Book Review: Oracle WebCenter 11g PS3 Administration Cookbook by Yannick Ongena

by Nick Olmsted

One of the latest WebCenter books released, “Oracle WebCenter 11g PS3 Administration Cookbook” by Yaninick Ongena has a great overview of the Oracle Portal product (including a chapter on WebCenter Spaces). This book has “cookbook” in its title meaning that it doesn’t describe the detailed functionality or architecture of Oracle WebCenter but has a lot of examples of how to use the functionality that a WebCenter Portal or Spaces application gives you.

Some highlights from the book are:

• Learning how to create Page Templates and Page Styles and what within the ADF tags is determining when a part of your page template or style is customizable within Oracle Composer.
• You are also shown some details on how to add business logic within a Java class to hide components, taskflows, or portlets within a Resource Catalog.
• How to create a portlet using the new JSR 286 standard that allows for inter-portlet communication.
• Displaying information from external applications through the Web Clipping, Omni-Portlet, or Data Source.
• Great section highlighting the tighter integration with Oracle Content (formerly Oracle UCM) through the Document Taskflows such as Document Explorer and Content Presenter. Would have liked some more examples of custom Content Presenter templates as this is a feature I believe will be popular with this latest release.
• Lots of examples on how to use all of the WebCenter services such as Wikis, Blogs, Documents, Discussions, Tags, and more.

If you are a new developer or customer of Oracle WebCenter 11g PS3+ or are looking into what features are available then this book will describe the majority of the functionality that you can unlock within latest release of the Oracle WebCenter Portal application. If you are an experienced WebCenter Portal developer than this book will not give you any new tips, but may help you understand a part of the WebCenter product that you are not as familiar with.

You may view or purchase the book at Amazon.com.