OpenWorld 2009 - Wednesday

I considered going to the early keynote on Wednesday, but ended up just hanging out in the Fusion Middleware lounge and doing some work instead. Around 10 AM I packed myself up and headed out to the day's sessions.

10:15 AM - AIA and distributed SOA at Dell - Dwij Trivedi

I'd talked to the Dell folks last night at the AIA customer dinner, so I wasn't particularly surprised by much of what I heard here. Dell has had WebLogic server for a long time so they had built many infrastructure services (logging, error handling, etc) for it before Oracle acquired BEA. When AIA came along, it initially didn't support WebLogic, so they took the AIA design patterns and applied them to the tools that were already build, creating a "Dell Foundation Pack". Some of the lessons learned from their experiences apply to any AIA implementation, though, since the design patterns were the same.

Dell implemented 5 EBO/EBS and 29 ABCS in their Order to Cash transformation project. Some of the standard AIA practices were extended to allow queuing and routing across geographies in an efficient matter. They learned that the EBO model is efficient for messaging but not a good model for an application data structure (thus the transformation to an ABM that is common in application integration). The EBO is missing quite a bit of information for a 360-degree view of the customer, but it serves well as messages between applications. They use a centralized group to manage their EBOs - good to hear, much like we do. They also mentioned that it's not always a good idea to strictly follow the ABM-ABCS-EBM-EBS pattern with modern web-services-enabled applications, since they may be capable of using the EMB-EBS directly without the added overhead of an ABM-ABCS. This would need to be considered on a case-by-case basis, since you're effectively trading performance and code complexity for the ability to easily change your EBM-EBS or application without downstream impact.

There's more information at http://dell.com/casestudies (look for How Dell Does It: Oracle).

11:45 AM - Oracle Forms to ADF - Grant Ronald

I went into this session expecting to hear that there's no easy way to do this conversion, and I was not disappointed. Grant did a great job explaining the similarities between Forms development and ADF development, but it was very clear that there's no easy path. Developers are going to need a lot of retraining, and there won't be any sort of automated upgrade path. (There may be some tools to give general guidelines around migrating - JHeadStart was mentioned - but nothing that does a full upgrade for you.) The good news is that ADF is light-years ahead of Forms in terms of capabilities - everything from the look and feel to performance to customizability has been improved.

My favorite line from this whole presentation: "The Java world is round and uses objects. The database world is square and uses relational tables." You can include Forms in that second part. I thought this was a nice way to look at the paradigm shift that's necessary for the conversion from Forms to ADF development.

Lunch - Picked up a turkey sandwich on my way to the next session. Pleasantly surprised that it was actually pretty good. And there was a small piece of chocolate cake with it. Mmmm, cake.

1:00 PM - ELT, Federation, Replication - Data architecture

An architect from Overstock.com gave this short (half hour) presentation on their infrastructure for data warehousing architecture. They use GoldenGate, a data replication tool recently acquired by Oracle, to move information from their production transactional system to their data warehouse in a near-real-time manner. He recommended the Extract, Load, Transform model (as opposed to Extract, Transform, Load) which makes the middleware component thin and puts much of the heavy lifting on the database. This isn't all that different from some of the things we at Amway do today with our GDW, although we still have a decent amount of transformation in the middle layer as well. Nothing particularly earthshaking in this session, but it was a good presentation and it's nice to hear about other Oracle customers doing similar things to our own BI team.

1:45 PM - Fusion Middleware and Applications Unlimited Q&A

Another short session, this with a couple of Oracle folks representing Fusion Middleware and Applications Unlimited (which is the term for all the existing apps like PeopleSoft, JDE, Oracle E-Biz, etc). I attended so I could ask the question "Since all these applications have their own toolsets, what's the right place to develop new functionality?" I figured I already knew the answer, but it can't hurt to see what they'll say. Indeed, the answer was pretty much as I expected: for light customization (adding a field to an exsting screen and the like) use the apps tools; for heavy customization or brand-new functionality, use the new Fusion Middleware platform tools. That's more or less the same thing that was said to us a year ago (and more) when we started working with E-Business Suite, so it's good to hear that the message is consistent. Unfortunately we at Amway haven't followed that advice very much at all, so we've got a hole that we'll need to dig out of, but at least the tools continue to get better and we can start moving in the right direction at any time.

