Oracle's Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0 destination

Just saw the Oracle sales.com site.It rocks!!

Also see that the Oracle Sales Prospector product is now live.

Finally there is a SFA product that actually increases productivity and effectiveness for the sales person than giving them yet another data entry tool. Thats been my one big gripe with all the SaaS SFA products out there today that claim to be the next generation of CRM products. I think they should actually be labelled next generation network based products. Cause they didnt do much for CRM/SFA but rather leveraged the internet to deliver the same data entry screens.

There's more coming from Oracle in the form of Sales Library, Campaigns and much more. Stay tuned for more on the new Social CRM Apps.

The Oracle Lounge on Google Lively

Google launched its take on virtual worlds today called Lively. I think its a good offering in a very amazing space. This is going to be the future of chat, interaction, dating, service resolution ... you name it on the web in a few years.
Though I was a little disappointed with the product. Knowing that this is from Google, it didnt really blow my mind away or anything. They need to step it up on this one.

I'm hanging out at "The Oracle Lounge". Come check it out.

Updated RSS Experiment

DONTCLICK.IT - An amazing experiment in User Interactivity

Recently saw this interesting site called DONTCLICK.IT that challenges the user to navigate without using the mouse click. Its rendered through Flash and is probably a great example of how creative and versatile one can get with Adobe Flash/Flex/AIR and keep the user engaged.

I'm not sure how well this kind of a site would perform in the enterprise with Accessibility/508 Compliance kind of scenarios. But definitely had me hooked.

Pretty cool video take on Billy Joels "We didnt start the fire" and the next wave (bubble maybe)

Saw this interesting video posted on Vinnie M's blog and thought I'd post it here.
For some strange reason this brought a large grin on my face ;-). Still trying to interpret my emotions and why the grin.

Enterprise 2.0 a pragmatic view of the world

There is a an interesting Enterprise2.0 related post by Dennis Howlett this morning about his conversation with Charles Phillips, President Oracle Corp.

Its pretty much a given now that enterprises do want to use solutions that incorporate Web 2.0 technology, products and application development paradigms. One of the main logjams being around security. Its not that these products/solutions cannot be secured, they can be secured in the same way/extent as any other application. Its just that providing the same level of security on these kinds of apps as any other enterprise app leads to the E2.0 app either losing some of its delight/stickiness/usability.

Collaboration in the enterprise has always been a big thing and there have been multiple revs of solutions trying to solve that requirement. E2.0 solutions might have a leg up in this area because with even notifications, feeds, blogs, cloud based applications and storage, self-regulating mechanisms like wikis, collaboration is woven into the fabric of most W2.0 solutions.

As always there is still a lot of education that will need to be done around the E2.0 area before CXO's are comfortable signing off large checks for solutions of this kind.

Click here to read the complete article

Oracle shows off Web 2.0 mashup @JavaOne

Click here to view a pretty cool demo of an Enterprise 2.0 mashup using Oracle technology. Its got tag based search, instant collaboration, viewing employee networks and some other goodies all applied to a rather mundane Order Management task.
Wonder why Oracle does not show more of its technology in these kinds of demo's. Its much better than the "Let me show you how to build this using my fav development tool" kind of demos that they've been doing for some time now.

Oh yea and did I say no "pictures or video" at Web 2.0 Expo

Besides the ruffle Google created with their "our PR says no pictures please". I did not see any image or video presence at this years expo. Voice was there with Nokia and TellMe amongst others. Maybe video was out there and I missed out, but as far as I could tell they werent.

So what does that mean with 3-6Mbps lines for users and everyone flocking to Youtube making it the more visited than Google ... no Web 2.0 stuff happening with video??

Huh, that's troubling.

To Web 2.0 Expo and back

The fire was there but the sparks were missing. Dont know why but this years Web 2.0 Expo seemed kinda low key to me. There were a number of companies out there showing off their wares but didnt really see the one or two or few killer applications, tools or products. The Microsoft Live Mesh announcement came close but didnt quite stand out as that spark.

The good thing was that almost all of the vendors out there were trying to position themselves as enterprise 2.0. Which means the guns are now trained on making it happen in the enterprise.

Walking around at Moscone I clubbed vendors in 4 main categories this year.

• PaaS vendors
  
• Vendors who'd squeezed Wiki, Blog, Forums, RSS, Chat into a suite that was enterprise friendly
• Vendors who provided specialized manpower with Web2.0 expertise.
  
• Everyone else mobile apps, voice enabled apps, vendors focused on individual components of category (2) above etc.
  

Its interesting how everyone's swarming to the PaaS space, so the webs been the platform for a while now and it seems like this might be the year when we go mainstream by sending the platform through the web.

Web 2.0 Expo 2008

Web2.0 returns to San Francisco in the week of April22nd and Oracle has a good presence out there. There are some unconferences planned on the booth and here are some of the links to things that relate to Oracle and this event.

Oracle Mix - Oracle's social network
Oracle Wiki - you're here
Oracle WebCenter - Web 2.0-esque features for enterprise apps
blogs.oracle.com
AppsLab Blog - blog by Oracle's own Web 2.0 think tank
OTN TechBlog - official voice of the OTN (developer) community
Oracle Community on Ning
Oracle Tweeters
Application Express

Posting to a Blogger...

Posting to a Blogger from Jott. Trying to figure out where the blog title comes from and what it's posted in the blog post. Also, wanted to figure out how it deals with long pauses and other expressions and also wanted to figure out what the experience of blogging via Jott is like because you might have to think ahead of what you wanna speak and get posted on your blogs. Anyways, I wanted it to give it a try. Let's see how it comes out and also wanted to add some tags, CRM(?) Jott online. Let's see how it goes. listen

Powered by Jott

So I believe the title for the blog comes from the first 3-4 words for the post and also there is currently no way of tagging the blog post. Outside of that it seems to be pretty straightforward.
I guess the "Posting to a Blogger" makes me suspicious if I actually dictated that or it just mis-interpreted something. Need to go back and listen to the recording.

Will play around with it a little more and see how my custom Jott Links behave. More on this later. Oh yea the CRM2.0 link ... I guess no more complaining sales guys dont want to log into a system to create and update activities. They can now do it from their phone, while they are in a cab on the way back from a customer visit.

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