Oracle buys Sun, but what does it mean for CM ? Updated

Updated 21st April - Please scroll down and read the comment left by Jorge from Liferay, who thank for keeping on the straight and narrow as far as the LifeRay portal :-)

So much for the earlier rumours of a joint Oracle-HP bid for Sun, instead the lean (?) mean acquisition machine goes for it again !

However swallowing the whole of Sun Microsystems with its own micro-processor designs, serious server hardware and its own operating system is not the same as taking onboard JDE, Siebel et al.

Nope, this one is going to take some more digesting, and could give Oracle some serious heart burn. However lets leave the discussion of indigestion for later analysis, instead lets think a little about what this means on the information management and content managment front;

Well first of all, Sun did not provide a CMS or an ECM system at all, so whats the big deal you might ask ? Java is the big deal I will respond !

The Java language and platform is a very big deal in enterprise IT, and it is of course the underpinning platform and architecture for many a content management system. Many pundits where worried about IBM getting their blue fingers all over Java, but is stewardship going to any better under Larry Ellison's team ? I really don't know and jury is going to be out on this one for a while, as is the whole issue of Oracle and open source in generally, highlighted by how Oracle will deal with the MySQL database.

Web portals are another confusing area, Sun had pretty much deprecated the old Sun Portal in favour of another open source product, LifeRay. However Oracle has swallowed up more portals than you can 'shake a stick at' (as we say in Yorkshire). So I don't see LifeRay getting a lot of attention when there is already the work being done to meld all the best elements from the old BEA (PlumbTree) AquaLogic product line into the WebLogic line to emerge as the Oracle WebCenter suite.

As for the hardware, well I can see where Sun's new massively hyper-threaded CPU's will provide a great platform for egually massive Oracle databases, and its ZFS file system and disk storage systems will provide a full on Heirarchical Storage Management (HSM) environment below Oracle Universal Content Management (aka Stellent).

So as they say in North America, Oracle can provide the full 'soup to nuts' enterprise IT environment:
1. Servers and highly robust operating system (Solaris)
2. storage (disks arrays, file systems and HSM elements)
3. The database !
4. Middleware
5. Applications (be they ECM, CRM, ERP, messaging and collab etc...)

I am still trying to figure out what the Yorkshire version of soup to nuts is? "From Ale to Yorkshire Pudding"........??

Perhaps the 'alternative' stack might be offered at the lower end of the spectrum ? Oracles' 'Unbreakable Linux' plus MySQL plus LifeRay..... etc on HP or other partners hardware (on Intel x86 architecture).

Well, all we can do now is spectate, so pull up a comfy chair, and lets sit and watch the spectacle unfold before our very eyes.... :-)

The reality of SharePoint deployments

Over at Intranetblog.com Toby has commented on a recent AIIM webinar in a post titled "SharePoint: Truth or fiction"

I am not going to repeat the post here, you can read it yourselves. However Toby notes that the AIIM research suggests the majority of real world SharePoint (MOSS 2007) deployments are at the departmental level for file sharing / collaboration scenarios.

The AIIM research backs up previous CMS Watch comment (and their comprehensive reports) on where SharePoint can find its 'sweet spot'. Most of my previous posts on SharePoint have suggested that its really a portal server / portal development platform with additional features added for collaboration and content management (much like you can buy similar add on's for IBM WebSphere, Oracle Webcentre (ex-BEA Aqualogic) or even the LifeRay OSS portal). I have also suggested that Microsoft are wrong to market SharePoint as an 'Enterprise Content Managment" platform.

However AIIM (or was it Gartner?) did coin the term 'Basic Content Services' to describe SharePoints Microsoft Office centric lightweight document management and library services features, and it appears that this is where many department level deployments are focused - on replacing disorganised and unmanaged 'file share hell' with hopefully better managed and better organised SharePoint document libraries - maybe they are even using metadata ! (sorry lets stick to MS terminology - 'site columns'........)

No doubt AIIM is right that an easy and simple introduction to enterprise information management and ECM via SharePoint based document management is better than nothing, and is a good start to helping organisations build up their information management environment. But Toby points out that the evidence seems to suggest the more 'sophisticated' web content management, records management and even forms management functionality is not seeing much use.

