Oracle goes consumer with web for enterprise developers

PART-TIME OPEN SOURCEROR Oracle has released a collection of social notworking mashups for its Webcenter punters.

This is not something you'd normally expect from the enterprise IT vendor that is Oracle, but the company is shamelessly following the consumerisation of corporate space with this release.

Dubbed Webcenter Suite by Oracle, it consists of a host of converged enhancements including "business mash-up tools" that are designed to bring a customised consumer experience to the enterprise.

Webcenter Suite has Portals and Sites, which provides developers with web toolkits like Dojo and Jquery. Oracle reckons its added visual based web tools speed development by a factor of fifty.

Mashups and personalisation would be nowhere without skins or user profiles and Oracle has put these in to its Webcenter Space. The profiles can be accessed and unified from any source, speeding up team location within companies.

Developers also get enterprise mashups, using JDeveloper to produce data controls. Business users can use Oracle Webcenter Composer to combine disparate tools to create a unified dashboard to run their business.

Content management is updated through Oracle's UCM 11g, while its Webcenter Personalization Server offers more dynamic content delivery. Oracle backs the Content Management Interoperability Standard (CMIS), which means it lets companies use the same content from different IT infrastructures.

Direct Oracle Secure Enterprise Search apparently offers better search facilities through the Webcenter Suite. Other updates also include an Outlook plug-in and an analytics dashboard with templates to run reports off the business mashup tools. µ