Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog

Is Bluenog’s Use of Open Source Sustainable?

Blogger: Larry Cannell

There have been some recent interesting posts discussing Bluenog, a company which sells the Bluenog ICE (integrated collaborative environment). This is a product consisting of a portal framework, content management system, a report generator, a wiki, and a calendar all working within a secured environment using a granular permission model and is capable of integrating with enterprise single sign-on systems. The system looks to be very Enterprise 2.0-ish and may provide a useful intranet environment that brings together the breadth of information needed by knowledge workers. I had a chance to look at the product at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference and talk with the company in an extended briefing. The product should get the attention of many IT managers.

While the Bluenog ICE product itself looks interesting, it is the business model the company uses to develop it that is causing a controversy and, in my opinion, raises some flags. Bluenog advertises itself as an open source company (or, rather, that is what most people walk away thinking when they have seen or read about the company). To be precise, here is what Bluenog says about their use of open source:

Bluenog ICE leverages several open source CMS, open source collaboration, open source portal and open source BI projects. These projects provide the building blocks for Bluenog ICE and allow us to provide tightly integrated solutions at a fraction of the cost of traditional alternatives.

The web page linked above lists a total of 19 open source projects as being used within the Bluenog product so, clearly, Bluenog is a consumer open source software. However, although the distinction may be subtle, the way Bluenog uses open source is different than what most enterprise IT managers may be expecting.

First, let’s be clear, Bluenog sells a proprietary product. Bluenog does not make the resulting source code of their commercial product available via an open source license. Paying customers get a copy of the source code but this offers none of the benefits, such as transparency and choice, that enterprises can gain from leveraging open source. What can you do with a copy of the source code? Open source becomes powerful when it is out in a community, gaining new features, getting security flaws fixed, etc.

Second, the only company that has benefited from Bluenog’s approach to open source is Bluenog itself, not its customers. But the sustainability of that benefit is questionable. Let me explain.

A number of the open source products used, which provide core ICE features, require significant changes to work in the Bluenog framework and these changes are not contributed to any sort of open source community. In essence, major parts of Bluenog are built from forks of open source products that are folded into their proprietary framework. Any enhancements or security patches from the originating open source community would have to be manually integrated into Bluenog because they are now separate products. For example, Bluenog is built with a version of the Hippo CMS that is one major version behind the main project.

So the question enterprises should be asking is this: Is Bluenog’s development model sustainable? Arguably, other companies have used open source this way. For example, IBM’s Lotus Symphony is based off an old version of Open Office. However, Bluenog is different for two reasons. First, Bluenog isn’t IBM. They are a startup and have limited resources. Second, they are creating a whole new integrated product based off of the amalgamation of several open source products, which sounds like a big integration challenge. IBM is re-basing the next release of Lotus Symphony on Open Office 3. Can Bluenog say the same about Hippo CMS? Do they care about future versions of Hippo CMS or are they content with keeping the older code, essentially turning these pieces into their own proprietary code?

If I were an enterprise IT manager considering Bluenog I wouldn’t let their use of open source sway me at all and evaluate them as a proprietary software vendor. I would also start asking questions about how they plan on sustaining the development of the product. Bluenog’s approach to using open source may have helped initially to get the first product out the door faster. However, the enterprise software market is a marathon not a sprint.

Oracle WebCenter and Fusion Middleware 11g

Blogger: Craig Roth

Oracle's analyst summit in mid-June provided a good look at their plans for Fusion Middleware 11g and WebCenter (released July 1st for download; see summary of features here).  Now that we're out of non-disclosure mode (and into "please disclose!" mode) I'd like to share my high-level impressions.  They covered a ton of stuff, but my view is biased towards my coverage area of portals with connections to search, productivity, and collaboration. Other Burton Group analysts were also in attendance from our Identity and Privacy Strategies team and our Application Platform Strategies team (see Anne Thomas Manes' thoughts here).

First, although Oracle owns 4 portal products, all the portal-related time was spent on WebCenter. Sure, other portals were mentioned in bullets as examples of how they can plug in (or consume WebCenter's social software), but it was clear WebCenter is the leading actor here (and supporting actor in the stories of the SOA, identity, and enterprise application teams). This confirms what I (and Oracle) has been saying: that WebCenter is the primary portal and that the other 3 (Oracle Portal, WebLogic Portal, and WebCenter Interaction née Plumtree) will be supported and have their die-hard fans but will not be best for new portal projects.

It was helpful to hear Oracle frame its collaboration/portal/search/productivity/social software ambitions in relation to Microsoft SharePoint.  For all its plusses and minuses, SharePoint provides a common point of reference against which to measure.  They described how they line up with SharePoint as an alternative, can coexist with it, and where they surpass it.  This is what IBM should have done with Quickr+Connections at Lotusphere.