2:45 PM - Keynote

I decided not to try to join the rest of the OpenWorld herd in the Moscone North presentation hall, instead going back to the hotel room to watch the keynote on the live Internet broadcast. A bit of a risk, since I'd miss out if the 'cast went down, but well worth it to avoid the crowds in my opinion. There were some minor interruptions in the webcast, but overall I was very pleased with the quality.

Charles Phillips started off the keynote with a quick introduction of Roger Daltrey, which was very cool. Then Infosys CEO Gopalkrishnan put everyone to sleep. The speech content wasn't bad, basically describing how the customer experience is extremely important in all IT areas: end-customer interaction, learning activities, etc. We have the tools now to make the experience good, but we have to use them correctly. He covered several key industry examples. Unfortunately, his presentation style was awful, reminding me of all the professors I hated in college. I was glad to be watching remotely and not forced to sit through it in person.

Larry's speech was much better, kept me awake and interested. He started off by describing Oracle's committment to Oracle Enterprise Linux, Oracle VM, and Open Source in general. Very cool, and certainly good news for Amway as we consider moving to OEL as our server OS. Then he moved on to DB performance on the ExtData machines, talking about last year's V1 and this year's V2. Very nice, although I have to imagine it's way overkill for any of Amway's needs (at least until we bring China onboard). The ExtData spiel went on longer than it needed to, in my opinion, perhaps because Larry was stalling until the next speaker arrived...

Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Governator himself, came on next. I've got to hand it to Arnie, he gives a good speech. It wasn't a particularly innovative speech, being about the benefits of technology in general and how wonderful California technology is in particular, but it was very well presented. Lots was about green technologies, no surprise being on the West coast. There was a nice shout-out to Larry and Scott about the Oracle/Sun merger. He complimented the California government in its adoption of and approvements in technology. And then wrapped up with a joke (maybe...) to spend a lot of money in California while we're here...and best of all, dropped an "I'll be back" near the end.

After Arnold left the stage, Larry continued with a few more topics. He spoke about bringing My Oracle Support and Oracle Enterprise Manager together to improve the responsiveness and timeliness of customer support. Upload your configurations to My Oracle Support and get proactive patch recommendations, information data-mined from other customers that applies to your configuration, etc. Definitely some potential benefits there. I notice he didn't mention how this also lets Oracle sales reps take a look at what you might be running unlicensed, or analyze your data to tailor sales pitches to your environment, but I guess nothing comes for free. Then Larry segued from the technical support space into business-level SLA monitoring, talking about monitoring service levels and notifying of exceptions. Then he used the business service level monitoring subject to transition to a discussion of Fusion Applications.

The very first thing on the Fusion Apps subject that Larry said was that the "legacy" apps like E-Biz, PS, JDE, etc won't go away any time soon. Oracle will continue to support and even enhance all of those, as well as working to bring the next generation of technology in the form of Fusion Apps. Fusion Apps could be deployed as a replacement for existing applications, but it will also be built to run alongside the older systems if that makes sense in our environment. He gave an overview of Fusion Apps V1 which appears focused mostly around risk management, project management, and HR. It's all built on the industry-standard Java-based Fusion Middleware stack. Design and coding is complete, and testing is in progress. He mentioned several times that Fusion Apps is built to be customizable from the ground up, to allow customers to use the components of the systems in whatever way makes the most sense to them. No specifics on release date, just a vague "next year". Sounds excellent...be interesting to see the reality.

And now, I'm headed off to the customer appreciation night at Treasure Island. Aerosmith and Roger Daltrey will both be playing, there will be much food and beer, and I intend to enjoy all of the above. I'm not planning to attend any OpenWorld events on Thursday, so this is it for the 2009 recap. It was a great time and I'd be happy to do it again!

