Oracle WebCenter Reviews

• Java-based content management
• Runtime customizations

The main feature and idea of dynamically creating navigation, pages and portals are overall good and very valuable. Also, adjusting portal design (skinning) is quite easy. Then there is the WebCenter Content Repository, where you register the file system folder and can manage files of the portal. That feature is quite good too.

Defining permissions and access rights is also quite straightforward, as you can use JavaServer Faces expressions.

We developed a portal using the framework. Not all of the features were used though.

Some parts of the product seemed to be unstable; various exceptions which lead to reaching out for Oracle support. Using WSRP (Web service remote portlets) seems to be messy in terms of application deployment.

I have used it for three years.

I certainly encountered stability issues;

Not sure if they are exactly WebCenter related, but sometimes unknown exceptions were raised on runtime or deployment that could be resolved by restarting the server.

Regarding WSRP: Web Service for remote portlets feature generates metadata
files during deployment so that WSRP portlet can be used.

However, this leads to a situation where the application cannot be packaged and customized via deployment plan, rather it needs to be packaged during deployment.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is decent, but slow.

No content management solutions were used before.

Initial setup was more or less straightforward, as the official IDE - JDeveloper was used.

I was not the one to make decisions. One competitor to consider would be Liferay Portal, for instance.

Become as familiar with the product and features as possible before using it. Custom solutions might be difficult to implement.

The product is a standard document management solution, so there are no special features to point to. 

It's a very scalable solution and the performance is pretty good. The scalability, in my opinion, is the biggest advantage.

There are many document management systems that offer pretty much the same functionalities but at a lower price. The product as such is pretty good. However, the pricing is not comparable. They need to adjust their pricing to be more competitive on the market.

The solution is stable.

The solution is extremely scalable.

Technical support has been pretty good. We're satisfied with it.

The initial setup is complex. Since Oracle has re-written their solution in order to place it on their public server, the setup itself has grown more complex. This is necessary, however, the change has required more steps in order to set up the product as well more steps in order to make it perform, and there's more things to manually set up. 

The pricing is very high. You can get a similar solution for free. If you compare it and other products side by side, you would not buy Oracle.

In terms of advice I would give to others considering implementing the solution, I'd say if they have the Oracle stack, they should use the solution. If they have other technology stacks, I would search for solutions that offer a better price.

The solution works great. Feature-wise, it's a very complete solution.

I'd rate the solution overall eight out of ten, but if I was just rating it for price, I would rate it at about four or five out of ten, simply because I find it so expensive.

The business user has the capability to update content, look, and feel.

Each department wanted their unique content targeting.

I would like to see better performance.

We have used this solution for two years.

There were no deployment issues.

There were performance issues.

There were no scalability issues.

Customer service was fair.

I would give technical support a rating of 7/10.

We evaluated Sun ONE Portal Server.

The setup was very complicated.

We implemented via the vendor, and I would give them a rating of 8/10.

The most valuable features to me are the ability to create contents with the interface, such as creating database tables. The product's JSP APIs and REST APIs are also very useful.

Rules for contents personalization, workflows, publishing content, and the satellite cache all have room for improvement!

I have been using Oracle WebCenter Sites for 10 years.

In a cluster environment, we had stability issues with the satellite cache.

We did not have any scalability issues.

The technical support we received was excellent.

I used a free OWS solution.

The installation in a WebLogic environment is straightforward.

It is an expensive product. I would try to negotiate a better price.

Before choosing Oracle WebCenter Sites, we evaluated Vignette and some free products.

When you start a project, you should consult early on with your developers.