Scoot’s thoughts on all things technology, design, photography and life in general !
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.
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
Day 1 – Started with forecast call and history of the area, plus introduction to the area where the urban coyotes that live across the street from the office. The real sessions started at 1pm after a quick lunch.
We meet with some of the development team and the business leaders who walk through the evolution of Beehive and the business unit. This moved into how we use it internally and finally moving into the business pitch for some of the new capabilities. Once the product is released I will go into details.
We finished day 1 with dinner at Champps watching the Denver Broncos getting beaten by Pittsburgh 28 – 10. Had a steak burger and a few Flat Tires (nice local beer).
Day 2 – Early start at 8am and loads of very interesting content on the roadmap, more details on capabilities of the product and the team and introduction on how to sell collaboration to your mother Finished the day exhasuted at about 6.30pm and headed for a technical team dinner at the local mexican. Very good food and cheap. Got to chat with the Sales Manager for Oz and also the Channel GM for Beehive. Back to the hotel by 9pom to revise for the presentation I would need to certify against.
Day 3 – Looked at the On demand and competition plus more roadmap details before each running through a certification pitch in addition to listening to the industry pitches. Very exhausting day but also very interesting. Finished around 6.30pm and headed to get quickly changed before heading to dinner. Journey to restaurant proved a challenge as the map and directions were wrong. Barry ended up ringing the boss and asking for directions, only in the US can you be at a retail park with a Cinema and the restuarant be a mile up the road on a retail park with the same Cinema chain
Dinner was at Jing an Asian fusion place and the food was excellent and so was the wine. The clientele were not from IT and this place seems to be a hangout for the beautiful people of Denver. Great starter and Kung Pao Chicken for main.
When finished 10 of us headed to a local steak house that has a smoking room and bar. We spent a couple of hours drinking after dinner goodies such as 20/30yr Port and par taking of the cuban cigar
Day 4 – Final day so finished with sesisons on case studies, Channel/alliances and then a test. Wow my writing was v bad Finished by lunchtime so headed to the airport with Brian, Richard and Rob. Checked in and upgraded again to economy plus for those extra inches of leg room.
Managed to grab LCJ a pressie and boarded a very full flight to Washington for our connection. Landed early in Dulles and the wait was very short only an hour before we were on the way home. Watched UP again plus started Harry Potter but fell asleep for a couple of hours.
Landed early again at LHR, so this is a first 4 out 4 flights landed early, must be the Oracle magic. Beat CJ & LCJ to the arrivals but very very glad to be home and to see my family.
BTW – this is officially the first time I have been to the US where I havent done any shopping, surely thats a crime
Just come back from a week in Denver Colorado where I attended an internal training course related to the next version of Beehive. The course was an excellent chance to meet the rest of the team that we have spread around the world including Sydney, Beijing, Reading, Seattle, Boston, Atlanta, Columbus, San Fran, SoCal etc etc.
I flew into Denver via Chicago on Sunday 8th from LHR on United and to be honest I wasn’t expecting much, but the flights were very pleasant especially as I upgraded to economy plus that gave me the extra room. A great help even if I am short Both the transatlantic and US flights arrived early and security at Chicago was a breeze taking only 25mins from touchdown to being on the train to the next terminal.
On the flight over I watch UP and enjoyed it very much. The film has a bit of curve ball in the beginning, not what I was expecting, but very funny in places. The weather on arrival to Chicago was a bit of a shock with 19C and sunny but much appreciated.We grab a couple of beers at the bar by the gate before grabbing some food and heading to the plane. Richard managed to drop his sandwich which was most amusing
The second leg from Chicago was good and manage to watch BBC episode of Yellowstone whilst listening to music and eating. The main fact I remember from the program was reintroducing the Wolf increase the numbers of Beavers. Google it if u want more info.
Finally arrived at Denver around 5pm local time, about 2am UK time not too tired, but then waited about 45mins while the bags were sorted. It seems that some idiot decided to mix connecting bags with normal and left them on the ramp 
Got a cab to the Hilton in tech center and did a quick unpack and shower before heading down to meet Richard for a quick beer and dinner.
Shane arived around 9pm and we also bumped into Kirk & Jim. Had steak, well had to be done then retired for the night.. Slept through till about 5am and then got up at 6am got dressed and headed to Breakfast.
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.
So 45 days have passed since starting the new role, so its 45 elapsed days and only 26 working days due to weekends, holiday and bank holidays. Having a blast so far with learning loads of new products not just Beehive, but lots of familiar concepts and architectures due to JEE. Have spent some time build and demoing the product whilst learning on the job in terms of the capabilities of Beehive.
