Tuesday was another fun day here at OpenWorld in San Francisco. First session of the day was the UCM product roadmap, which appeared to be pretty consistent with what we’ve seen since Stellent was acquired by Oracle. There were a couple items of interest though:
1. Content DB is not going away. Content DB was Oracle’s content management system prior to the Stellent acquisition. I personally don’t have much experience with it, but understood it to be very good at storing large amounts of content. Beyond that though, I’m not sure where it’s strengths and weaknesses are. With Stellent Content Server being brought in to the fold, I think we all expected Content DB to sort of fade away, instead they seem to be positioning it as a platform for archiving historical content.
2. Heard more about leveraging integrations with the other applications in the Fusion Middleware stack, specifically Oracle’s Real Time Decisioning(RTD) application, which is part of their BI application. This is really about the most exciting thing I’ve heard since I’ve been here and is just a super cool idea. RTD is very good at determining what they call the “Next Best Activity”, meaning what is the next best thing you can do or show this user. They’re hoping to tie this to the content server, so that you can identify areas on a web page which will dynamically determine what the next best piece of content is to show the current user based on their previous behavior and profile. Sort of a super-charged personalization engine.
Later in the afternoon I attended the “50 Ways to Integrate with Oracle Universal Content Server” session. For anyone who attended Cresendo last February, it was pretty much the same session with a couple new items in the 50 ways list, like integrating with Oracle WebCenter(I wonder what they removed?). Interesting stuff and a nice look at how flexible the content server’s architecture is, but what was very cool was that they talked about a new component called RSS Crawler.
The concept behind the crawler is to provide the ability to output a snapshot of all the content in your server to a XML file out on the file system. This is a very good thing, because it should make integrating with external, third party, enterprise search applications much easier. I have a little bit of personal experience with this, integrating Content Server with Endeca’s search platform, and only wish this component was out a year earlier.
