OOW15: Microsites with SCS on top of DCS

Most of us are familiar with or have at least heard of the concept of microservices, this year at Open World I also heard the term microsites more and more and I went on an investigation to find out more about the possibilities. I was surprised to find out I got more and more enthusiastic about this concept and the possibilities with the Oracle Cloud.

Microsites is a concept for a small temporary site. You can think of example like a page for a market campaign, an event, a product launch, etc. Oracle offers this with the help of two cloud services the Document Cloud Service (DCS) and the Sites Cloud Service (SCS).

The DocumentCloud Service is already live and ready to use, this is a tool to help you collaborate and share documents with others. It has a lot of out of the box functionalities, a mobile application and you can even get your content offline, for example to work on your ipad when disconnected.

In the concept of microsites you put all your web content, documents, images, etc in one or more folders on your machine. Use the sync master tool to synchronize these folders back to the document cloud. The DCS assets can then be used by the Sites Cloud Service.  

This is what the sync master tool looks like:

Oracle Sites Cloud Service will be coming soon, this is in terms of a couple of weeks. The documentation of SCS is already up and running, so you can check it out. Within SCS you have a WYSIWYG editor to create sites. The product is shipped with a few standard themes, but you can create your own or use an existing bootstrap theme to help you set up the basics for  the site. The layout management of the site is not done by the theme, but in the edit modus of the site.

In the left hand sidebar you can easily switch between the Documents in DCS and the Sites in SCS:

After this you can drag and drop out of the box components to create your website, add images/galleries, youtube videos, documents/folders and more. You can access any content in DCS and drag & drop it on the site. You can rearrange component on the page any way you like.

When you start editing you create an ‘update session’ in which you make several changes, this features helps with creating several changes and publish (or schedule) them as one batch to the live website. You can even work separated on different batches in different parts of the microsite. 

In the left hand side bar you see that you can drag & drop components from several menus, in the top bar you see a toggle to switch between edit and preview modus:

I am sorry the screenshots are a bit blurry and vague, but they are the best I have for now :)