Getting Started with Oracle Content & Experience Cloud
What is Oracle Content and Experience Cloud?
Oracle Content and Experience Cloud is a cloud-based content hub that lets you manage your content and digital assets wherever you are, keeping all your files at your fingertips at home, in the office, at the airport, or in a hotel halfway across the world.
Easy-to-use collaboration and workflow management that helps you streamline the creation and delivery of your content to improve both customer and employee engagement.
In today’s world, experiences are everywhere — speakers, in cars, watches or headsets, you name it.
So what is standing in the way of truly frictionless, unified and consistent multi-interaction customer experience?
Today the average enterprise is managing content in at least 5 siloed / vertically integrated content systems. Brands lose 10s of millions in marketing investment each year due to misaligned messaging and badly targeted promotions across the customer journey.
A scattered content strategy makes it challenging to deliver compelling content experiences, because:
1) Finding & Authoring “Quality” Content across the customer experience presents several challenges.
2) Syndicating & Personalizing content across all channels is nearly impossible.
3) Keeping Content Experiences Fresh: the inability to update content separately from the front-end application forces developer involvement and results in simple changes becoming projects and costing way more than they should.
These organizational challenges, manual process and segregated CX content strategies translate into broken experiences for customers.
Why Oracle Content and Experience Cloud?
Content is at the heart of all marketing and sales efforts and therefore with Oracle Content and Experience Cloud you can share, collaborate, process and manage all your content easily and effectively.
All you need is a computer, tablet, or smartphone and you’re good to go. You can manage your content just like you’d expect, adding, deleting, and moving files as needed. If a picture needs to be approved before use on a website, you can view it on your desktop or mobile device, approve it, and move it through the design process.
You can share entire folders with others, or just individual files. Whatever you share, you’re in control of who can get to your files and what they can do with them. You can also share websites and collections of digital assets, so others have access to all the content that’s needed for a project.
It’s easy to keep your content synchronized between a local computer and the cloud. Install the desktop app on all your desktop or laptop computers and it automatically keeps your files synced across all of them.
No more emailing files to yourself or tedious copying to flash drives.
Websites can be created and reviewed as needed with out-of-the-box templates and themes. You can easily preview what your site looks like on devices with different screen sizes. For an optimal mobile experience, page content is automatically rearranged on smaller screens. Your sites will use the most up-to-date information and assets to produce always-current material.
Under the hood, Oracle Content and Experience Cloud includes a content delivery network to ensure that web pages are distributed and hosted around the world, so visitors to your site in the US are not waiting for a European server to send the web pages and vice versa.
You can manage all the assets you need for your website in one place and set up policies governing the use of those assets. Leverage content and data from existing sources to use it effortlessly where it’s needed, right now.
You can easily publish and update your sites and make them available immediately. You can work on one or more updates, preview the site, and then, when you’re ready, publish the update with a single click.
Streamlined content sharing means more efficiency and less gaps in shared knowledge.
You can create content items, such as articles or blog posts or listings, and publish the items on a website or in a brochure or wherever it’s needed. Different layouts mean that the content exists separately from the format, freeing you to update your content as needed without worrying about how it will look or whether it will fit on the page.
Oracle Content and Experience Cloud: it’s there where you need it and when you need it so you’re always in touch with all your enterprise content.
If you are looking for the products and features pages, look no further. You will find them here: https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/paas/content-cloud/user/getting-started-content-and-experience-cloud.html
How to get Oracle Content and Experience Cloud?
First, you will need to sign up to get an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Free Trial Account that includes the Free Tier here.
With a Trial Account you’ll get 300$ for a 30 day trial period at the end of which, you can still use the services included in the free tier. You can find here more info about it.
Once you get access to your Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Account, open the panel on the left by clicking on the hamburger menu on the top left corner.
Navigate to Application Integration and then select Content & Experience by clicking on the menu item.
NOTE: when I’m writing this article there are two menu items that have the name “Content & Experience”. One is under “Platform Services” and brings you to the Gen1 version. Please make sure you get the Gen2 Content & Experience under the menu Application Integration -> Content & Experience
From here you can select the blue “Create Instance” button and you will get a window similar to the one below.
Here you just need to fill the Instance Name, a short Description (optional), a notification email and finally click on the “Create” button.
Note: The email you insert at this stage will receive a “Welcome to Content & Experience” email with a direct link to access the instance once it will be ready.
After a couple of minutes, your instance should be ready. You will receive an email with a link or you can click directly on the instance in OCI console to access all instance’s details and to get the service’s URL (by clicking on Open Instance).
The welcome page of the instance should look familiar to the screenshot below.
It’s done! You can now enjoy Oracle Content and Experience 😊
