Should you upgrade to WCS 12c?

It been long since Oracle introduced new version of WCS i.e. 12c and till now 4 versions of WCS have been released, you can check the details about releases on the official website here. You may want to check which are all the new and deprecated features; which I have already listed on this blog post.
Now the bigger question, why one should consider upgrading to WCS 12c. Are there any advantages on using 12c version of WCS rather than 11g ? I, myself, don't know much information about it but let's just dig into it and try to figure out what are possible reasons for you or your clients to upgrade.

1. RIP 11g: First of all, if you are already a client or working for client on WCS project, you might already know by now that WCS 11g is discontinued and is subject to just extended support. Thus, there is no way one would like to continue using deprecated version of WCS. Not only that, Oracle stops providing fixes in form of patches once the product is discontinued, thus, it makes no brainer to figure out that you or your client needs to upgrade to WCS 12c as soon as possible.
2. Improvements: Frankly speaking, a lot of effort has been made by Oracle in order to improve user and developers experience by improving the way it used to work in 11g. Many new features have been introduced which would help not only the contributors on how they work within WCS but also developers after introduction of new mode of development (MVC and aggregate REST API). Thus, kudos to Oracle for working so hard on introducing these features and streamlining the product.
3. Integration to other relevant products: This is one of the best feature introduced within WCS 12c where various integration points to different products are targeted mainly for marketers and editors to enhance the web user experience before the release of the desired content on their websites. Few of the integration with other products like Oracle document cloud, Oracle Eloqua, Oracle CEC, Blukai, WebCenter Content, etc. really allows wider groups to collaborate and contribute to website with rich content within an organization. With A/B testing, it is possible to test, analyze and publish more appropriate content which suits your organization. Content Targeting with Blukai  is even easier. You can contribute your content on the fly on any device by integrating WCS with Oracle Document Cloud service. Any REST based services are capable of being integrated with WCS using proxy assets. Thus, there is now larger scope of integrating with other non-Oracle products as well within WCS.
4. Easier for developers. Is it? Well, with introduction of MVC in WCS, I would say that it was long desired feature but really does it helps ? I don't think so. In my experience, WCS at first seems very easy product to understand and use for development but as you dig more into development and designing (which is the most important aspect for WCS projects), you will find that with introduction of MVC, it is now very crucial to built a solution which should be very optimal, easily readable and planned with more precision. Just browse through code base of avisports sample website which is shipped with Jump Start Kit (available at Oracle edelivery website), code base has grown too much and with every new layout/section, a WCS controller is needed. Basically, you might end up with so many controllers and layouts which can be quite confusing and difficult for developers to understand for bigger projects.
5. APIs: Well, it seems Oracle did provide a robust API for content fetching, searching and rendering easier. With JSTL tags, it can be little tricky but once you get used to it, it is okay. Not that bad. Other APIs like the new aggregate REST api is good and Java APIs are updated too.
6. Design: According to me, in past few years, whichever projects I have handled as consultant or architect or developer, the most challenging part was and is design when it comes to WCS. If you don't design content model well, be ready to face hell lot of issues while migrating, upgrading, publishing and deploying. There are currently no standards provided by Oracle for content model and template designs and that's where I feel people lack interest in product due to the complexity which grows as the project goes on. In 12c, its same so again nothing new.
7. Others: There are a few tweaks here and there but are not listed in the official documentations. Left for the developers to decipher that.
8. Upgrade: This is another aspect where Oracle has really provided quite good (if not optimal) functionality for customers who wish to migrate to 12c (details in official guide). I (me and my team) personally have migrated 2 projects using this upgrade tool from 11g to 12c and it was good if you use it only once. After upgrade, needs few tweaks here and there with your template code which uses some deprecated API and custom functionalities. If you want upgrade in concurrent fashion then there is this another tool: DataDiff migration tool which can migrate the content after certain dates, thus allowing to migrate content in chunks whenever needed. We faced many issues with DataDiff tool and had to resolve most of the issues by ourselves but that I guess is nothing new who have already worked with product :)
9. Last but not least, given that now WCS 12c ships with more new and newer features from time to time, it is easy for WCS editors to curate their content as technology demands. I will write more blogs about the new features in future and will keep you updated with latest changes of WCS 12c.

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