The flagship offering, Universal Content Management 10g, Release 3, consolidates several former a la carte items, including document management web content management, digital asset management, and document retention.
It also upgrades integration with Microsoft’s SharePoint portal. Previously, you could important and export material to SharePoint. In the new release, many of SharePoint’s functions, such as check-in, search, browse folders and accessing workflow, can now be performed form directly inside Oracle’s offering. And you can promote or migrate material from SharePoint’s repository into Oracle.
Another new feature adds the ability to expose Stellent’s old content format translation capability as a web service. That means that you could store documents from various sources and automatically reissue them in the latest version of Word or as a PDF, and so on. The Stellent translator supports nearly 400 files formats.
Additionally, as we reported previously, you can now store content directly in the Oracle database, as opposed to just using it for metadata. That means you can apply database housekeeping features such as backup, restore, and in some cases, file compression (you can use Oracle’s compression routines, but as with any compression tool, it will work unevenly with unstructured content). But you won’t have to use the Oracle database. You’ll still have the option of using the native file system that came with the old Stellent products, or you can store content in other third party repositories.
The new release, not surprisingly, extends existing Java JSR 168 portlet support for IBM and BEA’s appservers and portals to Oracle’s as well. And, in addition the Verity search engine packaged with the old Stellent product, Oracle’s Enterprise Search will also be available as an option.
Oracle Universal Content Management 10g, Release 3 is available now.
Our View
There’s little to be surprised about in this release. Of course, Oracle as going to take the old Stellent technology and add support for its middleware, portal, and search offerings. And of course, being at root a database company, Oracle would for you to buy extra database licenses to house all that content. By using the database, Oracle gives you more robust management capabilities compared to traditional file-based storage, but of course, whether your firm decides to act on it will likely depend on how well it negotiates enterprise licensing deals with Oracle.
