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Janus Boye

Problems with Oracle's WebCenter Wiki

10-Jan-2008

Tags: Portals and Content Integration, Implementation, Marketplace at Large, Selecting Technology, WebCenter Suite

In an interesting and detailed blog posting, Singapore-based consultant Paul Gallagher shared his problematic experiences backing up the Oracle WebCenter (OWC) wiki, a version of the open source YaWiki module.

Strangely for a company that prides itself on leveraging its own Oracle Database, it seems that YaWiki employs file storage for content by default, with database storage an undocumented work-in-progress. Even a backup of the file storage seems to be poorly documented.

In the recently updated Enterprise Portals Report we described how Oracle customers have many different wiki options. UCM (formerly Stellent) has a wiki inside developed by its own engineers, while other units of Oracle use a SaaS wiki called wetpaint and have evidently been experimenting with Atlassian and JSPWiki as well. But today, WebCenter ships with YAWiki (recently renamed jzwiki). To quote from the report:

"These wikis are all quite different and while the wiki plays an important role in OWC, in particular in sales demonstrations, it remains to be seen whether YAWiki is really the wiki platform for the future for Oracle"

Oracle released a WebCenter 11g Tech Preview 3 in late December, but the new release is not yet feature-complete. 11g is expected out during the next five months. I don't know for sure, but don't be surprised if Oracle changes its wiki strategy. However, some things don't change in 2008: We continue our usual recommendation for buyers to probe product roadmaps carefully before embarking on serious projects.