OpenWorld 2009 - Tuesday

On Tuesday I actually got my lazy self up in time to go see the morning keynote. Actually it had more to do with ignoring emails from work than with getting up on time, but...anyway. Very rainy day in San Francisco, with plenty of wind to make the umbrella just a minor annoyance to the rain trying to soak me. That's OK, though, the other 40000 people were in the same boat.


8:30 AM - Keynote - Thoman Kurian

I sat through about 90 minutes of this giant sales pitch for Oracle products on every tier of technology. They didn't actually dip down into the hardware level (must not have had time to include Sun boxes in the spiel) but everything else was: from web applications to backend enterprise systems to data security to operations monitoring. Some of the use cases looked very promising - I especially liked the ADF web application to Siebel CRM to E-Business Suite - but then, every sales pitch looks promising.

I lost count of all the different tools that were shown, but there was one thing that stood out - no real mention of how all these different tools could be brought together. The whole presentation was about using all the tools in one fictional company, but each one was brought in individually and magically integrated with everything else. Where the magic happened wasn't at all clear, and there was no mention of how Oracle might be using all this stuff in a single product offering (i.e. Fusion Apps).


I spent most of the rest of the morning talking with various Amway folks about the conference so far, and what we had left to see. One interesting thing that the other folks had picked up involved upgrading E-Business Suite. Apparently you can't go from 12.0.4 to 12.1 - instead you need to go 12.0.4 to 12.0.6 and then to 12.1. Doesn't sound like a huge deal, but when you customize the way we have, any extra upgrade step could be a problem.


11:30 AM - Data Services in the Cloud - Jeff Pollock

Since a good chunk of data services is the integrations to provide data to various consumers, I thought this session might have some interesting information. Unfortunately, there wasn't really anything new. The whole sessions can be summed up as follows: Build your data services to be reusable, using canonical models and the like, and then deploy them on an architecture that scales dynamically (this is the cloud bit). I've been hearing that we need to build reusable data services for years, but it always comes back to having governance and enforcement of the processes and technologies needed to do so. It's always easier in the short-term to build an interface just for a single purpose than to make it reusable, and without the organizational will to look ahead to the long-term, the short-term always wins.


Lunch - Since it was still raining pretty hard, I stayed inside and ate in the Marriott's lunch area. I'll probably go back tomorrow, it was well organized, easy to find, and not too crowded. Food was a chicken caesar salad, as usual nothing special but it kept the stomach happy for the afternoon.


1:00 PM - Fusion MiddleWare Performance Review

We don't use all of the Fusion Middleware stack yet at Amway, so the first 2/3 of this session was somewhat lost on me. They discussed the WebLogic server and ADF, neither of which currently exist in our environment. Both are components we'd like to use in the future, but it's hard to get engaged in performance tuning for something you've never used.

The SOA Suite portion of the presentation was interesting, but pretty much a rehash of things I'd already heard in the past. I suppose that's a good thing - the experts we've had come in to our environment and make recommendations must know what they're talking about. The biggest recommendation both in this session and from our own environment reviews has been related to the BPEL dehydration process - minimize the number of times dehydration and rehydration must occur to maximize performance.


2:30 PM - SOA Governance with OEM - James Kao

I only stayed for the first half of this session, since I wanted to get to the CVC later. The focus here was on operational support of SOA Suite artifacts. A lot of this repeated information from earlier sessions, around use of OWSM for policies, alerting on errors or SLA violations, etc. There was one major new thing I heard, though, about the capabilities of the next version of OEM. It will be able to tie run-time monitoring to the design-time artifacts used in your processes - for instance, it will be possible to drill down into a poorly performing service to see what components (BPEL, Mediator, etc) are used, and even to get inside those components to see which steps are causing the problem. That's a big improvement over the current state, and I'll be very interested to see it working in a real production environment.


