So, a few updates for those interested in attending OpenWorld as a blogger.
The registration process is now working, and we have a few confirmed attendees, including Vinnie and Jeff, who have also graciously offered to help plan the agenda for bloggers, which I think is still in the works.
Because of the sheer number of attendees (over 40,000 expected), finding a hotel room in the city is virtually impossible. PR may be able to help, so drop a note in comments, and I’ll put you in touch with them. If all else fails, there is a free shuttle bus service that will ferry you from various points on the Peninsula up to the conference. This is how most employees get to the Moscone Center, so you can use the ride to chat with them.
In my first post, I listed some sessions that might be interesting for bloggers, and now, I have another one. This session is called “First There Was Napster, Now There’s Flickr–What’s Next? Introducing the Reports Repository”. This session is the culmination of several years of work on an idea that sprang from Terrance Wampler’s brain in 2004 2001.
Reports Repository is tied to BI Publisher (formerly XML Publisher). Before XML Publisher, Oracle Reports was the reporting engine for the E-Business Suite. Oracle Reports combined the report query with formatting details (i.e. look and feel) into a single file. So, any change to the query or to the formatting required a new file. XML Publisher separated the two; the engine consumes an XML file of data and a report template file (.rtf, .pdf, etc.). The template file contains all the formatting information, and the XML data file contains, well, the data. This approach makes it much easier to tweak a report, since changes can be made to the template without affecting the data query.
Terrance, who ran Global and Public Sector development at the time, was awash in reports because global and public sector customers have very different and specific legal and statutory reporting requirements. His idea was to create an iTunes of report templates where customers could find new report templates from Oracle and Oracle partners and share their own reports. They should also be able to rate templates and publishers and make comments on templates.
Smells like Enterprise 2.0 to me.
I took on the design for this project back in 2005, and we’ve been working to get done since then. The recent New Web groundswell has helped get the Reports Repository off the ground. Tim “BI Publisher” Dexter has also been involved for quite some time. He has a post about the upcoming demo here. Billy “Fusion ECM” Cripe has been instrumental as well, helping extend the capabilities of Fusion ECM to deliver a sweet 2.0 app. He will be showing Reports Repository at the Fusion ECM demopod, so watch his blog for details on that.
Here are the Reports Repository session details:
S291208
First There Was Napster, Now There’s Flickr–What’s Next? Introducing the Reports Repository
Joe Gum, Oracle; Elise Mattei, Oracle
Tuesday 11/13/2007 10:45 AM – 11:45 AM
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