AIIM is offering free Enterprise 2.0 training, at least for a short while. They have a ten-part course on Enterprise 2.0, and AIIM is offer one of the ten sessions for free...

A lot of folks are confused, and justly ask what the heck is Enterprise 2.0 anyway? Jake opined a while ago that the Enterprise 2.0 label might be a little unnecessary... because its all pretty much the Web 2.0 stuff anyway. I agree in part... a lot of the initial buzz about Enterprise 2.0 is pretty much just making blogs, wikis, and social software more "enterprisey."

However, its also about streamlining business process management, data mining, and data visualization with freaky new tools... and a lot of cool new security offerings. Personally, I think that solving Enterprise 2.0 security problems is easier than solving Web 2.0 security issues... because cross-domain single sign on is a lot easier to do in the enterprise... and there's less spam ;-)

I'd also like to emphasize that real Enterprise 2.0 shouldn't be focused on the latest buzzwords... it should be about empowerment, simplicity, and evolution. Bill Gates recently reminded us of the dirty little secret of software: tradition enterprise apps are more about tracking and monitoring employees, rather than empowering them to do their jobs better. Enterprise 2.0, if it takes the lead from Web 2.0, should break that command-and-control mold to enable bigger, better, faster innovation. Otherwise, it shouldn't even be called Enterprise 2.0.

To paraphrase Clay Shirky, innovations aren't socially interesting until they are technically boring. Frankly, I'd argue that enterprise applications could certainly benefit from some technical boredom... instead of re-architecting your solution every 5 years with the latest and greatest ivory tower buzzwords -- J2EE, EJB, Portals, SOA, CEP, ESB, etc. -- just use the simplest things that works.

To sum up... Keep it simple (stupid!), focus on usability, and your audience will love you... Or as Einstein would say:

Things should be made as simple as possible -- but no simpler.

Always good advice...

Well... not in so many words... what he did day is that he expects the next operating system -- Windows 7 -- will be out within a year or so.

Wow... a lot of enterprises were taking the "wait and see" approach to Vista... because so many developers were taking the "wait and see" approach... because of so many problems with Vista. This kind of message from Bill Gates himself will probably make a lot of companies skip Vista entirely, and just wait for Windows 7.

That's probably a good move... developers never warmed to Vista. Many of them jumped ship to Mac OSX or Linux rather than develop on Vista. UPDATE here's a quote:

MacOS experienced 50 percent growth as a primary development platform and 380 percent growth as a targeted platform during the period.

Even dedicated Microsoft developers aren't writing applications for Vista. According to PC World, only 8% of Windows developer are writing apps for Vista. The same survey said about 24% thought they might do development for it in 2009, but considering this latest missive from Bill Gates, I think that number might be lower in the next survey...

Oh well... file Vista in the whoops file... just like GMOs

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web (shown right, Gore-ified), is complaining about how difficult it is to find what you want on the web. He brings up some points that ECM folks have known about for a long long time: metadata is essential for finding what you want. Timmay has been awarded a $350,000 grant to study the issue... like he needs the cash...

Anyway, I'm all over embedded metadata... but I can tell you right now its nearly impossible to get everybody in a small company to agree to a complex metadata standard, so good luck accomplishing that on the whole frigging internet... also, its even more impossible to get content creators to follow the metadata policies. People who work hard to create great content believe others should work hard to FIND their content.

Silly? Yes... but a very common attitude.

The ones who usually spend a lot of time optimizing their metadata and search results, are usually those with lower quality content, or people who are obsessed with their own popularity. Such as myself... Or, like spam blogs, aka splogs...

That being said, I wish Timmay well... but you don't need $350,000 to come up with a solution for this. I'd recommend creating a Microformat for embedded metadata, to apply to the content in the containing element... You'd also need some kind of cryptographically strong key for "trusted" metadata suppliers, so people don't try to tag porn sites with every metadata keyword in the universe. Also, the microformat needs to be extensible, so anybody can embed custom namespaces and keywords in it.

The Microformats folks have a tag similar to what he wants already, the rel-tag microformat. Its overly simple, but that simplicity will encourage adoption -- much in the same way that the "inferiority" of HTML over all other markup formats ensured its success. It looks like this:

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/tech" rel="tag">tech</a>

If this link is anywhere on the page, it signifies that the page has something to do with the metadata tag tech, and it gives Technorati as the home for the tag. I'd expand on this to allow for other tag homes, such as del.icio.us, or even any arbitrary social bookmarking site.

