How to deploy Real Time Collaboration? & How does RTC work?

All access to the Real-Time Collaboration applications can be initiated over HTTP or HTTPS, but there is a limitation: the current release does not fully support the use of reverse proxy servers and load balancers.

It is therefore necessary to configure the network in such a way that users can contact the Real-Time Collaboration server(s) directly. This is less likely to be an issue for internal users on the same intranet but may be a problem for external users coming in through a corporate firewall.

In order to ensure that maximum security is maintained, it may be considered advisable to run the Real-Time Collaboration server on a middle tier node installed specifically for this.

It will only be this node that need be directly routable to (or accessible through NAT) from the outside world. The other middle tier node(s) offering other component application services (and Web Cache, Apache, the Single Sign-On access point, and all the other application components) can be protected by a reverse proxy server and load balancer in the usual fashion.

The user is running a browser somewhere on the Internet. The Oracle Collaboration Suite middle tier consists of two Oracle Application Server middle tier instances in the firewall

DMZ; one runs only the Real-Time Collaboration server, the other runs all the other components. The infrastructure instance with the Collaboration Suite database is behind

the internal firewall. The connection flow is the following:

1. The user’s browser, through whatever firewall reverse proxy server is in use, requests a connection to Real-Time Collaboration.
2. If there is no Single Sign-On cookie in the browser, the user is redirected to the Single Sign-On server for authentication. If there is a Single Sign-On cookie,proceed to step 4.
3. The Single Sign-On cookie is sent back to the browser through the reverse proxy server.
4. The user is redirected to the Real-Time Collaboration service that he requested in step 1. This service is running on a different middle tier instance, on a directly routable node.
5. If the user does not have the Web Conference and Messenger consoles installed, the Real-Time Collaboration server generates a download page for these and they are installed on the client; if they are available, they launch immediately.
6. The consoles establish a session against the Real-Time Collaboration server directly, bypassing the firewall proxy.
7. The Real-Time Collaboration server connects to the Oracle Collaboration Suite component data store.