TL;DR: The archive_lag_target parameter will force log archiving in Standard Edition.

Just a quick note here that I wanted to share since I didn't see anything directly confirming this when I was searching around.

I have an Oracle 11gR2 Standard Edition (SE) database that I'm also maintaining a manual standby for, since Oracle Data Guard is not available in SE. I created a metric extension in EM12c to alert me if the standby is more than 1 hour behind the primary. However since this is a very low-activity database, archive logs were not switching even once an hour. Obviously, I could include a command to force a log switch/archive in the script that I use to push archivelogs to the standby. However we all know that with Data Guard on Enterprise Edition (EE), one would use the archive_lag_target initialization parameter to set the desired maximum standby lag. Oracle enforces this by performing a log switch at most every X seconds, where X is the number specified by the archive_lag_target value. By default this is set to 0, which disables the feature.

I had assumed that archive_lag_target would only work in EE but decided to give it a try and was pleasantly surprised to see that it does work as intended in SE. So I can set archive_lag_target=900 to specify a 15 minute maximum log archiving (it would be more frequent if the database activity warranted an earlier switch).