Oracle WebCenter E2.0: Bunny Marketing

When I first found the Oracle E2.0 channel on YouTube I was as PSYCHED as an intranet or portal fan boy could be.  Being one of the many "continue and converge" customers I've been eager to see some screenshots, webinars, or video walk throughs of what Oracle WebCenter intranets look like in the wild.

When the first of the Bunny video's came out I only watched a few seconds because it didn't seem targeted to me.  I had some free time tonight <I'm lame> and watched the videos, and I'm still a little confused by them - although I have to admit the background music is really catchy:)  I like the idea of WebCenter having some type of mascot, and am thrilled to see that the WebCenter product marketing team has a sense of humor.

But, since every legacy portal customer will need to migrate to a new platform in the next few years I'd like to see a harder push. The video series, Twitter and Facebook are a great start in reaching out to the current customer community, but if I had a magic wand I'd consider a few more tricks:

1. Host an Oracle E2.0 conference
1. OpenWorld is so large that it becomes impossible to find and network with other E2.0 customers
2. There aren't enough sessions on E2.0 products at OpenWorld.  To be blunt, 4 session on UCM, 4 on BPM, 2 on Beehive and 4 on WebCenter aren't enough - especially when half of them are technical and the other half are business oriented.
2. Host a webinar series that shows customers using the product
1. I've participated in a lot of webinars where folks talk about what the product does or how to make semi-sophisticated modifications, but for those customers that want to use as much out of the box as possible, how about some basic sessions for us?
2. Webinars geared toward Continue & Converge products would be great also.  As a Plumtree customer I'd love to see how features from one product line up with the other.
3. Build a community
1. I'd love to see the E20 folks focus more on community building outside of Twitter/Facebook.  Something simple like facilitating an East/West Coast customer meeting every 6 months where customers can talk about their challenges and victories with the product. As a customer we found these types of sessions very beneficial back in the Plumtree days.

For those that haven't seen the videos, enjoy!
and post a comment to let me know what you think of them.

Bunny Inc. -- Episode 1. Mr. CIO meets Mr. Executive Manager


Bunny Inc. -- Episode 2. Mr. CIO meets Mrs. Sales Manager



Bunny Inc. -- Episode 3. Mr. CIO meets Mr. Marketing Manager



Bunny Inc. - Episode 4. Mr. CIO meets Mrs. Finance Manager



Bunny Inc. - Episode 5. Mr. CIO meets Mr. Product Development Manager

First Steps into Liferay 6: Part 2: Configuring the Liferay Developer Studio

A few weeks ago I installed the Liferay 6 Tomcat bundle.  When the time came to dabble in custom portlets and experiment with themes I discovered that a Java based development environment was needed to work with the Liferay SDK.  Not a problem - my Liferay rep was quick to provide me with a trial license file and a link to download an Eclipse IDE bundled with everythinig you'd conceivably need:

• Eclipse for JEE Developers Helios SR1 (3.6.2)
• Eclipse pre-installed with the latest Liferay IDE and Liferay Developer Studio plug-ins
• Bundled Liferay Plugins SDK 6.0 EE SP1
• Bundled Liferay Portal 6.0 EE SP1 Tomcat Bundle
• Example projects bundled with additional Plugins SDK

Given that I'm working in a Windows Server 2008 x64 environment I ran into a problem unzipping the download. This is the same issue that I experienced with the Liferay/Tomcat bundle, because of long file names the OOTB Windows zip utility chokes.  My rep advised me to install WinZip, WinRar or 7Zip.  The first 2 programs failed because of the overly-long file names, but 7Zip proved a winner!

Before installing Liferay Developer Studio 1.2.0 you must have JDK 5.0 or higher installed on your machine.
You can grab the SE JDK 6 (which includes the JRE) from Oracle.

"You must have a copy of the JRE (Java Runtime Environment) on your system to run Java applications and applets. To develop Java applications and applets, you need the JDK (Java Development Kit), which includes the JRE."

The Eclipse install is straight forward, just launch the Liferay Developer Studio 1.2.0/eclipse/eclipse.exe file
and then select a Workspace folder for the IDE to store your projects in.

Given that I had already installed (and done some work building-out) a Liferay portal instance, I was fearful that the Eclipse bundle would either a) overwrite it, or b) ignore it and install another instance.  BUT, fear-not my friends! As soon as the IDE opens up you are prompted to either install a new instance, use an existing instance, or skip the launch wizard completely.

Naturally I selected to use an existing instance, and for the runtime location I unknowingly selected my "Liferay" folder, and the wizard corrected me and pointed itself to the tomcat subfolder.
 I clicked the wizard's finish button and voila!

...true, nothing magical happened, and I was presented with a very gray and unpopulated window, but I'm taking that with a grain of salt and assuming everything is configured as expected and I'm ready to start developing in this Liferay Developer Studio environment!

