Oracle Role Management Seminar with Deloittes

Last week we completed two successful seminars in Sydney and Melbourne on Role Management for the Enterprise. The two events had strong representation from all of Oracle's major customer segments including manufacturing, government, and especially the financial services industries or FSI. A lot of the organisation's that attended have already began or completed Identity Management projects and are now looking at how to harness that existing infrastructure better into the business. IDM projects offer great productivity gains with users gaining from technologies like self service for password resets and single sign on for simplified logins. The IT organisation benefits from IDM due to the automation that provisioning offers in account creation and the reporting that can be produced when compliance comes knocking. Role Management can integrate with any IDM system today including Oracle, SUN, IBM or Novell.

Oracle Role Management Business Level - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: Oracle Role Management Business Level

What IDM doesn't offer is the ability to reflect how an organisation actually functions. Since IDM uses LDAP as its primary data store organisations are mapped in a hierarchy map that mirrors fixed org reporting structures or geographic alignment. We all know that informal, formal and dotted line reports all make up the matrix or reporting structures that is the modern enterprise. IDM up to now couldn't cope well with these structures. Role Management overcomes these obstacles by allowing management of roles and fluid business units. Empowering the business owner to decide who should have access to a system by granting a role access as apposed to granting entitlements in a database or application. This allows business to become more agile by empowering the business unit to make access decisions to systems that are required for a project or on a permanent basis.

Role Management removes a lot of complexities also. I talked about a case study of a USA retailer that had over 10,000 entitlements or manage. Think of an entitlement as an type or access grant to any system - LDAP, Mainframe, WEB or traditional business applications like CRM and ERP. By implementing Role Management the business could now manage 15 roles which sounds a lot simpler than 10,000 entitlements.

I would like to thank Deloittes, their presentation which covered Role Base Access and how to build a business case was very well received.

DTT RBAC Presentation 20080724 - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: DTT RBAC Presentation 20080724

If you have any further questions please contact Oracle or myself. And if you attended thank you for your time last week and hope to see you at another event in the future.
Here is the full podcasts of both sessions.

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Cheers
Carl

eDiscovery Customer and Partner Event

In August 2008, Oracle is hosting an eDiscovery event with two strategic partners across Australia. Presenting with Oracle will be Vincents and Hyro - two strategic partners working with us on this initiative.

You can register to attend by clicking here.

The event will be informative if you are interested in learning more about eDiscovery and want to see how solutions from Oracle can help you in the future.

This will be a multi-city event across Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney and Perth and will educate on the new practice notes that came into effect on the 1st July 2008. Oracle will be previewing its Universal Online Archive solution that provides a proactive repository within which an organisations information assets can be stored and managed effectively.

We look forward to welcoming you to these events and meeting you in person.

Paul

NSW Government RM Suppliers

The Australian IT reported on the recently published NSW Government list of suppliers for records management.

"The NSW government information asset management systems (IAMS) software panel will comprise of Vignette, Oracle, Interwoven, Alphawest Services, EMC Documentum, ELO, Netcat, Objective, Opentext, and Tower Software.

The move ensures the companies are able to supply NSW agencies and departments with software under the state's Government Selected Applications Systems (GSAS) Contract 2606.

New South Wales Public Offices can only use members on the panel for software purchases and are required to obtain three quotes.

The NSW Department of Commerce, the agency overseeing IAMS, describes information asset management systems as software applications that capture, manage and store physical and digital information (including documents, web content, business systems data, emails, images, audio, video and maps).

"They can also offer functionalities such as workflow, web content management and collaboration. These applications enable real benefits to be achieved through the effective utilisation of information as a corporate asset," the department says on its website."

We at Oracle are obviously pleased to be on the IAMS list - each of our counterparts has a place to play with government agencies who will access software from us. We all have a unique value proposition and capabilities list that will suit some uses and not others. The choice of vendors provides the NSW government with a great choice of vendors and partners to do business with - it is going to promote competition between us which is a good thing for the departments and their own customers - you, the public. We feel that our UCM and URM products in conjunction with the acquired technology from BEA (AquaLogic UI and WebLogic Portal) will provide a solid foundation for Enterprise 2.0 initiatives undertaken by the government.

