Source: http://www.jboye.com/blogpost/should-oracle-be-on-your-web-cms-shortlist/
August 31st, 2009 by Janus Boye
Oracle is among the largest global enterprise software vendors and like IBM and Microsoft, Oracle entered the CMS marketplace via an acquisition (Stellent in 2007). Oracle Universal Content Management (UCM) is based on the original Stellent product now fully rebranded, much improved and leading the market according to IT analyst Gartner. Does this make Oracle an obvious and safe candidate on your Web CMS shortlist?
We find that Oracle UCM does not come up often in standalone Web CMS selections, which is why it did not appear on our 2009 CMS Shortlist. According to Oracle sales pitches, the product has experienced increased adoption in recent years. As the Oracle customer list is very long and Oracle is known for upselling to the install base and for including UCM in larger deals, this sounds plausible.
Depending on your specific requirements, there are several reasons which might make Oracle a meaningful inclusion on your shortlist.
- Oracle has continued to invest engineering resources in the product and made several recent improvements to the WCM part of UCM including usability, personalisation and accessibility.
- As a large software vendor, you may already have a strong existing relationship with Oracle. If this the case, your stakeholders will probably appreciate getting a proposal from Oracle.
- If you have a strong requirement to manage non-web content, eg. documents, this will play well with the product’s strengths.
Before you go ahead and add Oracle UCM to the shortlist here’s a few bullets for your consideration:
- License and implementation cost will require a serious budget. The starting price is either US $115k per-CPU or $2,300 per system user. Moreover, Oracle implementation partners are not known for attractive hourly rates.
- Usability might have been improved, but still existing customers on the newest version of the product are so frustrated with poor usability that they publish commentaries like Oracle, can you improve your poor usability please? by Mark Morrell at BT.
- You will need to learn the proprietary “Idoc Script” language for Site Studio until 11g release comes out.
- UCM is a complex product and will be overkill for many scenarios.
Oracle is planning to release the much-anticipated 11g version of Oracle UCM later this year, which we look forward to studying closer. In the mean time, consider talking to Oracle on getting more information about what’s coming.
Comment on this article by Kas Thomas August 31st, 2009 21:49, Source: http://www.jboye.com/blogpost/should-oracle-be-on-your-web-cms-shortlist/
I would add another precautionary bullet point, having to do with the rights model. Study the UCM roles and rights model carefully and compare it against your requirements; that’s my advice. Maybe @bex or someone with deep UCM experience can educate me here, but I find the UCM rights model a tad unconventional. It defines a security group as a collection of files (not users). It maps rights to roles, then users to roles. Each security group is accessible to appropriately privileged roles.
If you create more than 50 security groups, system performance (initially at the admin level, but eventually at the user level) begins to take a hit, at which point Oracle suggests you turn on a feature called Accounts, which is a more granular, hierarchical permissions model. But if you choose to enable “Accounts,” you can’t go back to a non-accounts-enabled model without losing data (according to Oracle’s own documentation).
The whole thing seems a bit scary to me, but maybe that’s because I don’t understand it, which is not infrequently the case with things that scare me.