Done and done.

Naturally, you'd want to be more precise... some new sites have dozens of articles on the main page, and you'd like to tag each section individually... so this tag should only apply to the content in the containing tag. Also, this kind of formatting is difficult to embed in a Microsoft Word document: I couldn't get behind any kind of distributed metadata model unless it easily worked in multiple formats. A CSS style might be a better choice than the rel attribute in the link...

Finally, it needs some kind of authentication model... perhaps you need an authentication microformat somewhere on the page, and all microformats on the page inherit the credentials. Of course, you'd need to have some kind of tag to force exceptions, so banner ads from remote servers would need their own auth tokens.

Whaddya say, Timmay? Is that due-dilligence worth $5k?

If you're a Stellent customer, you've probably noticed that you no longer get those nice customer emails about ECM from Oracle... that's because Oracle -- wisely -- has a pretty strict anti-spam policy... so people who own one Oracle product aren't blasted with info and offers from other products.

So what should you do instead? Well, first of all you need to register for the quarterly content management newsletter. This isn't customer-only focused, but its got a lot of good stuff... and the archives are online.

In addition, Oracle is now is doing a quarterly customer webcast to keep folks up to date about the latest changes in the product line. The next one will be June 5, 2008 at 9:00 a.m Pacific Time. If you'd like to attend, you need to register with Intercall. Its for customers and partners only... so be sure to use your company email address, or you'll get booted!

Another option is to configure Metalink to send you ECM updates. Follow these steps:

1. Log in to Metalink.
2. Click the Headlines link in the upper left of the page.
3. Click the Edit Page button under Headlines on the right.
4. In the drop-down list, select Certify and Availability, and click Add New.
5. In the top right, select the Certify Settings button.
6. In the drop-down list under Product Alerts, select Oracle Universal Product Management, and click Add New.
7. Click the Overall Settings button.
8. At the bottom of the page, click the Automatically email My Headlines to me checkbox.
9. Click Store Settings.
10. Play the waiting game, or hungry hungry hippos until your emails arrive.

You can also subscribe to bug reports and knowledge base articles, if you'd really like to keep up-to-date...

Of course, to be fully up to date, you'll need to do all this, plus subscribe to email notifications from the Stellent Yahoo Group and the Oracle ECM Forum... but that's only for information hogs like me ;-)

I'm out here at the BEA Participate conference... or more correctly, I'm up in the hotel writing while everybody else is attending the conference... I'm just tagging along so I can chat with Andy about the book, and get the low-down on what the BEA acquisition means for Oracle.

I asked Victoria Lira over at the Oracle ACE Director program if she could get me a free ticket to the event, but there were none available. Even Oracle employees had to pay their own way! Highly unusual, especially considering that Oracle now owns BEA.

I was surprised at first, until Michelle revealed the free iPod Touch that all attendees got! Damn... I haven't seen swag like that since the dot com days...

I guess now that they are Oracle, they suddenly have money to burn...

Well, I'm preparing my talk for the free Minneapolis BarCamp technology conference tomorrow: Communication For Geeks: How to Influence Your Boss, Your Customers, and Your Team. It will be early in the morning, 9am, so hopefully I'll still have an audience! I'f you're in Minneapolis, please show up!

Coffman Union at the University of Minnesota Campus (Minneapolis)
Address 300 Washington Ave. S.E. Minneapolis, MN 55455-0110 (map and directions)

Ahhh... the U of MN... my old stomping grounds. Almost 400 folks signed up so far, so it should be bigger than the Oregon BarCamp that Jake attended last week... There's also a pre-event mixer at The Bulldog at 8pm tonight... which is the best damn place to get Belgian beer in Minneapolis.

I like presenting first thing in the morning... then I have the rest of the conference to relax. I also enjoy presenting non-tech talks at tech conferences. Last year I talked about marketing with Derrick Shields, which was a blast. This year, I'm talking about conflict resolution with a technology spin.

Personally, I believe communication and conflict resolution are woefully overlooked skills in the technology industry... I mean, a vast vast VAST majority of software projects are complete failures... and if the statistics from the AIIM failure study still ring true, the biggest problem seems to be communication. Its not the technology, its the people. This might be more true in my industry (Enterprise Content Management) than in others (writing device drivers), but its always important.