Paul Ricketts

Oracle Launches iPhone Applications

There's been a lot of talk about the highly-anticipated 3g iPhone release last week. I queued up and got my hands on a 16gb Black model Thursday night and am very happy with the device. A lot of organisations are preparing to release their applications for the iPhone, taking advantage of a. the wider release and availability and b. the significantly faster connectivity provided through 3g.

Dennis Howlett, a long-time critiquer of Oracle's products, spoke last week on his blog about the first of our iPhone applications - Business Indicators. He found it 'hard to fault the company for piggybacking on a platform that is getting plenty of attention. Even better that it is offered as a free download'. Thank you Dennis!

Oracle's new applications are focussed on the business intelligence world where key decision makers require up-to-date access to critical business information. Te new applications allow finger-tip access to key business metrics and analytical data - Oracle is clear in saying that the iPhone solution is NOT intended to replace a complete user dashboard experience. The application, known as Oracle Business Indicators, uses the service-orientated-architecture (SOA) capabilities of OBIEE and Oracle Business Intelligence web services to access reports and metric data from within the OBIEE catalogue. Access to custom reports from this environment are not yet available. Security and access controls are also managed by OBIEE - this is the same solution for more traditional desktop users.

Coming soon will be applications that manage the 'Approval' of information - suitable for purchasing, recruitment and expense reporting. Also, to follow will be applications that support CRM and ERP environments amongst others. One of Oracle's competitors released their version of the BI application for the Blackberry in 2007. One of the key differences is the platform of course, Blackberry's are generally provided by an organisation to an individual whilst the iPhone has been traditionally procured by individuals. In a world where form-factor is as important as functionality - user-experience with the large touchscreen with be preferred to the smaller displays offered by Blackberries. The development kit provided by Apple for the iPhone will also be a strong reason why we may see iPhones becoming common tools within the corporate world.

Paul

Customer Service

I was in Canberra last week to attend a Governance, Risk and Compliance workshop - interesting stuff I know and little to do with customer service so I will get on with it.

Without a doubt I experienced my most disappointing stay in a hotel, and I have stayed in a lot of hotels across. It was zero degrees outside so I decided to order room service at approx 6:30 and was told it would be in my room within 45mins. No problem until 1 hour later i realised stomach growling that my dinner wasn't in the room. A polite call from the kitchen then informed me that it would be 10mins. I appreciated the call however 20 mins after that call hunger pains had grown and the mini bar chips look appealing. I tried room service but couldn't get through so i called reception. The gentleman on the phone kindly informed me that the kitchen was busy and my meal would come. This wasn't reassuring in any way and I requested he contact the kitchen and follow up on my meal. He didn't want to follow up what i thought was a reasonable request so then I demanded he follow up. I was informed that I could receive a call back straightaway. Unless Canberra runs on a different time (which I probably does) I waited about an additional 20 mins. Once My Name Is Earl finished I realised it was 8:30 and I had enough so I rugged up and left my room informing the reception on the way out that I won’t be needing my meal if it was even getting prepared. On top of this my wireless internet didn't work in the morning and the reception with the same 101 of how not to treat a customer stated it often doesn't work and you need to ring the carrier. I found this unacceptable since the hotel offered to empathy and simply handed the problem back to me. So when i checked out i politely told the duty manager that the hotel needs to review its customer service and that i would refrain from staying at this hotel chain ever again. It’s poor when a hotel targeting business can't feed you and can't provide broadband to get email or check my facebook page :-).

