Oracle Drops Premium Product Post-Stellent

After purchasing Stellent and recently playing the tease about what they'd do with it, Oracle finally releases its first ECM offering since the acquisition.

The software once known as Stellent Universal Content Management will again see the light of day, this time as Oracle Universal Content Management 10g Release 3. This reflects its new position as a critical part of the enterprise content management giant's Fusion middleware.

Oracle Universal Content Management enables users to snatch, store, manage, locate, publish and keep unstructured content like documents, video and audio. Oracle has also adopted Stellent's ability to interact with third-party products. For example, the solution features integration with Microsoft's SharePoint Web CMS.

Oracle is also working on improving relations between Universal Content Management and the Oracle Portal Server and Oracle WebCenter Suite, in addition to third-party portals from IBM, Sun and BEA Systems.

But the software doesn't just make for a good team player. It can also convert the native format that content is stored in, transitioning documents easily from Microsoft Word formats to PDF, for example.

A new file store provider architecture gives users an opportunity to choose from a number of content storage options, including EMC Software, Fujitsu, Network Appliance and Oracle itself.

The Oracle 10g relational database is the only one available as an out-of-the-box option, but this may change over time depending on demand. This feel-it-out approach was typical of Stellent, which allowed companies to use competitors like Fast Search & Transfer or Verity in its Universal Content Management system as user demand increased.

The souped-up Oracle/Stellent offering also comes stock with a dedicated use license for Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (SES), so user content can be indexed and accessed by SES as-needed.

In the future Oracle expects to integrate Universal Content Management with other software, including enterprise Apps. Oracle Universal Content Management 10g Release 3 is available as a free download, but hold your horses -- the licensing fee is $100,000 per processor.

A gutsy move, considering the number of sharks in the enterprise content management tank. Then again, Oracle's no baby clown fish. We can't wait to see how competitors like EMC's Documentum, IBM, Microsoft and Open Text react.

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