Collaborative Thinking

Beehive Session Notes

Beehive Unified Collaboration

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

• Enterprise collaboration is fragmented
• Need to deploy multiple products, sometimes same / sometimes different vendors
• Enterprise Messaging / Team Collaboration / Synchronous Collaboration / "Next Big Thing"
• New: Collaboration Brokering: connections, interest & expertise, relationships, terms & topic: c
• Beehive Platform: common infrastructure supporting the above domains
• Review of Beehive Services ... common components, interfaces, object model, etc
• Social software doesn't connect ou to who you should know
  • Not really the
• User maintained tags and profiles fall short
• Collaborative Brokering: Expertise Automation - Social Network Discovery - Profiles

 

Oracle Beehive & Expertise Automation In Enterprise Collaboration

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

• All forward-looking info
• Today's collaboration tools: only as effective as your social network
• It's not who you know but who you need to know (latent connections)
• Optimizing participation in key business activities
• Evolution of business productivity
  • Individual productivity
  • Group productivity
  • Enterprise productivity (Note: should perhaps be "network productivity")
• Note: Productivity not that strong of a hook - nebulous when it comes to information/knowledge workers since there has been no credible method of assessing productivity improvements due to technology - keeps coming back to "time saved" which is a very soft argument since you cannot assess how the time was re-applied outside structured task workers.
• Beehive: automate business connections, ensure intelligent participation, optimize enterprise productivity
• Note: process-centric productivity is what Oracle is saying ... exception handling, latency, etc.
• Beehive addresses who should be collaborating as well as when and why.
• Collaboration Brokering: Expertise Automation, Social Network Discovery, Secure Connection Management
• Oracle WebCenter with Oracle Beehive
  • Beehive portlets will be surfaced via WebCenter
  • Note: not clear whether WebCenter will support Beehive objet model
• Who Knows What and Who Knows Who both supported
• Demo of Beehive integrated with SharePoint
• Content search and insertion of brokering request totally within SharePoint user experience
• Note: This is the type of deep integration that Lotus should have done with Lotus Connections - missed opportunity on the part of IBM given level of SharePoint existence in market - Oracle integration includes Webparts ... Webpasts by Oracle for Mysite and other areas within SharePoint

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

The Art Of The Possible

Notes from Monday keynote:

• Charles Phillips and Safra Catz take the stage
• Discuss their own transformation
  • Transition from just sending customers pieces of technology they had to put together themselves to a mode where vendors deliver systems that work together
  • Need all pieces in order to send complete systems (Oracle's assertion that justifies Fusion - could debate that re: standard interfaces, protocols, etc - owning all the parts just one model/approach not the only one)
  • Importance of advisory boards, focus groups, etc to Oracle (all vendors actually) so they can prioritize enhancements
• What's changed over last year:
  • By delivering domain (CRM, ERP) solutions and vertical solutions (industry specific) provides them with important insight on understanding flows of work, data, etc. Basically - Oracle knows the meta model of work, the meta data in work, the activities in work as they are expressed through all the applications and supported processes  (Note: this is the wedge issue for Oracle and collaboration - collaboration in-flow of work - just wonder why its not leveraged more vs. Microsoft and IBM)
  • More platform and infrastructure discussion and management
  • Sun Oracle Database Machine (leverage setup form last night - Oracle's version of an iPod re: integrated hardward/software device - maybe Oracle should call it the Oracle "dataPod" - would make a funny graphic (a person with earbuds plugged into their enterprise data...)
• Run through customers, business units, verticals (PeopleSoft, Retail)
• Thinking out loud - you would think that a company (i.e., Oracle) with so many business solutions would have a social media solution for their customers that extends the value of the application platforms being delivered... listening to a discussion on the retail challenge - sparked the idea that social media would fit - also, the collaboration angle - when they discuss processes, design, etc - fashion planning I imagine involves creative and community interaction which would be an interesting play for social software (blogs, wikis, social networking). The data analytics might have an interesting spin re: social network analysis and social analytics in general. Processes don't end the the outcome (as being discussed) - they end with customer interaction and the value perceived by the customer from that experience so the social angle is missing as I listen. Seems inward focused, not sure CXO's are thinking with that type of boundary. Get the portal, BI angle but portals are not a new concept in this regard.
• Would have been nice for them to talk about the peering between designers - very process focused (typical Oracle) but missing the notion of building community across roles, experts, etc. Expertise location might have been a nice demo here. Processes don't get work done - people do - Oracle needs to weave in the collaborations story much more strongly and not just leave it as a portal value-add due to WebCenter.
• Discussion on Trade Promotion (Siebel), gaps in linkages of promotions to supply chain, category management, etc.
• "Oracle Siebel controls the customer relationship" on the slide - funny - companies are not in "control" of its relationships.
• Demo shows integration between Promotions and analytics and statistical modeling. Once optimizer is finished, bi-directional push back into Siebel,
• Value of pre-packaged integrations - wonder if there are open interfaces and protocols for these pre-packaged integrations.

More informative keynote than last night - just very process centric and missed opportunities to weave in the collaboration and social story - albeit a small aspect of Oracle's overall market presence - but a critical theme to not cede to Microsoft, IBM or perhaps even Cisco. Not sure the title "art of the possible" really came through - loved the concept behind the title but theme was not really strongly linked.

A Hard(ware) Keynote To Watch

Last night was an interesting keynote session to jumpstart this year's Oracle OpenWorld. Scott McNealy lead things off with an innovation theme that went through a list of Sun's accomplishments in the industry. James Gosling and John Fowler of Sun joined Scott on stage - lots of subtle messaging that Java is going to be ok, that MySQL is going to be ok, that Oracle will continue to invest in Sun technology, etc. etc. etc. Also a lot of shots at IBM - especially when it came to performance (claiming to be #1 in TPC-C) and pointing out that Sun consumes less power than IBM (poking fun at IBM's Smarter Planet marketing). There was also discussion of how Oracle runs best on Sun platforms and that will continue to be the case. When Larry Ellison took the stage - there was an interesting analogy(and some flattering remarks) given to Apple and what they've accomplished in the market by controlling both hardware and software design. The way it was presented, one might wonder whether we will someday see machines designed to run certain applications ("an ERP server").

Overall though - I was not "wowed" - Scott seemed to be delivering a farewell speech, not a keynote to pump up the crowd. Larry's dialog was more interesting but really very much compute / storage / network centric. There was no "setting the stage" for the week - so I left without much anticipation... perhaps today will set a different tone.