Which products do we need?

Question

Hi there,
We are working on a new enterprise portal (which will provide services and content to end users, employees, partners....).
The idea is to have a heavy weight/powerful CMS (We choose Oracle Web Center Sites 11g) which renders the webpages and requests any business logic from our high performance service layer (it will be responsible for ALL the business logic). On top of that we will have OAM (Oracle Access Manager) for Single Sign On capabilities.
The current portal handles about 150 million pageviews/month, and most of these pageviews come from logged users. We expect that number to grow in the next couple of years.
Some of the goals of this project are:
- to personalize any particular content to different users (the logic to decide which content has to be presented to each user will be encapsulated in WebServices (OSB)).
- to allow Marketing and Sales teams to customize and tweak websites (Although there will be an approval step before publishing - Worflow), so that if they need to put a new image, change a menu, change some text or create a new website that can be done easily and quickly;
- to reuse business logic provided by the SOA level, for example, I can use some WS which provide the available credit for a particular user anywhere in the webpage I am creating or in other webpages. No programming skills needed;
- to provide high performance, availability and reliability; We are going to deploy it on Exalogic connecting to Oracle RAC.
- to provide search mechanisms with autocomplete features, like when using google search, where while you type suggestions pop up (http://google-web-toolkit.googlecode.com/svn/javadoc/1.6/com/google/gwt/user/client/ui/SuggestBox.html).
The stack we are considering at the moment is:
SSO - Oracle Access Manager 11g
|
CMS - Oracle Web Center Sites 11g
|
Service Layer - Oracle Servcie Bus 11g (SOAP)
|
Legacy applications (SAP, Java, Cobol...)
So the question is:
If we assume all the webservices needed are already available through OSB, can I considering Web Center Sites 11g will be enough to achieve our goals??
Some people here are suggesting we need some other framework, like GWT on top of WCS. It doesn't make sense to to me! How could that help a part from making things more complicated and fragmented?
Some others say we will also need Oracle Web Center Portal 11g.
Could anyone working on big projects share your thoughts on that?
I think the simpler we can keep the architecture, the better.
Cheers :)
Edited by: jfbaro on Feb 26, 2013 10:30 AM

Answer 1

Hi Jean,
I'm afraid the facts you share are most likely not enough to decide what product stack you need, even though there are some indications that WebCenter Sites might not be sufficient, or you would need to compromise on functionality and/or user experience.
In particular:
to personalize any particular content to different users (the logic to decide which content has to be presented to each user will be encapsulated in WebServices (OSB)).WebCenter Sites has very good personalization features. And it does integrate with other decision engines like RTD (Real Time Decision) or Endeca. I am unable to find a reference in the documentation, if web services can be used for the same (so, you might expect that something might have to be done to achieve that), but it should be doable.
to allow Marketing and Sales teams to customize and tweak websites (Although there will be an approval step before publishing - Worflow), so that if they need to put a new image, change a menu, change some text or create a new website that can be done easily and quickly;This is OK - they will just need to become contributors of their sites. Alternatively, you could also use gadgets.
to reuse business logic provided by the SOA level, for example, I can use some WS which provide the available credit for a particular user anywhere in the webpage I am creating or in other webpages. No programming skills needed;I am not sure about this one - WebCenter Portal might be a better fit here as it provides "Business Mash-ups" where WS can serve as the Model, and a user may select among available ADF components to define the View.
to provide high performance, availability and reliability; We are going to deploy it on Exalogic connecting to Oracle RAC.This is not a question of a product, but of sizing and architecture. If I calculated it correctly, you have approx. 90 hits per second, so you should be OK even with a single Content Server (have someone who has done this before to review your sizing and architecture!)
to provide search mechanisms with autocomplete features, like when using google search, where while you type suggestions pop up (http://google-web-toolkit.googlecode.com/svn/javadoc/1.6/com/google/gwt/user/client/ui/SuggestBox.html).
I am not sure about this one either. Oracle has a product called Secure Enterprise Search (incl. in WebCenter Portal, Content, but not in Sites) which should be capable of that. Sites include Lucene, so check whether features you are looking for are provided ( http://lucene.apache.org/core/ ) If you/your users are used to Google products, it might be an argument to use them either way.
I hope that helps.