I figure, these BarCamp folks know plenty about how to make projects successful with technology... but they have no clue how to politely inform their boss that an executive decision is threatening the success of a project. They don't know how to make such a statement, and keep their jobs, and put the project back on track.

Do you?

If not, come see me at 9am this Saturday...

UPDATE: I got some really good feedback about my session... hopefully it helped a few folks out. Ed Kohler has a review, and a fairly unflattering photo of me ;-)

I recently came across the article We Don't Know How We Program. It was a discussion about the gaps between what developers and non-developers think about the process of writing code. It begins:

I was talking to a colleague from another part of the company a couple of weeks ago, and I mentioned the famous ten-to-one productivity variation between the best and worst programmers. He was surprised, so I sketched some graphs and added a few anecdotes. He then proposed a simple solution: "Obviously the programmers at the bottom end are using the wrong process, so send them on a course to teach them the right process." My immediate response, I freely admit, was to open and shut my mouth a couple of times while trying to think of response more diplomatic than "How could anyone be so dumb as to suggest that?"

hehehe... the central premise to the article is that programming is a creative endeavor, which doesn't lend itself well to process... The unfortunate developers subjected to process will only achieve mediocrity... additionally any process that stifles creativity will expunge or crush exceptional programmers, because they need creative space to be ten times as productive.

Does that mean that good programming cannot have a process? Of course not... although as others have noted, things like CMMi should be avoided like the plague. A process needs to be able to empower creativity, but also reign it in when necessary. Programmers -- like artists -- think big, and do wild things that are cool but don't satisfy the needs of the end users. The product doesn't sell, the users rebel, everything goes to hell... the developers know full well of the "failure," so to nurse their bruised egos, they blame the users for being dumb, or the specification for being incomplete. Then they curl up into a ball and call themselves misunderstood.

Yep. Just like Van Gogh.

To reign this in, you need a peer- and customer- driven process to help keep the project down-to-earth... however, done in such a way to not bruise egos or go anywhere near arbitrary rules. The process needs to evolve with the code. You also need something that encourages developers to think of the code as a community project, to reduce a sense of ownership, and thus keep egos intact. Agile focuses a lot on those kinds of processes... although Agile needs some tweaking for very large projects.

In addition, you also need processes that get the creative juices flowing... this doesn't mean brainstorming sessions or hyper expensive collaboration tools. This usually means simple things like physical proximity. Some teams even had great success with an enforced MESSY DESK policy. That's right... clean desks are evil! Messy desks and physical proximity encourage the "drop in, say hi, notice notes strewn about, and comment on them" process... which more than anything else inspires collaboration and fresh ideas.

My gut feeling? Unless you have artists designing your code process, your organization will never create exceptional code.

So keep a close eye on that process weenie with the stopwatch... he's clearly up to no good.

Its even more official... the Oracle purchase of BEA is final.

Most of my thoughts on the subject are in an older post from when Oracle announced their initial offer for BEA.

Its effect on Oracle ECM technology will be minimal... Oracle ECM already integrates quite well with a large number of BEA products, and this doesn't alter the overall ECM strategy much. The Stellent alumni are pleased as punch... Although the price list for Oracle Middleware just got a lot more complex.

Speaking of which, the effects of the BEA purchase on Oracle ECM sales should be very positive... since Oracle sells the best content management app available, and it integrates nicely with lots of BEA goodies, it should be a pretty easy sell to existing BEA customers.

Of course, the devil is in the details... so stay tuned.

UPDATE: Billy Cripe has some info about potential layoffs in Oracle Fusion Middleware. I'd like to link directly to the specific article about layoffs... but when I click on the permalink, it just takes me to Billy's LinkedIn page! Bad Omen?

UPDATE 2: Billy fixed the link...

Finally online... at Blip.tv instead of YouTube:

Its a really great description of what social software is (mostly a pile of failures) and where its going. Hopefully the 3rd or 4rd generation of social software learns from past mistakes, and helps do something with the insane cognitive surplus in the world. I would have just used the phrase "free time" instead of "cognitive surplus," but Shirky is an academic after all... and they love inventing new words.

My favorite quote was when he was chatting with a TV producer about Wikipedia, and how people were obsessing so much about the Pluto page when it was downgraded from a planet... She shook her head and said "where do people find the time?" Naturally, Clay Shirky snapped and said "people who work in TV don't get to ask that question!"

