Oracle News & Articles

For organizations that have invested in Oracle Universal Content Management (UCM) (news, site) and feel that maybe the collaborative workspace features of SharePoint might have suited them better, a new solution has just been unveiled that might make them change their mind.

Developed by Fishbowl Solutions, a Minneapolis-based software company specializing in Oracle UCM solutions, CollabPoint offers many features in common with SharePoint, but on the Oracle UCM platform.

This new solution, which was unveiled at Oracle’s Collaborate 2009 forum during the week, offers users Enterprise 2.0 functionality for Oracle UCM accessed through a clean and simple interface.

CollabPoint allows users, either singly, or as teams, share and collaborate on projects within the Oracle platform.

Beehive (news, site) was launched in October last year to give Oracle some leverage in the booming collaboration tools market. What does its big update have to offer to make you look away from the other solutions on the market?

Oracle has been serious about records management since they stepped up to the plate offering their first enterprise Records Management application in 2007. But that was 10g Release 3. Now it's 11g and it is the only product to successfully pass all parts of DoD 5015 V3 certification testing, including Baseline RM, Classified RM, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and Privacy Act (PA) RM. The question is, what are the other enterprise content management vendors doing?

Every day, every hour, every minute -- more information is flowing in, ad infinitum. A constant deluge. Each item must be addressed, classified, tagged, stored, secured, and made available for real-time recall. It’s enough to make a grown IT manager take up social drinking and ballroom dancing -- only without all that dancing.

Now that the acquisition of Captaris by Open Text is no longer an intention but a fact, what does the Enterprise CMS giant plan to do with this Washington-based provider of document management and delivery solutions?

For organizations who have invested in Oracle Universal Content Management and want to expose its content to other systems and applications, EntropySoft has created a connector just for you. And it’s bidirectional to boot.

If you use Oracle’s Enterprise Search product and would like to see it integrate searches from a wider variety of sources then you are in luck. MuseGlobal is offering a solution called MuseConnect for Oracle Secure Enterprise Search that lets you tap into a much wider range of content sources without leaving the safety of Oracle search itself.

According to a recent study by the 451 Group — an independent technology industry analyst company — the pure, non-hybrid open source is, apparently, not a viable business model.

Addressing the ever-so-popular question of how to make money from something that’s in its foundation free, the analyst company assessed the development, licensing and revenue-generation strategies used by open source.

At the same time, we’ve noticed that software giants like Microsoft started playing friendly in the open
source space. In addition, CMS vendors like eZ and Alfresco report that open source can be profitable.

Oracle comes to rescue the Enterprise 2.0 corporate bees with its new solution dubbed Beehive that aims to allow employees to collaborate through electronic workspaces, calendar, IM, e-mail, voice mail and conferencing applications.

All of that is done in the name of collaboration and the ability to easily share and simultaneously work on documents, e-mails and multimedia files.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), a provider of Internet data storage and delivery services, is expanding options for developers and enterprises looking to host their databases on the AWS cloud computing platform.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a scalable web service solution offered by AWS, is now the first authorized cloud computing platform to run supported Oracle databases.

Alero Technology, a provider of Enterprise Information Management (EIM) software products, launched Alero 2008 R1 ECM system with Oracle 10g and 11g support, enhanced compliance, electronic signature management, process simulator and a new .NET library.

CMS Watch has a pretty interesting content management vendor map (see link below), laid out in the format of a subway map, which makes for intriguing viewing. The diagram is overtly enterprise-oriented, and links vendors according to their scope of operations across various content management arenas like Enterprise CMS, email archiving, DAM, XML management, etc.

It’s interesting to note that there are five main ‘Hubs’ — extending the subway metaphor — of vendors who can provide pretty much everything. Microsoft, IBM, OpenText, EMC and Oracle.

IBM has released new extensions to it’s ECM platform designed to support eDiscovery and help its clients manage compliance better.

The new eDiscovery software integrates with IBM’s auto-classification and records management technology as well as it’s BPM capabilities.

Now here’s an interesting note that crossed our path today. According to CMS Watch, Oracle is hosting all their blogs including the Oracle ECM Fusion blog on the Movable Type platform.

CMS Watch points out clearly that Oracle sells its own blogging capabilities through several of it’s products including Stellent, Oracle and it’s latest acquisition BEA AquaLogic. So what exactly is going on?

In their Enterprise Social Software Report 2008, CMS Watch did caution about Oracle’s “lack of decent blogging functionality”, so maybe this is Oracle’s way of acknowledging they have work to do in this area.

It does make you pause and wonder if a company like Oracle with a hugely successful ECM suite really has their stuff together. May be all these acquisitions are causing more problems then they bargained for — and the Web 2.0 technology is suffering as a result. Or maybe they just like Movable Type better.

Curious to know what you think of this turn of events. Does it make you think twice about Oracle?

Oracle is stepping up their game through the acquisition of two new software companies that will enhance their enterprise content management offering in very specific industries. Some say it may finally put them in front of the pack of big boys like IBM and EMC. But how will this new offering stack up against rival Interwoven?