As with SharePoint, WebCenter provides an impressive set of functions in one box. There is often better integration between WebCenter and other Oracle assets (like their applications and development tools) than Microsoft where other groups can sometimes get away with ignoring what the SharePoint and Office group does.

There are numerous SharePoint analogies in WebCenter.  From conversations with the execs there I found that some are intentional and in other cases they say SharePoint copied them (well, copied AquaLogic User Interaction)!

• Business Dictionary as a role based catalog of information assets. Seems like SharePoint's Business Data Catalog.  This should be an interesting battle since SharePoint's BDC is clearly a version 1.0 work-in-progress and Oracle has a lot of expertise to bring here being a database company at heart.
• Federated search. 'Nuff said.
• Office integration. Clients I speak with expect Microsoft will always have the best Office integration, but there are cases where Microsoft's internal silos or some good ideas can expose openings.  Oracle showed a nice Word sidebar for document management that had people, versions, etc.
• Slide sorter. This was a neat feature that SharePoint offered, but Oracle's version seems to leapfrog it. They demoed picking all the slides for a sales deck. Oracle calls this a "folio" or compound document. Oracle acquired a neat little company called "Outside In" that has sophisticated filters for productivity files.  Blending this into Web Center can provide for some good Office integration.

Oracle did a fine job of acknowledging the need to work with SharePoint and others.  But the meat boils down to their WSRP producer running on .NET, selective metadata consumption, and Ensemble (a reverse proxy solution).  Hopefully this gets beefed up with more programmatic integration, discovery tools, and guidance so it requires less reliance on WSRP.

Of all the competitors, WebCenter is the newest architecture from the ground up.  Being the youngest has its advantages.  Since WebCenter is newly architected it feels like it more seamlessly integrates new concepts like tagging, linking, social connections, and REST services than IBM and MSFT where it's more bolted on. So they're better at utilizing these features across the suite that Microsoft and a little bit better than IBM.

But will Oracle - the whole company - give WebCenter the resources it needs to win the marketplace(not just the resources required to be a good and useful product)?  In the Q&A session, Oracle President Charles Phillips said there are "No plans to have middleware broken out in reporting. We have lots of product lines, we're getting more with Sun... " This hits at the perennial knock on Oracle's efforts around knowledge infrastructure - lack of push and commitment.  Oracle did talk about how much revenue Fusion pulled in, the growth rate, penetration, etc.  That would indicate the company would have to care.  But still, Microsoft manages to report on four breakouts (Client, Server and Tools, Online Services Business, Microsoft Business Division, Entertainment and Devices Division).  Oracle sticks to two (Applications, Database and Middleware).  Sun will add at least one more (servers and hardware).  If Oracle is dedicated to the enormous space between enterprise apps and the database, breaking out middleware from the database would be a great way to track and prove this commitment.

On the Relationship Between Portals and Social Networking: Replace or Coexist?

Blogger: Craig Roth

Burton Group recently announced the completion of a field research project to determine how organizations are approaching social networking (see Field Research Study: Social Networking Within the Enterprise). The interviews were only very lightly guided, so respondents got to guide the conversation where they wanted to go. It was telling that quite a few of them, when asked to talk about social networking, wanted to talk about portals. In fact, one third of the 29 organizations interviewed steered the conversation to portals at some point. This point occurred in one of two places: when talking about how social networking could bolster an existing, successful portal – or how it could replace a failed portal.

First, replacing a failed portal effort with social networking. Respondents in this category indicated they had failed in attempts to create a portal to address generic “knowledge management.” One idea is that perhaps social networking will offer a better route to KM than portals since it focuses on human interconnections rather than collecting data assets. For example, one organization said they had an “older KM Portal previously established, but information was hard to find and use,” so now they were interested in social networking.

In other cases, portals failed to get off the ground due to endless planning. One respondent indicated “They have not deployed yet after a year and a half of planning but are now looking to go to a collaboration platform”. Another organization had different internal constituencies (IT, corporate communications, and HR) come into conflict as they forced the portal in different directions. For this organization, the result has been a portal effort that has been stalled for over 3 years. We recommend time boxing portal implementations to be six to nine months (the longer time being for large enterprise deployments) to avoid analysis paralysis.

If a social network is being launched from the ruins of a portal effort, one has to seriously ask why the social network is expected to succeed when a portal failed. If the answer is that a focus on connecting people to people is really what the organization needed rather than connecting people to applications and content then you may be on the right track. But if the answer is that the new technology is better or more exciting, expect failure for the same reasons the portal failed: lack of business buy-in, poor or no governance, poor adoption resulting in a failure to reach a critical mass of users, analysis paralysis, and no business proposition for solving problems the users can recognize.