Classic snark...

Its been two years since my inaugural blog post on April 29th, 2006: The Trouble With RSS. Over my site's second year, I wanted to do some long-term analysis on how different web analytics tools track hits, visits, and the like. As expected, they don't agree with each other:

• SiteMeter: 89,800 visits (132,000 hits)
• Google Analytics: 84,000 visits (140,000 hits)
• Webalizer: 431,000 visits (3,660,000 hits)

Curious about why web site statistics differ based on the tool? SiteMeter uses an embedded image (at the bottom of this page), and tracks a hit every time somebody loads the image... so if you block banner ads, your visit might not be recorded. Google Analytics loads some JavaScript, which is useful for tracking more complete data... but if your browser blocks JavaScript (or cross-domain JavaScript), it wont register a hit. I found it odd that SiteMeter tracked more visits, but fewer hits than Google Analytics... curious.

In contrast with the other two, Webalizer uses raw Apache logs to determine hit count, so it tracks every single dang hit... Over 3 million hits in one year??? That's clearly too many... I'm not that interesting... but the visit count might be more accurate. Webalizer is the only analytics tool that tracks folks who view my site with RSS Readers, which may hit my site several times per day... thus the higher visit count. The hit count is hyper inflated because it counts search engine spiders, spammers, and hack attempts (some better than others).

All told, if the majority of folks view my site with RSS, then Webalizer's count is more accurate. If most of them view it the old fashioned way, then the other two are more accurate. I'm probably in the 100,000 - 200,000 visits per year range.

Unfortunately, none of these numbers include the folks who read my site through an online RSS readers, like Google Reader, or Bloglines. These sites hit my RSS feed once, then share it with dozens of folks who subscribe to the feed... To get a better estimate, I could pipe my RSS Feed through something like Feedburner. Feedburner keeps track of how many subscribers you have on the online feed readers, and produces decent stats on it... however, once you move your feed to Feedburner, its almost impossible to move it out... so I'm not happy with that option. Even so, that still wouldn't track those who view my content through RSS aggregators like Central Standard Tech, or Orana, or other sites that run Planet.

Well, what about the data from Alexa? That site ranks web pages based on those who surf the web with a toolbar that tracks their every move. Personally, I think people who surf with that toolbar are opening up a major security hole... so their viewing audience is probably restricted to folks who are kind of tech savvy, but don't take security precautions. In other words, newbie geeks. I've never broken into the top 100,000 sites ranked on Alexa, but I frequently break the top 100,000 sites ranked by Technorati... although Technorati only ranks blogs.

Even if we could accurately count how many people hit the site, we're still at a loss to know who paid attention. Google Analytics tries to measure "time on the page", other metrics include bounce rate, or even the number of comments.

Oh well... A reliable measure of relevance will always be elusive... but at least we have enough estimates to support a cottage industry of people analyzing those metrics to prove anything they are told to prove ;-).

Back to my anniversary... Lots of stuff has changed since my first anniversary post: I've traveled to South Africa, Brazil, and Argentina... I've remodeled my kitchen, I've nearly completed my second book on Oracle enterprise content management, I've given technology presentations at Oracle Open World, AIIM Minnesota, BarCamp Minnesota, and IOUG Collaborate in Denver. I've trained both salespeople and consultants on what Enterprise Content Management actually is, and I helped negotiate a settlement to an 18-month lawsuit against a local non-profit. Oh yeah... I implemented about a dozen ECM solutions as well...

Next year, I hope to have even more goin' on... and a few more web site visits.

Not to be outdone by Garrick's Hefe Weizen, I decided to make a bit of Scottish Ale this month.

There's a place here in Minneapolis called Vine Park Brewery, a decent little microbrewery... but its main income comes from people renting their kettles and making their own beer! They have a bunch of suggested recepies for you, so you pick one, boil it all up in a kettle, then place it in a keg to ferment. In 2 weeks, you come back to bottle it yourself.

Compared to making beer at home, you get better equipment, a brew coach to help you out, and your home won't smell like hyperactive yeast.

My dad and I went there 2 weeks ago to make beer, and split the end product. Last night I came home with three dozen 22-ounce beer bottles. I toyed with several different labels and ego-centric names -- Bexwiser? Bezzo Brau? Special Bexsport? -- but settled on the dignified "Huff Manor Scottish Ale." I printed up some custom labels, and slapped them on the bottles after we filled them up.

