Everyone likes lists. They are easy to follow, easy to cross off, and easy to add to. And since it is the holiday season, and you are (hopefully) putting the finishing touches on your gift giving or meal preparation lists, I thought what better way to summarize what we learned from Oracle OpenWorld 2015 in a Top 10 list. However, one caveat to that is these are not listed in any particular order, and they represent Fishbowl’s perspective on what was shared at the event regarding Oracle WebCenter Content and Portal 12, The Oracle Cloud, and front-end user experience. You can get more information on the items in this top 10 list by listening to the recording of our webinar that we delivered on December 10^th.

1. Oracle is definitely in the enterprise sync and share space. You’ve probably used Dropbox, Box, or Google Drive, and if you have you would probably agree that they were easy to use. Oracle Documents Cloud Service (ODCS) couples this ease of use with more manageability – especially for Oracle WebCenter Content customers. Content customers can maintain their content repositories on site, and easily and securely share and sync content with ODCS. New in WebCenter 12c is the ability to collaborate on content in the cloud, capture content in the cloud (emails or scanned documents), and mirror content between your on premise WebCenter instance and ODCS.
2. Oracle’s clouds offerings help usher in new ways to engage with content and facilitate business processes. For example, you could use Oracle’s Mobile Cloud Service to build a mobile app for human resources to help with employee on boarding. We all have been through the on boarding process before, and in most cases the tasks to complete are contained within archaic HR systems and must be viewed on a desktop. With Mobile Cloud Service, coupled with Oracle’s Process Cloud Service, new employees could go through training videos, ethic courses, etc., on a mobile device – even downloading the videos for watching offline. Then, Process Cloud Service could be used to build a simple form where the user could check off their on boarding list, and any checked off items would trigger a workflow update to managers and HR. Dashboards could also be created for users to see their overall on boarding process status, and gamification elements could be incorporated rewarding employees for prompt training/on boarding.
3. Oracle WebCenter has a new interface and it is really cool. Oracle released the ADF-based user interface with 11.1.1.8, but in 12c the new interface is present out of the box and does need to be enabled/turned on. This new UI, based on the Oracle Alta UI is modern, allows for more visual content, and was designed with mobile in mind.
4. You can now annotate (mark up) images within WebCenter Content. This feature makes it even easier to collaborate on documents in WebCenter. Annotations include highlighting or redacting text and adding notes or watermarks. This feature should help speed up document-centric workflow processes.
5. The Document Imaging Server from Oracle WebCenter Imaging has been consolidated with the Oracle Content Server. No more having to maintain separate repositories for transactional content (invoices) and business content (legal documents).
6. WebCenter Portal has made major improvements with contribution, publishing, and mobile responsive. Again, the interface improvements alone will help contributors and developers build, launch and maintain a portal site in less time.
7. Oracle JET will help front-end web developers create better user experiences. Oracle JET (Java Extension Toolkit) is a set of JavaScript libraries to build applications that interact with Oracle products. JET will especially be useful in building applications that consume and interact with Oracle Cloud Services. Again, the future looks bright from a user interface perspective at Oracle.
8. Hybrid Content Management and Portal deployments may be the most logical progression. Fishbowl’s sees scenarios where WebCenter customers deploy their dev, test and staging environments on premise, and then deploy a production portal or content repository to the cloud using Oracle’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Java Cloud Service.
9. Customers are talking cloud but don’t necessary have a strategy to get there. Most organizations are using cloud-based solutions (Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.), but some of these may not be approved for use. With Oracle’s comprehensive offerings across content, portal, mobile, workflow, and the cloud, organizations do not need to look outside the Oracle stack to fulfill business requirements. When you consider integrations, interoperability, and scalability, Oracle customers look to benefit from a total cost of ownership perspective.
10. The event is growing! Estimated attendance this year was 60,000 people. 5 years ago, my first OpenWorld, it was around 40,000 if I remember correctly. Oracle is investing heavily in The Cloud, business process automation, and user experience, and if OpenWorld attendance is any indication their customer list is growing. Oracle has a great ecosystem of developers, thought leaders, and users. This growing community will only help strengthen the products further.

Again, for more information on any of the items in the list above, check out the recording of our webinar on YouTube.

Happy Holidays!