My Oracle OpenWorld 2011 experience: Notes on WebCenter

I'm just settling in after attending Oracle OpenWorld 2011 earlier this month, followed by a fantastic week exploring the west coast (Yosemite, Bodie, Reno, Klamath Falls/Crater Lake, Seattle and Vancouver).  Now that I'm back I have a few days before heading down to Washington DC to attend the KM World: Microsoft SharePoint Symposium 2011, so I thought it was about time that I posted all of my notes!

Forgive the sentence fragments and partial thoughts...my laptop was acting up at the conference and I write significantly slower than I can type.  All in all it was a good conference and I'm extremely grateful to Oracle for my free passes for being an ACE and a blogger.

WebCenter Customer Advisory Board
Kumar Vora, SVP Product Development Oracle WebCenter
There are 6 high level trends which will influence Oracle's WebCenter strategy and products over the next few years. They are essentially "motherhood & apple pie" meaning they are common across the industry, however the uniqueness is in Oracle's approach/reaction to them.

1) Personalization
-not about preferences in the traditional sense, but more about system activity
-things you do more frequently should be surfaced
-things your friends do, should associate more

2) Mobility
-mobile devices are far more functional than PCs in the short term (camera, gps, etc)
-design for a mobile device gives you flexibility to design for more functionality than you would get if you designed for a PC
-the approach to think first about mobile devices and special characteristics is a more modern strategy than starting on a pc and thinking of how to reduce functionlity to a mobile device.
-This is a complex area for everybody given the rapid evolution and various mobile operating systems

3) Social
Lightweight, connecting people, connectivity
Bringing consumer into the workplace

4) Multi-channel
-device form factors, physical presence, etc

5) Consumerization of IT
Consumerization of IT
IT reacting to the consumer space (email, cell phones, laptops, consumer web)

6) Self service
-making it easier to do what you need to do


Additional notes:
Sites doesn't use UCM today but will be able to in the future.
WCM capabilities will be integrated into Sites
The WebCenter space is growing, there will be some aquisitions in the future.
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Yogesh Gupta, FatWire
There are more developers, project managers and resources today than there were 60 days ago.
Every employee is still there.
6x as many sales people than there were 60 days ago.
Your sales person will probably change!
Fatwire is not a social product although it does have comments, ratings and the such.
Fatwire was an enterprise software company, focus on enabling enterprises to create really engaging experiences online. Primarily used for external sites.
Customers: Hartford, 3m, Ford (myford.com), Apple, Walmart, Banco Santander, Epsom
Features include: site design, targeting, analytics, managing user experience, multi-device, engagement, localization, a rich dynamic experience.
The product was used in ways they hadn't envisioned such as for intranets.
Often married with a commerce engine such as ATG to take over the shopping cart (note: how ironic that Oracle recently purchased ATG as well!).
Presence jumped from 12 to 150 countries.
200+ employees before aquisition

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Ken Moore
VP of Product Development, Oracle WebCenter

Oracle is known for bottom up development - which is to say that they build/acquire great technology and usability is an afterthought, something usually of last concern.
They are actively trying to change that for WebCenter.
He admitted that Oracle "Has a ways to go for a great out of the box experience."

Oracle.com: Today the site is fully based upon UCM (aka Oracle WebCenter Content).  They plan in the next release to roll out some WebCenter Sites (aka Fatwire) feature into it.

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The 11g product set focused on performance, scalability, and the integration of various components.
RC12 - next calendar year.
Oracle is looking to make deeper integration with ATG & Siebel
The plan for 12g is to offer new user experience features inside the browser and on tablets, as well as the syncing of things - technology like Dropbox (they mentioned this concept of "sync" and "dropbox like features" several times.

