You Got Your AppsLab in My WebCenter

A few weeks ago, I announced that our team was moving to WebCenter development.

Since then, several people have asked what our role would be specifically, many of you in person at OpenWorld. Now, I can tell you, since I finally know for sure.

We’ve been charged with the internal rollout of WebCenter 11g, which, we’re hoping, will become the de facto place inside the Oracle firewall to collaborate, share information, manage group projects and generally, you know, do work.

WebCenter 11g is currently hosted internally and available to all employees. Our mission is to bring what we’ve learned operating Connect to the WebCenter instance.

We’ll begin by making tweaks to the hosted instance to make it more like Connect, and eventually, Connect’s data will move to WebCenter, allowing our existing users (about 1,500-2,000 unique visitors per day) to leverage all the goodness of WebCenter’s backend services in a Connect-like interface.

Like what services you ask? Well, we’ve never been able to offer file sharing on Connect due to a number of reasons beyond our control, but now, with WebCenter’s UCM services, we can. That’s a huge win for Connect users.

But, we’ll not only add files, but we plan to add viewers so people can browse the content inline without having to bounce to another site, download the file and open it. We already do this on Connect for certain media file types, and it’s a huge time saver.

Don’t believe me? Use Brizzly for a day and come back to me. More on that tomorrow.

Anyway, this is our mission. To take the awesome array of services that WebCenter 11g offers and call them out in ways we know users want and will appreciate.

Overall, I’m excited for this venture. It’s not without challenges and risks, but it’s a great opportunity.

When we launched the IdeaFactory, which became Connect back in 2007 (full history), there were no social platforms inside the firewall, and many people didn’t see the value of a social platform inside the firewall.

Today, it’s a much different ballgame. We’ve learned a lot in the last 2+ years, and Connect has grown to be an everyday business tool. We’ve learned a lot, and Connect’s current iteration is much more about sharing information than about social features, which makes sense.

I like to think our work on Connect is what got the attention of the WebCenter team, since they have been thinking along the same lines we have for quite some time.

Managing the internal instance of WebCenter will get us exposure well beyond what we’ve had with Connect, which never had any marketing behind it and spread only through viral adoption and word-of-mouth.

All of this is good, especially for our little team. We’ve come a long way, and I finally feel like we’re living up to our tagline of driving innovation, at least directly.

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