3:00 PM - CVC on Oracle Linux - Sergio Leunissen

I felt a little bad for Sergio since we had about 10 Amway folks in the session and he was all alone except for the sales guys, but he did a great job. The discussion was about Oracle's use of Linux and what we could expect to gain by using it over AIX. There was a lot of discussion about how Amway could be sure that investing in Linux (as opposed to say, Solaris) would continue to be Oracle's direction in the future. Nothing's ever guaranteed, of course, but there's a lot of evidence that Oracle will continue to be a Linux supporter for a long time to come, not least of which is the fact that all development is being done on the Linux platform today. We also confirmed that changing to Linux should have no impact on our development practices (since the app servers and everything that runs on them are unaffected), and that using the Oracle VM solution to run virtual Linux servers will provide the same functionality we use from the AIX LPARs today. Personally, I really like the idea of going to the Linux platform, and I didn't hear anything in this session to change my mind.


Evening - AIA users dinner

The Oracle folks in the AIA group put together a nice dinner with about 50 people from various clients who used the AIA Foundation Pack. I met a few interesting folks and had some good conversations. One of these was with an AIA PM from Oracle, confirming that AIA 3.0 would be the first version certified with SOA Suite 11g, and that it wouldn't be out until January 2010 at the earliest. I had some good conversations with other clients, also, including an architect from Dell. We swapped a few war stories and some descriptions of how things worked in our environments. A couple of things stuck with me from the conversations: 1) Dell doesn't use UDDI as they don't get much benefit from it. Discovery is available through their repository, and their deployment processes are controlled to an extent where runtime binding of endpoints isn't necessary. 2) One of the ways that governance processes have been inserted into development lifecycles at Dell is to make them part of existing review processes. For instance, security code reviews to ensure PCI/PII compliance already are required, so some SOA governance components were simply added to those reviews. Overall, I enjoyed the dinner and I'm glad to have had the opportunity to meet some like-minded folks from other companies doing the same things we are.

OpenWorld 2009 - Monday

I had originally intended to start Monday with the keynote presentations, but I ended up spending a couple of hours on emails from the office instead. Based on prior keynotes, I don't figure it's any great loss - I always get more out of the smaller sessions.


10:15 AM - Architect's overview of SOA Suite 11g - Greg Pavlik, Clemens Utschig

The BPEL overview session I attended yesterday had already covered a lot of what I heard here, although Clemens went into more detail on several things. The biggest new features covered were still SCA and EDN, like the sessions on Sunday. There were a few things that were new to me, though.

Metadata Services (MDS) allow a developer to configure a repository on his own machine that is mirrored by an administrator on a server, and then develop against the repository. Similar to JNDI names for database connections, this allows various environment-independent artifacts (like XSDs) to be referenced in the code without environment-specific pointers.

Composite config plans are a complement to MDS for environment-specific artifacts (think external WSDL URLs). Much like BPEL 10g config plans, these can be used to set up different values for various environments at design time, so that the code doesn't have to be changed as you promote it through the environments. These config plans can be created and validated directly in JDeveloper.

Java integration with composites is improved in 11g (though much of the improvement will be in R2, not R1). Custom Java objects can be embedded into composites as components using Spring, and accessed via interfaces like any other component.


11:30 AM - Automating SOA Suite Deployments with OEM

This topic is a bit outside my area, dealing more with deploying entire environments than individual pieces of code, but it's helpful for the admin types. The current OEM doesn't manage WebLogic server deployments, but the 11g version will (due sometime in 2010). When it does, you'll be able to do cloning, provisioning of entire installations, expansion of clusters for additional capacity, and patching of existing environments. The patching was the most interesting bit to me personally, since code changes can be bundled up as patches. But the tool has no workflow/approvals for moving through DEV/TEST/etc on the way to PROD, so it wouldn't be all that useful in that scenario. Still, the new OEM certainly looks like it'll be useful for the admin who is dealing with large numbers of SOA Suite environments, especially if they have to be patched and/or refreshed from gold copies often.


Lunch - Lots easier than Sunday to find the lunch. Barely had time to go find it and get to the next session, though, so ate it as I listened to...


1:00 PM - App Server Roadmap - Mike Lehmann

The 11g version of the application server is primarily the WebLogic foundation, but some of the OAS features have been added in, such as better RAC integration and AQ integration (along with the existing JMS messaging). Coherence is also being added in to provide caching of application state/sessions outside the app server itself. Upgrades to the 11g app server are being strongly urged by Oracle (no surprises there) and they're backing that with quite a few upgrade tools. This includes the Smart Upgrade tool that will generate a report of your OC4J applications indicating what parts will need to change to run on WebLogic. During 2010 we'll be seeing a couple of patchset updates to the 11g app server, and near the end of the year 11gR2 is scheduled for release.


