It’s hackathon weekend at Fishbowl Solutions. Fishbowl’s consulting and development teams – the hackers – along with members of the sales and marketing teams join forces to collaborate on and develop new software applications. While the overall goal of the hackathon may be to produce usable software, the event also is a great learning opportunity for participants and results in a lot of fun.

This is Fishbowl’s 4th annual hackathon and previous events have produced “beta” software that eventually evolved into shippable software components that benefited customers. Here are recaps on the 2012 and 2014 events.

This year there were over 16 different ideas, and out of those 3 teams were formed to develop the following:

• Oracle WebCenter Portal and Slack integration – Slack is a popular collaboration tool for the enterprise that enables members to communicate across channels (specific topics), send direct messages, and drag and drop files for sharing. Integrating Slack with WebCenter Portal brings its popular features and ease of use directly in context of a user’s portal session, ensuring that collaboration is easy and reducing the amount of switching between applications to communicate with others – leaving the portal to send an email, for example.

WebCenter Portal and Slack Integration Team – Andy Weaver and Dan Haugen

Oracle WebCenter Content and Google Vision integration – This integration would enable the tagging of images upon check-in. The Google Vision API enables applications to understand the content of images by encapsulating machine learning models in an easy to use REST API. Using this technology, images are auto-classified into thousands of categories (e.g., “sailboat”, “lion”, “Eiffel Tower”). For example, you might check in a picture of a knit hat and it would be tagged with xKeywords of “hat”, “knit hat”, and “fashion accessories” without any human tagging. To further automate image discovery, the GSA can be used to map related terms so that searches for “beanie”, “stocking cap”, or “winter hat”, could also return the image. This tagging automation would have great implications for Oracle WebCenter customers that are using it for Digital Asset Management.

WebCenter Content and Google Vision Integration Team – Kim Negaard and Greg Bollom

• Oracle WebCenter Content Email Check in – This integration would enable emails with attachments to be checked in to WebCenter Content automatically. Instead of the user having to check in the email itself, and then relating each attachment to the associated email, which results in additional check in steps, the emails and attachments would be parsed out and sent to a user workspaces in WebCenter. From there, users can tag and validate that the email should be checked in with the appropriate attachments – either from their desktops or mobile device.

WebCenter Content and Email Checkin Team Member – John Sim (fueling his hacking mind)

The hacking commenced at 3 PM today and will continue until 4 PM on Saturday, April 16th. Each team will then present their developed integration/component, and the other Fishbowl team members will vote on their favorite finished product. Check back on this blog next week to see who won.

Happy hacking!

Fishbowl Solutions Hackathon 2016 T-shirt