Its pretty tasty... and at about $2 per 22-ounce bottle, its a pretty cost-effective way to get my recommended daily allowance of hops and grains... ;-)

When I first heard about Oracle taking a new direction with their old content management product -- meaning the old Content DB, not the newly acquired Stellent stuff -- the first thing I thought was it's about time!

When Oracle claimed it had 2 content management systems, that really confused people... especially considering that Content DB was at best a set of tools to create a content management system, whereas Stellent was a full blown application plus framework. They really weren't like each other at all.

Universal Online Archive (UOA) is Content DB, but now focused on being an archiving platform. On Oracle 11g, it is an extension on the Secure Files feature of the database. If you haven't heard of Secure Files yet, it beats the Linux filesystem on both read and write performance. It also has compression, de-duplication (only storing duplicate files once), and encryption. The encryption is an extension of Oracle Transparent Data Encryption, plus support for encrypting entire tablespaces instead of just individual columns. This means support for foreign keys, as well as indexes beyond the basic b-tree stuff...

Compression reduces the storage needs by 33% on average, according to Oracle. If you then use the statistics from IDC that there are 8 copies for every 1 content item, then de-duplication would bring to total storage down by 87.5%... all while maintaining better-than-filesystem performance, despite the added cost of encryption. See this whitepaper for some tuning statistics and tips.

Secure Files is the next generation of Large Objects for the database... and it's very cool... but what should you run on top of it? For the longest time, the folks at Stellent balked at using the database for file storage. Using the filesystem made much more sense because of performance reasons, which made up for the additional complexity of the architecture. However, if the user has 11g, there really is no better option than storing content items in the database.

NOTE: This rule-of-thumb does not apply for web content -- especially for small images and thumbnails. In those cases, a split approach where public web assets are stored locally would probably be faster. Luckily, a customized FileStoreProvider can help you achieve this.

Also, Oracle Universal Online Archive finally fits in with Oracle's broader strategy for content management. Even though it can store anything, the first release will have connectors to email servers to be a mail archive:

• Microsoft Exchange
• Lotus Notes
• Generic SMTP Server

This fits right in with the Universal Records Management strategy, which is to embed a Records Management Agent in remote repositories, and control their life cycle from the Records Management system.

In other words, your email archiving policy is no longer dictated by IT. Your records managers can say when an item should be archived, and how long it should be retained based on events, instead of simply time and size constraints. For example, emails should be retained 2 years after a project completion, 6 months after employee termination, or 12 months after you lose a specific customer. That will reduce both your email space requirements, and your legal risk.

But it doesn't stop there... the next step is to make connectors to other content management systems, for example, Sharepoint. The idea is to archive content out of systems like Sharepoint, and replace them with a "stub". When a user downloads from Sharepoint, the "stub" is smart enough to redirect the download to the archive, and return it directly.

In other words, you could be using a secure, compressed, de-duplicated, encrypted, archive without ever noticing. Throw in a Records Management Agent, and you'll also invisibly comply with dozens of regulation and laws... no matter where you store your information.

Its a good strategy, and some interesting technology... we'll see how it pans out.

UPDATE: The release was announced, but they don't have a date for when it will be available for download. Here's some more info about the release, and some places to watch for downloads:

• Official Oracle Universal Online Archive Page
• Podcast on UOA
• Press release

Microsoft has been pushing a new XML standard for word processing, OOXML. Its generally regarded as unnecessary, not to mention overly complex and weird... so much so that not even Microsoft Office 2007 passes conformance tests.

Yikes...

Anyway, the world was a bit shocked when Norway voted YES to make it an ISO standard... OOXML looked dead in the water, until this shocker gave it new life... so one guy on the 30-person committee decided to give the inside scoop:

http://topicmaps.wordpress.com/2008/04/18/the-norway-vote-what-really-happened/

...Halfway through the proceedings, a committee member had asked for (and received) assurance that the Chairman would take part in the final decision, as he had for the DIS vote back in August. It now transpired that the BRM participants had also been invited to stay behind. 23 people were therefore dismissed and we were down to seven. In addition to Standard Norway’s three, there were four “experts”: Microsoft Norway’s chief lobbyist, a guy from StatoilHydro (national oil company; big MS Office user), a K185 old-timer, and me. In one fell swoop the balance of forces [about rejecting OOXML] had changed from 80/20 to 50/50 and the remaining experts discussed back and forth for 20 minutes or so without reaching any agreement...

