OpenWorld – Wednesday

Wednesday at OpenWorld was the slowest for me in terms of sessions.  There was one UCM session related to building an image repository later in the afternoon, but some scheduling kept me from attending.  Instead, in the morning, I had the opportunity to attend “Foundations of Social Networking with Oracle WebCenter”, which was a very exciting demo of Oracle’s new portal application / framework.

The session demoed WebCenter 11g, so many of the features demonstrated aren’t actual out yet.  That said, they seem to have a very good idea of what organizations are looking for beyond just a standard intranet / extranet.  The session focused on how to leverage the WebCenter “Spaces” module(11g only) to create personal and community mini-sites to facilitate collaboration and ofster social networks.  The usual Web / Enterprise 2.0 suspects were shown; blogs, wikis, message boards, messaging and personal profile pages all made an appearance.  I am very excited about WebCenter, but haven’t worked with it yet, so it’s tough for me to have a solid opinion on it.  It’s full of features and also shows a great deal of flexibility in integrating with different systems and technologies(we hear the Content Server JSR-170 connector is due out soon).  I’m going to set up a test instance in the next few days and start playing with it some, so check back for updates.

Later in the day, we were down at Oracle’s meet and greet demo area where some of the Enterprise Search folks took some time to walk me through their product.  It’s officially called Secure Enterprise Search(SES) and it’s standalone application which is designed to live in its own environment, providing search functionality across the organization internally and potentially externally too.  They call it secure because the results can be tailored to the user, based on their rights or the resource they are attempting to access.  Applications “publish” content to SES via a connector, either one from Oracle or one based on an Oracle sample framework project.  

I believe Content Server’s connector for SES is out now or at least coming out very soon.  Yesterday’s post highlighted the RSS Crawler component which is a critical piece of the Content Server/SES integration.  The one other thing I noted about SES, was that the price pointed seemed to be pretty reasonable when compared to some of the other competitors in the space.  My experience with licensing is pretty limited to a couple of the major vendors so I’m definitely not the expert in that area(among othersJ).  Based on my informal chat though, Oracle does seem to have a competitive price associated with SES.

Later in the evening Oracle threw just an amazing party / concert.  I haven’t really gotten in to the social aspects of the trip, but I have to mention what a great time I had last night.  Had a chance to catch both “The Smithereens” and Lenny Kravitz.  Billy Joel was on another stage in addition to several other popular bands.  Just a very good time and nice way to close out the conference.

OpenWorld officially closes out Thursday afternoon but instead of visiting sessions today, I’ve been on a plane all day heading back to Virginia, making this my last post from OpenWorld.

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