2:30 PM - SOA Governance with Oracle Enterprise Repository Lab

I've had mixed experiences with the hands-on labs at OpenWorld. If you've never seen the products before, then they're pretty decent. But if you know anything about the products at all, then the labs are pretty useless - not enough time to really learn anything in depth. I'd never seen OER in action, so this seemed like a good candidate.

OER was picked up in the BEA acquisition and it's clearly not yet integrated completely with the other tools. You have to run a command line tool (or Ant through JDev) to push data into OER, rather than it being part of the standard compilation/deployment process. You can't browse OER through JDev 11gR1 (though that feature is coming in 11gR2). The OER to Oracle Service Registry process isn't seamless, either, requiring a command line tool to synchronize the two products.

As I said before, there's not enough time to really understand how a product works in these labs, but from the little I've seen I'd say that OER has a lot of potential once it's better integrated with the other tools. With JDev 11gR2 and the OER 11g release, it'll be a solid governance tool. Of course, governance is really all about your processes, not your tools - if your processes are solid now, then the tools can be used to implement them.


4:00 PM - SOA Governance for Architects

This was a panel discussion with several folks from industry. Most of this was just rehash of everything I've ever heard about governance (SOA or otherwise) - communicate early and often, have a way to measure your results, get buy-in at the executive level, set up your processes and enforce them, etc. There were a couple of things I hadn't heard very often before, though. "Make compliance with your policies the path of least resistance for project teams" was an interesting one, tied into the executive buy-in and enforcement concepts. I also liked the suggestion to have different rules for services you've bought vs those you've built.


5:30 PM - SOA Suite 11g Best Practices from Fusion Apps Development - Khanderao Khan

I really enjoyed this session - it was almost like a user group session from Oracle. The Fusion Apps development team are users of the SOA Suite foundation, after all. A bit more clout than your average user, sure, but they have the same problems we do. On a larger scale - 2000 developers and 50 architects are working on Fusion Apps.

Some of the most interesting SOA Suite 11g improvements are being heavily leveraged in (in some cases driven by) Fusion Apps development. The Event Delivery Network, composite-level config plans, and Metadata Services are all big parts of Fusion Apps development. 80% of the interactions from the ADF front-end to BPEL processes leverage EDN, for instance. This bodes very well for the support and reliability of these new components of SOA Suite 11g.

BPEL is being heavily used in Fusion Apps, and there are some best practices that we can all find useful. A few of these:

• Create a scope for each step in the high-level business process, so it's easily readable at the highest level.
• Don't try to implement complex if-then-else constructs in BPEL. Just because you can use switch to do it doesn't mean you should. Business rules are made for this.
• Use fault policies wherever possible. Keeps your BPEL processes clean of repeated error-handling code and makes maintenance of error handlers much easier.
• Pass payloads by reference whenever possible, to reduce memory usage and improve performance.
• Use sensors for visibility.

I went over to OTN night for a bit, but it was pretty crowded, so I ended up just going back to the hotel room and watching Monday Night Football. Nice to relax a bit from the crowds.

OpenWorld 2009 - Sunday

Last year I felt Sunday was the best day of the conference, and it hasn't disappointed this year either. I got my bosses to spring for the extra $100 for Develop registration, so I had quite a few options for Sunday sessions. The extra charge (tiny in comparison to the full conference fee) is well worth it if you're coming in for the Sunday sessions.