...The VP thereupon declared that there was still no consensus, so the decision would be taken by him. And his decision was to vote Yes. So this one bureaucrat, a man who by his own admission had no understanding of the technical issues, had chosen to ignore the advice of his Chairman, of 80% of his technical experts, and of 100% of the K185 old-timers. For the Chairman, only one course of action was possible.

Sounds like election fraud to me... if true, this could cause a pretti nasti backlash.

File this one under "whoops":

Genetic modification actually cuts the productivity of crops, an authoritative new study shows, undermining repeated claims that a switch to the controversial technology is needed to solve the growing world food crisis. The study – carried out over the past three years at the University of Kansas in the US grain belt – has found that GM soya produces about 10 per cent less food than its conventional equivalent, contradicting assertions by advocates of the technology that it increases yields.

Why the difference? Well, its simple... it takes a REALLY long time to genetically engineer plants. By the time you have one new viable generation of frankenstein foods, traditional breeding techniques could generate dozens of new varieties... in which case, the best traditional crop will almost always outperform the best genetically modified crop. If not now, then probably in a season or two.

I'm not as paranoid about the label "genetic engineering" as some folks -- probably because I did it once in a lab and it wasn't what people think -- but what always bugged me was the woefully unscientific methods that Monsanto used to promote modified crops.

At best, Roundup-Ready crops introduce a new dimension to the arms race between farmers and pests... and one that has much more collateral damage than others. As pests inevitably grow resistant to pesticide, then only the second generation of modified crops and will survive... what then happens to traditional farmers? Or organic farmers?

If they want to use superorganics techniques to grow drought-resistant, flood-resistant, or salt-resistant crops, they have my support... but pesticide-resistant crops make absolutely no sense in the long term. And now it appears that they can't even keep up with the food yields of traditional crops...

Back to the drawing board, I guess.

A usual, the last day of a conference ends on a half day... so I imbibed some Chimay Red with lunch. I was able to get a few others in the crew to follow suit. The usual suspects, indeed...

Michelle won the cookoff to see who had the coolest ECM implementation... woot! The prize was one "silver" ladle, and a $100 gift certificate. Besides Folios, annotations, and the new Site Studio contributor, she showed off Kyle's PicLens integration with Stellent's RSS Feeds, which went over quite well... nice and flashy! The roadmap and ECM focus groups were good as well... although in the future I'd do the cookoff first, then the roadmap, and lastly the focus group. That way, people have their feature lists and questions fresh in their mind.

As usual, a conference this large left me feeling like I missed out on a lot. I networked with a lot of people, and discussed ECM a lot... but I wanted to learn more about identity management, performance tuning, and Hyperion. There were simply too many options, and the handful of non-ECM talks I attended were a tad too high-level for my taste. Maybe I'm too technical, but I don't feel like I learned that much.

Brian Dirking wanted some feedback, so I guess I'd make the following suggestions:

• After people register (and pay) for Collaborate 09, give them access to the presentations from 08. Then we'd better be able to determine who is a good presenter, what topics are too technical, or which ones aren't technical enough.
• Have some level of continuity between years... I've given the "50 ways to integrate with the content server" talk about 4 times, but its always a bit different, and people continue to be surprised at how flexible Stellent is.
• Have some kind of easy trends analysis to help people find "what's hot" in their industry. Ideally this would be community based, to avoid sales pitches and promotions. For example, send out a survey to ask people what their industry is, and what topics they are interested in... perhaps even which technologies or presentations that they might find useful.

I'm used to more focused conferences, like the O'Reilly ones... so this many high-level presentations makes me sad. I personally would like a bit of community feedback to help everybody find which topics are most relevant to their background, goals, and needs.

Not an easy undertaking... but I'd wager a lot of conferences would appreciate something similar.

I hung out at mostly Stellent sessions today. Vijay talked about the FileStoreProvider, Alan had a great presentation on metadata models, and Tom was up on a customer panel. One of the questions on the customer panel was about the strengths and weaknesses of the Stellent UCM product. There were happily few minuses, and everybody on the panel said that ease of use (deployment, management, customization) was the biggest plus.

