Poor integration between Oracle Webcenters portal and content management tools

The built-in CMS in Oracle Webcenter (UCM), formerly Stellent, is very powerful for building and maintaining ”information-heavy" sites with its great document management and workflow features. The problem is that the UCM has no portal and portlet integration functionality.

To edit the site structure of a web portal application (change meny items or order, add/remove portal web pages and change portlets on web pages) You have to use the development environment (typically JDeveloper). Then You have to rebuild and redeploy the web application onto the target production environment. This means that web site editors are restricted to edit content in an existing site structure, otherwise they have to engage developers to build and deploy. A very time- and resourceconsuming process. These type of changes simply shouldn't require a re-deploy in my opinion. Competing portal products have better solutions. Also, it is obviously a disadvantage to have to work in two separate tools with content updates.

I have heard mixed messages from Oracle regarding this, I have both got information saying that they will fix this, but I have also heard argumentation from Oracle experts that this "flexibility" is an advantage!

© Copyright 2008, Tomas Elfving