M&S Consulting is a technology and strategy consulting firm that delivers enterprise process and technology solutions for mission critical objectives.  As adopters of other Oracle Fusion Middleware offerings including Application Server, Portal, BI, and SOA Suite (BPEL/ESB/BAM), M&S Consulting has als embraced Oracle's new Fusion Middleware offering called “Oracle WebCenter”.

Through the years of working directly with our customer requirements and matching products to provide a solution for their key objectives, we often need to evaluate commercial and open source offerings that match our customer’s deployment profiles.  We are constantly searching for products that implement open standards, provide a flexible architecture to leverage our customers’ existing investments, and provide a rich user experience to excite their business users when they need to get real work done.  With all the excitement around efforts in the SOA and Web 2.0 initiatives, we require a core set of services that place our customers on a path to achieving their future goals.

In this review, we take a closer look at the recently announced Oracle WebCenter Suite.  We checked out the capabilities that are included in the current release and mapped them to a set of requirements that are common among the majority of our customers.

Key Customer Requirements
When customers approach us to help them solve their business requirements, they often have a set of existing applications, both custom and purchased, that requires their end users to spend time moving from one system to the other.  Even a simple task like approving a budget request, first requires the users to check existing committed budget allocations in spreadsheets or enterprise applications.  Then they must visit a set of reports from their business analytics system to understand current spending levels.  And finally, they need to correspond with the requestor to validate all the specifics of the proposal.  All of these interactions require the end user to remember and interpret information from one system to the other.  It is a key requirement to allow business users an easy way to link these different components in the context of the budgetary task they are trying to accomplish.  Customers are looking for a way to share information with others in a faster, simpler and more dynamic way.

Establishing a SOA will allow for integrating enterprise applications and processes but it requires the user interface to be much more dynamic to respond to new services when they become available.  With Web 2.0 and mashup type services available on the Internet, the user paradigm is changing.  Business users expect to have the same experience they see on the Web when they share photos and videos with their friends and family across the globe.  They demand the same ease of use and speed in their experiences with internal applications.  Because they see the blending of transactional applications, composite applications, portals, and Web sites quickly merging together, there are no longer any clear differences between any of these types of “applications”.