UPDATE 2: I've incorporated all the great feedback and comments from ex-Plumtreevians, ex-BEA and ex- and current Oracle folks.
UPDATE: A bunch of Plumtreevians are contributing really good comments on this post over on Facebook.
Back around 2005, BEA's BID (Business Interaction Division) still had a lot of really smart engineers from Plumtree working on a lot of really interesting things, including Pages (think CMS 2.0), Pathways (kind of an enterprise version of del.icio.us) and Ensemble (the portlet engine/gateway, minus the overhead and UI of the portal itself).
They were also working on an enterprise social network, kind of a Facebook for business if you will.
However, there was a lot of wrangling at BEA, primarily between BID/AquaLogic and BEA's flagship product, WebLogic (the world-class application server). Most of the strife came in the form of WebLogic Portal vs. AquaLogic/Plumtree Portal nonsense. Senior management at BEA, in their infinite wisdom, had taken a "let's try not to alienate any customers" policy and in the process they confused all their customers and alienated/frustrated quite a few of them as well. They renamed Plumtree to AquaLogic User Interaction (ALUI), put in place a "separate but equal" policy with WebLogic Portal (WLP) and spewed some nonsense about how WLP was for "transactional portal deployments" vs. ALI for .NET and non-transactional portals, but no one, including BEA management, had any idea WTF that meant. To further confuse the issue, the WLP team, which also had a lot of really smart engineers, built products like "Adrenaline" (which was basically a less-functional and more buggy version of Ensemble) rather than do the unthinkable and integrate Ensemble into WLP so that WLP could finally host non-Java/JSR-168 portlets.
I was really pissed about BEA's spineless portal strategy, their "separate but equal" policy between WLP and BID/ALUI and their waste of precious engineering resources in an arms race between WLP and ALUI rather than just stepping back, growing a spine, and coming up with a portal strategy.
Because I can't keep my pie hole shut, I started several loud, messy and public fights with BEA management. Why? Because the real loser here is the customer.
And BEA, because management got mired in politics and chose to waste engineers' time on in-fighting and competition instead of building enterprise Facebook, which Steve Hamrick and I arguably already wrote in our spare time. All they needed to do was product-ize that and they would have owned that market.
In 2008, Oracle inherited this clusterfuck of a portal strategy when they bought BEA for $7B+, giving me new hope that cooler heads would prevail and fix this mess. The first thing they did was fire all the impotent BEA managers who were afraid to make any decisions. It took Oracle a while, but alas, they have finally arrived at a portal strategy that makes sense. I first learned about this strategy when I crashed the WebCenter Customer Advisory Board last Thursday.
First of all, let me say this: under the leadership of Vince Casarez, current (and future) customers are in good hands.
I realized when he said "everyone still calls it Plumtree" that this was going to be a bullshit-free presentation.
He also said something regarding the "portal stew" at Oracle that puts all of my ranting and raving in perspective: "Oracle did not buy BEA for Plumtree or WLP, just like it didn't buy SUN for SUN's portal product." To rephrase that, Oracle bought BEA for WebLogic (the application server, not the portal) and Sun for their hardware (not for Java, NetBeans and all the rest of Sun's baggage).
So, let's face it, portals are a relatively insignificant part of Oracle.
However, they've finally did what I called for 2008 and what BEA never had the wits to do: pick a single portal strategy/stack and stick to it. SO, if you're a current Plumtree/ALUI/WCI or a current WLP customer, you have a future with Oracle.
Here's the plan, as I understand it.
At the heart of Web Center will be WebLogic's app server and portal. Plumtree/ALUI as a code base will be supported, but eventually put into maintenance mode and retired. You get nine or twelve years of support and patches (blah blah blah) but if you want new features, you need to switch to the new Web Center, powered by WLP. CORRECTION: WebCenter will not be "powered by WLP." At its core will be the Oracle-developed, ADF-based WebCenter Portal running on WebLogic Server.
Publisher will be subsumed by WCM/UCM (Web Content Management / Universal Content Management, formerly Stellent). The other products will be more-or-less covered by similar offerings in Suite or Services.
Pages is dead as WCM/UCM does it better. Pathways is getting rolled into the new Web Center somehow, but I'm not sure how yet. Perhaps I can follow up with another blog post on that. Ensemble has been renamed "Pagelet Producer" -- more on that below. CORRECTION: Pathways is now called "Activity Graph" and it will be part of the new WebCenter. Think of an enterprise-class version of the Facebook News Feed crossed with Sales Force chatter and you'll be on the right track.
This is a really interesting question and the key question that I think drove a lot of BEA's failure to make any decision about portal strategy from 2005-2008. Plumtree had a lot of .NET customers and some of the biggest remaining Plumtree/ALUI customers are still running on an all-Microsoft stack. In fact, one of them told me recently that they have half a million named user accounts, two million documents and 72 Windows NT Servers to power their portal deployment.
So, let's start with the bad news: Oracle doesn't want you to run .NET/Windows and they REALLY don't want you to run on SQL Server.
(That will change when Oracle acquires Microsoft, but that's not gonna happen, at least not any time soon.) WebLogic app server and WLP/WCI, to the best of my knowledge, will not run on SQL Server. They will, however, run on Windows, but I would not recommend that approach.
It's inevitable that large enterprises will have both .NET and Java systems along with a smattering of other platforms.