Now that I’ve discussed using social networking to replace a failed portal effort, I want to move on to the more cheerful subject of using them together. The path is clearer for organizations with successful portal efforts that want to add social networking in. Portals act as a personalized hub for applications, content, collaboration, and processes. This puts them in a unique position to reach people in a role-based manner who may want to interact in a social network. Through integration, social network sites can inject people and relationships into the portal interface. One interviewee explicitly mentioned that it “would be interesting to add people and relationships to the portal user interface and experience ... to surface social networking in the portal.” Another mentioned they were interested in hanging community features off of their new, open source portal. This makes sense since portal infrastructure is often used today to create role-based portal sites. For example, one respondent had separate portals for employees, alumni, retirees, and a women’s network. By adding social networking technologies, these existing portals could become even more powerful mechanisms for connecting people with similar interests that may not come in casual contact during their workday.

Note that in this model the portal is not itself a social network, but it can work with the social network site. The SN site may have portlets or widgets that the portal can consume, APIs that custom-written portlets could access, or (worst case) screen scrape summary information the network site. The portal could also provide links to contextually relevant social network sites. The social networking site simultaneously exists as a destination for use when social networking is a primary activity and can point to information in the portal. In this way the portal and the social network site can each play to their strengths and make each other stronger and more successful. The portal provides the back-end integration (directory, single sign-on, implementation of portlet standards, portlets connecting to enterprise applications) and front-end presentation (in a personalized, screen real-estate metaphor) for building portal sites. However, the SN site is probably not built on the portal framework. The SN site provides the ability to define an online persona, list connections, receive notifications on the activities of those connections, participate in inter-personal, group, or community activities, and control social networking permission, preference, and privacy settings. It’s a great combination and one we expect to see more frequently.

On the Relationship Between Portals and Refrigerated Cookie Dough

Blogger: Craig Roth

I'd like to talk today about refrigerated cookie dough.  Well, actually I'd like to talk about portal infrastructure and other cases where collaborative infrastructure is reused, but I find that the store bought refrigerated cookie dough where you slice cookies off a roll works great as an analogy.

The analogy came out of a full day discussion I had with an infrastructure analyst at Meta Group where I worked in the collaboration group.  I was trying to convince him that portals were a real thing, not just a fuzzy term.  He was coming at it from an infrastructure perspective and asking how it can be a real thing when practically all its pieces, such as an app server and content management, already exist independently. 

I dismissed the idea that a portal was just a design pattern, best practice, or blueprint.  If it was, it was just a piece of paper that said it's a good idea to connect an app server to search, content management, and single sign-on and make the interface configurable.  No, it wasn't that abstract as smart organizations were spending real money on actual products. 

But I also dismissed the idea that a portal was an application.  Except in the very early days of portals, organizations weren't just installing it out of the box like an app.  There was significant development and integration work required. And companies that obtained good benefits from portals leveraged them many times (such as portals for each product, portals for each division, and special project portals all built leveraging the same infrastructure setup work), which is a hallmark of infrastructure.

The answer we came up with (for the record I think Bruce, the other analyst, suggested it first) was store-bought refrigerated cookie dough.  Like this.  Rather than buying a printed recipe or finished cookies, portal buyers were getting something inbetween - a set of ingredients that were pre-mixed, but ready to slice off, customize, and bake later each time a portal website was needed.  It's true that content management already existed, as did collaboration, single sign-on, and many other components.  But here they were being pre-integrated in a mix-or-match way for the creation of dynamic, personalized websites.  You could use, for example, the built-in content management or substitute any of three other content management products using pre-built connectors.  Same for all the other pieces - they were all ready to finish off, but left to the buyer to finish as desired.  Also, since organizations often want many portal websites, they were ready to slice off and customize every time a department or project wanted a portal site. 

A central portal group provides an organization a portal framework.  They select the product, app environment, work with the identity team to connect to the directory and single sign-on, connect to the collaboration product being used, design the highest level navigation and UI, connect the content management tool, and figure out operational details.  This framework is only created once, but now every time a part of the organization wants their own portal site they can take this framework, which already has 70% of the work done, and bake it however they like within the bounds of the governance that is established.  This balances the need for a department (or other such interest group) to want its own portal and the need for the organization to leverage existing investments in products, development, and best practices with the need to reduce the time spent reinventing the wheel for every portal website.

This insight provided me a clear answer to a famously murky question: how many portals should a company have?  The answer became obvious: you want to have as many portal websites as needed (after all, portals are about personalization), but ideally there is only one portal framework they are built off of.  In real life it's still often a few frameworks due to very different needs, purchasing environments, and governance structures, but that isn't a reason to abandon pre-integration and reuse all together - just create as few frameworks as possible and ensure they are  sliced off and finished multiple times to best leverage the investments.

