Workshop Reflection – Installing Oracle WebCenter in OCI

In June Oracle hosted a workshop inviting several partners with the goal of installing Oracle WebCenter content from the OCI Marketplace into their OCI tenant. As someone who has worked with WebCenter Content for over 20 years, this is a very exciting topic. The workshop was scheduled for 90 minutes, and spoiler alert, I needed just under half the time to have a fully functioning domain with the following applications.

• WebCenter Content
• WebCenter Imaging
• WebCenter Capture

Prerequisites

There were some prerequisites that were needed prior to installing WCC in our tenant. These are outlined here, and are documented at the following URL.

https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/paas/webcenter-content/webcenter-content-marketplace/#prerequisites

Of the following items, provisioning the database did take some time to complete, but the rest went in very smoothly. Please note, that you do need a tenant in OCI in order to do this work, this is not listed below.

• Generate an SSH keypair - I used PuTTYgen
• Create a compartment in OCI
  • This way all the installed/added items are ‘contained’ within this compartment
• Create a master key for the vault
• Create a database
  • Oracle Base Database was used for the installation
  • Please a lot some time for this to complete – it took around an hour for my database to be provisioned
• IDCS
  • I actually skipped this step as it can always be added at a later time. For users, we used the embedded LDAP provided in WebLogic Server (with integration to our AD instance on the to do list)
• Storage bucket
  • WCC supports Object Storage, which is a huge cost saver for storing content items
• User API key
• Vault secrets

Install WebCenter Content

Installing WCC was very easy. Going to the OCI Marketplace, I selected WebCenter Content, Imaging & Enterprise Capture 12c (BYOL). Since this is bring your own license, there is no cost beyond the resources in OCI to run WCC (database, compute, etc.). Clicking the Launch Stack button below starts the process

Summary

I won’t go through all the steps for completing the deployment, but will make the following observations

• Steps to deploy WCC into OCI are very well documented – see the link at the top of this article
• The entire process to deploy took me 40 minutes. This includes careful review of all the values added to the various fields in the setup process
• The entire process, including prerequisites took a combined roughly two hours, including the time to provision the database

Many thanks to Vinay Kumar at Oracle for hosting the workshop and answering all questions that arose. Installing WCC into OCI via the Marketplace proved to be a positive experience. It is encouraging to see the monthly releases of WCC in the Marketplace. WCC is such a powerful and stable content management system. Combined with OCI it can be deployed quickly and easily as needed.