The many centers of Oracle WebCenter

The capabilities of a product are the first thing anyone considers when looking at any product. WebCenter like with many products Oracle sells it is really more than one product. The three primary products presented are as follows: WebCenter Portal, WebCenter Content, and WebCenter Sites. Each of these products has it's own set of features and functionality while still being under the WebCenter name.

WebCenter Portal
This product is intended to provide your employees and customers with a central place to consume information and services distributed throughout your company's infrastructure. This helps relieve stress by only needing to worry about managing their tasks in a single place. Development is primarily is done with ADF and a number of reusable templates.

WebCenter Content
Formerly known as Universal Content Management, Oracle's WebCenter Content is a content management system as the title might imply. The extent of this product lies not simply in the managing digital documents. There are also features which allow for the tracking of related physical documents. It can act as a repository for your company's digital assets, create web friendly format for high resolution files and provide a central place for publishing digital assets. There is a supplementary product called WebCenter Imaging which allow for the capture of documents into WebCenter Content. It provides data capture from scanned documents and images, and markup on those documents.

WebCenter Sites
Sites is focused on easy creation of websites for consumers, drag-and-drop functionality and integration of WebCenter Content allow help with publishing content that your company has accumulated; sites can also help with optimizing for mobile devices. With an additional license called WebCenter Sites Satellite Server which can be used to establish a content delivery network (CDN) for you company.

Summary
With all of these products combined your company can build its web presence, internal web pages for your employees to complete their daily tasks and manage the many documents that are involved with business. While together the products have the potential to be very powerful, it is always good to take a look at them individually and determine the need for each.