One thing I noticed right off the bat is that while my Liferay instance seemed properly configured all indications through the IDE were that it was stopped - which was not the case, it was up and running just fine.  Clicking the "start" button in the IDE caused my command line to begin spitting out a series of errors, so I quickly decided that the best thing would be to turn it off and see if things would behave better on a fresh start from just the IDE and that did the trick!

At barely more than a paragraph I found the install instructions to be incredibly brief but that wasn't an issue since the install was so simple!  

Curiously, at no point did it ask me for the license key that my rep had provided me with.  Perhaps that will be something I'll need to conquer in my next task which is building out a Hello World portlet and creating a custom theme!

Liferay East Coast Symposium 2011: My experience

Just back from the Liferay East Coast Symposium 2011 and thought I'd post some of the interesting bits of information that I picked up:

• Random stats:
• The conference was attended by nearly 300 people from 110 companies, up from 150 people from 75 companies in 2010
• Liferay gets ~500k hits per month from ~200k unique visitors 
• There are nearly 100 Liferay partners around the world
• In 2010 they had 40k forum posts
• Between 2002 and 2010 there have been:

• 3,794,841 downloads
• 250,000 deployments
• 31,620 website users
• 164,966 messages
• Notable quotes:
• "We want to make a software that makes a grown man cry"
• "When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail"
• "Liferay is just as good as Oracle" 
• "Liferay is like IKEA - they provide parts/components so you don't have to reinvent the wheel each time"
• "Liferay is one of the first to marry portals & cms"
• "Workflow will do 80% of what you need it to"
• Liferay takes pride in being "lite"
• Quick to download
• 150mb vs 4gb for IBM WebSphere
• Easy to use
• Richness/Depth: "80/20 Rule: 80% of the features are used by 20% of the people"
• Liferay vs. Sharepoint
• The point was made that Liferay has a community of 45k vs Sharepoint which only has a few hundred engineers.
• Liferay has never taken venture funding
• In support of "social" they did a show-of-hands poll to see who had seen a recent viral video, curiously only a dozen or two hands went up of the 200-300 in the room.  I immediately checked YouTube to see the view count and it was at 11.3 million.  I expected more awareness from this group, but it goes to show that even among techies not everyone has bought into social media.
  
• Buzzword alert: "Liferay is cloud-ready", I presume they are referring to multitenancy here, but it wasn't clear
• A show-of-hands poll to the audience indicated that around 40-50% were developers
• AlloyUI is an HTML, CSS, JS framework built on YUI with a consistent taglib
• Most libraries are lazy-load (not loaded until called)
• Liferay hooks go through rules and are supportable, extensions break rules and make it harder to upgrade
• Brian Chan built Liferay because Oracle license fees were more expensive than the organization he was working for could support.
• Portlets can be exposed in Facebook or iGoogle with only a corresponding API key, title, description and a few mouse clicks
• I saw a demo of this and it was impressive
• Road-map
  
• 6.1 will be a big investment in content management and will allow for integration with many more backend document repositories.  It will also include an improved UI for blogs and discussion boards, a richer notification template and more social sharing tools.  It was also mentioned that they plan to "invest heavily" to improve existing tools, in particular social collaboration and content management will have "huge improvements"
• 6.1 CE is slated for July, 2011
• 6.1 EE is slated for Sept, 2011
• 6.2 (which might be version 7) is slated for Sept, 2012
  
• Social Office will become an add-on package as opposed to an either/or type of app
• A "Market Place" akin to the Android/Apple markets is in the works with a target launch date of Q4 2011 for 6.1 EE
• The goal is to encourage the community of developers to contribute more 
• like cell phones, it will have a link to install the apps and the install will be automatic - no need to download and go through confusing configurations
• There will be a basic membership to post free apps and a developer membership to post apps for sale of which 20% of proceeds will go to Liferay and 80% to the developer.
• Featured Apps will be posted for $1500 per month, or $750 per month for a specific category
• There will be various purchasing models including: per user, per session, per CPU (can't be enforced currently), per server, or "all you can eat"
• http://www.wordle.net can be used to make funky word clouds - here is one based on my blog's RSS feed!
  
• They showed this chart from indeed.com which shows the fast-rising growth in Liferay jobs
  
  
  
  
  
  

  liferay Job Trends

  Liferay jobs

• The Hershey case study session was interesting.  They are hoping to replace their current WordPress intranet with Liferay in the near future.
• "Data Lists and Workflow Forms" look nice and appear easy to use
• They are coming out with a "spreadsheet view" in version 6.1.  This basically looks like an editable table which presumably would be a quick way to make quick content edits.
• The web content management seems to use automatic versioning, so users don't need to be confused by the check-in/out process.  The WCM also appears to use CKEditor
• It was stated that Kaleo and JBPM BPM tools are provided out of the box, but have to be installed separately as a plugin.