So what’s this got to do with IT, let alone anything else? Well the next morning at a very informative workshop on Governance, Risk and Compliance - (don’t yawn) the issue of customers came up time and time again. I gained some interesting insight into what we as IT solution providers need to look at and how we are slowing adoption of these technologies due to poor execution especially around the end customer. Take for instance Identity Management or IDM. IDM has tremendous benefits for an organisation, and most security vendors can rattle of numerous reasons why an enterprise needs to lock down data, lock down access ect. But what we fail to tell you is that by doing this - i.e. locking down access, providing single sign on or reduced sign on we are reducing the risk for the enterprise no doubt but we are in fact pushing more risk for no reward to the customer of that enterprise. For instance take Internet banking, we all do it and the banks encourage us to do this. It’s relatively simple and thanks to the EFT legislation the banks assume the risk if something goes wrong. However what happens if Grandma Simpson (real name changed to protect the identity) isn't aware she has a key logger on her PC, and the bank can prove through negligence that she is at fault for the fraudulent transactions. I am not stating today this scenario would occur but it could in the future. Where you may be responsible for ensuring your connection, identity, access control and data is secure and encrypted. This would of course benefit the banks but not you since the onus would be on you to keep everything up to data and functioning. What this means is that when we are talking to an Enterprise about security, yes it’s important to mitigate risk but we need to look at if we have simply shifted the risk profile. If so what benefit does the consumer get if they are assuming the risks? The benefit could be better portability of information or maybe reduced fees.

The other interesting topic covered involved those clever Swedes. In this Nordic world most enterprises are adopting technology that mirrors banking security and banking access methods. Most of us leverage these technologies and are familiar with how to use their multifactor authentication, so why not adopt these same or similar technologies so you can have the same look and feel for access to all social, business and government sites that exists. It without doubt adds to the customer satisfaction. And again is food for thought when designing complex multifactor login systems to look at what already exists, is familiar.

If only i could get that hotel I won’t name to look at customer service.

Thank you for listening to my rant.
Carl Terrantroy

The iPhone and It's Impact on Information Management.......

I'm really excited!

I'm so looking forward to camping out in the middle of Sydney Thursday night (btw. Carl, I maybe a little tired Friday morning!)

I AM the gadget king and despite having a collection of all-things cool, including the previous model iPhone, will be in the queue this week to get my hands on the new 3g model.

What does this have to do with this blog you maybe wondering? Actually it has a lot to do with information management in general and the impact that organisations like Apple are having on the way that individuals (as opposed to organisations) view their unstructured information.

Apple is launching a couple of things this month. First of all, the obvious and well publicised launch of the 3g iPhone and secondly, the vastly improved MobileMe service which replaces the .MAC services. I'm not going to spend time in this post talking about the iPhone - there are plenty of other sources of information available across the internet for you to peruse. Instead, I thought I'd talk holistically about MobileMe and its offerings to the public and how its principals can be applied to the corporate world.

To start with, and to put this all into context, I am a gadget geek! In my arsenal of tools I currently use the following on a regular basis.

• My corporate laptop - a Dell D430 kindly provided to me by Oracle
• My personal laptop - an Apple Macbook Air
• My home desktop - an Apple PowerPC tower with 2Tb of storage holding my audio/video etc....
• My home media hub - an AppleTV
• My home backup solution - Apple TimeCapsule
• My ipod(s) - principally I carry a 160gb but also have an 8gb nano in the car
• My mobile phone - a 2.5g iPhone running on the Optus network (soon to be replaced by the new 3g model)
• My UMPC - an OQO 02 running Vista and Office 2007 on a 5" screen

I use Outlook on my corporate laptop to manage my contacts and calendar, I use the Apple tower at home to manage my multi-media files, I use both WiFi and Bluetooth technologies to get all these systems to talk to one-another and I have a very understanding Fiance who accepts me for my geekness!

Keeping all of this technology in sync is relatively easy to achieve for me - having been around IT for 20 years I understand how all this works and how I can get the best out of every component. But, the majority of the public would struggle when more than a couple of these devices need to work together. Running a desktop/laptop at home and synchronising through iTunes with an iPod is easy. Even adding a smartphone into the mix and using some proprietary integration with the Windows/Mac application to synchronise the calendar and contacts can be relatively easily achieved. But I want a choice of which technology I leave the house with in the morning and that's where it starts to get complex. For example, if I am at work during the day and I add new contact to Outlook - I have to somehow get this onto my iPhone, my OQO, my Air and my Desktop and any changes made on any device have to be synchronized appropriately.

