Oracle UCM Content Folios

A few weeks ago, in a somewhat underwhelming fashion, Oracle released their Content Folios component as a non descript patch to the UCM Content Server.  Folios, which has been under development for some time, allows users to create groupings of items in the content server as a new content item.  I first learned about the project early last year and have been anxiously awaiting it’s release ever since.  Last Monday out at OpenWorld I finally got my first introduction when it was demoed during the digital asset management session.  Now that I am back I wanted download and set up Folios for myself and here’s what I found.

First off, it’s a pretty easy install.  I was actually setting up a new Content Server instance and since the patch, it’s now been added as an initial install option.  Even still I’ve going through the documentation and there does not appear to be any prerequisites or anything too tricky other then uploading and enabling a component.  Once installed a “New Folio” prompt can be found in the “Content Management” menu.

Simple or Advanced 

Folios appear to come in two flavors Simple and Advanced.  Simple Folios are a list-view type grouping, where items which are already checked in to the content server can be grouped via a search interface.  Advanced Folios provide a greater amount of flexibility allowing for a heretical structure, items to be checked in directly, property editing, a snazzier interface and probably some other features I haven’t discovered yet.  Simple Folios can easily be converted in to advanced, but so far as I can tell, advanced cannot become simple.

Creating a Folio

For my first go, I decided to create an advanced folio, which would consist of a group of common UCM PDF documents.  Right away I discovered something cool in the ability to create “nodes” or what I might call sub-folders in the Folio.  So for my UCM documents I setup three nodes to categorise my docs; Content Server, Content Conversion Server and Folios.  Right clicking on the nodes presents options to insert new items via check in, items from search or to insert a hyperlink.  Using the check in option, I inserted several UCM docs off my desktop.  Even though they were checked in by inserting them directly in to the Folio, the Folio only keeps pointers to content, so very cleverly all of my checked in docs also became new items int he repository. 

Also of note was that I found you could add a Folio to another Folio, the affect of which appears to be similar to having added a node.  Basically the “sub-folio” becomes sub grouping in the greater group.

Folio Templates

Under the administration menu,  Folio users will find an option to create a Folio template.  Folio templates are a lot like what they sound like, templates which future Folios may be based on.  Creating a template allows you to define what types of content, how much content and what way content can be added to the Folio.  Once created, templates are stored in the repository, much like actual Folios or any other content item, and behave similarly to an XML schema template(further review will reveal they are not though).  Users have the option to base their new Folio on a template in the first step of the “New Folio” process.

Renderers

In the actions menu of the Folio interface I found a list of “Renderers”, which appear to allow on-demand ”publishing” of the Folio to various formats.  By default there are three renderers, XML, Zip and PDF.  For my UCM documentation Folio, I was able to render a ZIP version which returned a Zip containing all my PDFs in the node(now folder) based folder structure I put together along with XML documents containing each PDFS meta-data.  The PDF renderer(which actually threw an error with my advanced Folio but did work on a simple version), will create essentially a “compound document” by appending all the PDFs in the Folio together.  The XML renderer returns an XML version of the Folio, displaying meta-data for the content items.

At OpenWorld they demoed a renderer which created a complete PowerPoint presentation out of several single slide PowerPoint files.  I am not sure if or where that renderer is available.  As I understood it at the time, the PowerPoint renderer was a sample, how-to example.  Renderers appear to be an area of potential future expansion for Folios both from Oracle and hopefully other third parties.  A little bit of component investigation reveals that all renderers are registered to the CpdRegisteredRenderers table, making it a potentially straightforward process to create a new renderer in a component which also merges to CpdRegisteredRenderers.

Many Potential Uses

There are quite a few uses for Folios and I think it’s going to take some time to flush them all out.  Nearly every CMS implementation I’ve been involved with has had requirements related to grouping content together, making this a very exciting new feature to Oracle’s UCM suite.  Right off the bat, there’s a clearly uses in grouping technical documents, similar to what I’ve done in this example with the UCM documentation.  Using the PDF renderer, you could imagine a “create your own document” service where users can assembly the individual managed documents they need in to a single, complete PDF.  Another option might be to use Folios to manage multi-lingual content, relating the different language versions of a document all together.

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