Looking forward to the start of the new quarter which looks like it will be very busy with lots of interesting leads coming in now for the product. Likely to be a trip to Netherlands soon and then we shall see where else I need to go. One thing I have noticed that I have been so busy that my blog and twitter entries have tailed off a lot, but hopefully I will address that soon.
It is good to see that Mac’s have been embraced by the Oracle population as a business tool although its not standard issue. As with other companies it is creeping in as an alternative. Wondering if I should try the Linux desktop at some stage but this will need me to run a VMWare client image for some demos especially the Outlook integration. Nice to see a large number of iPhone in use and the option to use either IMAP or push IMAP service on it. Enjoying using the Blackberry 8900 as a busy device especially with its huge battery life. I will see what Apple do with the WWDC event in a week or so with the iPhone, might be worth upgrading if battery life is better.
I have loads of training materials to get through over the next month and need to look at what other training materials I want to do in the coming year. My training schedule has been something like this:
- Induction to Oracle
- Product and Development Training on Beehive
- Sales Training
- Red Stack Training (Beehive related products only)
Look at development tools as well to gain an understanding of the art of the possible going forward. Other areas will be related to portals and other E2.0 products including ECM, RM and IRM.
I will post a similar update in a month or two….
Now had the new desktop up and running for a while and have used it lot more no issues found so far. I like the boot up of around 30-40 secs from pwr on to login including entering user and password. The Ubuntu 9.04 is working well and using 64bit desktop version rather than going for the server version.
Installed VMWare Server v2 and then copied some existing images across plus created a new image based on Oracle Enterprise Linux. This has worked well and the learning process has proceed with a few hiccups with the 11g database but all now sorted and good experience. Over the last week have learnt a hell of lot of stuff around the base product set and the potential pitfalls that you can encounter. This all ended with a customer presentation and workshop that was very successful. As a follow-on from that this week has been hectic as we are getting more and more enquiries.
I expect that June is going to be a very busy month and the start to an epic journey around EMEA or at least some of it working with customers and the local Oracle teams.
Spotted an excellent offer from ebuyer today that was a 1TB 3.5 7200rpm hard disk with 32MB cache for £60 so decided to get two to add to the desktop for backup and file server purposes.
So doesn’t time fly when your having fun. So after 4 days in the new job it was time to take a well earned rest and shuffled off to Turkey for a week of rest and relaxation, ok a week away. Went to Turkey and stayed just outside Bodrum and enjoyed it and loved the attitude of the people especially towards LCJ. The area was very nice most of the meals out were fab. I will post some photos soon once I get them off CJ.
Tomorrow its back to work and it really starts in ernest BB and laptop should be there and should get my hands a test install and look at the capabilities.
More to come
Headed into TVP Oracle site in Reading this morning to meet up with my new team for Beehive. Started with breakfast, followed by a general discussion with Dickie on Beehive and activities in the first weeks. The office is nice and am hot desking which is very familiar scenario after all my time at IBM.
Spent the morning looking at information and documentation on Beehive and now waiting for the Lenovo to deliver my new laptop which is due on Friday.
In the afternoon looked at some more background information and some presales materials. This was followed by meeting one of the account team to discuss the On Demand option for a customer followed by a whiteboarding session to help create a session abstract for OpenWorld for the development team.
Looking forward to the coming days and hopefully being completely online.
OK after nearly twelve years at IBM I am moving on to a role at as part of the Oracle Global Sales Unit for Beehive. Obviously this was a difficult decision for me to make after such a long time with IBM within the Lotus Brand. Currently the product set that Lotus has in the market is excellent and covers many aspects of Portal and Collaboration. Although the products are good it was time for a new challenge and one that would allow me to stretch myself and to be part of something that is new and exciting especially with Oracle.
Beehive is the new offering for Collaboration that will replace Oracle Collaboration Suite which frankly had a bad press. I will be a Principal Sales Consultant working in the EMEA region with the Sales teams and the customers. This will start with me being part of a very small team worldwide to grow the business and who know what will happen next.
The most interesting aspect of this new role so far is the recruiting process that I have been through that was a very different experience from my previous job moves. I first became aware of Oracle’s product Beehive and the requirement to recruit a new team came in the form of an email via my LinkedIn profile http://www.linkedin.com/in/scoot
The email was at first ignored and then after a week or so I thought why not ask for some more information on this one this was back in the first week or so of December 2008. I dropped the Oracle HR person an email to ask for more information that was promptly responded to within less than a day. The response gave me some brief details plus a job description but that was about it. At this point I would like to highlight that Social Networking has proven that electronic interaction does work.
