Drupal vs. Oracle WebCenter Portal

Drupal is best suited for a dynamic website that needs customization and may need different user roles. It’s also great at learning to build a complex web application without knowing how to code a complex website. Although it can be implemented with minimal coding, knowing how to debug is almost necessary.

Incentivized

Based on my experience with Oracle WebCenter Portal, it is best suited for [Oracle's] existing customers who are already familiar with Oracle products but need to look for [a] specific topic in a broad sense. It is also suitable for people who are not Oracle customers yet but has industry experience and simply looking to enhance their Oracle knowledge and compare [it] with other products in the industry. I think it's less appropriate for people who are looking for answers to very specific technical questions for an Oracle product.

Incentivized

• Content Types... these are amazing. Whereas a more simplistic CMS like Wordpress will basically allow you to make posts and build pages, Drupal 8 gives you the ability to define different types of content that behave differently, and are served up differently in different areas of the website.
• Extensibility... it scales, ohhhh does it scale. They've really figured out server-side caching, and it makes all the difference. Once a page has been cached, it's available instantly to all users worldwide; and when coupled with AWS, global redundancy and localization mean that no matter where you're accessing the site, it always loads fast and crisp.
• Workflows... you have the ability to define very specific roles and/or user-based editorial workflows, allowing for as many touchpoints and reviews between content creation and publication as you'll require.

Incentivized

• Allows personalization integration
• Allows API integration
• Google search integration

Incentivized

• Security and new release notifications are a hassle as they happen too often
• Allowing them to write PHP modules is a big advantage, but sometimes integrating them is a small challenge due to the version the developer is working on.
• Steep learning curve, but worth it

Incentivized

• Unexpected cryptic error messages.
• The site does not seem to have SSO capability as I have logged into my user account already, but it still can't verify at the Support page
• AI should be built into the portal to auto-assist when error occurs.

Incentivized

The time and money invested into this platform were too great to discontinue it at this point. I'm sure it will be in use for a while. We have also spent time training many employees how to use it. All of these things add up to quite an investment in the product. Lastly, it basically fulfills what we need our intranet site to do.

In comparison to other CMS alternatives out there, it is quite clean and maintainable when it comes to the small details. The general usability is great once you get to learn the details of it. The problem is that the onboarding process for new developers is a bit hard since there is no official, straight-forward documentation or video series.

Drupal itself does not tend to have bugs that cause sporadic outages. When deployed on a well-configured LAMP stack, deployment and maintenance problems are minimal, and in general no exotic tuning or configuration is required. For highest uptime, putting a caching proxy like Varnish in front of Drupal (or a CDN that supports dynamic applications).

Drupal page loads can be slow, as a great many database calls may be required to generate a page. It is highly recommended to use caching systems, both built-in and external to lessen such database loads and improve performance. I haven't had any problems with behind-the-scenes integrations with external systems.

Incentivized

As noted earlier, the support of the community can be rather variable, with some modules attracting more attraction and action in their issue queues, but overall, the development community for Drupal is second to none. It probably the single greatest aspect of being involved in this open-source project.

Incentivized

I was part of the team that conducted the training. Our training was fine, but we could have been better informed on Drupal before we started providing it. If we did not have answers to tough questions, we had more technical staff we could consult with. We did provide hands-on practice time for the learners, which I would always recommend. That is where the best learning occurred.

The on-line training was not as ideal as the face-to-face training. It was done remotely and only allowed for the trainers to present information to the learners and demonstrate the platform online. There was not a good way to allow for the learners to practice, ask questions and have them answered all in the same session.

Plan ahead as much you can. You really need to know how to build what you want with the modules available to you, or that you might need to code yourself, in order to make the best use of Drupal. I recommend you analyze the most technically difficult workflows and other aspects of your implementation, and try building some test versions of those first. Get feedback from stakeholders early and often, because you can easily find yourself in a situation where your implementation does 90% of what you want, but, due to something you didn't plan for, foresee, or know about, there's no feasible way to get past the last 10%

Incentivized

Drupal is community-backed making it more accessible and growing at a faster rate than Sitefinity which is a proprietary product built on .NET. Drupal is PHP-based using some but not all Symphony codebase. Updates for Drupal are frequent and so are feature adds.

Incentivized

It's all comparable and very expensive.

Incentivized

Drupal is well known to be scalable, although it requires solid knowledge of MySQL best practices, caching mechanisms, and other server-level best practices. I have never personally dealt with an especially large site, so I can speak well to the issues associated with Drupal scaling.

Incentivized

• Drupal has allowed us to build up a library of code and base sites we can reuse to save time which has increased our efficiency and thus had a positive financial impact.
• Drupal has allowed us to take on projects we otherwise would not have been able to, having a further impact.
• Drupal has allowed us to build great solutions for our clients which give them an excellent ROI.

Incentivized

• It's hard to calculate specifically the ROI Oracle WebCenter Portal had.
• After all, this is a portal for users to find information.
• This is a starting point for users to navigate, and it would be dependent on how far the users drill down to get the specific information they need to grow their business.

Incentivized