Oracle Magazine - May/June 2011

and bring those into your Oracle WebCenter Suite composite application, which is a powerful concept if you’re building applications. Oracle Magazine: What IDEs does Oracle WebCenter Suite support?

MacMillan: There’s a great connection between Oracle WebCenter Suite and Oracle JDeveloper, but we also support open development. If people want to build their own Web framework and connect to Oracle WebCenter Suite and use our Web services or our REST [Representational State Transfer] services, they can do that. Or if they want to build a set of standards-compliant portlets in Eclipse and build JSR-compliant portlets and deploy them into Oracle WebCenter Suite, they can do that.

Oracle Magazine: What capabilities are available for business or power users? MacMillan: One of the main ideas behind Oracle WebCenter Suite is that developers are going to build applications but that power users or typical business users are going to want to customize, extend, and personalize them. There needs to be a relationship between how that is done and how development occurs.

We’ve done two interesting things in this area. First, our Oracle Composer technology allows business users to go into an edit mode from the browser and connect to datasources. They can drag components out of the page, move things around, and edit content. It’s really about allowing business users to take ownership of that experience and blend it to whatever their needs might be.

The second area is actually the relationship between Oracle Composer and the development environment. What we enable in Oracle WebCenter Suite is the idea that a developer can build a component or even a whole site. Let’s say I build a component as a developer and I publish that component into the application. Let’s call that version 1.0. The business user can take that component, put it on a page, mash it up, and customize it. Let’s call that version 1. 1.

What’s unique about Oracle WebCenter Suite is that as a developer if I want to work

“We have a unique capability to marry
together collaborative capabilities and their
enterprise applications.”

—Andy MacMillan, Vice President of Enterprise 2.0 Product Management, Oracle

on version 2.0, I can actually get version 1. 1 very easily from the application space, frame that into my development environment, work on it, and create version 2.0. In the typical model, development would create version 2.0 based on development version 1.0 and all the business user changes would get overwritten. So there’s a relationship between business users and their ability to use browser-based tooling at runtime, and the developer experience at design time, that allows users to work together.

Oracle Magazine: What are organizations looking for in terms of Enterprise 2.0, and how is that reflected in Oracle’s Enterprise 2.0 strategy and Oracle WebCenter Suite? MacMillan: We’re seeing a lot of interest in social computing, or Enterprise 2.0. Organizations are trying to bring those technologies to bear on business challenges and business opportunities, and in many cases, their key business processes and transactions are represented in their enterprise applications. So we have a unique capability to marry together collaborative capabilities and their enterprise applications to apply social computing to those business transactions.

Our strategy is really about connecting the benefits of social computing—the ability to have people quickly connect, and connect on the right topics, and provide rich context— to relevant business topics.

If I have a transaction in my enterprise resource planning system and I want to escalate that, I need people to collaborate. Collaborating around a transaction or escalation is a core use case, but others include increasing innovation and engaging customers. If I want to collaborate around my product development process, then I need social tools in the context of my product lifecycle management product. The big opportunity is to actually connect the power of these kinds of social concepts to key business drivers.

That’s really our strategy at Oracle. How do
we provide that context, as well as the tools
and the technology, for social collaboration
around business activities? That’s where
we’ve gone with Oracle WebCenter Suite.