MobileMe goes a long way to making this easy for all to achieve. The principal of supporting PUSH for email, contacts and calendar means these pretty much get automatically synchronised whenever an appropriate internet environment is available. Supporting native applications (Outlook on Windows, Entourage on Mac etc.) is a big plus as users don't have to worry about importing or exporting information from these solutions. Providing web-based accessibility to these solutions through a 'common' UI means users can go to almost any connected terminal in the world and access/change information and have this 'automatically' updated on 'all' their devices. Of course, this all works for multi-media and unstructured information as well so pictures, video and audio as well as documents, spreadsheets and presentations become instantly available to you from anywhere in the world.

This is all great from a personal perspective, but what about the corporate world?

One issue I see is where an individual takes their corporate information and 'shares' it with themselves through this type of service so that they can work from home. I take work home all the time but my corporate information does not leave my corporate laptop - if it does, I ensure it is properly deleted after I have finished working with it. We see this type of problem with many of our customers and prospects - the solution is to apply some kind of digital rights to the information meaning that only people with appropriate access can access the data. Implementing an IRM solution is straight-forward and any organisation that allows users to work in this flexible and mobile manner should be seriously considering this environment.

The concept of supporting a more-mobile workforce within an ECM environment is a common theme nowadays. When we speak to our customers and prospects - this is a frequent and highly-weighted business requirement that our solutions are expected to support. Looking back historically, 5 years ago mobility within the workforce was limited primarily as a requirement to executives who travelled frequently between offices. Putting in place an ECM solution that couldn't be accessed remotely from a users office location meant severe disruption to their effectiveness and at the executive level could place an organisation at risk (or a the very least, result in a bagging of the IT department who implemented the solution). Nowadays, we are expected to support mass-mobility within an organisation - here at Oracle a large percentage of employees frequently travel inter-state and internationally and ALL enjoy ongoing access to their information - assuming they've followed our internal guidelines of course.

This brings me to the real solution. Technology is really good and works well when it is supported by appropriate policies and procedures that allow the workforce to retain their flexibility in their work-practices whilst adhering to corporate standards. If it is easy for a user to create, store, manage, publish or search for information with negligible impact on their daily lives then this type of solution will be successful. If the same solution provides a level of security for the organisation, preventing loss/theft of data for example, then everyone wins.

ECM solutions, implemented correctly, do just this! A simple architecture based around a centralised repository with non-intrusive user-facing tools that appear to be the standard applications is the technological solution. Implementing best-practice change-management procedures to address the education and support of the users is the human solution. Together, adoption of the solution can be assured and the project deemed a success. Where one or other fails to meet its expectations or objectives - the problems begin.

Long live the iPhone, just make sure that when your users start using its features and functions you are protected or at least - are thinking about protection in the near future.

Paul

Do You Want to Streamline Your Applications?

Oracle has acquired a lot of technology recently - some of the biggest acquisitions have been within the Applications space. In addition to the Oracle eBusiness Suite, we own PeopleSoft, Siebel and JD Edwards and our acquisition of the Stellent technology in November 2006 puts us into a great position to underpin these applications with real-value content solutions.

Let's take a financials package for example, Oracle eBusiness Suite (EBS). Many organisations have successfully deployed this application to streamline their business processes but have neglected to solve an issue that causes headaches within the business teams. The handling of paper-based information within a financials process occurs on a daily basis and at certain periods (end of month, end of year predominately) the volume of paper being handled rises dramatically. Handling paper through a review and approvals process generates risk for an organisation. Believe it or not, the risk of spilling a cup of coffee on the paper is pretty high in most organisations as is simply mis-placing or losing the paper itself. Internal envelopes are notorious for getting lost for months-on-end - I've heard so many horror stories around this in my past. In addition to the risk of damaging or losing the paper, the process itself becomes long and cumbersome. Manual review and approval of paper - including the necessary cross-checks required can take anything from a week to a month to complete which in today's electronic age should be unacceptable to most organisations - particularly those that supply you with their goods!

There are solutions that help streamline the process through image-capture and electronic workflow processing. These solutions are easy to implement, highly-configurable as required and on the grand-scheme of things - relatively cheap to procure and own.

