This post comes from Fishbowl’s president, Tim Gruidl. One of Tim’s biggest passions is technology innovation, and not only does he encourage others to innovate, he participates and helps drive this where he can. Tim likes to say “we innovate to help customers dominate”. Tim summarizes Fishbowl’s Hackathon event, held last Friday and Saturday at Fishbowl Solutions, in the post below.

What an event! I want to start by thanking Andy Weaver and John Sim (Oracle ACE)! Without their passion, drive, leadership and innovation, this event would not be possible.

What a great event to learn, build the team, interact with others and compete. We also created some innovative solutions that I’m sure at some point will be options to help our customers innovate and extend their WebCenter investments. This year, we had 3 teams that designed and coded the following solutions:

• InSight Image Processing – Greg Bollom and Kim Negaard

They leveraged the Google Vision API to enable the submission of images to Oracle WebCenter and then leveraged Google Vision to pull metadata back and populate fields within the system. They also added the ability to pull in GPS coordinates from photos (taken from cameras, etc.) and have that metadata and EXIF data populate WebCenter Content.

Fishbowl Product Manager, Kim Negaard, discusses the Google Vision API integration with WebCenter

• Slack Integation with WebCenter Portal and Content – Andy Weaver, Dan Haugen, Jason Lamon and Jayme Smith

Team collaboration is a key driver for many of our portals, and Slack is one of the most popular collaboration tools. In fact, it is currently valued at $3.6 billion, and there seems to be a rapidly growing market for what they do. The team did some crazy innovation and integration to link Slack to both WebCenter Portal and WebCenter Content. I think the technical learning and sophistication of what they did was probably the most involved and required the most pre-work and effort at the event, and it was so cool to see it actually working.

Team Slack integration presentation.

• Oracle WebCenter Email Notes – John Sim (Oracle ACE) Lauren Beatty and me

Valuable corporate content is stored in email, and more value can be obtained from those emails if the content can be tagged and context added in a content management system – Oracle WebCenter. John and Lauren did an awesome job of taking a forwarded email, checking it into WebCenter Content to a workspace, and using related content to build relationships. You can then view the relationships in a graphical way for context. They also created a mobile app to allow you to tag the content on the go and release it for the value of the org.

That’s me explaining the email integration with Oracle WebCenter Content.

Participants voted on the competing solutions, and it ended up being a tie between the Google Insight team and the Email Notes team, but all the solutions truly showed some innovation, sophistication, and completeness of vision. A key aspect of the event for me was how it supported all of Fishbowl’s company values:

Customer First – the solutions we build were based on real-life scenarios our customers have discussed, so this will help us be a better partner for them.

Teamwork – the groups not only worked within their teams, but there was cross team collaboration – Andy Weaver helped John Sim solve an issue he was having, for example.

Intellectual Agility – this goes without saying.

Ambition – people worked late and on the weekend – to learn more, work with the team and have fun.

Continuous Learning – we learned a lot about Slack, cloud, email, etc.

Overall, the annual Hackathon is a unique event that differentiates Fishbowl on so many fronts. From the team building, to the innovation keeping us ahead of the technology curve, to all the learnings – Hackathons truly are a great example of what Fishbowl is all about.

Thanks to all that participated, and remember, let’s continue to innovate so our customers can dominate.

Tim