This is a cookbook filled with numerous recipes for learning important and advanced aspects of administering WebCenter. If you are a WebCenter administrator who wants to keep up to date with the newer version, and learn all the important and advanced aspects of administering WebCenter then this book is for you. You need to have WebCenter installed and to have basic knowledge of administering WebCenter.
Oracle WebCenter 11g PS3 Administration Cookbook
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Book Description
Frequently Bought Together
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Yannick Ongena
Yannick is an Enterprise 2.0 architect who has dedicated his career to specializing in Enterprise 2.0 portals. With over 5 years experience in Oracle portal products like Oracle Portal and WebCenter he has seen the evolution in enterprise portals. He was one of the first who received the WebCenter Implementation Specialist certification.
Yannick is also dedicated to helping out the community: he is the founder of the WebCenter Enterprise Methodology Group, top contributor in the WebCenter forums at OTN, and Enterprise 2.0 SIG leader for Oracle Benelux User Group.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By E. Martinez
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
You're much better off just reading the Oracle documentation. The so called recipes are so full of holes they leave you searching the Oracle docs anyway. For example, they cover Creating a Portlet, Consuming Portlets, Registering Portlet producers, but never mention DEPLOYING the portlet app from JDeveloper. Then all the examples have you registering things that are in WebCenter by default, and you do not get any concrete examples. Using the same example, It shows you how to register the WSRP_Tools producer, which is already deployed, but I have no idea what URL to use for MY WSDL! And I'm still left scratching my head trying to figure out how to deploy my app.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By rajendra
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
This book is missing details.This book is a copy/paste of some pages from Oracle fusion middleware documentation library. I would not recommend this book to anyone.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Main conclusion: if you want to get started with WebCenter 11g, this book will help you take your first steps on many of the most important areas of Web Center (Portal). The recipes in the book provide clear instructions on getting things going. Where the Web Center documentation can be a little overwhelming - the Web Center Developer's Guide has 69 chapters and presumably over 1500 pages of content - Yannick's book is clear, straightforward and easy to follow.
I am not exactly sure about the intended reader for the book. The title and Yannick's introduction mention Administration and a technical person responsible for administration. Many recipes however discusses topics and tasks I would associate with developers. So presumably both administrators and developers will benefit from the book. Note that the traditional roles of developer, administrator and end user are not as clearly defined with Web Center Portal: business or end users can take a lot of control over the portalat run time, potentially performing tasks traditionally associated only with developers. However, many run time activities are probably to complex for ordinary business users - so a technically skilled person who is typically active at run time in the run time environment is looked at to help out. In comes the administrator. Even though that may not be the usual Middleware Administrator turned DBA but more of a portal & content administrator. Well, that is for each organization itself to figure out. The persons responsible for creating the WebCenter portal, editing it at run time and taking care of its infrastructure and environment will all benefit from this book.
Set up of the book
The book consists of over one 100 recipes such as "Creating a template at runtime", "Enabling tagging functionality to pages" and "Adding custom content to a navigation model". Each recipe is a fairly short - typically 2 to 3 pages - that is structured according to clear template:
title and introduction to the recipe
getting ready - what do you need to have set up in order to apply the recipe
how to do it - what are the steps to go through, usually with screenshots to illustrate the instructions; note: the screenshots are in color in the e-book and gray scale in the printed edition
how it works - what is really going on internally or behind the covers when you work your way through the recipe
there's more - suggestions for additional steps, related recipes or functionality etc.
Once used to this structure, it is helpful and pleasantly consistent.
The book contains a little over 330 pages. Given the enormous breadth of functionality in WebCenter Portal, that is not very much. And that is both a strength and a weakness. The book will not overwhelm the reader. Its physical size (in so far you can call it physical size for an e-book) is such that you will not be overly daunted. 330 pages - you can take that in. However, it also means that in many areas, only the surface can be scratched - and many other areas are not touched upon at all. That is of course a constant balancing act for the author - which topics to cover, to what extent, and which subjects to ignore (with pain in your heart most of the times).