Now, of course, Oracle doesn't only look after it's own applications. SAP is out there being used by many organisations to run their businesses - we know a fair bit about this as most of the large deployments run Oracle's database at the back-end. SAP has a relatively good content management solution within its environment - but it is not considered by many to be enterprise-class as it doesn't really support the majority of ECM capabilities outside of its own ecosystem. Within SAP we provide an important and crucial solution that helps streamline the application itself ensuring ongoing performance without the need to consistently invest in new hardware. This solution is called SAP Archiving and is based upon the principal that only a relatively small percentage of data within SAP is actually being used. Once a financial transaction is complete, for example, the details (including any unstructured information) can be shipped out of the live environment into an archive - as long as it remains accessible if required. The Oracle Universal Online Archive solution fits this requirement nicely.

We are running a series of informative events in Sydney and Melbourne in the next few months to educate our customers and partners around these solutions. If you would like to be a part of these events, please let use know otherwise watch this space for registration details.

Paul

Unstructured Information Management a Problem? There is an Answer!

A recent Varonis Systems funded survey of 870 IT professionals found that only 23% believed unstructured data stored by their companies is properly secured and protected.

BELIEVE ME WHEN I SAY THAT THIS IS NOTHING NEW!

Unstructured information has ALWAYS been difficult to store and protect when so many organisations still rely on antiquated and outdated solutions that include simple file-system and PST environments. ECM solutions, and let's face the truth here, have existed for almost 20 years as mainstream-solutions to this very problem. Today's technologies allow for the automated categorisation and classification of unstructured information in an efficient and controlled manner and there is really no excuse for this result other that apathy and complacency in existence across these organisations.

Let's look at where unstructured information comes from...

1. Desktop document/presentation/spreadsheet tools and I'll use Microsoft Office as an example here. These solutions allow users to store their unstructured information, as a choice, on their local or network drives.
2. Email systems allowing users to create and store their unstructured information in, for example, a PST file on their local or network drives.
3. Workgroup tools, and I will include SharePoint in this, that allow users to store information more effectively that on their local or network drives - but still within a Silo.

Organisations are being taken down the path of ensuring that unstructured information is discoverable - this drive is coming predominately through legislative changes but also through knowledge management initiatives. To enable an organisation to respond to these drivers, an Enterprise-Class Content Management solution MUST be enabled that encompasses the management of office, email and 'siloed' information environments.

This is a blog that is contributed to by Oracle employees so it should come as no surprise to read that I will say, here and now, we have a solution to your unstructured information management problems - and we are far from being alone in the market. The issue, and this comes from 9 years of experience in this space, is that it is the business units that need to drive IT into providing a solution and not the other way around. Traditional solutions driven by IT address very specific requirements - I have lots of employees to manage therefore I need an HRMS, I have lots of customers to manage therefore I need a CRMS. The answer to the question of 'I have lots of documents to manage, how do I do so' is unfortunately answered on the whole with 'we already have a solution, it's called Windows Explorer and you can store your information on the network'.

The problem here is that once stored, either locally or 'on the network' - it is pretty difficult to provide access to anybody else - unless you've configured an enterprise indexing/search tool and this happens to be configured to look at all drives across the corporate systems. A centralised repository, that maybe deployed across multiple geographies and business units, really does help here. The Oracle solution for eDiscovery for example, is called Universal Online Archive and will eventually have the capability to store any corporate unstructured or semi-structured information.

The survey goes on to say, and I quote here, '61% of respondents say they cannot keep track of which users access specific unstructured data, and 91% say their organisations lack the ability to determine data ownership because of faulty governance policies and a lack of available storage tools that can remedy the problem'. Of course, the problem cannot be simply addressed through the implementation of technology. If it could, we would have every IT manager around the world knocking on our (collective) doors demanding that we sell them our latest and greatest solution right now as it represents the answer to all their prayers!

Organisations do have to develop maturity around unstructured information management if they are to succeed in solving their core issues that will eventuate into a successful ECM implementation. Policies and procedures is a good place to start for managing important corporate information. Educating their personnel is another place to go to - developing a message that storing emails in a PST file is a really bad this for the organisation as a whole and taking this out to every employee is another important message. Developing a taxonomy against which unstructured information is classified is equally as relevant for a large organisations.

