Book: Integrate Web 2.0 Trends and Technologies Into the Enterprise

Reshaping Your Business with Web 2.0

Three of my close colleagues, Vince Casarez, Philipp Weckerle, and Billy Cripe co-authored the newly published book: Reshaping Your Business with Web 2.0. Credit should go to two other contributors: Jean Sini from Buzzlogic and Manish Devgan, Oracle WebCenter Product Management. The book is now orderable on amazon.

Here’s a brief description: Written by a team of experts from the Web 2.0 community and Oracle Corporation, this innovative guide provides a blueprint for leveraging the new culture of participation in an enterprise environment. Reshaping Your Business with Web 2.0 offers proven strategies for the successful adoption of an enterprise 2.0 paradigm and covers the technical solutions that best apply in specific situations. You will find clear guidelines for using Web 2.0 technologies and standards in a productive way to align with business goals, increase efficiency, and provide measurable bottom line growth.

Timing couldn’t have been better, the book nicely lines up with this year’s Oracle OpenWorld. Vince, Billy, and Jean have a session closely related to the book:

Wednesday, September 24, 1:00pm S297844: Vince Casarez, Billy Cripe, Jean Sini: Reshaping Your Business with Web 2.0 – Marriott Salon 05

If you’re interested in other portal related sessions at OpenWorld, check out the Portal Related Sessions at Oracle OpenWorld 2008 in San Francisco post.

Oracle Portal 11g New Features

We’re about to post the updated Oracle Portal Statement of Direction on the Oracle Portal page on OTN. Oracle Portal 11g is part of Fusion Middleware 11g, and will be released at the same time, currently scheduled for the first half of calendar year 2009. Here is the summary of the planned new features in the 11g version:

• Oracle Portal 11g will be integrated with WebLogic Server.
• Extend support for open industry standards:
  • WSRP 2.0 (Web Services for Remote Portlets)
  • JSR 301 (Portlet Bridge for JavaServer Faces)
    • Build new portlets with JSF
    • Turn JSF pages and oracle ADF task flows into standards-based portlets
    • Bring existing JSF applications into Oracle Portal 11g
    • Available with Oracle WebCenter Suite
• Oracle Portal will be able to consume the Enterprise 2.0 services offered by Oracle WebCenter. These services include: Discussions, Wikis, Search, Presence, Instant Messaging, Email, and Document Library.
• Content integration
  • Expose content from 3rd party document management systems in Oracle Portal via portlets (using WSRP 2.0 and JSR 301).
  • Build portlets in JDeveloper that utilize JCR 1.0 (JSR 170) adapters to connect to content management systems.
  • Available adapters (with Oracle WebCenter Suite): Oracle Universal Content Management, Oracle Content DB, Oracle Portal, and file system. Additional adapters (Documentum, SharePoint, Lotus Domino) are available from our partners.
• Extend Core Portal Functionality
  • Omniportlet enhancements, including enhanced support for complex Web Services.
  • BPEL-based process content routing & approval
  • Support for new Document Type Declarations: HTML 4.01 Strict, XHTML 1.0 Transitional, and XHTML 1.0 Strict
• Streamline management and administration
  • Performance metrics available in Enterprise Manager interface
  • Improved Lifecycle Support — Export/Import
• Simplify and extend security
• Deeper integration with Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g

What can I do with the Technology Preview 4 of WebCenter?

Just got back from my long vacation from Europe. I had several emails in my inbox asking: What are the types of things I can and cannot do with the Tech Preview of WebCenter? Here are a couple of simple things you can try out and provide us feedback on:

• Portlet creation: build and deploy JSR 168 portlets
• Portlet consumption: Consume WSRP 1.0 and WSRP 2.0 portlets
• JSF Portlet bridge: JSR 301: Portlet Bridge Specification for JavaServer Faces reference implementation: expose JSF applications through WSRP
• Content integration: test the new and improved JCR level 1 and level 2 support using the file system adapter
• Runtime customization: build applications featuring Composer, which allows privileged business users to add new resources to the pages and re-arrange to contents of the page
• Web 2.0 services: tagging and linking

If it sounds promising, give it a try!

Also wanted to make a note of things you cannot test without back-end services, which have not been released as part of the preview: threaded discussions, wiki, blog, presence, instant messaging, WebCenter Spaces.