The approach taken with the recipes - that are intended to be stand alone as well - have a drawback in addition to the obvious advantage that you can read them and apply them in random order and as they are required in a specific situation. The drawback is that the recipes are frequently a little too simple. The getting ready section for a recipe should not get longer than the how to do it - I understand that - but it means that the recipe will primarily describe the first steps to take in a certain direction, not the more advanced decisions or fine tuning decisions made later on. Since the recipe has no previous context to draw upon, they all start more or less from scratch. It's a bit like making day trips and starting from the same location every day - compared to a case based book where you make a journey across the country, starting the day trips at various subsequent locations as it were.
I prefer the case based books for reading (back to back). The recipe approach makes for a better reference manual. That is where Oracle WebCenter 11g PS3 Administration Cookbook is at its best I think: as a reference for quickly finding out how to go about (or at least how to start out with) a certain task.
To do the book justice though: I did read it back to back and it gave me good overview of many different areas and provided inspiration for topics to revisit and try out in more detail at a later stage.
The content
After the last reshuffle, the Oracle WebCenter product is now defined with four main building blocks (maybe even four different products and entries in the price list): Sites, Content, Portal and Social. Yannick does not mention the Sites product (the acquisition of Fat Wire probably came after the deadline of the book) and merely brushes upon Content and Social. The book is focused on the areas of WebCenter now called WebCenter Portal. The book contains one chapter on Spaces - but that is clearly not the heart of the matter. Building, constructing and deploying an enterprise portal is.
The 14 chapters in the book are:
1: Creating an Enterprise Portal with WebCenter
Get started with a WebCenter Portal application, first in JDeveloper, then on the integrated WebLogic Server using the WebCenter Composer. After just a few pages, your first WebCenter Portal application is running and you learn how to start editing the portal at runtime.
2: Consuming Portlets
This chapter discusses not just the consumption of portlets in WebCenter portal pages, it also explains how to create such portlets (in a very simple my first portlet example). It mentions in passing that ADF taskflows can be published as portlet - but unfortunately it does not dwell on it. It also neglects to explain how the simple portlet created in this chapter can be deployed to be consumed at run time.
Using the standard portlet provider shipped with the WebCenter extension to JDeveloper and the integrated WebLogic Server, this chapter describes the consumption of portlets, both at design time and run time. The last part of this chapter on `wiring portlets together' is quite in depth. It includes a substantial portion of code - taken from a Page Definition file for a page containing two portlets - to illustrate the integration at design time of the portlets in the page, using page variables. Finally, the chapter explains contextual wiring at run time - one of most complex topics in the book in my opinion.
3: Navigation Models and Page Hierarchies
Chapter three introduces the reader to the design time and run time aspects of Navigation Models and the Page Hierarchy. I found this to be very clear and instructive. Through this chapter, it is very easy to quickly have the menu and navigation flow of the portal constructed. It is a lot less abstract than portions of the previous and next chapter, clearly illustrated and therefore quite inviting.
4: Managing the Resource Catalog
An important aspect of enterprise portals created with WebCenter is the ability to edit the pages - and even add pages - at run time. Editing a page includes the ability to add components - such as static content items, portlets, images, pieces of text, custom task flows, shipped WebCenter (service) taskflows and more. The set of components available to user to include into the portal at run time is defined through a Resource Catalog. This chapter describes the process of configuring the resource catalogs at both design time and run time with the components exposed to end users in various roles. This chapter is quite thorough and in depth, containing many examples of configuration files and even some Java code to determine at run time which catalog to display to a user and which resources in a catalog to expose.
5: Managing the Look and Feel of Your Portal
For a chapter concerned with the Look and Feel, this chapter could have done with a lot more screenshots I think. However, the content is quite clear on how to get going with templates that define the overall layout structure and the recurring content for portal pages, such as boiler-plate, navigation and action buttons.
