We have an interesting activity happening next week at Oracle where our E2.0 Technology Director Rachel will be conducting a Twinterview with Graeme Stoker from BT Retail. The Twinterview will take place on 15th April 2010 at 3pm (BST) in Twitter.
To check out the stream follow Rachel Phillips from Oracle at http://twitter.com/Phillips_R and Graeme Stoker at http://twitter.com/Graeme_ncl
Hashtags: #e20eyao, #BTCare
Find out how Graeme Stoker from BT Retail is using Twitter and live chat to improve customer service.
As promised a longtime ago here is a brief update on Oracle Beehive 2.0 that was released in February 2010. The main changes that will be immediate to people is the revised team collaboration client that provides a richer web2.0 / enterprise 2.0 experience. Here is a screenshot of my homepage to give you an idea of the new client:
You can then drill into one of your workspaces to gain access to the content within including documents, the wiki, calendar, forums, tasks, announcements and participants.
The final piece is the profiles tab that allows you to see peoples information, see their presence within IM and contact details plus the reporting line.
Having finished a number of books related to E2.0 I thought that it was only right that I made a quick summary of my views on them. As a very slow reader of books and someone who always has at least 4 books on the go at any one time excluding manuals 
content can get fused. This has the plus side of allowing me to remix ideas and content to suit my business requirements. For example real world stories from non E2.0 books may actually provide context or anecdotes for business scenarios. I tend to read a lot of history related books, which is very strange considering it was one of my least favourite subjects at school. Typically I read military based history books so at the moment I am reading Tobruk: The Great Siege 1941-42 by William Buckingham as well as Admirals by Lambert. Both these show how people interact, work, collaborate,fail and succeed.
So back to the two books I have finished in recent months on E2.0. The first was the long awaited Andrew McAfee – Enterprise 2.0 : New Collaborative Tools for your Organization’s Toughest Challenges and the second was Willms Bushe, Soren Stamer – The Art of Letting Go Enterprise 2.0. The first thing that struck me about both these works was the excellent references to real world examples.
Coming from a technology background and having implemented, supported and sold collaborative capabilities over the past 12 years I am always looking for content that will aid me challenge my customers views of the new fads in the IT world and how to look for unique business opportunities to drive adoption and participation of E2.0 platforms.
I think this book really captures the essence of Andrew’s blog and hopefully will provide the opportunity for him to deliver a follow-on work that provides a more detailed insight into the progression of E2.0 and of course E3.0, or whatever term is coined to label the next wave of collaboration capabilities.
One final comment relates to the term social, I like Andrew’s idea of avoiding this term in some circumstances as in reality this is about collaboration and this has been a perfectly good term to describe the capabilities.
Moving on to the Art of Letting go this was a great example of essays from different people on real world situations and implementation of E2.0 style technologies to fulfil business requirements as well as enhance businesses standing with their customers. The book drew on experiences from Prof Andrew McAfee, Craig Cmehil (SAP), Stephen Johnston (Nokia), Stefan Bocking (Vodafone), Willm Buhse (CoreMedia AG), Suw Charman-Anderson, Nicole Dufft (Berlecon Research GmbH), Gotz Hamann (Die ZEIT), Prof / Dr Michael Koch, Prof / Dr Kathrin Moslein, Prof Dr Frank Piller, Prof / Dr Ralf Reichwald and Soren Stamer (CoreMedia).
All of these different authors bring their experiences to you enabling you to see how different organisations implement and use these types of capabilities everyday. I would recommend both of these works.
Have been playing with Google alerts over the last few days and decided to set one for my surname as its not very common, unlike smith and jones.
Interesting to see the results, of course I only appear when I blog, but some interesting entries do come up for other scoullers. I wonder if any are related to me ????
So far we have a reference to the Alexandra Technique, which is something to do with helping with posture. Then someone joining facebook, an entry for a pastel on paper by Lara which looks nice here , a reference to article about an equity fund and finally a link to a masonic lodge newsletter.
A very bizarre mixture !
Finally got our lab server from the US, it is a beast in terms of power all delivered by Intel in a blade size 1U unit It hums along with its 48Gb RAM, Multiple Multi-core processors and a mere 800Gb of diskspace. This week we have had two Oracle DB instances running on it with a full Oracle Beehive install plus a complete Oracle WebCenter Spaces install and experiencing lightening quick response times.
In addition to the server we have a tree…
Xmas Tree
So I promised to show more Oracle Beehive stuff in my blog and finally got round to covering some of the aspects of Outlook integration for Beehive. Lets start with the basics here we have a connector that allows the Outlook user to access their normal PIM components including email, calendar, contacts and tasks. Now this is pretty standard functionality in this day and age, but to show you some of the neat features here are some screen shots:
So first here is my inbox, note this is not an MS Exchange Inbox it is an Oracle Beehive Inbox. But this is a familar interface for many business users today.
With the sidebar in Outlook we can expose the personal and team workspaces that a user is a member of. The user will need to select those workspaces they want to interact with using Outlook.
The integration of the workspaces provides the ability to drag and drop emails from the users mail file into the inbox of a workspace. This provide the users of a workspace access to all relevant pieces of email content related to this activity, project, programme or team. This ensures as team member come and go from a project the core data is always available to use and review.
In addition to the inbox capability you can drag emails into other folders but these would not be available within the Zimbra Web Email client.
The workspaces provide folders for documents, pictures or any type of content which a use may wish to store in the documents workspace. The outlook client by default provides the ability to preview a number of attachment types including office documents and PDFs without the need to open the document with the local application.
From a folder within the workspace I can double click an Office document and launch the relevant application to review and edit the content and then save back into the workspace with my revisions.
Here is an example of viewing a bitmap from within the workspace folder…
Now you can see my calendar entries within Outlook including my selected workspace calendars. This shows them in overlay view so I can see the appointments from the selected source overlaid on my personal calendar. If I am invited to an event on a workspace calendar I get an appointment available to added to my personal calendar. This is very useful when using my blackberry or iPhone to view my perosnal calendar.
This shows the side by side calendar view in Outlook. You do also have the option to create multiple calendars within a team workspace so that you can manage different events on different calendars without the need to create a separate workspace.
Here we have moved onto the Contacts within Outlook, first here are my personal contacts
Now we have opened a workspace contacts list related to one of the team workspaces:
This is the tasks list show my personal tasks.
Again we display the workspace tasks.
Thats the very quick tour of MS Outlook using Oracle Beehive. In the near future I will do an article on somemore of Oracle Beehives capabilities.
