Hackathon 2017 captains – from L to R: Andy Weaver, John Sim, and Jake Ferm.

It’s hackathon weeked at Fishbowl Solutions. This means our resident hackers (coders) will be working as teams to develop new solutions for Oracle WebCenter, enterprise search, and various cloud offerings. The theme overall this year is The Cloud, and each completed solution will integrate with a cloud offering from Oracle, Google, and perhaps even a few others if time allows.

This year three teams have formed, and they all began coding today at 1:00 PM. Teams have until 9:00 AM on Monday, April 10th to complete their innovative solutions. Each team will then present and demo their solution to everyone at Fishbowl Solutions during our quarterly meeting at 4 PM. The winning team will be decided by votes from employees that did NOT participate in the hackathon.

Here are the descriptions of the three solutions that will be developed over the weekend:

Team Captain: Andy Weaver
Team Name – for now: Cloud ECM Middleware
Overview: Lightweight ECM for The Cloud. Solution will provide content management capabilities (workflow, versioning, periodic review notifications, etc.) to Google’s cloud platform. Solution will also include a simple dashboard to notify users of documents awaiting their attention, and users will be able to use the solution on any device as well.

Team Captain: John Sim
Team Name: SkyNet – Rise of the Bots
Overview: This team has high aspirations as they will be working on a number of solutions. The first is a bot that they are calling Atlas that will essentially query Fishbowl’s Google Search Appliance and return documents, which are stored in Oracle WebCenter, based on what was asked. For example, “show me the standard work document on on ordering food for the hackathon”. The bot will use Facebook messenger as the input interface, and if time allows, a similar bot will be developed to support Siri, Slack, and Skype.

The next solution the team will try and code by Monday will be a self-service bot to query a human capital management/human resources system to return how many days of PTO the employee has.

The last solution will be a bot that integrates Alexa, which is the voice system that powers the Amazon Echo, with Oracle WebCenter. In this example, voice commands could be used to ask Alexa to tell the user the number of workflow items in their queue, or the last document checked in by their manager.

Team Captain: Jake Ferm
Team Name – for now: Cloud Content Migrator
Overview: Jake’s team will be working on an interface to enable users to select content to be migrated across Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, DropBox, and the Oracle Documents Cloud Service. The goal with this solution is to enable with as few clicks as possible the ability to, for example, migrate content from OneDrive to the Oracle Documents Cloud Service. They will also be working on ensuring that content with larger file sizes can be migrated in the background so that users can carry on with other computer tasks.

Please check back on Tuesday, April 11th for a recap of the event and details on the winning solution. Happy hacking!

Taco bar to fuel the hackers!