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Brian Dirking - WebCenter Marketing
Join the Oracle Social Enterprise Group on LinkedIn: http://linkd.in/ORCL_Social
also signup for the Oracle WebCenter Newsletter: http://bit.ly/News711

Collaborate 2012
April 22-26 Las Vegas
Developer and user focused
3+ days of dedicated content
Separate tracks for each pillar

They are looking for folks to join/assist with the WebCenter special interest group http://bitly.com/UCMSIG
The content management SIG is changing to a WebCenter SIG
Looking for folks to joing the advisory board
Not a big committment, phone call every month or two.  Contact Brian if you are interested.

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Portal Breakout Session: WebCenter Portal Product Strategy
The strategy is persona focused around the following users:

1. Java Developer: data controls, wrapper APIs
2. Technical Power User: OOTB data sources, extended runtime tooling to build UIs at runtime
3. Web Developer: Expose REST endpoints to build UIs with UI technology of choice
4. Business User: business components, pre-packaged and business-user friendly

This announcement caused some concern among CAB members who asked where was the end user in all of this and why aren't they #1 on the list.  The answer was that the end user is implicitly #1 on the list and that this list of personas was more for how to maximize the platform.  All the same, I wish they had been more explicit, especially given the UI concerns they brought up earlier in the meeting.

Roadmap
1) Portal Server & Tooling
Template Driven Portal, more tools/features and pre-built templates to serve as a foundation for gadget integration.
Enhanced in-context social tools
Migration and upgrade tools
Directory: enable power and business users to publish, share, discover, and consume portal artifacts
Security & Extended Profiles: enable portal to deliver personalized user experience based on rich user profiles and dynamic authorization
Runtime tooling: enable power users to build & manage portals. Enable business users to personalize using intuitive tooling (enhancements to admin console)

2) UX Platform for Applications
Composite Applications & Mashups: make the integration of enterprise applications into WebCenter portal easy for Java Developers, web developers, technical power users, and business users
12g Roadmap:
-application packs: library of portal solutions
-foundation for gadget integration
-enhanced in-context social and mobile delivery capabilities
-data controls for Oracle Applications - Siebel, EBS, PeopleSoft, etc
-Migration and upgrade tools for legacy portal customers

3) Portal as Platform for Collaboration
-provide in-context, seamless integration of social tools

4) Delivering Portal Content to Mobile
Provide framework for creating and engaging experience for users accessing the portal through mobile channels

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Afterthoughts:

After the CAB I was left with the following questions running around in my head:
1) Under what, if any circumstances, would Sites (Fatwire) be used for an intranet over WebCenter Portal? and what would the benefits or limitations of Fatwire be when used as an Intranet.
2) If Jive is used as for some aspects of the Social pillar, is an aquisition of Jive on the horizon?
3) Why isn't there a pillar for metrics/analytics? Where does a customer get that type of information for the products in the pillars?
4) what is the deal with WebCenter Interaction and the other portal products? Over the last two years "Continue and converge" has seemed more like "ignore and forget"
5) From a tool/feature perspective what is the roadmap?


Quotes and notes from OOW Sessions
WebCenter Content Integration: Deep Dive
Yannick Onega "the integration between UCM and Webcenter (currently) is very bad"


Strategy & Vision - Content, Sites
Content:

• Focus on UI and sync (dropbox) features
• Develop a next generation end user & admin interface
• Content synchronization and mobile access
• Enterprise imaging w/ deeper BPM integration & updated capture capabilities

Sites:

• New site building and authoring interface
• Enhance mobile, gadget, social, user generated content
• integrate portal, content, connect (social)
• marketing centric experience management
• w/ embedded actionable analytics

Panel Discussion: Why We've Gone Social: Was it Worth it
There were 4 people on the panel from very large companies.  When asked how many of them were using the tool out of the box (uncustomized) 3 of the 4 said they were using it directly out of the box.  The 4th company explained how they had particular security issues specific to their organization and they had to make some tweaks to the security of the tools but from a UI perspective it was out of the box.

When the panel was asked what changes they would like to see in the WebCenter Social tools they responded with:

• Improved usability
• Tighter integration of WebCenter products (Content, Portal, Social) to ease the installation, administration and development burden
• Seamless migration capabilities
• A Dropbox/sync feature