The survey closes by stating the obvious - it is not a question of money, IT departments always have funding for projects that reduce costs and risks to the organisation - it is a question of the organisation simply not knowing where to start resolving the issue because of the complexities involved in managing unstructured information.

Here again, companies like Oracle have consultancy practices that really, truly and definitely CAN help!

Paul

Viacom vs. YouTube - an eDiscovery Event in the Making

News broke this week that Viacom has been successful in its application to get hold of information from YouTube on its users interactions with content hosted by the site. Initially, the legal proceedings commenced in March 2007 after Viacom had identified around 160,000 video clips hosted by YouTube that had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times. This is yet another example of a very public mega-litigation case between two organisations that focusses on electronic information held by one party being access by another.

All this is perfectly legal, and has existed around the globe in various juristictions for a number of years. In this case, Viacom will gain access to more than 12 terabytes of information - and as you can imagine there will be months (years even) of effort to establish the facts of the case. YouTube will be preparing their own defence - the costs for this action are going to be astronomical.

Now this is US based litigation, the laws that side of the ocean have been around for a few years now. Here in Australia, we are starting to see legislation (currently practice notes) coming into effect. Starting on July 1 this year, organisations across Australia are required to maintain appropriate records of all information including physical, eMail, ERP, CRM, HRMS and ECM systems. Where litigation cases of a certain size (over 200 documents) go through the court system, evidence must be produced electronically. The new privacy laws passed through Senate require organisations to maintain personal information in an encrypted manner and where loss of data occurs - this must be publically disclosed.

Whilst these new procedures may cause concern for some organisations, there are solutions available. Oracle, for example, announced its Universal Online Archive which allows for a scalable archiving environment that can initially be deployed for the main problem area for an organisation, eMail, but will over time allow for any unstructured, semi-structured or structured information to be held securely. Implementing this will go a long way to protecting an organisation from escalating costs and risks where frequent- or mega-litigation occurs.

Wikipedia has a number of great articles to read around eDiscovery and electronic evidence. I have provided these links here......

Wikipedia article on Digital Evidence
Wikipedia article on Electronic Evidence
Wikipedia article on Discovery Law

Oracle is running a series of events across Australia during August 2008. We will post details of these in the next few weeks - if litigation is an issue and you want to learn more, we would welcome you to attend one of these events.

Paul

Identity Theft Hits $1billion dollars in Australia

An interesting article came out today on the Australian IT web site referencing a study the Australian Bureau of Statistics have published.
The highlights or low lights depending on what side of the fence you sit on in regards to security services and solutions include;
-More than 800,000 people fell victim to at least 1 instance of fraud
-77% where victims of credit card fraud suffered a loss from $100 to $10,000
-23% suffered fraud through unauthorised use of their details.
-Nearly 6 million Australians were exposed to email scams like the Nigerian scam. The astounding statistic is that "there were 329,000 victims of all selected scams in Australia in the 12 months prior to interview, where a victim was defined as a person who responded to the scam by providing personal details and/or money or sought further information from the scammer. This represented a victimisation rate of 2%." according to the ABS.

With the new information age upon us, and the increased sharing, storage and transmission of data we need to start looking at what to do.

The Australian banks have just turned on PIN numbers for credit card transactions, this happened relatively unannounced last month. What this means is you can now enter a pin like your ATM card to authorise a credit card transaction. So you don't need to sign the small piece of paper. This functionality alone is not going to reduce Internet fraud. But it may change the landscape.

Today, those unfortunate souls that suffered credit card fraud pass the onus onto the bank. They accept the cost of this fraud begrudgingly and the consumer is protected. If this Billion Dollar bill continues to increase then i can imagine the banks looking for ways to cover their exposure. Rumours are already starting around the banks passing this costs down, especially if negligence i guess can be proved. If the banks introduce more sophisticated credit cards then this may become a reality.