9 AM - Oracle Develop Keynote with Tom Kyte (the man behind http://asktom.oracle.com)

The title of Tom's presentation was "What are we still doing wrong" and he discussed quite a few things that should hit close to home for anyone in IT. Right up front was "Underestimating Complexity" - how hard is it really to make a "simple" change if you do it right? Closely related to this is "Taking Specifications too Literally" - if you do exactly what the requirements say, then you've probably missed a large chunk of work needed to handle ramifications of whatever was originally requested. Another that I appreciated was "Relying too much on Best Practices" - those best practices only apply under certain conditions, and you have to understand the business and technology to know when to modify or ignore the standards. There were several more, including "Adding Security after the fact", "Not paying enough attention to error handling/recovery", and "Over-Complicating Code". In closing, Tom left us with this: "Question Everything" - Spend time to understand things and do them right the first time, or you'll make time to do them again later.

Tom gave an entertaining and insightful talk early on a Sunday morning, a good way to start off the conference. My only complaint is that this was on the Develop track and thus unlikely to be attended by the managers who need to hear this stuff from someone other than the developers themselves. Plenty of Tom's points hit home precisely because I've said them before, but been unable to convince anyone in authority to do anything about them up front.


10:30 AM - New Features in BPEL and Human Workflow 11g - Robin Zimmerman and Mohan Kamath

This had a lot of stuff crammed into a one-hour session. Robin and Mohan raced through material that easily could have taken twice or three times as long to cover, so there wasn't a lot of depth to the talk. Plenty of good information covered, though. I primarily focused on the BPEL portion as human workflow hasn't really taken off at Amway yet.

BPEL 11g uses the Software Component Architecture (SCA) standard for interoperability with various other components (such as Mediator and Human Workflow). In fact, BPEL is just one component of several that run on the service infrastructure. This allows creation of "composites" that can use any or all of the components interchangeably, each of which is a independent deployment object and can be initiated by one or more service calls. All of this runs on the 11g WebLogic application server. A new development component called entity variables will make life easier on the performance-conscious developer by allowing large data sets to be passed by reference between services within a composite. And the event delivery network (see next session) will be available in BPEL with the first 11g patch set (coming by end of 2009).

I did get a few notes on the human workflow information. The 11g human workflow components are built on the 11g technologies, including ADF and the business rules engine. In addition to the upgrades just from the technologies, the 11g release includes an enhanced worklist app and many more options to customize tasks and security. There are also improvements in the ability to interact with Office applications such as Excel.


Lunch - Being a Develop attendee, I actually got lunch on Sunday (it's not included in the normal full conference registration). Unfortunately it took me almost 20 minutes to *find* lunch since the signs pointed the wrong way, and the people running it thought they weren't supposed to open until noon (it said 11:30 on the ticket). I finally located it and grabbed a mediocre pastrami sandwich to eat in my next session. (Of course it was mediocre. Is conference food ever better?)


Noon - Fusion Middleware SIG - Demod L'Her, Ron Batra, couple of others I didn't catch

I had asked a question on the FMW SIG LinkedIn page about how to sell SOA Suite 11g as an upgrade in my organization. This session covered quite a bit of SOA Suite 11g related information, so it helped somewhat in that regard.

A general overview of the new features of 11g began the session, which didn't tell me much I didn't already know. I found it interesting that AIA was mentioned several times even though it doesn't work on 11g (see next session) - looks like the Oracle divisions might want to do a little more communicating about timelines. The best new features of 11g, in my opinion, are the end-to-end instance tracking and event delivery network (EDN).

The instance tracking gives you the ability to see instances of a composite including all the components that make up that composite, whether they be BPEL, Mediator (old ESB), human workflow, or whatever. It only works within a single SOA Suite instance (or cluster) since it relies on the dehydration store, but you can generate unique IDs across multiple instances.

The EDN is the true pub/sub that SOA Suite has been lacking, and we've had to build with custom JMS/AQ/MQ solutions in 10g. A provider raises an event (a publish) and any number of consumers can process it (subscribers). It also will not function across SOA Suite instances, but it's tentatively planned for the 11g R2 release, and the old custom methods will work in that scenario until then.

Another part of SOA Suite 11g that sounded interesting is the Oracle Enterprise Repository (OER). It provides a lot of functionality around managing services, showing which composites use which services, and providing some information around what impact a change may have. However, it's not yet integrated in 11g R1, and requires manual population of OER from the information you've developed. It also is a separate purchase from the base SOA Suite. Maybe in 11g R2 this will make sense, but I don't see a lot of value in something that isn't integrated and so will end up being out of date very quickly.