Over the years I've seen that this is indeed how organizations that are happy with their portal investments are treating them - as pre-integrated frameworks that can be easily instantiated to meet the specific needs of groups that had portal needs.  So while I don't recommend real-life rolls of cookie dough (too many preservatives and too much sodium; just make your own dough and keep it in the fridge), I have found that portal infrastructure has found a better application of this concept.

Is an Intranet Infrastructure or Application?

Blogger: Larry Cannell

While keeping the driveway clear of snow and battling slippery roads to finish some last minute holiday shopping I’ve also been thinking about a report I am working on (to be published in the February/March time frame). The topic is intranets and the role they play in an enterprise. It seems to me the intranet is something many of us take for granted but its importance has changed dramatically over the 10-15 years they have been around.

Most definitions of intranets describe intranets in terms of technology. For example, the Wikipedia entry for intranet starts out this way:

An intranet is a private computer network….

In my opinion, saying intranets are just technology is similar to Henry Ford saying “Any customer can have a car painted any colour he wants so long as it is black.” At the time Ford said this he was only looking at cars as technology, but they mean so much more to us. Perhaps our prevailing view of intranets is as mature as cars were in 1909 (when Ford said this).

We discount the importance of intranets because, at one time, they were simply a bunch of technologies. They were pieces of infrastructure. Just deploy a few intranet technologies (like maybe a portal, a web content management system, or even collaborative workspaces), similar to how we might install a router, and they will simply pay for themselves.

This is where we got it wrong. In my opinion, intranets should not be treated as infrastructure. They should be treated like a suite of applications which support the most important processes used within the enterprises. Intranets support how we work online, and this is something we all should feel strongly about since it impacts our personal and organizational effectiveness more than any other set of tools we use.

When NCSA launched Mosaic browser in 1993 it was a rudimentary client, just good enough to get us thinking about the potential of an interconnected web. A couple of years later the Apache web server project was born out of another NCSA project and we were off making websites and demonstrating how easy it is to connect everyone to the same information.

Also taking place in the late 1990s was the rise in use of client/server e-mail systems, like Microsoft Exchange (version 5.0 was released in 1997). In many cases, Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes became the standard e-mail system providing the first reliable peer to peer enterprise communication system.

Deploying these e-mail systems was fairly straightforward and success soon followed since most everyone already knew, or were quickly learning, how to send and receive e-mail. The first experiments in using the web were similarly, although more narrowly, successful. These private applications of popular Internet technologies demonstrated to us that this stuff worked.

However, for many enterprises these early successes came from the IT infrastructure group. This may be the source of the problems we have today, with intranets that don’t seem to add any value (other than being technologies which connect our office computers to the Internet). Since these efforts grew out of IT infrastructure groups many of our intranet efforts stayed within them and were also considered IT infrastructure.

I’m not blaming IT infrastructure groups (I worked in one for ten years). But, intranets should no longer be treated as infrastructure. Infrastructure is technology that is well understood and could be considered a commodity (paint it black, who cares?). Intranet technologies are far from commodities. E-mail, yes, might be considered a commodity. But, for example, the use of collaborative workspaces is still quite immature and not at all close to being commoditized.

Rather, intranets should be treated as a portfolio of applications that are owned and funded by an organization and has a roadmap for improvements based on real, documented needs. Intranet technologies are used by people and understanding how people work is a touchy-feely sort of thing that infrastructure groups aren’t good at doing (for that matter, it’s one reason why some people work in an infrastructure group, to get away from the touchy-feely).

What do you think? Are intranets infrastructure or applications?

SharePoint Zeitgeist: Caution Before Proceeding

Blogger: Craig Roth

Here's a quick pointer to a good article on the status of SharePoint in the enterprise by J. Nicholas Hoover of InformationWeek.  Over the past year there has been a noticeable shift in the SharePoint zeitgeist.  Before that SharePoint mostly flew under the radar while word of mouth and Microsoft events and press releases touted its ease of use and popularity.  Now it's been picked up on radar and is being examined more closely.  I have had several conversations with the IT press writing articles such as Hoover's that describe pros and cons, question its abilities, or warn against wandering into it without thinking.  Another good example is "Microsoft SharePoint popularity comes with issues" by John Fontana of NetworkWorld. Our SharePoint workshops at Burton Group continue to be filled by attendees that want a more objective view of SharePoint's good and bad points than can be found in inexpensive seminars by Microsoft partners.  And our clients continue to ask us these questions on a regular basis.  All of this points to a shift in the way SharePoint is being examined.