Some folks from Oracle's "Beehive" project presented "the future of collaboration." The beehive project is the latest iteration of Oracle Collaboration server, which is an email/calendar/task application more akin to Lotus Notes, and quite different from Stellent's document-centric Collaboration Manager. I missed the show, but everybody I talked to about it said it was quite memorable... however, they left out if they meant that as a good thing...

Somebody noticed that IOUG had me down to give my "50 Ways" presentation twice... I was surprised, so I headed down early to scope the room out. Then I spotted the big sign that said it already took place and is therefore canceled. On the way back, I sung by the bookstore, and noticed that they seemed to be running low on my Stellent book. I later bumped into the 2 customers who bought the last 2 copies, so I autographed them.

Its a good feeling for my niche-technology book to sell out half way through the conference... ;-)

I also spent about 2 hours in one-on-one sessions with customers. They were all concerned about how they were supposed to get started with a coherent enterprise-wide content management policy... those interactions drove the point home that there's a real need for the book Andy and I are currently writing.

And oh yeah... it snowed. Tuesday was 83 degrees, and on Wednesday it snowed. Strange... I thought that kind of stuff only happened in Minnesota.

One more half-day, then back home!

I gave my presentation on 50 Ways to Integrate with Oracle Content Management today... it was similar to my one from Crescendo last year, but I updated it a bit with some of Oracle's new connectors (BI Publisher, Secure Enterprise Search, Records Management Agents, etc.).

After that, I had a book signing. On my way over, I realized that I didn't tell anybody I was doing a book signing.... so attendance was kind of thin. Plus I was late. Chaffee showed up with Patrick and Rhonda, and I signed his book with something characteristically glib...

I had lunch with some customers -- finally attempting that business networking thing -- and promised to help a few folks out with their architecture.

In the afternoon, I helped out on Michelle's two hour hands-on lab about Site Studio: Building an Enterprise Web Site From Scratch. Believe it or not, if you know what you're doing, you can get a pretty good handle on an enterprise scalable web site in a few hours with Site Studio... Then it was dinner with some Stellent folks, and drinks while we watched the Wild lose.

Since I'm now done with my official obligations, I'll be spending day three going to sessions and networking...

Hat tip Reddit:

http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl:SELECT+inurl:FROM+inurl:WHERE+intitle:phpmyadmin

Almost 1000 hits... yikes. Trust me, its funny (and sad) if you know SQL injection...

I suppose I should start with day zero, and not day one...

Michelle and I landed, but the hotel didn't have our reservations on file. Great... and on the one day we decided to not print out the confirmation letter. Michelle scoured her web-email using the computers behind the reservation desk... in the meantime a few Oracle employees came in and were initially confused as to why she was working behind the counter... Anyway, the clerk looked through their list of who was checking in that day, just to see if our names were spelled incorrectly.

We were there of course: as Brian and Michelle Hugg. Lovely. Yeah. We'll live that down.

Later I had drinks with some folks I hadn't seen in a while (like Dan Norris and Matt Topper), as well as folks I heard of but never met (like Jake Kuramoto and Paul Pedrazzi). The Oracle ACE Director dinner was good. I love finding out what other ACEs are up to, and what technologies they are interested in. The buzz these days seems to be all about Hyperion... just when I started learning about BI Publisher and Real-Time-Decisions!

Keeping up on enterprise technology is a constant struggle...

The first day of IOUG Collaborate 2008 was pretty good... I hung out at the Enterprise Content Management conference-withing-a-conference a lot to chat with other ECM folks. I gave a well-recieved talk about why ECM projects fail, which was essentially an extension of the AIIM list from last year. It wasn't just a rant, it had some practical advice of what typically goes wrong, and what you can do about it. Cliff Cate and Tom Tonkin presented their war stories and advice as well.

Here's a tip: very few enterprise software failures have much to do with bad software... its almost always poor communication.

I wasn't able to attend many sessions after that... not the exhibit hall, not even the keynotes. I did check out the hands-on lab about Oracle Text, hoping for a deep dive... but it was pretty basic. Attending a conference is more fun when you're not a presenter. I had to go to my hotel early to put the finishing touches on my Tuesday presentation... so I skipped all the festivities.

I have another session on day 2, after which I'll be able to relax, attend more sessions, and network more.