5 Pillars for Oracle WCM Optimization: Supercharged Web Content Management BILLY CRIPE WITH STEVE FAHEY & MARIAH BAILEY FISHBOWL SOLUTIONS, INC. i
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Contents Supercharged Web Content Management 1 Pillar 1: Don t wait until your site performance stinks to implement optimization techniques 1 Pillar 2: Re-use rather than re-store or re-create 2 Pillar 3: Convert and render content on the fly 2 Pillar 4: Optimize in-site searches with database and zone indexes 3 Pillar 5: Tips and Tricks for Oracle WCM 3
Supercharged Web Content Management These days there seem to be as many Web Content Management (WCM) systems as there are programming languages. From Open Source systems to blogging platforms to wiki systems to big vendor Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and portal systems we are swimming in WCM options. Oracle Web Content Management is part of Oracle Universal Content Management. Whether you are using Oracle WCM or another system, there are some key strategies for optimizing your site and content that can spell the difference between a site that successfully drives desired behavior and one that simply exists on the web. Each WCM platform will have its own idiosyncrasies and optimization tricks. But with some careful consideration of the basics, an intentional uptake of technologies that help and regular maintenance your WCM site will sing. Here are 5 pillars for successful WCM site and content optimization. Some are specific to Oracle WCM, some cross technological and vendor boundaries. The web and WCM systems have evolved to a substantial level of maturity. The level of sophistication incorporated in these technologies is substantial. While they do not require a rocket scientist to implement or administer, they do require a disciplined and consistent approach to management Pillar 1: Don t wait until your site performance stinks to implement optimization techniques Unfortunately many organizations find themselves in this position. A site or sites have been around for a while and suddenly the site tanks, users get frustrated, employees grumble and IT scrambles to fix big hairy problem with more executive level attention than is probably warranted. There is any number of reasons the site tanks. A market shift puts attention on an offering described by the site and traffic spikes against a sub-optimized site. Stale information left on a site is used in a way never intended and opens up a liability for the organization. The reasons are many but the negative results are the same. A few hours of up front planning and execution can make all the difference. None of the items in this list are new or revolutionary. However, consistent and disciplined practice is vital to ensure you are not caught unawares. 1. Caching. Do it. Many WCM systems have built in caching mechanisms. The best systems have the ability to cache whole pages or specific portions of the page. Oracle WCM has the ability to cache whole pages or specific portions of the page. Take advantage of these features. If a page has a high traffic rate, an unanticipated spike or is consumed by other SOA services in the organization, implementing caching for even one minute can make a huge difference to site performance and user satisfaction.
2. Content Delivery Network (CDN) loading for common files: Offload commonly used libraries, such as JQuery, to a CDN. When a user views the website, the libraries will be loaded from the geographically closest data center. It should be noted though, that this should be used primarily in an externally facing or public web scenario. For intranets and other domain-contained content, CDNs can have a net negative performance impact. Remember that sites often evolve over time to add in new and ever-richer content. As these incremental changes stack up substantial performance impacts can be realized, often only after a critical tipping point. Therefore, having a disciplined approach to performance and infrastructure and conforming incremental changes and additions to this approach can save headaches in the future. Pillar 2: Re-use rather than re-store or re-create The primary advantage that organizations gain through incorporating WCM in their enterprise information management (EIM) strategy is the ability to repurpose existing information. Research has consistently demonstrated a material cost incurred when employees search for information and spend time re-creating information that already exists. When WCM is included in a larger EIM strategy, content owners are able to leverage the web distribution channel without having to re-create content. This has the follow-on effect of minimizing or even eliminating synchronization efforts to keep multiple copies of the same item up to date. It also means that when a change to the content is affected, it ramifies throughout all the distribution channels including WCM channels without additional work. Think about your corporate web site and the mobile version of your web site. Most of the content is probably the same with the mobile site maybe containing a subset of the main site content. If you are copying and pasting content or even automatically publishing a copy of main site content to a mobile website directory or server, you are forced to update the same information twice: Once for the main site and again for the mobile site. Even when replication is automated, if problems occur synchronization and tracing efforts are required. A better solution is to leverage WCM systems that draw content from the same logical (even if physically distributed) repository and render it for the appropriate delivery channel. Which brings us to Pillar 3: Convert and render content on the fly Oracle WCM is built on top of Oracle Universal Content management. It has the ability to convert content to HTML on the fly. Different vendors call this different names: templating, dynamic conversion, etc. Oracle WCM has rules based dynamic conversion for a multitude of source file types. Web channel appropriate templates and conversion rules get applied to content items whether MS Office documents, XML files, images or text files to create a web ready output that conforms with the look and feel of the web site as well as the site structure. Continuing on with the previous example, this means that the same MS Word document can be converted to HTML or XML (for example) for a main site and converted to an HTML snippet with a slim template for a mobile site. Same item. Dynamic conversion.
