Oracle WebCenter 11g R1 PS7 (11.1.1.8.0) has been released and new features of WebCenter Portal 11g PS7

Oracle WebCenter 11g R1 PS7 (11.1.1.8.0) has been released and includes the following products:

• Oracle WebCenter Content 11g R1 (11.1.1.8.0)
• Oracle WebCenter Portal 11g R1 (11.1.1.8.0)
• Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g R1 (11.1.1.8.0)
• Oracle Fusion Middleware Repository Creation Utility 11g R1 (11.1.1.8.0)

About Oracle WebCenter Portal 11g R1 PS7

WebCenter Spaces is no more in WebCenter Portal world, Spaces is renamed to Portal. Simply speaking, if you are running Spaces or you are running custom portal means you are just running portal. Here are some of the highlights of the release:

1. Portal Builder: Browser-based Tools

This release focused on optimizing the browser-based tools to make it faster and easier for non-technical users to create and manage the portal experience.  The key themes in these enhancements are intuitiveness and efficiency.  Examples include:

• Streamlined interface to manage all portals and portal assets.
• Quickly create new portals based on templates.
• Quickly add pages and manage navigation structure when creating a new portal. 
• Drag and drop components onto page from the resource catalog.
• Save the resulting portal as a portal template. 
• No more popup windows


2. Multi-Channel Portal Experiences
In this release, WebCenter Portal adds easy-to-use tools which allow for creation and management of tailored experiences for target client devices (smartphones, tablets, kiosks, etc.).  Some key features include seeded profiles for the most common devices such as iPad®, iPhone®, Samsung Galaxy S®, etc.  Ability for knowledge workers to create tailored experiences leveraging techniques such as adaptive/responsive design, variant pages and preview/emulate the experience within the browser.
3. Performance
This release has a number of performance gains including improved response time for initial page request, responsiveness of Portal Builder and increased transactions per second for server performance.
4. Simplified deployment
You can use Portal Builder administration or WLST commands to export a portal archive (.par file) and then import portals from the file.

5. Terminology changes

Prior to 11g PS7	In 11g PS7
WebCenter Portal: Spaces	WebCenter Portal
space	portal
space template	portal template
resource	asset

For detail about Portal deployment, see http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E29542_01/webcenter.1111/e27738/wcadm_deploy_portal.htm#CHDFDFHJ
Oracle WebCenter Portal 11g R1 PS7 (11.1.1.8.0) Documentation : WebCenter Portal 11.1.1.8.0 Documentation

UCM 11g Fails to Start due to csDbFailedToGetNonEmptyTableList Error

After WebCenter 11.1.1.7.0 (PS6) installation with MS. SQL Server 2008 R2, I created one domain includes WebCenter Portal and WebCenter Content components, everything went good. When I tried to start UCM server, it fails to start with following exceptions:-

 <31/05/2013 12:16:48 PM NZST> <Error> <ServletContext-> <BEA-000000> <Could not start server of type 'server' at default relative web root URL 'cs'.javax.servlet.ServletException: Could not start up IDC server deployment.Caused By: java.io.IOException: UCM Server failed to initialize inside its servlet environment.Caused By: intradoc.data.DataException: !csDbFailedToGetNonEmtpyTableList,WebCenter,DEV_OCSS

Cause

I have configured case-sensitive database for WebCenter. In the Weblogic CSDS data source configured for MS. SQL Server, the database name case doesn't match the case on the database on SQL Server.

Such as like the database name in the data source is all lower case but the actual database name in SQL server is all upper-case even i have given same upper-case during RCU schema creation and domain creation time.

Its looking me the bug with SQL Server installation with WebCenter Content. 

Solution

In the CSDS data source, set the database name so that it exactly matches the database name in SQL Server:

1. Go to WLS Admin console, in the Domain Structure pane, expand Services

2. Select Data Sources

3. In the Summary of JDBC Data Sources pane select the CSDS link

4. In the Settings for CSDS pane select the Connection Pool tab

5. In the Properties field change the databaseName to match the case of the database on SQL Sever

Example:

Change:

databaseName=WebCenter (in my case, its change in this way)

To:

databaseName=WEBCENTER

6. Click the Save button8. Restart the Admin Server and the UCM Managed Server.

Note: As a best practice, do this steps for all data-sources configured for MS. SQL Server.

WebCenter PS6 (11.1.1.7) and future releases

Version PS6 (11.1.1.7) of WebCenter has been released on 1st of April, 2013. PS6 includes many bug fixes in addition to enhancements to the WebCenter Content Application Extension Framework (AXF) supporting integrations with E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft.

There will be one major version 11.1.1.8.0 (PS7) of WebCenter by end of 2013. In this release, following are some highlights I learned from Oracle:-

1. there is no more two solutions (Spaces & Portal) for WebCenter. Spaces will be the part of WebCenter Framework. Only one concept that is PORTAL.

2. We can create multiple portal from Web Interface.

3. You can import/export portal archive (PAR exactly like JAR/WAR/MAR) from/to Web to/from JDeveloper for complex customization.

4. All types of popup windows will be eliminated from portal.

5. You can drag and drop Web 2.0 components and taskflows on to the page from resource catalogue.

6. Migration among different environments is easy due to PAR.


You will see WebCenter 12C in somewhere in 2014. 12C will be based on PS7 features but utilizing & certifying Weblogic 12C and other components of FMW 12C.