I read the short job description plus the background detail on the product Beehive and thought actually there is something in this, but I cannot put my finger on it at this stage. So upon the request of the HR contact I sent through a CV that I had been working on updating with my Technical Sales role activities for 2008. A day later I was contact be another HR consultant at Oracle that was interested in having a brief chat to discuss the role and my skills and experience. This was duly arrange and a call took about 90 minutes on a dark December Friday afternoon. On completion of the call the consultant Brigitte asked me if I was willing to have a phone interview with one of the VPs in the US who were involved in the hiring. The answer was yes and I thought long and hard about what it could mean going forward and what did I have to lose by having further discussions.
Then followed a period of time in which I had regular contact with the HR consultant on how things were being progressed and apologies for the delay in arranging the follow-on meeting. Finally post Christmas and New Year I had a call with the VP to understand if both parties were on the same page and that I had the sort of skills and personality for the role. As it turned out there were actually two different roles one with a pre-sales and the other post-sales focus. After the discussion it was clear that I had the skills for both roles with my background in Technical Sales, Services, Early Programme Management and internal Systems.
The next step was to have two further telephone interviews with someone from the development team and someone for the consultants group. These were arranged very quickly and both went well and answered a lot of questions that I had and also Oracle need to know. The next stage was to have a further interview with the head of the team. This was arranged for a Friday evening and the discussion went very well especially since I had met the person when they were in fact employed by IBM Lotus in Europe. This was bizarre to be interviewed by someone that I had met about 9 years previous when I provided support to our eastern european offices. Again this went well and I was informed that I would have a technical interview in the next week or so. At this stage I was packing for my trip to Lotusphere and wondered whether this was going to happen. I had also managed to find out from the VP that Oracle had an Architect (ex-Lotus) attending Lotusphere so were given her details to arrange a catch-up to really understand what working for Oracle is like.
So off I went to Orlando to see what we intended to do over the coming year in the products from Lotus and hopefully meet up for a drink and a chat with the Oracle Architect. On the Tuesday evening I met the Architect Barb and had a really good chat about Lotus and Oracle and how it was a fab place to work. I was now thinking hey this is sounding better all the time. It definitely wasn’t a walk in the park, but had a real set of challenges for me to tackle. Later in the week I was contacted by the hiring manager and discussed my skills and experience and filled in the blanks about the technical aspects. After this call which was the sixth call and didn’t include the quick beer at Lotusphere I was told that they would be making their decision in the next 5-7days.
A week after returning from Lotusphere I was called and verbally offered a position at Oracle subject to their standard vetting process and management approval. At this point it was decision time or would be in a couple weeks as the process to vet and approve takes about two weeks. I completed a vetting questionnaire and passed to the vetting agency to process and report back to Oracle.
After about three or so weeks the process was finally completed with the management team approving the hire, apparently part of the process given the investment being made in the current economic times.
So this was now crunch time with regards to taking the plunge. I had received the paperwork over the weekend of the 7th March and ironically in the same post was a letter from the Software Group VP at IBM congratulating me on my successful 2008. So as I had the Monday off and was out at the Science Museum with the family for CJs birthday had to text my manager and try and get a meeting arranged. Managed to arrange time for a quick chat on the Tuesday lunchtime to discuss my position. The chat went OK and my manager had thought something was on the cards. We agreed to touch base on Friday at the pre arranged face to face in London, where things could be finalised.
The following day I was called by my manager confirming what IBM could do to try and tempt me to remain in my current role. In reality this was limited by a set of processes and very much based on guesswork as nothing could actually be confirmed at this time. With this update I decided that it would be best for my career development, a fresh challenge and improvements in my package that to get the formal resignation to my manager. We arrange to meet on Thursday lunchtime to compete the process which included handing back all of my IBM property
So after spending Wednesday at UC09 at Olympia talking all things Sametime I sorted out my kit bag of IT, Comms and gadgets and packed it up ready to take into South Bank for my lunchtime appointment. It was very weird on Thursday driving into the office ready to hand over my stuff and complete my resignation. It was good to meet up with Spradders and Malcolm and grab some lunch before finally leaving an IBM building for the last time as an employee. The upside to this process is the fact that I have been put on a months gardening leave so now have the task of sorting out how best to use my time.