I will just end this post the same way I end all SharePoint posts by stating I am not knocking the product, SharePoint maybe the perfect fit for your organisation in meeting specific requirements. The caveat is that unless you follow the same process you would normally follow for a major enterprise software procurement, and develop a good set of requirements how will you know if SharePoint will meet those requirements, or if you would be better of spending thousands on WordPress or millions on Documentum ? Remember the '5P's' - Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance !

So don't assume that because your IT shared services organisation says you can have it for 'free' that there is not going to be some impact on your bottom line. Indulge in a little prior planning to ensure your solution will at least be 'good enough' even if its not 'the best ever', and as ever Prescient Digital Media stands ready to assist you :-)

Linking collaborative content creation to web publishing

Complicated title eh ?

Well this post stems from both yesterdays Oracle tech session and from a conversation I had at CMF2006 in Arhus with James Robertson of Two Step Designs (Sydney, Australia), so its quite a complicated story to start with !

In his workshop session at the conference James was lamenting that sometimes fail because they get overly complex, often because of trying to use a single platform for everything, instead of using the right tool for the right job. If you have never spotted James slides on Slideshare.net or seen his sessions, he suggests intranets are used for four main purposes:

• Content

• Communication

• Collaboration

• Activities
  

His point was that you don't need a single system or even a single platform to do all these things, but that it makes much more sense to use the right tool for the right job. So, you might provide publishing facilities, news and interactive 'eForms' via a WCMS, but if collaboration is a big thing for you, then you should buy a specialist collaboration system such as EMC eRoom or Lotus Quickr etc

He also suggested he had never seen a nice, full end to end integrated system where users could collaborate around content in the collaboration system, but then easily send it through the workflow to be published on an intranet site via the WCMS (including if necessary, linking to documents from and EDRMS). I think James was also suggesting (and I am sure he will jump in and correct me if I am wrong) that he is not a big fan of the big "ECM suites" (back to right tool for the right job ?).

Anyway after I got back to the UK, and the Open University, I got to thinking that we could have created such a setup with our full set of EMC products, but that it would have needed some custom code written to glue it all together. My 'design' if you like, would have people working on collaborative authoring in an eRoom, drop the resultant content item into a 'linked folder' – (which is a folder in which the content really resides in the main Documentum ECMS repository). From there it could be workflowed into the Documentum Web Publisher sub-system and published to the required site on the intranet. Like I say with the version 5.25 / 5.3 products we had at the time, this certainly would not have been 'out of the box' and no body, but no body I talked to back then had a very good opinion of Web Publisher as a WCMS.

However, EMC put quite a bit of effort into improving Documentum version 6 (D6) Web Publisher, and of course they were going to rebuild eRoom as .Net based web services oriented interface on top of the D6 repository. Moving along to where we are now with the D6.5 product set and we are talking about Web Publisher based blogs and wikis and eRoom is going to be replaced by CentreStage (ex-codename Magellan).

So could we be getting towards the seamless 'suite' based intranet, which does allow the use of the right tool for the right job, but by providing all the relevant tools built up from the same underlying platform ? Well not 'all' the tools, but the collaboration and content management ones, with any other application you like being surfaced via portlets in a portal ???

So, are Oracle already there ?

At the demo yesterday we saw collaboration via an enterprise portal (WebCentre Interaction – aka ALUI) with blogs and wikis etc built on the WebCentre Services infrastructure, passing content into the UCM repository (Stellent) and publishing it out via the UCM WCM module (which could also have been Oracle portal or WebLogic portal based external sites). As I said yesterday, I always had a high opinion of Stellents technology (and their web publishing was way better than Documentum) and I was also a big fan of BEA Aqualogic (Plumbtree). < Please note I may come back and edit this post, but putting links to all the Oracle products above, but tonight all the said links are sooooo slow, I can't be bothered to wait ! >

So it all looked good and pretty seamless in the demo – I guess the only thing that might put James off would be the price – lets face it, buying this is not going to be cheap....... OK possibly a sweeping statement, but lets face it, your probably going to need an 'enterprise class' budget ! But then I have always said that ECM should be treat as a major infrastructure investment, not as a 'point solution' application buy.

Oracle E2.0 Tech Briefing

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.