Oracle UCM 10g Folios - New way to assemble and organize content

Oracle UCM Folios is one of the many cool features that Oracle UCM has introduced in its 10gR3 version. In content management, one of the important feature most organizations look for is grouping/reuse of existing content from different parts of the website. Folios are built to support such functionality. It also improves the productivity of the website as is claimed by Oracle.

Folios is a new UCM component and installing it follows the same process as installing any other component in UCM, via the Component Wizard. Once installed, you can create a simple folio in matter of seconds: Go to the content management server and click on new folio, provide the simple folio type as the folio type and load the folio.Now save this folio and the folio is created. One might have a question "What is this Simple Folio type we selected?". Yep, thats right, it is the template on which you have based this folio. You can create folio templates and provide structure and the options available to the nodes in the structure. This is what provides the options shown to the content editors who are creating the folios based on this template. A folio creates a simple flat file which consists information about the items in the folios and any additional custom properties defined in the template for the folio.

Folios provide slots for either checking in new content or connecting to an existing content on the content server. It allows us to download either a zip, pdf or XML rendition of the contents in the folio. Similar to any content item in the content server, Folios have security, workflow, version control and all other content features.

Now getting to the application part of these folios. One can setup a template having predefined structure for preparing for presentations, where in the first section contains static sections of the presentation like background of the company, while the second section is dyanmic and varies based on the contextual requirements. For example, you have two folios, one for Company A and another for Company B, in which case you can link the static section of the folio to the same static content related to your company and other details, while the dynamic section of two folios are linked to content relevant to Company A and Company B respectively. You can create new folio for Company C by assembling/reusing the content that is for Company A and Company B.

One another potential great feature of this for the future is to have content items in the server and group the items on the fly and construct folio pages for end users based on the permissions for that specific user providing for a personalized presentation for the user of the site.

Pack things into a folio ;) and WOOOHOOO ready to go!!!!!