The introduction to the chapter also mentions an introduction to custom skins - which I typically associate with CSS like style definitions. However, as the chapter progresses, it seems that Yannick mixes the terms page style and skin, both indicating "how the content will be displayed on your page" [in terms of the layout of the content facet within the page template]. So this chapter is not on Skins as defined in ADF applications, but on (custom) page styles for portal pages. Like almost anything in a WebCenter Portal application, page templates can be defined both at design time as well as run time. This chapter describes both ways. Page styles are created at design time in this chapter - and require fairly advanced ADF Faces skills.
6: Integrating Content with Document Services
Embedding content into the enterprise portal is one of the key responsibilities for portal editors (I am not sure I would that a Portal administrator, but perhaps I should) and to some extend portal developers too. This chapter discusses the various ways in which content can be integrated or mashed up into the WebCenter Portal application.
Yannick makes a brief remark on identity propagation and how that ensures that users will only see content they are entitled to see. Read more ›
I am not exactly sure about the intended reader for the book. The title and Yannick's introduction mention Administration and a technical person responsible for administration. Many recipes however discusses topics and tasks I would associate with developers. So presumably both administrators and developers will benefit from the book. Note that the traditional roles of developer, administrator and end user are not as clearly defined with Web Center Portal: business or end users can take a lot of control over the portalat run time, potentially performing tasks traditionally associated only with developers. However, many run time activities are probably to complex for ordinary business users - so a technically skilled person who is typically active at run time in the run time environment is looked at to help out. In comes the administrator. Even though that may not be the usual Middleware Administrator turned DBA but more of a portal & content administrator. Well, that is for each organization itself to figure out. The persons responsible for creating the WebCenter portal, editing it at run time and taking care of its infrastructure and environment will all benefit from this book.
Set up of the book
The book consists of over one 100 recipes such as "Creating a template at runtime", "Enabling tagging functionality to pages" and "Adding custom content to a navigation model". Each recipe is a fairly short - typically 2 to 3 pages - that is structured according to clear template:
title and introduction to the recipe
getting ready - what do you need to have set up in order to apply the recipe
how to do it - what are the steps to go through, usually with screenshots to illustrate the instructions; note: the screenshots are in color in the e-book and gray scale in the printed edition
how it works - what is really going on internally or behind the covers when you work your way through the recipe
there's more - suggestions for additional steps, related recipes or functionality etc.
Once used to this structure, it is helpful and pleasantly consistent.
The book contains a little over 330 pages. Given the enormous breadth of functionality in WebCenter Portal, that is not very much. And that is both a strength and a weakness. The book will not overwhelm the reader. Its physical size (in so far you can call it physical size for an e-book) is such that you will not be overly daunted. 330 pages - you can take that in. However, it also means that in many areas, only the surface can be scratched - and many other areas are not touched upon at all. That is of course a constant balancing act for the author - which topics to cover, to what extent, and which subjects to ignore (with pain in your heart most of the times).
The approach taken with the recipes - that are intended to be stand alone as well - have a drawback in addition to the obvious advantage that you can read them and apply them in random order and as they are required in a specific situation. The drawback is that the recipes are frequently a little too simple. The getting ready section for a recipe should not get longer than the how to do it - I understand that - but it means that the recipe will primarily describe the first steps to take in a certain direction, not the more advanced decisions or fine tuning decisions made later on. Since the recipe has no previous context to draw upon, they all start more or less from scratch. It's a bit like making day trips and starting from the same location every day - compared to a case based book where you make a journey across the country, starting the day trips at various subsequent locations as it were.
I prefer the case based books for reading (back to back). The recipe approach makes for a better reference manual. That is where Oracle WebCenter 11g PS3 Administration Cookbook is at its best I think: as a reference for quickly finding out how to go about (or at least how to start out with) a certain task.
