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.

Thanks for reading ! Stay tuned. Need help? Click here.

Re: List of 12c new and deprecated features

It has been more than a year since WCS 12c has been released but if you check the official website, you should see 4 versions of 12c released when this article was published. So, I thought to basically jot down all the new features and list of deprecated features.

List of all new features in WCS 12c (all versions)

1. DojoTree instead of Java applet: Hugh improvements for loading tree tabs in Admin UI, very important change for WCS administrators (Note: this feature is also available for 11g 11.1.1.8.0 Patch12+). No more battling with java plugins in browser:)
2. Publishing from Contributor UI: Publishers can now publish assets from Contributor UI itself, no need to provide "AdvancedUser" role to editors until they really need to access Admin UI. No more technical/configuration slip-ups by editors.
3. Content help menu: There is help menu in Contributor UI which can be used to know how-about of various basic functionalities. Another option would be to customize it and point it to Client's document or wiki page.
4. GetURLExpressions.groovy can be customized: It has been hard in past to write some custom functions within this element and maintenance of this element has been headache but now in 12c, it is possible to create customized element and add your custom functions as needed.
5. Content Audit Report: It has been long desired feature for any customer to have an overview of who, what and when performed which operations on assets & 12c meets this requirement aptly.
6. History of an asset in History tab: Small but helpful feature
7. A/B Testing: Allows editors to check their website's "more viewed or favored sections" and thus, lets them decide to set the content for the website.
8. New security, engage and user properties. Check out properties guide.
9. MVC framework: A slight relief for developers ? Well, all depends on design but still at least a great effort by Oracle to provide such functionality
10. Lucene indexing test
11. Integration with other products like Bluekai, Eloqua, Content Cloud, LDAP, Oracle Access Manager, Oracle WebCenter Content, etc. are available out-of-the-box (of course, there are some or the other nitty-gritty details which one needs to implement)
12. Some small notable changes like separation within search assettype in Contributor UI, colored tabs according to device groups, improved mobility features, tags tree tab, etc.
13. Log4J is replaced by ODL which is good but too much logging happens now, thus, need to configure log settings very carefully. Custom loggers are feasible in ODL which is pretty nice feature to separately log in different log files if you have deployed your own custom implementation.
14. Logs are now visible from Admin UI which was very slow and many times not possible in 11g
15. Logging information like ip, geo-location, etc. are possible due to inclusion of geoip library but it has been recently removed from higher version of 12c3 as these needed licenses.
16. A very robust aggregate REST API; a very useful feature for clients to deliver micro-sites.
17. Improved context menu for asset operations in Contributor UI
18. Shared file system can be managed in database but it has it some caveats as well
19. Visitor services: New API and integration points with different products
20. Properties managed via now single json file: wcs_properties.json
21. Passwords are mostly saved now in keystore rather than AES or SHA encryption, providing better security
22. Installation, patching and upgrade process are improved drastically then previous 11g version
23. Deployment of static and custom implementation is to be done as a separate war file rather than updating default war i.e. sites.war
24. Monitoring logs files, caches, etc. in Oracle Weblogic console

List of all deprecated features in WCS 12c (all versions)

1. WCS 12c cannot be deployed (not officially supported) on other application servers except Oracle Weblogic (This is a bummer for many customers) and even db is mainly restricted to Oracle database.
2. No community or gadget server anymore.
3. No CIP integrations like SharePoint, EMC, etc.
4. No soap-based web services (replaced by new improved REST & aggregate REST API)
5. No analytics
6. No static publishing or any other publishing available out-of-the-box

Need help? Click here.

Introduction to OWCS 12c

Overview
This document is created to provide an idea on the news features of Oracle WebCenter Sites 12c. This new version of WCS introduces various marketing tools which can be used by marketers to generate web pages personalized based on the characteristics (interests, social category, context, etc.) of an individual or group of users, therefore providing them with a tailored user experience.

DEVELOPER’S PERSPECTIVE

• Server-Side Coding
• Oracle has introduced new MVC pattern of coding in 12c which follows the following flow:

• General idea is to write all the business logic in controller (WCS_Controller asset type) which serves as CONTROLLER, Templates or SiteEntry+CSElement can include controllers and should contain only basic HTML code and output from controller using <fragment> tags and thus, serve as VIEW. Output from controllers i.e. asset data are saved in MAP objects which serve as MODEL. Hence, the MVC pattern.
• Client-Side Coding
• REST api was already present in older version of Oracle WebCenter Sites to access data but 12c provides simpler ways to access data in different ways. Check out this section for more details.
• WCS Developer Tools
• Improvements in eclipse-csdt plugin and csdt command line feature.

CLIENT’S PERSPECTIVE

• Visitor Services
• Visitor services is a separate module which can be installed and configured with WCS 12c to capture visitor’s activity data from various multiple platforms like google, fb, twitter, etc. and saves as a unified profile within webcenter sites so that marketers can segmentize visitors on basis of these unified profiles/data and thus, target users with desired content. Details related to configuration are present here. This is very advanced topic in terms of capturing visitors data and providing personalized data. Engage is already a part of WCS 12c OOTB and can be used in tandem with Visitors services and Insights (described later) components to target end-users efficiently.
• Conversions
• This component is kind of reporting tool to check specific visitor action that one can identify for tracking for e.g. number of clicks on certain asset or promotion, specific link, amount of time a visitor watches video, stays on a webpage or an ad.
• Conversion assets can be created by marketers and works in tandem with Insights component and A/B testing to generate conversion reports.

• Insights
• The Insights component delivers a comprehensive real-time view of your website's ROI.
• This component is again a marketing tools for marketers to drill down marketing initiatives from webpage to single asset.
• It also provides information on the contributors which worked for contributing content within WCS during a period by generating reports.
• Marketers can analyse website traffic and user behaviour to segmentize them at very specific content level and target them using either both Engage and Visitors Service component or just with Engage only.
• A/B Testing
• This marketing functionality within WCS contributor interface works in tandem with Conversions and Insights components; to test a piece or group of content against each other to determine which can be best for visitors targeting and/or serving best content by testin g performance among variations of content before delivering the content to end-users. This is more of hit-and-trial kind of creating variation of content (assets), capturing data and analysing for targeting users. For A/B testing, insights component should be enabled.
• Rest of the features are few improvements, functionality and accessibility in the WCS product itself.

Need help? Click here.