I want to point out these articles are cautionary in tone, not negative.  The frequency with which you see common sense advice being applied to SharePoint (understand it, plan, manage your resources, pay attention to governance, avoid or shore up its weak points, etc.) reflects the hurried, ad hoc approach that SharePoint is often deployed with.  I'm glad to see that SharePoint is now being tracked by the IT radar so its benefits, of which there are many to go along with its faults, can be exploited by the organizations that are desperately in need of collaboration support.  And I hope that the extra introspection and examination step being introduced before deployments encourages organizations to perform due diligence against alternatives from other vendors, some of which they may already have in house, before assuming that the end users cry for SharePoint isn't just a general cry for a simple web-based collaboration or content management solution.

Note: This is a cross-posting from the KnowledgeForward blog

Liferay Social Office, Another Supporter of SharePoint Protocols

Blogger: Larry Cannell

Liferay, the makers of the popular open source portal, will soon be releasing a new product called Social Office. This is collaborative workspace product that consists of newly developed features combined with capabilities that were previously offered as portal add-ons. A Liferay Social Office site provides document libraries, team calendars, activity tracking, instant messaging, blogs, wikis, message boards, and announcements.

However, what I find to be the most interesting new feature of Social Office is its support for Microsoft Office. Liferay Social Office will support (as other open source vendors have called it) "the SharePoint protocol.” Specifically, Social Office will support two protocols used by SharePoint: MS-DWSS (Document Workspace Web Services) and Microsoft’s version of WebDAV. Documentation for these (and other) protocols used by SharePoint and desktop Office applications were released by Microsoft earlier this year. I blogged about this a few weeks ago (“Cloning SharePoint” and “What the heck is a SharePoint Protocol?”). In short, support for these two protocols facilitates the use of the “Shared Workspace” pane in Office applications. This enables management of document workspaces from within desktop applications like Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.

Two new vendors supporting a protocol does not make for a trend, but I will be on the lookout for others to follow. Maybe then the argument could be made that MS-DWSS is the POP3 for collaborative workspaces.

SharePoint: It's Not a Gap, It's Room for An Ecosystem

Blogger: Craig Roth

There's an old coding joke: when presented with a bug in your program you try to pretend it is intentional by saying "It's not a bug, it's a feature!"  I'm reminded of that when told about the rich ecosystem Microsoft has nurtured around SharePoint 2007.  More information is coming out about the parts of SharePoint where a sophisticated enterprise has to look outside of what is in the box, such as our half day of sessions at Catalyst entitled "SharePoint: Fixing a Hole Where the Pain Gets In" or this article today in InternetNews.  And the more that information comes out, the more I think back to that old coding joke, except now it is Microsoft saying "It's not a gap, it's room for an ecosystem!"

Now, I am not saying that all gaps in SharePoint are mistakes.  Honestly, I don't know how many of the gaps filled by the ecosystem are due to intentionally leaving some portions of SharePoint to communities, developers, and vendors and how many simply happened because Microsoft didn't forsee common needs that it should have.  It's probably some of both.  The best way to determine that for yourself is to look at the feature sets from the long and growing list of partners filling gaps in SharePoint (not just integrating, but filling gaps) and determine if those are niche needs that a vendor should correctly leave to the ecosystem or basic needs that should be included to fit the way the vendor advertises its product should be used.

Too many SharePoint implementations wind up causing pain because a promising demo or proof of concept led planners to underestimate the difficulty of the full solution.  The same implementation might have been considered a roaring success if time and resources were understood upfront and did not follow a winding path with multiple failures before completion.  If you're in charge of an enterprise-wide SharePoint plan or a specific SharePoint site, you don't care if a gap in SharePoint is intentional or not. The task for you is to quickly assess what users will need from SharePoint and to set expectations up front that SharePoint out of the box may not get them there.  Determining what combination of built-in SharePoint capabilities, partner products, community-provided bits, and custom in-house coding will be required to deliver the expectations of the users will help paint a realistic picture of the time and resources needed. 

To summarize, perhaps a cartoon (from our Catalyst track) will help:

Invitation To Join Portal Governance Benchmarking Survey

The most common questions I get about enterprise portals are around portal governance.  And while I provide as much of an aggregated view as possible into what others are doing about portal governance (for example, check out my podcast on Understanding Web Governance), it's been difficult to provide actual examples of what organizations are doing.  My discussions are confidential and companies rarely talk publicly about a topic that involves so much internal politics.

That's why I was thrilled today to talk to Elaine Walsh at United Health Group, who is conducting a benchmarking survey about portal governance.  Participants all benefit by getting a copy of the final benchmarking report that abstracts out any specific company information.  If you're interested, you can contact Elaine per the contact info below.

Here is the announcement:

United Health Group is conducting a benchmarking  survey on Portal Architecture Governance.  The standard benchmarking code-of-conduct will be followed and results will be shared, but blinded.  The survey has 30 questions covering organization, process and tools topics.