There was also a presentation on what we've already heard many times for a couple of years now. We shouldn't be customizing our applications, instead building functionality as extensions. Build your UI on top of the apps instead of customizing the app's UI. And so on. I agree with this just as much as I did last year, which is to say that it sounds great but I can't get management to spring for the up-front cost of development. Still haven't heard anything to help me do that. The argument of "it'll be better when you need to change later" just isn't enough, because I've used that often enough and it's always trumped by "it needs to be done yesterday so what's the quickest method" from the project managers.


2 PM - Fusion Council - Floyd Teter, Jeremy Ashley, Kate Candland

I didn't originally plan to attend this session, but it happened to be in the same room as my prior session, and sounded interesting. (More interesting than walking all the way up to the Hilton for OSB/Oracle E-Biz integration.) It turned out to be about the customer experience improvements in the Fusion platform, which sound pretty cool. Oracle's been doing a ton of research on how people actually use applications and working on getting the apps to streamline the job that people are actually doing. The implementation of this remains to be seen, obviously, but the process they're using to get there sounds very good.


4 PM - Migration and Integration SIG (aka AIA SIG)

I didn't even know about this session until a few days before showing up, but the Fusion Middleware SIG folks pointed me at this one since we use AIA at Amway. It started with only 2 people, but more showed up as it went along, and it turned out to be a pretty good session. The presenters were a couple of Oracle partners as well as a couple of Oracle AIA folks (didn't catch all the names). Most of it was a review of AIA, which again was review for me, but there were a few good bits of info.

It seems that PIPs aren't yet big in the market. I asked how many AIA customers actually use PIPs, and the estimate from the presenters was 25%. There's a lot more of the PIPs coming, though, and I expect that number will go up. I'd like Amway to be one of those, if we can find some that fit our needs. For us, the big deal will be getting ourselves to a version of E-Business Suite that's certified with the PIPs.

The most important info I got from this was that AIA 2.5, coming out by the end of 2009, will not be certified with SOA Suite 11g. That's a big deal to those of us using AIA - we can't move to 11g and still keep the AIA benefits until we get a certified version. It's looking like AIA 3.0, to be released sometime in 2010, will be the first 11g-certified AIA version. I kinda hope this info was wrong, but I did ask the question point-blank so there wasn't a lot of room for misunderstanding.


5:45 PM - Keynote - Scott & Larry

No real need to recap this since better bloggers than I will be doing so, but I'll write a few comments. Scott led with a recap of the innovations of Sun, with a few points about how Oracle was going to continue all these wonderful things. It was a good session, and provided a lot of "don't worry, be happy" vibes to existing Sun customers.

Then Larry got up and proceed to bash IBM all up and down - on the hardware side, anyway. Everything from poking fun at their commercials to issuing challenges that Sun hardware is twice as fast. Best way to unite people is to have a common enemy, and Larry's got IBM to get the Sun and Oracle supporters fired up.

Best bit of the whole keynote was James Gosling, IMHO. I respect a man who gets up in front of OpenWorld in jeans and a t-shirt and proceeds to compare Larry to a pig. ("In ham and eggs, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed. Oracle's committed to Java.") Oh, and he's the father of Java, too.


Welcome Party - The tent on Howard Street was full of people, food, drinks, and loud music. Too loud, for something billed as a networking event - hard to network when you can't hear the guy next to you without shouting. But the food was good, and I enjoyed the 45 minutes or so I spent there.

Upcoming Travels

Quick note about my upcoming travel plans:

• Australia (ATLAS project support): September 4 to September 18
• San Francisco (OpenWorld): October 10 to October 15
• Virginia (Oracle AIA Product Council): November 3 - November 5: tentative
  
• Portland, OR (Vacation at parent's place): December 18 - December 26
  

Email Notification Filtering in Notes

One of the most useful things you can do in Lotus Notes is filter your emails directly to folders, rather than having everything show up in your Inbox. We use Notes 6.5, and here's how to set this up in that version:

1. Create a folder (Actions -> Folder -> Create). You can nest folders if you like.

2. Go to your Mail Rules (Actions -> Tools -> Mail Rules).

3. Click the New Rule button.

4. You can do a lot of things with rules, but the simplest is to filter based on the sender. For example, in our system we get notifications from Remedy via the address "unmonitored.notification.system.-.servicedesk@amway.com". At the top of the New Rule screen, choose "sender" and "contains" in the first two fields, then enter the email address in the third field. Then press Add. Your rule will show up in the Conditions area.

