Oracle’s Sites Cloud Service - Upcoming, New, and Exciting!

After yet another successful Oracle OpenWorld conference, it is time to talk about a new and upcoming Oracle Cloud PaaS offering. This new offering unlocks exciting potential for future and existing users of Oracle Cloud services, as well as early adopters of the Oracle Document Cloud Service and the new Oracle WebCenter 12c Release.

A few days before this year's Oracle OpenWorld took place, we participated in Oracle's exclusive WebCenter and BPM Partner Advisory Council (PAC) event, where the new Sites Cloud Service (SCS) was introduced by Mariam Tariq (Senior Director Product Management). This new service piqued our interests and we had to pursue our research further. Luckily, it wasn't too difficult to get a demo of this new offering at the Oracle Demo Grounds from Joe Duane (Senior Principal Product Manager). Thank you, Joe!

What is this Sites Cloud Service? Why is it so exciting?

Imagine being able to quickly create a modern-looking responsive website without custom code nor worrying about your infrastructure being able to handle website traffic on the launch day. SCS offers exactly that. It takes a few mouse clicks to setup a template-based website ready to serve your digital assets to the world. The ease and simplicity will attract even non-tech savvy contributors.

Most notebale features:

• Modern and Mobile Friendly templates - every template will abide by the proper responsive design rules;
• Drag and Drop template composing - this allows you to quickly create templates with well-defined contribution (editable) and branding (non-editable) areas;
• Page Collaboration - ability to have multiple people composing a single page of a website at the same time;
• Inline Page editing - feature-rich page editing for in-line contribution à la WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) style;
• Publishing Approval process - a single step process for review and approval of all information before it is made public;
• Page Drafting - ability to save your work and then resume it at a later time;
• Seamless integration with Oracle Documents Cloud Service (DOCS) - embedding of and linking to your cloud-stored digital assets.

For the existing users of the DOCS, Oracle will begin rolling out this offering within the upcoming weeks and it will be exposed as a link in the Navigation Area on the left hand side of the User Interface.

For the existing users of the WebCenter Content's Web Content Management solution, Site Studio, the Sites Cloud Service is a good starting point to try and see if it meets their existing on-premises requirements. It is definitely a solid option and we are looking forward trying it out ourselves in the near future.

The pricing of the SCS offering will be based on the unique page per view count and more details on it will be available within upcoming weeks.

Overall, while the Sites Cloud Service might not have all of the desired functionalities of a full "Dot Com" implementation, it offers about 80% of a typical Web Content Management solution. As usual, Oracle has its bases covered, by offering complimentary technologies including WebCenter Portal 12c or WebCenter Sites 12c running in Oracle's Java Service Cloud.

*Source for the first image on the page: https://cloud.oracle.com/_downloads/eBook_Platform_Sites_File/Oracle_Sites_Cloud_Service.pdf

Anton Bondar, Principal Consultant at Mythics

Erik Benner, Enterprice Architect at Mythics