Oracle and Enterprise 2.0 - Page 2

page 2 of 2: Changes in attitude

Part two of the strategy involves changing how employees communicate in the corporate environment to reflect how people have become comfortable with sharing information over the public Internet.

Today, for example, most companies still communicate information using the model of mailing around reports in spreadsheet format to their colleagues, with all the problems that introduces around version control and data inconsistencies, he said.

But the future changes that: A user will create a report, publish it into a content management system where it gets versioned and indexed so that it is searchable, and make that available to colleagues via the enterprise portal. RSS handles the task of alerting users to new versions of the report, discussion forums replace emails as a place to ask questions, online presence alerts a questioner that a colleague can IM or take a VoIP call to further discuss an issue, and responses can be tagged and made accessible to others through tag clouds.

“It becomes a much richer medium of communication and a medium through which people can share information,” he said.

Oracle plans to expose the variety of backend systems users access through all patterns of data binding — REST, WSRP, or JSR168. Then, it plans to add in unified content management and search, and then provide a standards-based framework for developers to design custom portals and business people to customize these applications, “and with that to integrate the number of services I talked about — traditional enterprise portal-style development, discussion forums, communities, VoIP and presence, RSS, tagging, Wikis and blogs,” he said.

Products to fulfill this vision include Oracle Universal Content Management, Oracle WebCenter Framework and WebCenter Spaces & Suite, and BEA WebLogic Portal, BEA AL-User Interaction and BEA Ensemble & Pathways.

As to its overall integration with the products it gained when it acquired BEA, Phillips promised "absolute clarity" on products and how they are coming together in a format that maintains Oracle's strategy of offering pre-integrated and complete but open, hot-pluggable and standards compliant. He also noted that all BEA products will continue under existing support timelines, with "no forced migration at all."

This article courtesy of http://www.bitaplanet.com.