If you are interested in participating please contact Elaine_Walsh@uhc.com   (908-696-5090) or Aaron_gaalswyk@uhc.com  (952-931-5052) . We hope to have all survey responses by October 24, 2008.. Again, we will hide participants’ identities and companies  in the report, so no proprietary information about your company (or you)  will be divulged to any other party.

Enterprise 2.0: Oracle & BEA Webcast

Blogger: Mike Gotta

After the commentary, you will find a collection of links to different resources that provide additional information on Oracle's recent webcast regarding the BEA acquisition and Oracle's Enterprise 2.0 effort.

Webcast Notes

On Tuesday (7/1/08), Oracle provided an in-depth overview that provided insight regarding alignment, integration, and convergence of BEA and Oracle products into a common middleware solution. While I was mostly interested in the information provided on collaboration and social computing, I found some of the over-arching messages very important since that context established the lens through which you should judge what Oracle is offering to the market (e.g., Enterprise 2.0).

• First, I thought Thomas Kurian did an outstanding job of presenting the information in a manner that held my attention throughout the webcast. It was very detailed but not to the extent where you were lost overall.
• It was clear from the outset of the webcast that the notion of platform consistency is the foundation for everything Oracle is doing. In fact, "foundation" was perhaps a key sense conveyed throughout the session.
• Investment protection was another key take-away for those listening to the webcast. There was no rip-and-replace discussion.
• Unification and convergence were other words used frequently.
• Other key words that were repeated quite often: "complete", "pre-integrated", "standards-based", and "hot-pluggable". A paraphrased quote that might be revealing to keep in mind: "Install together, upgrade together, deploy together"
• Oracle views E2.0 as communication medium that is multi-channel - you can run composite UI on mobile, browser, PDA or other styles of devices - by composite UI Oracle sees a convergence of application styles:
  • when building rich media web site or building transactional application or building traditional portal or when building social computing site (portal with embedded communities) you had to pick different framework and tool set
  • key value proposition of Oracle is to leverage a single programming model to develop all four application styles (i.e., rich media style or traditional transactional application style or traditional enterprise portal style or a social computing style (e.g., communities)
  • Oracle's E2.0 plan is to unify the programming model for all of these patterns
• Oracle also views Enterprise 2.0 as a transformation in the way that people share information. Consider traditional scenarios: a business person runs a BI report (sales report), they want to share the report, today they use e-mail which leads to version problems, data inconsistency, search challenges etc. But Now, with Oracle's E2.0 foundation, that business person puts the document into the ECM system where it becomes secure, managed and searchable - they can make the report available within a workspace (that leverages the ECM system) and then RSS feeds can help get the information to subscribers. People can then interact around the document (chat, discussion forums, presence, VoIP) and when the interaction is complete, the document can be tagged/bookmarked where a tag cloud can help people find the information.
• For Oracle, the notion of "portal" is evolving (1) continued integration of web publishing, transactional applications and community and (2) evolving into integration of forums, wikis, blogs, rss, communities - portals are becoming a platform for richer communication
• Oracle is evolving its middleware to embrace E2.0 and "NextGen Portal" (think "Portal 2.0".
  • portals abstract all systems accessing through standard interface (implemented via JSR168, Web Service Remoting like WSRP or REST/HTTP)
  • portals have basic content management and search
  • portals provide the assembly and development environment 
  • portals expose data binding into all types of standard interfaces
• Everything goes though the portal layer.
• BEA AquaLogic User Interaction satisfied a more social style of portal where communities evolved. That will converge with WebCenter Suite. Customers will leverage WebCenter (e.g., content management, search, E2.0, integration with packaged applications, and BI). Pathways has a bright future. Oracle sees it as integral to user interaction with portal as it examines people's interaction patterns and will be able to personalize what people see based on how those interaction patterns are correlated to other activities  interaction and perhaps sets the ground for Oracle's network analysis of social patterns.
• Enterprise 2.0 slides:

Source: screen capture of Oracle webcast

First Reaction

Based on this webcast, I would categorize what Oracle is doing as "Portal 2.0" rather than "Enterprise 2.0". If you look back on some of the key points made during the webcast:

• An argument Oracle makes implicitly: what Oracle is doing represents a very robust, technically engineered middleware that is modular and standards-based as well as open - you can choose Oracle middleware alongside different products from other vendors ... Oracle and non-Oracle app servers, databases, etc.
• The argument continues but is more subtle on these points: This represents a single integrated toolset - you do not need to pick different tools and switch back-and-forth all the time - productivity win - yes we support multiple tools, multiple products, etc - but we don't think you need to do that - you are better off with a single, unified environment.
• So when you talk about E2.0 - it's about an Oracle stack and one that follows a portal and MVC (model view controller) interaction style. Note: in the block architectural diagram below, there is no Enterprise 2.0 component

Source: screen capture of Oracle webcast

Some of the examples cited during the webcast are more closely related to concepts put forth when the industry discussed the notion of "contextual collaboration" (circa 1999 through today - it is still a very relevant concept). The embedding of the collaborative services within the context of an application is not new. There are certain functional activities related to communication, information sharing and collaboration that can be correlated to the processing of certain tasks and process activities. That type of "directed" interaction is not really the foundation for E2.0 which is more about the use of social software for emergent collaboration.