So, if you're a .NET-heavy shop, you'll need to bite the bullet and have at least one server running JRockit or Sun's JVM, one of Oracle's DB's (Oracle proper or MySQL), WLS/WLP/WCI and preferably Oracle Enterprise Linux, Solaris or some other other flavor of Un*x. CORRECTION: WLP will run on SQL Server. Not sure about the new WebCenter Portal, but my guess is that it does not.
Now, for the good news: the new WCI, powered by WLP and in conjunction with the Pagelet Producer (formerly Ensemble) and the WSRP Producer (formerly the .NET Application Accelerator) will run any and all of your existing portlets, regardless of language or platform.
This was arguably the best feature in Plumtree and it will live on at Oracle.
.NET/WRSP and even MOSS (Sharepoint) Web Parts will run in WebCenter through the WSRP Producer. The Pagelet Producer will run portlets written in ANY language through what is essentially a next generation, backwards-compatible CSP (Content Server Protocol, the superset of HTTP that allows you to get/set preferences, etc. in Plumtree portlets). So, in theory, if you're still writing your portlets in ASP 1.0 using CSP 1.0 and GSServices.dll, they will run in the new Web Center via the Pagelet Producer. Time for us to update the PHP and Ruby/Rails IDKs? Indeed it is. Let me know if you need that sooner rather than later.
Well, first off, you have to wait for it to come out later this fall. Then, you have to start planning for what's less of an upgrade and more of a migration. Oracle, between engineering and PSO, has promised to provide migration for all the portal metadata (users, communities, pages, portlets, security, etc.) from Plumtree/ALUI/WCI to the new Web Center, with WLP at its heart. (Wouldn't it have made sense for some of those WLP engineers to start building that migration script in 2005 instead of trying to compete with ALUI by building Adrenaline? Absolutely.) All your Java portlets, if you're using JSR-168 or JSR-286, will run natively in WLP through a wrapper in WebCenter Portal. Everything else will either run in the WRSP Producer (if it's .NET) or in the Pagelet Producer (if it's anything else). The only thing I don't fully understand yet is how to migrate from Publisher to UCM, but I'm due to speak with Oracle's PSO about that soon. Please contact me directly if you need to do a migration from Publisher to WCM/UCM that's too big to do by hand.
The only other unanswered question in my mind is how the new WebCenter will handle AWS/PWS services -- the integrations that bring LDAP/AD users and profile information/metadata into Plumtree/ALUI/WCI. I wrote a lot of that code for Plumtree anyway, so if Oracle's not working on a solution for the new Web Center, perhaps I can help you with that somehow as well. CORRECTION: User and group objects are fully externalized in Web Center, so there is no need for AWS/PWS synchronization. (Thanks, Vince, for pointing that out.)
So, that's my understanding of the new portal strategy at Oracle.
Kudos to Oracle's management for listening to their customers, making some really hard decisions and picking a path that I think is smart and achievable.
I'm here to help if you have questions or need help with your portal strategy or technical implementation/migration.
Q&A;
(Some other notes about discussions that have spawned from this original post.)
Q: What's the future of the Microsoft Exchange portlets (Mail, Calendar and Contacts) and the CWS for crawling Exchange public folders. Retired and replaced with something Beehive related? Still supported? For how long? Against what versions of Exchange?
A: We've got updated portlets for Mail & Calendar in WebCenter now for Exchange 2003 & 2007. We don't have a Contacts portlet but it could be added quickly if we see a large demand. Crawling public folders can be done with an adapter we have for SES [Oracle Secure Enterprise Search] already. We're working but aren't done with a new version of KD on top of the new infrastructure that will come out post PS3. (Contributed by Vince Casarez.)
Q: If migration scripts are provided to move WCI metadata into WebCenter, I understand that a portlet is a portlet, but what about pages and communities, users and groups, content sources and crawlers, etc.? Do they all have analogous objects in WebCenter or is there some reasonable mapping to some other objects?
A: Pages and Communities follow a model where we extract/export the meta data and data, then run it through a set of scripts that create a WebCenter Space for each Collab project/community and a JSPx page for every page. Users and Groups will come out of the LDAP/AD directory they are already using and the scripts associate the right permissions to each of the migrated objects. I don't recall what we did about crawlers but since we use SES directly, all the hundred or more connectors we ship for SES are now available for direct usage. The scripts go through a multiphase approach to move content, then portlets, then pages, then communities so that dependencies can be fixed up versus trying to do a manual fix up. (Contributed by Vince Casarez.)
Q: Will any existing WCI-related products that are slated for retirement (e.g. Publisher, Collab, Studio, Analytics, etc.) be re-released with support for Windows Vista, Windows 7, IE 8, IE 9 or Chrome?
A: For Publisher, we are planning a set of migrations to quickly move them to UCM. For Collab & Studio, we have new capabilities in WebCenter Spaces to match these functions. For Analytics, we've also rebuilt it on top of the WebCenter stack with over 50 portlets for the different metrics and made sure we provide apis/ access to the data directly. These analytics data also feeds the activity graph in providing recommendations for people on the content and UIs that are relevant to them. These are tied into the personalization engine that we brought over from the WLP side. So there is a rich blending of the best features from WLP with WCI key features. As for Neo [the codename for the next release of WCI], we are certifying the additional platforms. On the IE 8 front, we've just released patches for WCI 10gR3 customers to be able to use IE8 without upgrading to Neo. (Contributed by Vince Casarez.)
