This weekend I am heading back to San Francisco to attend Oracle’s annual OpenWorld conference. I’m pretty excited because this will be my first interaction with some of the Stellent folks since their last conference, Cresendo, in February. Back in February Stellent was acquired, but still not wrapped in to the Oracle fold. There were quite a few questions about the direction of the product line as well as where it would fit in the Oracle stack. Everything we heard then indicated things would be the same or better under Oracle, and so far we’ve seen nothing to contradict those statements, but this conference will be my first opportunity to see where Oracle is taking the product and what direction they see for the future.
Some of the big questions I hope to find out are:
1. What happened to WCMA? It stood for Web Content Management for Applications(I think) and was supposed to be the next generation of Site Studio. They demoed what they had so far at the kick off event at Cresendo and it looked insanely cool. Supposably it would work with .NET, JSP, etc and most importantly provided true in-line editing. Meaning no more heavy-duty, IE only, editors. Since then I haven’t heard anything about it(though I haven’t really followed up on it either). I hope to find they are still working on it and are closer to a release.
2. How will Content Server and WebCenter fit together? WebCenter is Oracle’s pretty cool new portal or portal framework. It runs on their app server and has a ridiculous list of cool features: Blogs, Wikis, Messageboards, VOIP integration(what?, why?, how??), Messaging Integration, etc. The current version uses Oracle’s old content management package, Content DB as it’s content repository, but it’s begging to be linked up with Stellent. It’s pretty clear that coupling the two apps is the plan of the future, if not the present, but I would love to see some examples.
3. What is the future for Content Server? This is kind of a cope-out catch all question, but you have to wonder what direction the product is headed now that Oracle has been sailing the ship for a few months. Content Server was a pretty good product when they bought the company, so it’s sort of tough to just point out the weaknesses and say fix that. There are a lot of areas you could see them exploring; Search, Security, Social Networking all seem to be major priorities right now. Will they be hitting them all or is there an immediate need? Also there are a wide variety of uses for Content Server, from records management to document management to digital asset management to web content management. Even though they all fall under content management, is there one area that happens to be a higher priority then another, perhaps due to profit or because is fills an existing need in the Oracle stack?
Those are some of the big questions I have heading out to San Francisco. I feel pretty confident I’ll get answers to them and probably bring back a couple new ones. It’s going to be a busy week, but starting Monday I hope to start posting a daily log of what I’m seeing while I’m out there. It should be a great time though and I hope to meet some of you out there.
