Saturday, January 17, 2009

Things I dont like!

Writing a blog is a challenge. You should really spend some quality time to think though topics do your resarch and then write. Writing a techincal blog is a bigger challenge as time spent on doing research is more then for a ordinary blog.
Things said and done lets start blogging. This time I am puting a list of things I donot like about UCM.
  1. Support: Before cribing about the product and some of the intrinsic details I would like to mention that UCM support from Oracle is average. Most of the times support personel have no clue as to what is happening and what should be done. Agreed that Oracle has just acquired the product and doesnot have the required numbers to give best support considering the product is buggy and doesnot behave as mentioned in the documentation(actually most them do not!) support should be up to the mark so that the implementation teams doest not miss dead lines with your SR still in work in progress status.
  2. Documentation: I find UCM documentation to be too prechy at times. We need product documentation in tutorial format. Some thing like FileNet and Documentum have where they teach you step by step on how to do things. They also have published there case study similar to revanna. I donot see any documents related to revanna other than explaning site studio capabilites.Only good thing about this is that it has a good book in the market by bex.
  3. Folders: If ever oracle wants to get into serious document management it should beef up this component or still go ahead and do a redesign. Currently according to me this is very primitive. When ever you create a folder UCM gives it a unique id call collection id, this is done automatic and you have no control over this. Now if you have a situation where you have created a profile where all content ends up in particular folder and move that profile to other environament you have reset the default folder for the profile using the Collection id in each environament. I say give me some thing which i can control some thing in line of Content type, so that i need not worry about different environament when i am programming.
  4. Site Studio Designer: This is a lousy IDE. This cannot even do a word wrap! While creating fragments this doesnot automaticaly do some basic manual things. Will eloborate more later.
  5. Workflow Designer: UCM Workflow applet is very very primitive. It looks like it was created during the first version of Stellnet and nobody bothered to revisit the UI. Again if oracle wants to get into serious ECM it should beef up this gives us some good process design capability, should allow us to publish workflow as webservice, allow people to consume other workflows.. and blah balh blah....

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting. I would agree on nearly all these points. Overall, I really like this product, but there are certainly a lot of areas that can be improved upon. I think we're going to see and are currently seeing some major advancements in the areas of Site Studio (when 11g is here you'll be able to skip the SS IDE all together in favor of something else).

So, now I'd like to see your top five favorite things...

Unknown said...

Nice list.

I was hoping there would be some changes to Site Studio in 10gR4. Something fun like improved code highlighting or formatting...
Alas, disappointed once again.
Oracle has this simple stuff in other products, why avoid the easy win.

Guess we have to wait until 11g. Where the best improvement to Site Studio; will be that we don't have to use Site Studio.

cmstechie said...

Hi Jason,Tyro thanks for stopping by.
Jason,
I will soon come up with my fav list in UCM. UCM is a good product but some minor nagging things is against it to be in the excellent product category.

Tyro,
I havent tried R4 yet. Will do this week end. But from reviews i have heard looks like we need to wait for 11G

John Sim said...

.. .. I believe Oracle have plans to replace the UCM stellent workflow system in 11g aswell as the upgrade to SS ;)

I also agree to most of your points.. But as for support true they may take some time with responding but once you get them on the phone they really do help and get others involved!

I`v spent over 4 hours on the phone doing a conference with the guys on investigating an issue with just Active Directory and SAN setups.

Jambur said...

I've just about given up on UCM. There are cheaper/free applications that do a better job than this bloated, overpriced, hunk of junk.