The Questions

Open WCM – Word on the street is that it’s close, very close actually.  In fact I think they may just be waiting for a release date.  When I arrived actually I heard it was not being demoed, but then shortly before leaving I found out it actually was on the demo grounds…doh!

ALUI – When I headed out to OpenWorld what I was hearing was that ALUi would be bundled with UCM.  That unfortunatly is not true.  There is however now a WebCenter suite, which when purchased, has licnesing for ALUI as well as a stripped down version of UCM.  The interesting thing though is that with the WebCenter suite you actually get your choice of portal; WebCenter, ALUI, WebLogic…doesn’t matter the suite gives you licensing for all of them. 

Though I like and have been mostly interested in ALUI, if there was one BEA product that Oracle seemed most interested in, it would have to be Ensamble.  Ensamble came up in just about every session I attended, in addition to the off the cuff discussions in the demo grounds and end of day activities.

My questions around WebCenter were really answered by the ALUI question.  WebCenter is still a portal, however now all the BEA portals(as well as some of the other products) can be licensed as part of the WebCenter suite.  Oracle has plans for all the portals, but strategically it’s WebCenter that they want to lead with long term.

Billy’s book – Got a copy…Got two actually as well as catching thier presentation, which was the best of the conference in my opinion.  I’ll be giving it a read and a review in the next few weeks so check back for that.

Conclusions

I really had a great time out at OpenWorld.  I had a great chance to meet many of you who I normally only talk to online as well as learn a thing or two about what those clever UCM folks are planning for the next year.

The Demo Of The Day

The name is a bit long but it makes a lot of sense when you dig in to the details.  What this is is the realization of something the UCM folks were talking about doing at last year’s OpenWorld, integrating Real Time Decisioning in to UCM to create targeting and personalization.

The demo, which basically selected an appropriate banner ad to display as we surfed a site studio web site, uses all information available to decide which ad to show.  For anonymous users that may be just their location based on IP, perhaps their browser or operating system.  For authenticated users that could also include data from their UCM profile, or if say Siebel is configured your entire profile and user history.

What’s also cool is that the configuration can learn on it’s own.  You don’t have to figure out whether your mac users are going to respond better to one piece of content than your PC ones.  Real Time Decisioning will figure that out for you, adapt to market changes and allow you to run tests to see how users respond.

Where it goes beyond being just a really powerful personalization engine though is when you factor in the “Multichannel” word in the title.  With this set up a user could theoretically log in to your web site, search for something on your web site and then perhaps call you.  If your call center is also using Real Time Decisioning(what it was originally designed for) the operator could automatically be alerted to what the caller was looking for, or even better yet, predict what the operator might want to give the caller when they get on the phone.  All of this would happen seamlessly and would adapt over time autonomously.

It’s sort like a big brother, only a really nice one that’s trying to help you out.

Aqualogic User Interaction

I twittered on this quite a bit during the session, but I had the opportunity to catch the strategy and vision for Web Center User Interaction.  The “User Interaction” part of the title is what interested me the most.  Whenever you see those two worlds(along with web center), you’re usually talking about the product formerly known as AquaLogic.

I am a pretty big AquaLogic fan.  First off many of my clients use User Interaction, which automatically makes me a bit partial.  Second though, I really like the architecture and what it’s designed to do.  ALUI has a number of features, but if I was to sum up basically what it “did” in nutshell is;  it allows you to tunnel other, non-portal, web applications as services.  Those services can then be surfaced as portlets in the container.  No java, no 168, no web parts…point it at your application and go.

The neat thing about that design though is that those portlets can be configured to render asyncronously, basically using AJAX.  Fundamentally once you have that ability the portal container becomes unessecary, you can remote-script your portlets(really non-portal web applications) on to just about any web page.  That’s the principle behind the ALUI ensamble product, which was known as an “Enterprise Mashup” application. 

Oracle appears to have big plans for Ensamble and is planning on using is as what they called a “UI Service Bus” with Web Center.  Basically allowing them to drag and drop various web applications, tunneled through ALUI or Web Center services on to thier Web Center pages or really any web application.  In fact in the demo they dropped an application on to an IPhone.

Middleware Lounge. Where the party is. Look at these rocking folks.

