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I’ve been doing all-live demo presentations without incident since 1999, so I guess a serious mishap was due…

I’m just back from the DOAG Conference in Nürnberg where I was unable to get my Linux laptop to work with the conference room projector. Having no slides, that sort of puts you in a tight spot!

Fortunately, another speaker at the conference (Tobias Otto from MT AG) was in the audience and gracefully offered to lend me his laptop, which had JDeveloper on it. So while I ad-libbed, Tobias hooked up his laptop to the projector and I was able to do my demos on his machine.

But I guess I’ll be making som screenshots for the UKOUG conference in Birmingham December 3-6 - just in case…

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Do you remember that when WebCenter was lauched, the team started a blog? I recently revisited it and noticed that it hadn’t been updated in months. I posted a comment asking if we could expect anything to happen on this blog. Naturally, my comment didn’t appear on the blog right away, but started it’s way through the Oracle content management workflow - they are apparently careful about how much user-generated content they want.

I just looked at the blog again - well, I tried to. But now it’s gone…

It sort of makes you wonder how much commitment there is to Web 2.0 internally in Oracle, doesn’t it? I’m hoping the Oracle Wiki won’t suffer the same fate. So please, everyone, head over to the Oracle Wiki, register and update something…

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I’ve been considering how to describe the difference between Oracle WebCenter, Portal and Unified Content Management (what used to be Stellent), and I’ve come up with this picture:

It considers your requirements in two dimensions: How much content management do you need and how much application development do you need. To put in in another way: Unstructured data like documents need document management, and structured data needs applications.

If you need a lot of document management, you need Oracle UCM. If you need sophisticated applications, you might need WCS. But in general, Oracle Portal will cover quite a lot of application functionality as well as content management.

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I’m at the cmf2007 conference this week, where I’ll be speaking on the choice between Oracle Portal and Oracle WebCenter Suite tomorrow.

This led me to check up on the Oracle WebCenter Quick Start page. This page still seems more designed to scare people away than get them started: “Ready to get started?” it asks, and then presents you with dozens and dozens of links to stuff you apparently need to know: From “Getting started with Java” via JDeveloper, SOA Suite, BPEL, Portlets (including an Oracle Portal course?) to Oracle Content DB and Secure Enterprise Search.

Only after wading through links to half of Oracle’s product suite do you end up at “Learn to Build WebCenter Applications”. Really - how hard can it be?

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