Fusion Middleware Patchset 5 in the Wild

Oracle slipped out the fifth patchset release for the Fusion Middleware products during the middle of the night on the 22nd of February.  For the most part things will be very familiar to longtime users.  One of the most visible changes is that the branding has caught up with the software.  Oracle Content Server is now Webcenter Content,  Imaging and Process Management is now Webcenter Imaging.  It feels like an end of an era!

ImageSource has a customer that was entering an upgrade project for their Fusion Middleware based solution.  After two surprisingly easy days I got their development and test environments up and running with this new release.  Oracle has stated this released isn’t focused on adding lots of new features but they have rolled up a lot of bug fixes and patches that previously had to be installed separately into this release.  This is by far the best release of this platform ever.

That’s not to say Oracle didn’t sneak in some great new features.  Folks who haven’t got to try out the Oracle Business Process Management feature back in PR4 will find huge improvements in this release.  One of the Webcenter Imaging additions I appreciate is a built-in configuration editor for any Oracle solution accelerators installed in the environment.  Most folks probably haven’t had to work with those much but as one of the few who have let me tell you it’s a breath of fresh air to start seeing official Oracle tooling support and documentation for those things.

The folks at AMIS have a good write up with lots of reference links and general impressions of the release.  All in all,  I’m really excited to see what the future brings.  Oracle has come a long way since the initial release of the 11g platform as a whole.  Even from PS2 this seems like lightyears ahead.

Les Harris
Systems Engineer
ImageSource, Inc.