What You Should Expect

Organizations can expect Oracle to push hard on the concept of a single interaction platform built for the enterprise that spans just not social computing but all the application patterns it sees (system, human, document, decision). Oracle will pitch convergence of

Content Management

• Document management, content publishing, collaborative content creation, content approval, security/audit/compliance, and information lifecycle management

Internet/Intranet Web Presence

• Website creation, portlet creation/orchestration, single sign-on, multi-channel delivery (mobile etc), secure search

Community/Social Collaboration

• Teams and individual expertise
• Project productivity
• Mashups
• Team collaboration
• Web 2.0 "stuff"
• Desktop integration

Composite Applications

• SOA processes
• Integrated development
• Component assembly/orchestration
• Process portals
• Custom and packaged enterprise applications
• Alerts

And roll all of this into an "Oracle Enterprise 2.0" umbrella.

Summary

Some key points came to mind immediately after viewing:

• Please do not confuse how Oracle defines the term Enterprise 2.0 with how the rest of the industry is using Enterprise 2.0. If you want to call this Portal 2.0  that might fit better.
• I think Oracle is close to getting it right but really needs to understand the free-form and emergence aspects of E2.0 - right now, this comes across as a solution that is not really aligned with the cultural dynamics around E2.0.
• There also needs to be a better job done at the ecosystem around the platform. Yes, this was about Oracle and BEA - but some of the messages here seemed to imply that "third party vendors need not apply" (or if you do so, do it at your own risk because we view you as tactical) - if you are a best-of-breed vendor specializing in the E2.0 space, I'm not sure I saw the long-term business model laid out during this webcast.
• I saw nothing to convince me this is relevant to the external social media efforts of large organizations. The social networking insight was also weak - although again, this was an Oracle/BEA alignment so I did not expect it to be addressed in that context. There were some hints re: Pathways.

Overall, the Oracle position revealed so far leads me to believe that this webcast reflects a message that is more about an Oracle brand and marketing program that leverages the Enterprise 2.0 meme than a deep understanding of the tooling and organizational dynamics associated with E2.0:

• It is a very centralized and portal-centric view - missing was much information on how Oracle's version of Enterprise 2.0 aligns with some of the information it has shared on its "Beehive" collaboration project. In fact, there was actually little insight as to how Oracle will resolve the overlap in its portfolio related to blogs and wikis, or where Oracle Collaboration Suite fits (or does not).
• Also, I did not hear Oracle talk about the concept of "emergence" or some of the other key concepts discussed within the E2.0 community. Yes, the platform approach discussed by Oracle does allow for "patterns and structure inherent in people's interactions become visible" and for “contributions and interactions are globally visible and persistent over time" but the context was always about more structured and directed interactions. So I am not convinced Oracle (based on what information has been shared so far) fully comprehends the social dynamics of what E2.0 is all about.
• That said, Oracle's jump into the E2.0 competitive landscape will clearly position it against Microsoft and IBM. In some ways, the application integration offers Oracle a means to competitively differentiate itself from other platform vendors (IBM, Microsoft).
• Oracle is over-reaching however when it tries to jam so much into an E2.0 message (document capture and imaging?!) that smaller vendors such as Jive might be able to attract Oracle customers by touting its agility and ability to integrate with external consumer sites and deploy external-facing solutions for social computing.

This confusion over directed vs. volunteered participation reminds me of an earlier post on social software which I strongly recommend people read through again (or for the first time).

RESOURCE LIST

BEA Welcome and Oracle's Middleware Strategy Briefing

The BEA Welcome and Middleware Strategy Briefing is now available on demand. Learn more about Oracle Fusion Middleware and the important role BEA's products will play.

Recorded Tuesday, July 1, 2008
9:00 a.m. PT / 12:00 noon ET

Click here to view the webcast via RealPlayer.

Watch Oracle executives Charles Phillips, President, and Thomas Kurian, Senior Vice President, give an informative briefing on how the addition of BEA products to Oracle Fusion Middleware creates a best-in-class combination, advances a common vision, and reinforces Oracle's middleware strategy.

Events Overview

Enterprise 2.0: User Interaction & Portals

Oracle delivers the industry's only complete, open, and manageable portfolio of user interaction and portal products including Oracle WebCenter Suite (which includes WebCenter Interaction, formerly BEA AquaLogic User Interaction), Oracle WebCenter Services, Oracle WebLogic Portal, and Oracle Portal.