Organisations need to look at what they can do to protect their consumers, the online economy is a legitimate part of most organisations today. Organisations need to realise if they don't start protecting their customers being you and me then we might move to a competitors shop front. Lets face it the online economy is great for this, you aren't travelling anywhere. There are no new addresses to find, parking to deal with. Its just a simple matter of creating a new account elsewhere.

So what can an organisation do? to start with the basic username / password had been around now for eternity, well in IT years anyway since the dawn of computers. More sophisticated authentication mechanisms need to be put in place, that don't burden the customer. They need to be transparent, leveraging technologies like mobile phones for the transmission of pins and stealth technologies that look at each connection on in its own right. These stealth technologies like Oracle's OAAM or Adaptive Access Management will monitor each session, balancing white lists, black lists, hardware profiles, user habits, malware code on the connecting device and other variables to determine if the connection can be maintained.

Using these more sophisticated mechanism's can allow organisations to leverage the fact they are preventing ID theft on their sites. No one remembers good news but they do of course remember bad news, so with the right technologies in place you shouldn't be on the wrong end of a PR nightmare.

I might check my credit cards tonight however just to make sure.

Cheers
Carl

Oracle ANZ Blogosphere Highlights

Oracle Blogs

More lost or stolen data

The (Oracle) Red Room – June 27
Carl Terrantroy
Michael Specht posted an interesting article on his blog regarding the continual problem of organisations loosing sensitive information. I posted a reply outlinning some other challenges around data protection. This is indeed an area where Oracle has a significant value proposition to help protect an organisation.

More on The Phoney War

Dev2Dev – June 12
Sean Boiling
Oracle employee Day Five. My first week as an Oracle employee draws to a close with more exposure to Oracle people as we plan a product roadmap session for the Sales Managers and Sales Consultants. We got some Product Management people in, along with a couple of us from the Sales Consulting side of things and have planned a full day of product roadmap training next week before going straight into the full Oracle Sales Kick-Off for Australia/New Zealand…

External Blogs

More stolen data

Michael Specht – June 25
Standford University is the latest large organisation to be involved in unintentional leaking of personal data. A laptop was stolen that contained the personal details of 62,000 former and current employees.
Comment by Oracle’s Paul Ricketts

Oracle Mix: Time Running Out To Vote For OOW 2008 Sessions

Richard Foote’s Oracle Blog – June 28
Richard Foote
Just a quick note to say time is running out for anyone interested in suggesting or nominating for a session at this year’s Oracle OpenWorld via Oracle Mix. Nominations close this coming Monday, 30 June 2008, so you don’t have much time left if you wish to nominate a presentation that might be of interest to folks attending OOW 2008. If you think you have something interesting to contribute, go on, give it a go !!

Time for a name change? JDeveloper -> Fusion Developer

One Size Doesn’t fit all – June 16
Chris Muir
I'm sitting in on the first day at the ODTUG Kaleidoscope conference, the Fusion Middleware Symposium, and it struck me I think JDeveloper is a poorly branded product. From a technical point of view, Oracle has massively expanding the product beyond its humble Java roots, from the inclusion of SOA/BPEL, through to growing WebCenter support, and the return of SQL Developer as a plug-in (or spin off, take your pick). In turn the traditional code-centric Java ADF applications are being left behind, replaced with exceedingly declarative solutions in both ADF BC and ADF Faces RC (in fact I've recently completed day long demonstrations of JDev 11g without writing a single line of Java code!).

Psychology of why reuse fails - courtesy of GeekAndPoke

Aide Memoire – June 8
Kate Carruthers
This amusing cartoon by Geek and Poke captures one of the important reasons why so much of our planned software reuse fails. Thus projects often fail to achieve the economy of scale benefits from the business case.
Comment by Oracle’s Saul Cunningham

Enterprise 2.0 & HCM vendors

Michael Specht – June 5
There have been several posts recently about Web 2.0 and Human Capital Management (HCM) vendors saying it is more than a fancy user interface (UI), which seems to be all HCM vendors are promoting at the moment. On that front I could not agree more, but I would take things to a deeper level.
Comment by Oracle’s Amit Avasthi