We recently participated in Oracle WebCenter Sites training, provided for partners by the Oracle Fusion Middleware Architecture Team (“A-Team”). Oracle offered insight into architecting and implementing the WebCenter Sites Solution, and committed to assisting partners like Fishbowl through initial client implementations.
The promise of WebCenter Sites (formerly FatWire) is a very high-performance website delivery platform along with a business-focused WYSIWYG Web Content Management (WCM) solution. The main benefit of Sites is high-performance site delivery. High-performance, dynamic content sites require a caching layer between visitors and the content management system. With some solutions, this requires (potentially) endless meetings to figure out how to balance business needs for content/publishing timeliness against website and proxy limitations and finessing time-to-live settings on the cache server(s). However, the WebCenter Sites’ Content Server can communicate with tightly-coupled caching server(s) when any content asset has been updated and the caching server retrieves the updates. This dynamic “edge caching” model results in highly-efficient caching and allows for lower hardware costs compared to less-aware caching models.
Website types that are the best fit for WebCenter Sites include consumer websites where page-response time is a premium. Consumers won’t wait for your site to download when the competition’s site is responding more quickly. Site types include brochureware sites; product and services marketing websites; news/media websites; eCommerce sites (Sites is frequently used as the product catalog “behind” the shopping cart) and financial services sites. This technology works best when implemented for clients who can express the financial value of site traffic and performance and are willing to invest in improving site response times and the content editor experience.
If none of the use cases we’ve described apply to your website needs, then Oracle WebCenter Sites may not be the right technology for your environment. Each use case is different, and realistic implementation timeframes exceed three months with significant investment required. We have other tools available to meet the range of website needs, including portal and WCM tools for intranet, extranet and public-facing websites all leveraging the Oracle WebCenter platform. Contact us for more information on which strategy is right for you.