Oracle WebCenter Suite and Oracle WebCenter Services are Oracle's strategic solutions for developing Enterprise 2.0 enabled portals, composite, and web applications. Oracle WebCenter Suite is a comprehensive collection of user interaction components that can be used to create out-of-the-box enterprise portals and highly customized web-based applications. Oracle WebCenter Services enriches any standards-based Web interface with advanced Enterprise 2.0 user interaction services for community based interactions, web analytics, content management, and social networking.

Oracle plans to continue to develop and support Oracle WebLogic Portal and Oracle Portal, and expects to converge these products with Oracle's strategic solutions over time. Existing deployments of these products will benefit from complementary products such as Oracle WebCenter Services and Oracle Content Management.

Learn more about the role of Oracle WebCenter Suite and Oracle WebCenter Services in Oracle's middleware strategy.

Enterprise 2.0: User Interaction & Portals | Oracle Fusion Middleware

Oracle WebCenter Suite

Oracle WebCenter Suite is the industry's only complete, open, and manageable user interaction and portal platform that integrates Enterprise 2.0 capabilities into ad hoc and structured business processes, as well as custom and packaged enterprise applications. The suite includes components of Oracle WebCenter and Oracle WebCenter Interaction (formerly BEA AquaLogic User Interaction) and allows organizations to securely deliver Enterprise 2.0 services like wikis, discussion forums and RSS feeds through both out-of-the-box and customized portals. Oracle WebCenter Suite allows enterprises to enhance information worker productivity through a highly scalable, centrally managed platform that uses open standards to integrate with existing IT systems.

BENEFITS

• Complete—Comprehensive development framework and a rich set of Enterprise 2.0 services supports the creation of flexible and extensible portals and composite applications that meet the full range of business requirements
• Open—Support for industry standards and hot-pluggable compatibility with existing information systems extends the value of existing IT resources and skill sets and provides an open alternative to proprietary architectures
• Manageable—Centrally managed architecture seamlessly scales from workgroup to enterprise-wide deployment and is integrated with best in class web analytics and system management tools

WebCenter Suite | User Interaction | Oracle

WebCenter Services

Oracle WebCenter Services provides standards-based components that enrich existing portals and Web sites with the industry's most complete and open set of Enterprise 2.0 capabilities. These Enterprise 2.0 services are also available as part of Oracle WebCenter Suite and include community based interactions, online awareness and communications, content management, web analytics, and social networking. Oracle WebCenter Services enable organizations to use their current portals and web sites to empower their end users with Enterprises 2.0 services that work with their existing information systems.

BENEFITS

• Bring Enterprise 2.0 to your existing portals—Provides componentized services such as wikis, blogs, discussions, RSS feeds, virtual content repository, web usage analytics, and contextual enterprise search

• Open Standards based—Support standards including JSR-168, JSR-170, WSRP, AJAX, REST, RSS and SIP

• Minimize disruption and risk—Integrated and secure services work with each other and with your existing IT systems

WebCenter Services | User Interaction | Oracle

Enterprise 2.0 Bootcamp - Oracle Wiki

July 28, 2008 | Oracle Conference Center, Redwood Shores, Calif.

Web 2.0 technologies and techniques like wikis, blogs, tagging, social networks and mashups are now enterprise-strength and being used by organizations to collaboratively work smarter. Leading companies are using these new technologies to grow revenues, spur innovation, and lower costs, but the overall impact on the organization needs to be well understood before embarking on the Enterprise 2.0 journey
Enterprise 2.0 Bootcamp is a free, interactive, 1-Day workshop for Oracle customers, partners, and users (and anyone else who wants to show up!) designed to educate attendees about the impact of Enterprise 2.0 on business today, in a highly participatory (unconference) format.
Have Enterprise 2.0 insight that you want to share? Come prepared to sign-up and lead an unconference session!
Topics can include:

• PR, Legal, Security, and Privacy
• Cultural Change
• Metrics and Measurement/ROI
• Internal Collaboration
• Outbound Marketing
• And more…

Enterprise 2.0 Bootcamp - Oracle Wiki

Web 2.0 Resource Library - Oracle Wiki

Make this wiki more valuable by adding your Web 2.0 insights, experiences and findings!

*Get started by clicking on the "Join This Wiki" button to set-up your profile.

Welcome to the Web 2.0 Resource Library. The intent of this wiki page is to give you direct access to a variety of useful information on the growing topic of Web 2.0…especially related to the enterprise.

To begin, we have included links to iSeminars, demonstrations, white papers and much more.

Web 2.0 Resource Library - Oracle Wiki