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.

Since Oracle now owns these product stacks, there are three “portal” offerings – and, if you buy the Oracle WebCenter Suite, you own them all:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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”.
4. 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.

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!

If you’ve sweated through SQL*Plus sessions for way too long, definitely check this tool out – it’s cheap, at only $40.  If you’ve got a better tool for quick and easy Oracle DB queries, I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

Any thoughts?  A great step by Oracle to showcase the virtues of WebCenter Interaction?  Too little too late?  I for one haven’t completely given up, and this community shows great promise – even if it’s not for the community itself (which has been around for a while), but a showcase of how the ALUI Collaboration UI doesn’t have to be so bad, and can truly integrate into a social community space.

Don’t count Plumtree out just yet; there are still a few more tricks up its sleeve…

Oracle support, I salute you for the tireless, thankless job you have, but please stop telling clients their problems will be fixed with an upgrade when you’re not sure it will, or worse, know that it won’t.  Also, please honor Oracle’s support policy and don’t withold patches until a client gets to the latest version of the software, knowing that by the time they do, another patch release will probably come out, starting the whole cycle all over.  Of course, it’d be different if the upgraded version actually fixed the problem, but in the below rant, my client couldn’t even submit a patch request that affected the 10gR3 version of Analytics because they weren’t on the “latest version”, which was ridiculous because the latest version didn’t fix the problem either.

Aqualogic Analytics 2.5 has a bug in it (login required) where the “Excel spreadsheet export of the Analytics Collaboration Document Views report has Project Name data in the Documents column instead of the document name”.  That is, you can’t get document data when you export a Collaboration report.  Sure, a relative small issue, but pretty critical for ALUI/WCI portal managers who would like to see which documents are being viewed in a WebCenter Collaboration Server project.

Aqualogic Analytics 2.5 had a patch released for this “bug”, and all was right again.  But then 10gR3 came along, and the functionality was broken again.  No problem – just get the 10gR3 patch right?  Wrong.  There is no patch for 10gR3.  OK, but the bug report says to update to 10.3.0.1, so that should fix it, right? Wrong (according to the release notes). 

We contacted support, and – get this! – were told that Oracle won’t even submit a request to engineering for another patch until we first upgrade to Analytics 10.3.0.1.  But the .1 patch release seems to only provide asian character support, and requires even MORE software installed before putting on this “patch” that does nothing for us:

So we’re expected to install a patch we don’t need, including other additional software that needs to be tested, only so that Oracle will start building a patch for the version we’re on?  This isn’t an isolated incident; I’ve had an issue with NT File Crawlers as well that Oracle promised “will be fixed if you just upgrade” (it wasn’t, we discovered, after a huge amount of effort on our part to confirm that).

It seems to me that Oracle support’s #1 directive is to close tickets.  But, you say, “Every support organizations #1 directive is to close tickets, right?” Bear with me on this: there’s a difference between closing tickets and resolving customer problems.  All too often, it seems, I find clients not getting the support they’re paying for, simply because they haven’t installed last week’s patch – regardless of whether last week’s patch fixes the problem or not.  It seems “just upgrade to the latest version” is used way too commonly for support people to avoid resolving problems, because they know it could take weeks or months for the clients to actually be able to install and test said upgrades.

So, Oracle clients, I suggest this:  The next time you get a promise that an upgrade “fixes the problem”, get it in writing.  You invest a huge amount of time in upgrades (it’s not like Windows Update, after all), and you should have some sort of assurance that this time will be worthwhile.  And to Oracle support: confirm the issue actually is going to resolve the problem.  If you don’t know for certain, then the default answer should be “it DOESN’T”, and you should spend more time investigating the actual problem.

Am I wrong?  I will update this post with any official Oracle response to this post, and will approve any reasonable comment for discussion.

Oh, and stay tuned to a future post for the fix to that Analytics problem, bug #8198674.

The first tip here is that by default WebLogic Server looks at the Authentication Header, and even if you’re your code and app is set to allow anonymous access, if there’s any HTTP Authentication header, WebLogic fails to handle the requests and throws up a browser login dialog:

This has caused me headaches with PublisherEditor, which uses the ALUI Publisher Web Service to run.  The Publisher web service by default uses authentication headers, so the Publisher authentication headers get sent to my portlet code.  Fortunately, the fix for this is pretty straight-forward and documented: add the following to your config.xml file:

<enforce-valid-basic-auth-credentials>
false
</enforce-valid-basic-auth-credentials>

The second tip: what if you’re using jDeveloper, which bundles this monstrosity called WebLogic?  Where’s that stupid web.config file?  The answer:  when you’re starting your app, look for the “Wrote Web Application Module” line:

In my case, the line was putting the application’s .war file in C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data\JDeveloper\system11.1.1.2.36.55.36\o.j2ee\drs\PublisherEditor\PublisherEditorWebApp.war.

The config.xml file you’re looking for is up a couple folders, in that “system” folder (which has the version number), under DefaultDomain/config/: C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data\JDeveloper\system11.1.1.2.36.55.36\DefaultDomain\config\config.xml.

Of course.

Stop debugging first (because, naturally, jDeveloper overwrites any changes you make to this file when you stop debugging – I mean, why WOULDN’T it!?).  Then add the enforce-valid-basic-auth-credentials line right before </security-configuration>:

… and you should be good to go next time you run your app. Happy coding!

I don’t really know how long this has been available – or even if it’s an official Oracle site - and maybe you’ve already heard of it.  But I think it’s promising that at least the old AquaLogic User Interaction is getting some mindshare over at the Oracle mothership.

Ironically, this portal is still BEA’s ALUI version 6.5:

.. and not Oracle’s WebCenter Interaction (10gR3).  It would have been even neater if this was a preview release of the much-fabled 11g, but I’m not complaining.  The site does look pretty interesting in an “Enterprise 2.0-y” kind of way and appears to have some neat social features such as tagging, profiles, and a much more integrated Collab (if it’s even Collaboration Server at all?).  Maybe this will some day replace that terrible flash-based support.oracle.com site?  A person can hope…

Check it out at http://communities.oracle.com/ - your support credentials should work to get you logged in:

Finally, special thanks to Monty Pyton, Mark Twain, and, uh, The Little Engine That Could for providing the mixed metaphore fodder above…

You won’t need any of this stuff today (or tomorrow), but someday when you’re pulling your hair out and thinking to yourself “if only BEA’s CodeShare was still around!”, this is the link you’re looking for: https://aqualogic-interaction.samplecode.oracle.com/ (free registration/login required).