More Connect Mockups

Rich has finished a few more mockups of the changes we’re making to support OpenSocial. Since our last episode, he’s finished the Profile page. Take a look. One thing (other than location data, which will return soon, promise) people have been missing since we upgraded Connect to the Mix JRuby code line is status. More… Read More

Light the App Bar or Not?

So, I promised to blog Rich’s UI mockups for the OpenSocial UI changes we’re planning, and even though posts about what we actually do here at the ‘Lab get way less traffic and comments than fun posts about which O/S would win in a fight, I’m keeping that promise. Rich has made a lot of… Read More

Mix Updates and New Features

Recently, even though we’ve been focusing on Connect and OpenSocial, but Mix hasn’t been standing still. ENTP has been working to fix bugs and build features for Marketing that will be showcased heading into OpenWorld. Last night, a slew of bug fixes and a new feature or two were deployed to Mix. If you’re a… Read More

Big Changes are Afoot

I spent the day today with my AppsLab brethren sequestered like a jury in the Thunderball conference room in sunny Pleasanton, CA. Or maybe it’s Dublin. Anyway, Paul called us all together to hunker down on some design work. Well, some new design and some redesign. If you’re interested in the future of the Connect… Read More

Connect as a Blogging Tool

Since we started down this road last year launching Connect to go with the IdeaFactory, one common ask has been blogs. Blogs are a cornerstone of Web 2.0, allowing anyone to publish content and anyone to participate. We discussed very early on whether we should provide a blogging platform, like multi-user WordPress or MoveableType, for… Read More

Groups are Grrrreat

Connect has been live for several weeks now. We spent only a few days running it concurrently with original Connect, and then Rich slapped redirects in place for the old URLs. It didn’t make much sense to maintain two instances Traffic, which had dwindled significantly has ramped back up to between 13-15,000 pageviews each week.… Read More

Connect V2 is Live

I’m stoked to announce that we’ve opened our latest version of Connect, the internal community for employees, for beta testing. If you’re an employee, find me through email or otherwise, and I’ll get you the URL. We’ll be redirecting all traffic from the old version of Connect very soon, in case you’re not in a… Read More

Play Name the Platform

If you read here, you’ll know the ‘Lab’s history. If you don’t or you’re a new reader, here’s the quick skinny: In June, we launched IdeaFactory to collect ideas inside the firewall. In August, we added social networking to ideas inside the firewall and called it Connect. In November, we added groups and questions to… Read More

What’s Next?

Lately, our plans have started coming into focus. If you read here, you probably know we built Mix with ThoughtWorks back in November. Since January, Marketing has been making plans to use Mix a lot more heavily, starting with this year’s Openworld. Yesterday, I told you about the project and the new direct messaging feature… Read More

AppsLab: Year One

A year ago was my first day at AppsLab. Paul and I huddled (virtually) to talk about plans for the team. It was exciting stuff. We had a unique opportunity to operate like a startup within the bowels of a huge corporation. We had simple plans that I used a mnemonic device to remember, the… Read More

It’s That Time of Year

To usher out 2007, it’s time to do the retrospective. Cue the music. Looking back on this past year elicits “wow” moments for me. This time last year, I worked in a different team, Fusion Financials Strategy; I was neck-deep in the requirements for Secure Enterprise Search integration into Apps. I lived in a different… Read More

How Do You Do Enterprise 2.0?

Craig Cmehil, Ethan Jewett and I had an interesting conversation (over Twitter, natch) earlier today about demand for New Web tools like Twitter, social networking, social bookmarking inside the firewall. Twitter’s 140 character limitation sometimes leads to convolution, but I think the core question was how do you approach internal demand for these tools? From… Read More

The OpenLab

When we started our Connect experiment in August, one goal we had for the project was to engage the tens of thousands of technical folks at Oracle in something new. We call it OpenLab, and it’s run like an Open Source project within Oracle. The only thing we ask participants to do is use free… Read More