Under the Hood: Insight from the Ironworks Technology Group

Is Oracle Leading the Pack with Content as a Service?

Services and service-based offerings for enterprise content management have been around for about as long as I can remember, but Oracle has really changed the game in the last two years with Fusion Middleware. By separating content from presentation and providing that content management as a service, I believe Oracle is leading the pack.

 

 

Maturing ECM marketplace means new challenges

As enterprise content management has matured, developers and business users struggle to provide content across multiple portals, websites, and mobile devices. Its not always easy to integrate your old content management system with your new database system, for instance, and even a new operating system can upset the apple cart. There is growing demand for a platform with more centralized repositories and greater ability to integrate with existing systems. The benefits of such a platform would be substantial, sharing content across portals, mobile devices, and websites, just to name a few. With its centralized content repository and the ability to provide content as a service, Oracle has delivered an innovative solution for the challenge of how to deliver and display content consistently across the kinds of platforms the current marketplace demands.

Why Oracle Fusion Middleware is important

Because it is designed to work with service-oriented architecture, Fusion Middleware allows for greater ease of implementation of the system as well as expansion for inevitable future needs. Ease of implementation reduces the overall cost of the install and setup of the content repository, and means you can focus more on functional requirements for the system and less on what it will cost to extend the product. This is significant because most content management systems can require extensive discovery and reverse engineering to develop customizations that provide access to content and delivery functionalities of the system. With Oracle, customers are able to discover and leverage the services that exist in order to meet the demanding business requirements. With content and related functionality exposed as a service, its almost as if Oracle is providing other systems access to a secret stash that has previously been kept behind locked doors.

Service-based approach is flexible

Because of UCMs service-based approach, almost every function within Oracle UCM is a service that can be leveraged or extended to provide content or functionality. If a service doesnt exist, it's relatively easy to develop a custom one as needed.

This service-based approach is valuable for business users because as the business grows and requirements change, the basis of the model stays consistent and can be extended. Developers can build templates for rendering and capturing the content in a standards-accessible format. Coupled with a service-based offering, this means business users can leverage content across multiple delivery platforms. Oracles templates can be integrated with almost any other application platform or framework such as Java, .NET, ColdFusion, or an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus). You can even enable in-context editing of content using Oracles web content editor interface, MS Office, or Adobe Creative Suite, to name a few.

By enabling access to content through a service, Oracle has taken a unique step. Developers and business users have been looking for a solution to this challenge, and I believe with Oracles Universal Content Management platform, Oracle is leading the pack for delivering content as a service.

 

 

Cool and Refreshing RIDC

It's been out for a little over a year, but I wanted to throw a quick post out about RIDC as I've recently started using it and I'm really very, very pleased with my experiences.  RIDC stands for Remote IntraDoc Client and it's an API used in remote Java applications to connect to UCM.  It's effectively a replacement for CIS(Content Integration Suite) and in a strange bit of computer irony it's better because it is smaller and does a lot less.

Where's the Document Object?

The problem with CIS was that as a design it was, forgive me, a little weird.  It's not that it didn't work, it actually worked pretty well in most situations, but there were a couple of oddities.

• It  has what you might call an easy-to-use command pattern that hid underyling service calls from the application.  So for instance you would call if you wanted to make a DOC_INFO service call, you'd call the getDocumentInformationAPI method.  Not the end of the world, but also not really an intuative API for UCM.  I think the reason was that this pattern fit much better in Java web app and so it was designed a little more for that rather than as just a standard Java API.
• Because you're working with strict objects, it makes it sort of tough to call new services, like Site Studio ones, directly.  There is a work around, which involves using what's called the administrative API(sort of the base API for the whole thing).  Typically I've  just used this for all my calls,(and incidentally it would then look a lot like RIDC code), but looking at all of CIS, it just seems like you needed a lot of different classes to do really the same thing, make service calls.
• If you crack open the CIS jar, you'll find that there's a slightly loco version of Spring in there(based on 1.5 I think) along with a modified classloader.  I've only run into issues in one location(you know who you are), but with all that extra code in there, I've always been hesitant to use it with other Spring versions for fear of class conflicts.
• Inside of UCM there's already a Java API called the jspserver.jar.  It's about 5-6 classes total, allows you to call any service, uses objects that look and acts very much like normal Content Server objects.  I've based all my remote API's on it(.NET and ActionScript)..it was such a simple and elegant design, I always wondered why the CIS people never talked to the jspserver people.  Well that's pretty much what RIDC is.

And here's some code.

Manifesto on Content Management in Portals and Applications

What is the best way to integrate a content management system with a portal, or for that matter what if you want to “content-enable” a separate application?  There are a number of different approaches and depending on the portal, the application or the content management system any of them might be correct for the situation.  I find however that there are a number of fundamental rules that should be followed when evaluating an approach.

A UCM and Site Studio 10gr4 Primer for SharePoint Developers, Part 1

So you thought that wrangling SharePoint Designer was tough, eh?  Well, that’s because it is.  There is very little in SharePoint Designer that is perfectly straight-forward.  Dealing with everything from Microsoft’s bizarre naming conventions for essential (and delightfully obscure) components to remembering which operations are “safe” to perform in SharePoint Designer will drive anyone to put their fist through their monitor.

Well, I’m not here to sympathize (even though I do).  I’m here to take some of the concepts that you’re familiar with in SharePoint Designer and help you bridge the gap to using Site Studio 10gr4 for Oracle UCM, and introduce you to some new principles that you will need to know so you won’t have to call in Ryu to hadouken more electronic equipment for you.

Installing Oracle’s UCM on Windows 7

Recently I’ve taken the plunge to Windows 7.  I was a longtime user of Vista (and no matter what people say, post SP1 it was a great OS), and I’ve grown accustomed to the many niceties it brought with it (sorry XP, but you’re old and busted now).  I’ve been really pleased with how fast it is compared to Vista and I’m starting to grow fond of the new dock/start menu.

Besides doing a fair amount of .NET development, I also work with Java and specifically