Last week, Oracle announced a new version 11gR1 of WebCenter Sites. This is the erstwhile FatWire product, “Oracalized” -- a bit -- for the first time since the acquisition last year.

So how far has Oracle progressed? Well, there’s a new contributor UI, a new page builder, deprecation of SOAP-based Web Services, dropped support for JBoss application server, and some other changes.

The new contributor interface, replacing some of the older content contribution interfaces, seems to have been released in a hurry. If you don't believe me, just look at the number of issues related to the UI in release notes. For example, it does not support your browser's back button, and dashboard widgets cannot be moved around if you use IE9. Safari is not yet supported at all.

But all of this is really minor. It’s been a year since Oracle acquired FatWire, and I believe customers were hoping for more meaningful changes. But the name change appears to be the biggest change so far in terms of integrating former FatWire with the WebCenter family. While I realize platform integration can take a while to transpire, WebCenter Sites still looks and acts like a standalone product -- with its separate infrastructure requirements, different user and content repositories, and even its own middleware/integration framework.

Many features remain confusingly duplicated across different WebCenter modules; for example, support for gadgets, blogs, and wikis.

So in summary, Oracle has not done anything to unify and simplify things.  For now, the branding seems to be the only glue.

To be sure, a standalone product may not be a bad option for many scenarios and the product formerly known as Content Server does have many strengths including a well-regarded architecture as we have described in our Web Content and Experience Management Evaluations. 

So, if you’re evaluating WebCenter Sites as a potential web content and experience management tool, consider it on its own merit and not just because you've already made other WebCenter investments. Integrating Sites with your existing WebCenter modules is likely to be far from trivial, despite of what your sales rep tells you.