Oracle WebCenter Sites: An Inside View
August 03, 2015

Oracle WebCenter Sites: An Inside View

Earl Powers | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

11g

Overall Satisfaction with Oracle WebCenter Sites

Oracle WebCenter Sites is a robust and flexible content management system. Typicallly used for external facing web sites, WCS provides powerful tools for business users to manage web content separately from managing the actual presentation of that content. For businesses wanting to provide a more personalized web experience for their end users, WCS also provides excellent tools for managing segmentation and personalization. And most importantly for many business users, a solid implementation gives business users a large degree of autonomy from IT when publishing new or updated content to meet immediate needs of the end user.
  • Contributor UI: A robust, intuitive and customizable user interface for business content contributors, with in-context editing and preview capabilities. This allows a contributor to preview the content without leaving WCS and also allows the contributor to edit content directly in the context of the web page.
  • Application Integration: The Web Experience Management (WEM) framework allows easy integration with external applications needed in the content lifecycle. Applications such as cloud-based media or document libraries can be conveniently accessed within the context of WCS during content creation, vastly simplifying the contributor's workflow.
  • Digital Experience Marketing: On top of the CMS, organizations can optimize the experience for end users by providing personalization and segmentation rules to content, making content much more relevant and engaging to customers.
  • Release Management: It is difficult to group content together and manage as a unit. This is most noticeable with content like promotions, where there might be a number of different types of content that need to be published at the same time when the promotion takes effect.
  • Development Patterns: On the technical side, a lot of the code is contained in JSP files, using a combination of JSP tags and scriptlets. This can be tedious to manage from development perspective, though with some thought, an MVC-type pattern can be achieved. However, with every new release, the WCS product team continues to deliver a better environment for developers.
  • More efficient use of content (i.e. write once, use in multiple places)
  • Faster Time to Publish on time sensitive content (stock market news, breaking announcements)
  • More easily target content to specific segments of customer base
Oracle WebCenter Sites is very well suited to presenting marketing content in all shapes and forms, including mobile, an in a corporate web site. Oracle WebCenter Sites can also manage small product catalogs easily. Important things to consider when selecting a CMS:
  • How important is the ease with which my business users update content?
  • How often are updates made?
  • How distributed are my business contributors?
  • How important is preview in my organization's workflow and publishing process?

Oracle WebCenter Sites Feature Ratings

WYSIWYG editor
10
Code quality / cleanliness
8
Admin section
9
Page templates
9
Mobile optimization / responsive design
10
Publishing workflow
10
Content taxonomy
8
Bulk management
7
Availability / breadth of extensions
10
Community / comment management
9
API
8
Internationalization / multi-language
9
Role-based user permissions
9

Oracle WebCenter Sites Support

The WebCenter Sites Support team is extremely good and very responsive to client needs. They are quick to resolve Level 1 issues and when escalated to Level 2, the team makes every effort to keep the client informed.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
Yes - Premium support comes as part of the Oracle licensing agreement
Yes - My interactions with Oracle Support for WCS have been nothing but outstanding. The team is professional and quick to respond to initial requests as well as ongoing troubleshooting to resolve issues.