Web 2.0 and Oracle Enterprise 2.0

At my employer (Capgemini) a program is in place to use more Web 2.0 features internally for our daily business. Oracle was asked to share their vision on Web 2.0 enabling of a company, Oracle’s name for that is Oracle Enterprise 2.0. So a consultant of Oracle gave us a presentation of Webcenter. This was not quite complete so tonight i watched: this webcast.  This  is a very interesting one, I think. You see Andrew Mcafee and Thomas Kurian and the webcast is hosted by Sonny Singh.  Mcafee was interviewed on the subject of Web 2.0. After that Thomas Kurian showed how Oracle Webcenter brings Web2.0 into the enterprise.

Webcenter is a very rich Portal which can combine all sorts of components.  A component can be a service, for instance a calenderservice. A component can be a portlet, showing information from the Business intelligence systems. A component can be a window on a discussion from a discussion forum related to some of your actual interests. A component can also be a search engine, searching all information available within the enterprise.

And of course Webcenter delivers all these options: discussion forums, wiki, rss-feeds, blogs and a mashup tool. The last one was very interesting. It had the ability to combine the outcome of many webservices into one, and thus (in the example i saw) showing the cost of a product when delivered by various suppliers. On slide it looked promising.  And in the featured video it had an important role in deciding to quote on a offer.

So Oracle Webcenter is bringing Web 2.0 technology into the enterprise, which can be very useful. The great strength of the product, I think, is that it is an integrated solution, so you can share between the different options. On the other hand it is not providing industry standards. Take for instance the wiki. It looked like Oracle created it’s own version of this popular online document publishing tool. Probably with a deep foundation in the Oracle Database. This is not smart. The current widely used wiki’s, where mediawiki is the biggest, have a broad developer crowd that supports the software with a variety of extensions. These extensions make these wiki’s very powerful, I think Oracle will not be able to compete with these best of breed options. I still have to see how these web2.0 options in webcenter will compete with the web2.0 standard of the moment.

At the end of the webcast 2 Oracle implementations were shown where web2.0 technology was used. The first one called “Oracle Connect” showed all the known connections of a person. His manager, his directs and his peers. It also showed a list of the recent activity of the person (like twitter messages). This was a nice tool, but again an Oracle own version and not based on linkedin or corresponding social network.

The last example of the webcast did embed Linkedin into the enterprise and this was very interesting. Linkedin was used to show the network of a possible client. It showed the closest way to get in contact with him, his contacts that are your clients (possible reference persons) and so on. This is a good start! Imagine that you can see a list of the latest activity from linkedin or twitter, or see his facebook profile. Perhaps his blogposts, or blog comments and wikiposts. Then you would really have a complete web-profile of a person and it would really help you with making a great offer!

Oracle has a great start in web2.0 technology of it’s own but could do more with embedding with the current standard web2.0 applications. I keep my rss-feeds an tweetdeck and … tuned for news on Oracle Enterprise 2.0.