To do the book justice though: I did read it back to back and it gave me good overview of many different areas and provided inspiration for topics to revisit and try out in more detail at a later stage.
The content
After the last reshuffle, the Oracle WebCenter product is now defined with four main building blocks (maybe even four different products and entries in the price list): Sites, Content, Portal and Social. Yannick does not mention the Sites product (the acquisition of Fat Wire probably came after the deadline of the book) and merely brushes upon Content and Social. The book is focused on the areas of WebCenter now called WebCenter Portal. The book contains one chapter on Spaces - but that is clearly not the heart of the matter. Building, constructing and deploying an enterprise portal is.
The 14 chapters in the book are:
1: Creating an Enterprise Portal with WebCenter
Get started with a WebCenter Portal application, first in JDeveloper, then on the integrated WebLogic Server using the WebCenter Composer. After just a few pages, your first WebCenter Portal application is running and you learn how to start editing the portal at runtime.
2: Consuming Portlets
This chapter discusses not just the consumption of portlets in WebCenter portal pages, it also explains how to create such portlets (in a very simple my first portlet example). It mentions in passing that ADF taskflows can be published as portlet - but unfortunately it does not dwell on it. It also neglects to explain how the simple portlet created in this chapter can be deployed to be consumed at run time.
Using the standard portlet provider shipped with the WebCenter extension to JDeveloper and the integrated WebLogic Server, this chapter describes the consumption of portlets, both at design time and run time. The last part of this chapter on `wiring portlets together' is quite in depth. It includes a substantial portion of code - taken from a Page Definition file for a page containing two portlets - to illustrate the integration at design time of the portlets in the page, using page variables. Finally, the chapter explains contextual wiring at run time - one of most complex topics in the book in my opinion.
3: Navigation Models and Page Hierarchies
Chapter three introduces the reader to the design time and run time aspects of Navigation Models and the Page Hierarchy. I found this to be very clear and instructive. Through this chapter, it is very easy to quickly have the menu and navigation flow of the portal constructed. It is a lot less abstract than portions of the previous and next chapter, clearly illustrated and therefore quite inviting.
4: Managing the Resource Catalog
An important aspect of enterprise portals created with WebCenter is the ability to edit the pages - and even add pages - at run time. Editing a page includes the ability to add components - such as static content items, portlets, images, pieces of text, custom task flows, shipped WebCenter (service) taskflows and more. The set of components available to user to include into the portal at run time is defined through a Resource Catalog. This chapter describes the process of configuring the resource catalogs at both design time and run time with the components exposed to end users in various roles. This chapter is quite thorough and in depth, containing many examples of configuration files and even some Java code to determine at run time which catalog to display to a user and which resources in a catalog to expose.
5: Managing the Look and Feel of Your Portal
For a chapter concerned with the Look and Feel, this chapter could have done with a lot more screenshots I think. However, the content is quite clear on how to get going with templates that define the overall layout structure and the recurring content for portal pages, such as boiler-plate, navigation and action buttons.
The introduction to the chapter also mentions an introduction to custom skins - which I typically associate with CSS like style definitions. However, as the chapter progresses, it seems that Yannick mixes the terms page style and skin, both indicating "how the content will be displayed on your page" [in terms of the layout of the content facet within the page template]. So this chapter is not on Skins as defined in ADF applications, but on (custom) page styles for portal pages. Like almost anything in a WebCenter Portal application, page templates can be defined both at design time as well as run time. This chapter describes both ways. Page styles are created at design time in this chapter - and require fairly advanced ADF Faces skills.
6: Integrating Content with Document Services
Embedding content into the enterprise portal is one of the key responsibilities for portal editors (I am not sure I would that a Portal administrator, but perhaps I should) and to some extend portal developers too. This chapter discusses the various ways in which content can be integrated or mashed up into the WebCenter Portal application.
Yannick makes a brief remark on identity propagation and how that ensures that users will only see content they are entitled to see. Read more ›
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