WebCenter Vision and Strategy Session

Notes from Oracle OpenWorld presentation - only took notes on the social and collaboration aspects of the session.

• Organization challenge: connecting people, process, and information (not new, well know challenge)
• Bring social computing into portal to solve this problem
• E2.0 and portals: integrated multi-channel user interaction environment, unified access to tools, information, etc
• Same environment for work and social, facilitate common access and transact activities
• Transform how user work with each other
• Protect/leverage portal investment

Note: I don't disagree with Oracle's portal-centric approach - clearly, you should be able to surface portal elements within a portal. The disagreement I have is Oracle's belief it seems that a destination site is not equally important at times. Jive, Telligent, Lotus Connections are more along the lines of a destination site model. Destination sites are a requirement for many clients I talk to and has become a basic use case scenario. I would like to see Oracle have a collection of portlets that render a specific branded social network site for those that want a specific "place" to meet people's interest in having that destination sense of community (even if it is WebCenter underneath - similar to Spaces actually - it just would not co-mingle social and work elements). Lotus Connections has integration with WebSphere so they are on the track of distributing social elements into other applications and platforms. Jive and Telligent need to tackle that item at some point.

• Roadmap for Portals & User Interaction roadmap, review of 11g including addition of WebCenter spaces for collaboration and social networking
• New releases: WLP ("Sunshine"), ALU/WCI ("Neo"), WebCenter ("Roadrunner") as well as SharePoint integration, mobile, personalization, activity intelligence and recommendations
• Wish there was more consistent use of terminology - social computing, social services, Web 2.0, social networks - all these terms on the same slide without any consistency or context. Is social networks a social service? Unfortunate.
• Infrastructure slide now loses those social terms - hmm ... where did they go?
• Demo on activity streams and composer (developer tool) which leverages REST interface layer
• WebCenter Solutions: WebCenter Spaces, Social Networks, Mobile Spaces
• Social computing and social software: lack of definitions inhibits clear explanation of what Oracle is doing ... "social software makes people aware of new, relevant information" - really? That's an odd definition. Makes social software sound like KM - goes on to mention collective knowledge.
• Team Sites vs. Social Networks: Team is about a group coming together, has structure, permissions, process drives participation (note: not always the case - but serves to make Oracle's point).
• Social Networks: individuals sharing activities, tracking people, interest driven (note: this is a rather bizarre definition of social networks - really - misses the point of social networks entirely - social networks exist within groups and teams).
• WebCenter Spaces: instant communities, team sites ... designed for business users, pre-integrated with Composer, can be extended by IT, etc.
• Personal Spaces, Group Spaces, Business Role Pages (traditional portal)
• Group Spaces can be embedded into applications
• Social Networking; connections ... sharing ,., activity stream ... note: unfortunately a very techno-centric view
• Include "recommendations", mobile support and REST interfaces
• People aspect integrates with HR (no mention of identity - too bad)
• Nice screen shot of integrating social network components into business application
• Activity streams within group space

Comments

[John Schwiller @iJohnDNS]

Interesting to note (here and Twitter) that apparently there wasn't any mention of Beehive or the (possibly) planned integration of Beehive with WebCenter.

Just about to read the Beehive Statement of Direction (Oct 2009) which might make it clear that Beehive is/will be providing many of these services to WebCenter.

However I still find it hard to forget about time spent with OCS. Or the early days with Plumtree.