Morning Keynotes

I’ve been somewhat casually listening to the keynotes this morning.  Some of the highlights though:

Michael Phelps spoke.  Hey gave his daily routine, which more or less was eating, sleeping and swimming(though I think his swimming routine probably lacks the underwater handstands and cannonballs mine would include).  Interesting note, he said that the OpenWorld crowd was the most amount of people he had been in front of at one time so far.

BeeHive Announced and Demoed – BeeHive was actually demoed last year, but I guess this is it’s official launch.  Most of the demos on BeeHive look pretty nice and all, though it’s tough to dig deep on a new software solution during the 5-45 min presentations.  I say that because I was talking with some Oracle developers yesterday who were very casually talking about how they’ve been using BeeHive internally and think it’s great.

Oracle and Amazon – Oracle announced integration with the Amazon Web Services.  I wish I caught this in more detail, but it definitely sounds like they will have the ability to virtualize the Oracle database on Amazon cloud compute and potentially store information on Amazon S3.  I’ll post more details on this as I get them.

Sessions

I’m having some trouble getting in to the session builder site right now and unfortunately can’t remember the exact ones I signed up for.  I’ll put and update out when I get at them, but for now I’ll be heading over to a WebCenter session at 11.  Check back for sessions updates later.

Happy Blog Anniversary

So it’s been a year since I “really” started the blog.  The URL and some amount of content has been out here really for two years, but the ContentOnContentManagment.com you know began about a one year ago in September.

I am not sure how to evaluate the “success” of a blog, but writing and maintaing this thing has been an extremely rewarding and also challenging endeavor.  I’ve met quite a few nice people across the globe and also engaged in some great discussions.  All I can say is that it’s been great fun and I look forward to another year of writing.  Thanks very much for reading if you do, I hope you’ve gotten something out of it it, I know I have from your participation.

So What Have You Been Doing?

For the past few weeks I have to admit to a small obsession with anything related to the Large Hadron Collider.  The collider, which while I write this is hours away from being started up, is the gigantic 17 mile long science experiment out in Geneva.  My interest started of course with all the doomsday stuff, I mean how can you ignore something like that?  I started doing some reading and now I am just hooked on it.  I’m still a little freaked, but wow some of the things they are going to discover are just incredible.

One possible outcome for the CERN LHC….this is a joke

 
The reality is that the LHC is aimed at discovering new things, and when you’re doing that it’s always easy for other to point out that there’s an unknown.  Just from a personal perspective(and I know nothing about physics), I have to imagine particles end up colliding all the time, if it was possible to spawn off planet eating black holes that way I am sure we’d see quite a few more black holes around then we do now.  Thats the general crux of the LHC team’s argument, in addition to the massive amount of research and science backing their predictions.  I could be wrong, they could be wrong, but I’m onboard…good luck to those LHC folks today.

Oracle OpenWorld

OpenWorld is just around the corner and I’m pumped.  Like last year, I’m planning on posting the daily log of what I am seeing.  I may also twitter, we’ll see how that goes…Perhaps this year there will be pictures, who knows.

While I’m out there I am hoping to meet some of you, so definitely shoot me an email if you’re going to be there.

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.

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.

Some of the highlights so far:

1. There is a new web-based Site Studio editor coming out in the next few months to replace the existing activex one.  Personally this was huge for me as the IE only aspect of the existing editor has always been a pain point with some of my clients who prefer macs.  In general the editor was pretty slick.  It appears as a pop-up when you click the in-context edit button and has a tabbed interface allowing you to contribute content on one tab and update metadata on the other.  They’ve also added some additional validation which can be configured to require specific standards compliance when contributing.

 2. The WCMA project appears to now be called Open WCM and it looks to be very cool.  Not much of a demo this time, but more of an architectural discussion.  The concept is to allow web content management delivery on any platform, using any language..hence the open part.  In addition they also would like to take the content server out of the delivery environment, moving to more of a hybrid publishing model, which can be consumed by your web app.

 3. During the digital asset management session, we got a nice demo of what you can do with the Folios component that was released just last week.  Folios is very, very cool new feature which allows you to relate several content items together and have them become an additional new item in the system.  You’re new folio then can be associated with metadata, sent through workflow for approvals or, depending on the formats, published as a compound document.

Also very cool are some of ideas on how they plan on integrating Content Server with the other application in the Fusion Middleware stack.  There seems to be a big focus on delivering personalized, targeted content using Seibel profiles and Oracle’s Real Time decisioning application(part of the BI suite).  All of that is just conjecture at this point, but still very cool to hear they were working on it.