Oracle WebCenter Content vs. Plone

WebCenter Content is suitable for payables invoice processing for companies with a huge volume of paper invoices. 80% of data entry effort can be reduced. For small companies with less volume, WebCenter may not make sense. WebCenter is not perfect. It has some issues. We raised enhancement requests with Oracle, hopefully, Oracle will resolve them soon.

Incentivized

The larger your organization, the more appropriate Plone will be. This is not to say that Plone is a worse choice for small websites, only that the minimum investment for a Plone site is certainly higher than for other platforms. If you already use Plone for your site and are looking for a redesign or an overhaul, I would only advise switching to a different platform such as WordPress or Drupal if your organization is downsizing. For any other situation, Plone is the natural choice for your growth.

• It provided one single repository with a URL link to access each AP invoice.
• It gives a life cycle to each invoice where a business user can perform some additional indexing as per their needs.
• It also provides a reporting feature and a front-end for users to view invoices with ease and very helpful for auditing purpose.
• It uses the BPEL engine to customize the life cycle and also it can automate the auto entry of supplier invoices in your EBS system.
• Reduce a lot of manual efforts, manual errors and workforce.

Incentivized

• Plone is a folder-based system, organising content in a similar way desktop-users are doing for the last two decades. No need to teach non-tech customers some relational-database like paradigm for content management.
• Plone is secure. It is the most secure CMS you can get your hands on.
• Plone is flexible, and makes fast development easy.

• Some functionality you would expect to be built-in (such as reporting for compliance) is not and requires other Oracle products to be integrated.
• Separating an invoice with multiple lines for different departments is not an easy task.

Incentivized

• Not everything is configurable or editable by Plone, and when you need to adjust or add custom pieces in, you need to deal with Zope. Zope has an ugly, confusing and difficult UI and structure as a backend.
• Using 3rd party products is difficult to do - there are a few different ways to get them installed, all of which take a bit of luck to get right.
• Building custom products for Plone is not fun. You've got to deal with an archaic framework to tie in that is not well documented (there is documentation about many things, but not great documentation and there are a lot of holes in the documentation).

The challenges with converting to a completely new system create quite a barrier to switching to anything else. If we find another system that offers guaranteed improvements to the user interface -- as well as as a more coherent set of options for data interchanges with current and future enterprise data sources -- we would be more interested in swithing to that new product. Of course, the expense in purchasing competitor system, along with the costs of migrating all current content, along with retooling all existing workflows in place, would be carefully weighed against the benefits incurred from a switch-over.

We have critical systems running on Plone so will need it in the future.

Free to use since its Open source, so we don't have to worry about licence costs.

We know how to use and develop Plone and it has no limits.

It meets all required functionality requirements -- but handles none of them in an exceptional manner

Compared to the amount of Plone sites, users and customizations we have in our organization, the amount of support requests and training needed is really small.

The new user interface in Plone 6 is even better, it is super fast, has lots of different blocks for enhancing the page, has flexible layout system and is easy to extend with more features.

Our Plone sites are very robust. We have critical systems on Plone and we have been running sites on Plone for over 20 years with very little unexpected downtime.

Plone is very intensive in its operations, and if not configured well it can be slow. However it is designed and built with speed in mind and with proper use of coding, templates and caching can perform extremely well under high loads. It is capable of scaling to very high load availability environments with no specific coding requirements.

There are not too many Plone companies in the world. But the ones who are, are high level professionals

I have been participating Plone training and the trainers have always been professional. Materials were good and the instructions clear

Well organized, professional training with good materials and instructions

I can't really provide an answer for this question because I think the basic premise is flawed. Which system an organization selects is based (or should be based) on their unique business and organizational requirements, not the features of the system. We do not recommend a particular solution to a client based on subjective preference for one system over another but rather for its appropriateness to achieve a particular goal or collection of goals.

Drupal: Plone is cheaper, so with Drupal is more complex to reach the required ROI. However, Drupal has a lower learning curve WordPress: For our necessities it has a more expensive learning curve than plone. Joomla, is easier to use. However, it have some issues on security and web content where Plone is much better

Incentivized

Plone has no limits. We have massive sites and can run them just fine

• We were looking for a scalable solution for invoice processing needs. WebCenter did fit the bill. It reduced manual data entry effort by 80%.
• WebCenter saved our storage costs. We do not need to store the physical paper copies anymore in our expensive offices.
• WebCenter increased the employee engagement and reduced monotonous data entry work. Employees now have time to spend on value-added work rather than data entry.
• Auditors were happy with the tool, as they can retrieve any document with the click of a button as opposed to search and find a physical document.

Incentivized

• The impact Plone has had at the University of Oshkosh is as follows: this software allows student workers to learn about IT departments and CMS's in a user-friendly way. It gives many students great jobs that look great on their resumes.
• Since there are great training manuals for Plone, there is increased employee efficient in the workplace. Training doesn't take long, and if there's ever a question, the Plone manual is a great tool to refer to.
• If an employee using Plone quits, its easy to find someone to replace them with quick training and great resources.