This morning I got to attend an excellent briefing session at the Oracle office in Mississauga (only a 30 minute bus ride from my house !). It was the Enterprise 2.0 Tech Session, and it was very informative.
The first session or 'keynote' (if you can really call it that for such a small session) was an overview of, and positioning of Oracles product sets in the Enterprise 2.0 context. This was great for me perosnally because I have to admit to not having put a lot of effort into keeping up with their moves in this area since they gobbled up BEA. A lot of this session included references to McKinsey and AIIM Market IQ reports on E2.0, to Wikinomics, the long tail etc It was also noted that there is a major push within Oracle to embed E2.0 principles, features and functionality in all product sets, across the Fusion middleware, the traditional RDBMS and even the CRM and ERP applications suites.
Session 2 got a lot more into the product road map and the technical details.
We all know that Oracle have done a lot of said 'gobbling up' via acquisiton and merger activity, and in the ECM and portals space, I really liked Stellants content management offerings and was also a fan of BEA AquaLogic on the portal front. So it was great to see some of the integration efforts, and I know understand that alot of BEA's technology appears to have gone into Oracle's WebCentre product set. Very interestingly AquaLogic User Interaction (where do they come up with these names) or ALUI for short, has become WebCenter Interaction and is being pitched as the 'easy to implement' or 'out of the box' portal solution, while both Oracle Portal and WebLogic are being pitched as the developer frameworks on which to build your highly customised, purpose built environment (WebLogic for the big, high transaction customer facing sites, and Oracle Portal for the enterprise intranet market ??).
This to me is cool, as there was a lot of conjecture that ALUI would become the poor relation, but actually Oracle has taken a lot of the very well received and critiqued BEA web services 'middle ware' plus the ALUI tools like 'Pathways, Ensemble and Pages' which were all designed to enable 'business users' to develop mashups, simple data access applications and to add content rating and tagging. Anyway, I digress......
The full WebCentre 11g product set will be available next year, but not dates yet.
The third and final session majored on the use of Oracle Universal Content Management (UCM - the products previously known as Stellent) to manager web sites in an E2.o context. Lots of mentions of Information Rights Management (IRM) technology for securing information shared with partners and the 'communities' you might be involved in, largely for meeting 'brand protection' requirements. The session also had details on the digital asset management functionality available in UCM, although to be honest, I did not see anything new that I have not seen in many previous Stellant demo's.
Whilst I think I may post again on what I learnt today, I will finish off this posting with a link to a video we were shown this morning: Enterprise 2.0 User experience
Oh yeah, you should also check out Billy Cripes Fusion ECM E2.0 and ECM blog.
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