Everyone is talking about Enterprise 2.0. It came up at a recent online strategy briefing hosted by Oracle president Charles Phillips and senior VP of development Thomas Kurian.
At the event, which provided an overall outline of how Oracle would integrate BEA’s middleware technology into its roadmap, Kurian discussed how Oracle is now evolving its middleware product to support the new styles and patterns of development and communication in the age of Enterprise 2.0 and portals.
“The notion of a portal is evolving in two fundamental ways, from the point of view of how you integrate web publishing, and transactional styles of development, and the notion of communities,” said Kurian. “And secondly it also is evolving to integrate a number of these technologies — discussion forums, Wikis, RSS, blogs, communities, etc. — so it becomes a much richer medium of communications.”
Kurian defined Oracle’s product strategy around this as enabling users to use a single programming model to support the multi-channel composite interface resulting from the merger of different styles of applications in this new world, as well as transforming how people share information.
“By multi-channel we mean the ability to run this composite user interface on mobile phone, on web browsers, on PDAs or a variety of styles of devices, and by composite interface we really see the convergence of different styles of applications,” Kurian said.
He pointed out that traditionally developers would use different frameworks and toolsets to create: 1) the rich media web sites that run the corporate dot.com; 2) the web front end that performs transactions into an enterprise application; 3) a traditional portal that accesses information from different places under a single user interface; and 4) a social computing site such as a portal with embedded communities of users sharing information.
That created difficulties when companies wanted to extend their portals to support transactions into an enterprise application, for example, because portals support a non-transactional interface such as JSR 168 or WSRP.
“Our plan is to unify the programming model for all of these because we basically see all of these converging,” he said. “Every web site wants to have portal-like capabilities, every portal-like capability wants to publish rich media and have social computing facilities. So that’s part one of the strategy.”
Next page: Changes in attitude
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.