However, dynamic templating and conversion will often incur a performance hit when the first person requests the item. This is because the system waits to convert until that request. So the first requestor takes the conversion hit while subsequent folks get the item instantly. This can be avoided by pre-converting documents either on a scheduled basis or at contribution time. Pre-conversion allows the HTML, XML or web-viewable format to be ready for delivery when that first user hits the website. Pillar 4: Optimize in-site searches with database and zone indexes When dealing with WCM there are two ways to find content in a site. Users can navigate to items that meet their interest or they can search. As mentioned before, inefficient search leads to a measurable, material drag on knowledge worker performance in the work place. When dealing with search scoped to a WCM site, it is important to optimize inter-site searching. Creating indexes on fields and terms that are queried often (e.g. multiple times per page) should always be performed and then regularly maintained. Remember that direct database search queries can tend towards performance hogs. Oracle WCM has built-in optimization for pre-defined searches. Maximizing incorporation of these services to execute searches that you perform and cache ahead of time then filter at request time can go a long way toward improving your audience s web site experience. While it amounts to a logging activity to identify and index zones and terms that are queried by services and page build mechanisms, it is also important to track and log user based search activity. Identifying, testing, logging and measuring different site configurations that drive desired audience behavior is important. Incorporating predictive search capabilities, recommendation engines and persuasive content delivery not only optimizes WCM site performance but also drives content uptake and usage. Pillar 5: Tips and Tricks for Oracle WCM For those of you reading who are just getting started with Oracle WCM, there are several key tips and tricks that you should always keep in mind. Because WCM takes advantage of Oracle UCM that means that everything is a service. This makes for some very convenient and dynamic page-building. Need to inject dynamic content into a page? Simply include another service execution that runs a custom query and returns the result set to the page for you to display as needed, Right? While the above approach works well for POC and smaller sites, it can quickly build up into a performance killing and user-angering web site experience. So what is the new WCM developer to do? First, understand how the service-query-response pattern works. At its most basic level, a service will be invoked from WCM through an HTTP call. The service will execute some
actions, one of which will often be a query against some data source. The query response will be returned as a result set in a java data binder that is then parsed as part of the page-build process. Finally, that built page (HTML) is sent down to the browser on the client. While service execution is quite speedy the first place to optimize is your query. Tune that beast so that it runs as optimally as possible. This was already discussed in Pillar 4. The second place to optimize is in the result set manipulation. Oracle WCM allows one to manipulate those result set responses with IdocScript. But IdocScript was originally conceived as a way to parse and display dynamic HTML results on a web page. As such, it is not the best place to do more advanced manipulation. Tasks like merging result sets, multi-dimensional sorting or recursive arrangements are better suited to a stronger and faster language such as Java (if you have the server side luxury) or JavaScript (if you don t). Realize that although result set manipulation has always been a bugger, it can be greatly sped up through the use of Java or JavaScript (as compared to IdocScript). Simply read the result set into a Java/Script array before doing any manipulation. When you are done, send the newly arranged result sets on to the page building and let IdocScript shine. Thirdly, be sure to limit the number of service calls on individual WCM pages. Because of the flexibility of IdocScript, newer developers are easily tempted into overusing the <$executeservice()$> function any time they need a new area of dynamic content on a page. While this is allowed, it is not optimal. Developers need to remember that each service call in WCM creates a new data binder. This takes time. It is not uncommon for new WCM developers to take the easy way out and sometimes have several hundred service calls on a single page. All that time adds up. The solution is to give some thought to what you are doing. Combining services (it is terribly easy to do so don t be lazy!) and utilizing custom IdocScript functions are other options to help reduce the number of service calls on any single page. For highly dynamic pages, any service execution and results parsing that you can offload to the server will always generate faster, higher quality results. When combined with the caching and tuning pillars above, you can have extremely rich web sites that are lightning fast as well. None of these five pillars for WCM site and content optimization should be surprising to anyone. What is surprising is that, for all the intellectual acknowledgement of the principles outlined here, there is little real-world discipline in consistently implementing them. The web and WCM systems have evolved to a substantial level of maturity. The level of sophistication incorporated in these technologies is substantial. While they do not require a rocket scientist to implement or administer, they do require a disciplined and consistent approach to management. But rest assured, if you take the time to develop and execute these optimization plans, your website will certainly pay off in the long run.