migrated to Oracle Universal Content Manager (UCM), and Collaboration and Studio will need to be migrated to their equivalent WebCenter Services.
Regardless of what path you choose, at this point it’s pretty clear: you need to start thinking about a long-term strategy in a post-Plumtree world. As a vendor-agnostic consulting firm, Integryst can help you choose your way – or help implement whatever technology you’ve ultimately chosen.
Tags: Oracle, Sharepoint, Spaces, WCI, webcenter
Posted in Oracle, WebCenter Interaction, WebCenter Spaces | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, November 10th, 2010
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know we like getting under the Plumtree covers and figuring out what’s going on behind the scenes. The ALUI databases are sometimes confusing – particularly the newer half-baked ones like the security database. But the old legacy PT tables have undergone years of refinement, and every now and then show a well-thought-out design.
Today’s post is a quick lesson in binary math and how the ALUI security tables work.
As you know, WebCenter Interaction object security includes READ/SELECT/EDIT/ADMIN privileges, and while there are some challenges to manipulating these security settings in the database (and some products to overcome the limitations), the underlying database structure is pretty straight-forward: In tables like PTOBJECTSECURITY and PTCARDSECURITY you’ll find records that look like this:
While ObjectID, ClassID, and GroupID might be obvious in the context of the portal, AccessLevel is a bit-wise representation of the security level for that object, and contains either a 1, 3, 7, or 15.
Why these numbers? Binary math. Any number can be represented in binary (a base-2 numeric system) using bits; you’d represent the number 7 with a binary number of 0111, because:
| Value: |
8 |
4 |
2 |
1 |
| Bit: |
0 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
In other words: 8*0 + 4*1 + 2*1 + 1*1 = 7.
So if we look at the above table in the context of ALUI security privileges, EDIT access would be:
| Value |
ADMIN |
EDIT |
SELECT |
READ |
| Bit: |
0 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
i.e., a value of “7″ in the database means “edit”, and you can calculate the values for the other privileges. Interestingly, you can’t have EDIT privileges without having SELECT and READ (which is why you don’t see any values of, say, ”4″ in these tables). I wonder what would happen in the code if you manipulated the DB to give someone edit privileges WITHOUT giving them SELECT or READ?
I guarantee this: if you muck up this table, you are not going to get official support any time soon…
Tags: database, Security, webcenter
Posted in WebCenter Interaction | Comments Off
Sunday, October 10th, 2010
If you had asked me last month if you should install Windows Updates, I’d have said, “without hesitation, it’s a Best Practice to install Windows Updates as soon as possible; I’ve never seen one break portal functionality – whether it was in the Plumtree days, ALUI days, or lately with WebCenter”.
This month, the answer is: “without hesitation, it’s a Best Practice to install Windows Updates as soon as possible, but make sure to keep track of those updates and keep an eye out for problems when you’re done”. Generally, I still think they’re safe and don’t warrant a full regression test once you’re done, but for the first time, I’ve come across a Windows Update that breaks a piece of the WCI portal – specifically, portlet requests to SSL-protected Remote Servers.
Fortunately, Oracle’s support center came through on this one, and clearly documents the problem in KB article 1131443.1: “SSL Portlet Communication Fails After Installing Microsoft Recommended Security Update KB968389 [ID 1131443.1]“. In summary, there are a certain combination of hotfixes that cause SSL connections from the portal to the remote tier, as documented in the KB article and reproduced after the break.
The thing is, the KB article talks about one “real” Microsoft hotfix [KB968389] interacting with two other “unsupported” hotfixes [KB973667 and KB942636]. It talks about removing the two unsupported fixes, but on the system I was experiencing the problems on, those two weren’t actually installed. But I did see the one hotfix in there, and once I uninstalled that one (and rebooted), the problem went away.
My best guess at this point is that those two hotfixes from Microsoft (unsupported ones that “are intended to be installed only for customers experiencing this problem”) eventually got rolled into an official, supported hotfix with a different number since the Oracle article was published in June 2010. And Oracle will eventually update the above KB article listing that “official” hotfix number as well.
(more…)
Tags: portlets, ssl, Windows Update
Posted in Best Practice, WebCenter Interaction | Comments Off
Saturday, October 2nd, 2010
I’ve been critical of Oracle Support in the past, but recently had a great experience with some of the old Plumtree support buddies that are still around – specifically, Merrick Huang in Oracle Support was able to provide a tremendous amount of assistance on a very thorny search issue I was having at a client site and will be writing about here in upcoming posts. Before we get into the nitty gritty of that problem, I want to share with you a great resource I didn’t know existed until now: Oracle Support Master Notes and Webinars (login required).
The purpose of “Master Notes” is to “provide the most important links that users will need to install and support the product”, and there are some pretty decent pages in there if you know where to look. For example, the IDK Master Note is a collection of a bunch of documentation, KB articles, known issues, and bug fixes all in one place.
But what I really wanted to highlight here is the Webinars provided by Oracle Support – with one in particular being the best Oracle Webinar I’ve seen: the Search Webinar, by Eno Gjerasi. Eno shows that there’s still life left from the Plumtree support group, and demonstrates a level of knowledge of the Search Server that rivals most engineers or consultants. There was one tip in particular that I’ll focus on in upcoming posts (about how to communicate directly with Search), but I encourage you to check out all three Webinars (Search, Portal / SSO, and Analytics) and the other Master Notes – you may just find a gem in there and wonder how you made it all these years without knowing “that one thing” you never knew you needed.
Keep up the good work, Oracle support!
Tags: Analytics, Master Note, Oracle, search, sso, support
Posted in Analytics, Oracle, Search Server, WebCenter Interaction | Comments Off
Sunday, July 25th, 2010
You can do a lot with a few simple SQL queries against the ALUI / WCI database. Oracle (and I) strongly discourage any direct database updating without using the API, but there’s nothing out there that says you can’t QUERY the database – heck, for Analytics server, it’s actually encouraged (PDF Link).
So, today’s post is an easy one that answers the question: “which pages and communities are my portlets displayed on”? The SQL is simple:
select
ptcommunities.name community_name,
ptpages.name page_name,
ptgadgets.name portlet_name
from
ptcommunities,
ptpages,
ptpagegadgets,
ptgadgets
where
ptcommunities.folderid = ptpages.folderid
and ptpagegadgets.gadgetid = ptgadgets.objectid
and ptpages.objectid = ptpagegadgets.pageid
… and you’ll get a list of communities, pages and portlets that you can sort or filter any way you want:
Tags: SQL
Posted in WebCenter Interaction | 1 Comment »
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