My overall impression was that this was a good conference with excellent speakers.  Their impressive growth and product capabilities will surely make them a contender for customers looking to replace their intranet/extranets.
On a side-note: Wow! Apple iPads and laptops are EVERYWHERE! I didn't know companies had embraced them so much.

J.Boye 2011 in Philadelphia, PA

I owe a great deal of thanks to the folks at JBoye for allowing me to volunteer at their recent conference in Philadelphia, PA.  Being in attendance allowed me to learn more about intranet, web content management, and social media from the viewpoints of professionals from industry leaders like World Wide Web Consortium, IKEA, Verizon, Lockheed Martin and CSC.

Most of the conference presentations are available for download on the JBoye site.

Here are some of the tid-bits I picked up from the various sessions:

• RFPs:
• don't submit checklists of features and functions to vendors.  Instead submit a series of use cases telling a "testable" story.  This allows vendors to get to know more about how you would use their product, while at the same time enabling them to directly respond to your specific needs.
• Keep the RFP to under 10 pages if possible and 15 as a maximum
• Include information about your organization, project details/scope, project timeline, use cases and vendor selection criteria, technology landscape in use currently, and upcoming projects
• avoid using yes/no in grading minutia in an RFP, instead consider using a scale 1-10, pie chart or street light (red, yellow, green).  This tells a greater story of what the vendor offers.
• Start with 8-10 vendors to submit an RFP, narrow down the field to under 4 for a demo and ask them to demonstrate the use cases from the RFP
• Consider throwing a surprise use case into the mix during vendor demo's
• Always call customer references
• One of the biggest problems in selecting a CMS is companies over-spending and over-buying
• buy what is necessary to support your current and mid-term business needs
• Platforms are a good solution for future demands, and accomplishing multiple use cases.  Products are cheaper, easier and faster to implement to fix a more narrow need.
• HTML5 has some amazing features that will simplify the coding of websites while simultaneously making them more robust.  Some of the features are available today but like many HTML features, is implemented slightly differently in each browser.
• http://www.brandtags.net offers a collective experiment in brand perception where users tag brands with a single word and consumer sentiment boils to the top.
• Google docs can be used to create user friendly forms that can be embedded into intranets and tied to a spreadsheet back-end. Speaking of which, lets see how it works - I posted one at the bottom of this blog!
• Intranets should focus on people and what they need to do.  A user task based approach is a better model than building a taxonomy around organizational hierarchy
• The folks at the Smithsonian Institute have big plans for their online presence and are vocal and open about it on Smithsonian Commons.
• The Nature Conservancy has built an impressive example of what can be done with Oracle ECM
• Part of a content management strategy is making sure you have the right content contributors.  Volunteers that are "volun-told" often lack the desire to contribute fully.  Instead consider nominating users that you feel know enough about the content, are pro-active, are quick-learners, and can get the job done.  Always reserve the right to say "thanks, but no thanks" to folks that are "volun-told" to do the job.
• Disclosure of the groups a person has subscribed to is a great way to spread the word on information that might be relevant to others.
• When launching a new social media offering pick champions from throughout your organization and ask them to recruit others.  They can help you to plan, tell the story to executives - user testimonial goes a long way, inspire others, peer support, and to engage local teams.
• IKEA has launched an extranet for their employees but rather than refer to user in the typical way, it refers to them as "co-workers".  Checkout what they have done at http://www.ico-worker.com/
• The word "you" appears on their homepage 26 times - talk about being "co-worker" centric!
• It is easy to see how they could be voted one of the world's ten best intranets of 2008 by the user-experience research firm Nielsen Norman Group (NNG)
• In one session a particular company discussed the history of their intranet and referred to their use of Sharepoint as their darkest years.  When polled by the presenter the audience revealed similar experiences.
• Being an ex-CSC'er I couldn't help but be impressed by the presentation by Claire Flanagan on their C3 employee social media site which runs apart from their IBM WebSphere portal.  One idea heard several times in the conference was fail big and fail often, but something tells me that CSC's relatively new platform has a bright future.  I'll definitely be doing some research to try to uncover what their underlying platform is...Jive?
• Terminology: Social scares executives, Collaboration  is dated, Innovation might be more appealing
• The Johns Hopkins University: Applied Physics Laboratory allows employees to submit suggestions, each year employees are allowed to vote on up to 10, then the winning ideas are acted upon.
• Products worth investigating more: cubetree, remindo, yammer
• Use workflow, ESPECIALLY when it comes to publishing to social media sites. No company is immune

• Make sure you have a good PR team just in case: 
• http://redcrosschat.org/2011/02/16/twitter-faux-pas/