5. Now you have to choose what to do with the message. In the Specify Actions area, choose "move to folder" and then press the Select button on the right. Choose the folder you'd like the messages to go to. Then press Add Action. The action will then show up in the Actions area near the bottom.

6. You should now have a window that looks similar to this:


Press OK to save the rule.

Now any new messages received from the email address you specified will go directly to the folder. You'll know there's new messages in it because it'll show up in bold in the folder list, but you won't have to deal with seeing those messages in your Inbox.

Collaboration in the Workplace

I woke up this morning (in Australia) to find a long email chain in my inbox from Tuesday US-time about the possibility of using Yammer on our current project. Originally the request was just for people to try out a pilot, but then it devolved into a discussion about why we needed another collaboration tool when we already had enterprise alternatives like SharePoint.

It was painfully obvious that no one in that email discussion had any idea what Yammer was or why we'd use it. But that's not the part that really struck me as important. The only reason that people would be considering a new tool is if we aren't getting the value we need out of the old ones - so why is that?

My take is this. We don't get value out of our collaboration tools because people don't use the collaboration tools, and people don't use the collaboration tools because they don't get value of the collaboration tools. It's a vicious cycle. Collaboration tools require a certain critical mass of people using them to be useful, but you can't get people to even start using the things unless there's some value to be had.

Since SharePoint is what we already have at Amway, let's look at that example. That tool has the ability to post documents, to create wikis, create shared calendars, post blogs, post in discussion forums, etc. On my current project, SharePoint is used pretty much only as a document store. All that other stuff is barely used, if at all. So what happened?

First, almost no one has the rights to get creative on our SharePoint implementation. I can't create a blog, or a wiki, or a discussion group. I might be able to create my own little teamspace, but it requires jumping through administrative hoops, and once it's set up no one else is going to use it unless I spend a lot of time and effort evangelizing it. I understand the reasoning - if everyone could do it, you'd just have a proliferation of unmaintainable sites and content. But it sort of defeats the purpose of collaboration when I can't set something up that meets my particular needs.

Second, very few people make any effort to use SharePoint features that are accessible. Discussion groups, for example, do exist for various topics. But if I post something there, it'll probably be ignored by all but one or two people. If it does get some attention, chances are pretty good that it'll be copied into an email and sent out rather than actually using the discussion board, because that's the only way to get most people's attention.

Third, there are some limitations in our SharePoint implementation that actively discourage people from using it. For example, if someone deletes a document from the document store, it's gone forever - and there's no control over who can delete stuff. There's a Recycle Bin feature, but it's either turned off or not functioning properly - and even if it worked, it's maintained on a site-wide basis, so finding something would be a challenge. You might be able to get an admin to recover a lost document, but getting them to understand and act on your request is a massive undertaking. So I've taken to storing local copies of everything I put into SharePoint, just to make sure I don't lose it. Now I've got two copies, which are potentially out of sync, and I can't automate that synchronization or I run into the same deletion problem. If I'm in a hurry, chances are I'm going to update the local copy, probably just email it out to whoever needs it, and might forget to push it up to SharePoint. The end result of this is that we've actually stopped using SharePoint for our "official and approved" documents - they're stored in Subversion (which is a really poor document management tool, but that's another topic), primarily because you never lose something as long as the repository stays intact.

The only collaboration tool we really use properly is email, and I'm convinced that's because it's the only one that 1) everyone uses regularly, 2) is well-understood by everyone, and 3) is primarily controllable by the user. Until the same becomes true of SharePoint, Yammer, or any other collaboration tool, it's a waste of time and money to bother with them.