It's life Jim, but not as we know it

As you are probably aware, we have been working on a number of Flex based projects at Oracle. The deliverables so far have ranged from desktop gadgets to full fledged applications such as the Social CRM Applications and Oracle Metalink. Each day we hear from customers who are also building Enterprise applications with Flex - and using the best of Siebel (data, process, metadata) but exposing it through Flex or AIR. As the developments get more and more advanced, and larger in project size/scope, development teams are finding that there needs to be a more formalised approach to the application development and code structure.

Fortunately, there is a solution that may help you. Anvil is an Open Source project that was built to help make Enterprise Flex development easier. (It also provides a portal environment for running Flex applications).

In this video, Anvil project founder Ryan Knight, shares details about the problems Anvil solves, and the projects long-term goals. Ryan and James Ward (co-founder) also discuss some of the challenges of building applications with the Flex framework.

Whether you are using Flex or not - this is a brilliant video to watch as it discusses some of the darker sides of application development that seldom get considered when folks talk about technology or middleware. Most of this was hidden from the Siebel developer/customer but needs consideration when using Siebel with an alternative user interface - be it Flex, ADF or .NET.

I have never have I seen so much hysteria as that which surrounds the subject of Flash and it's support for Accessibility. This week I received an email recommending that we drop our use of Adobe Flash/AIR (we use it in our gadgets). (It was not a customer). The basis of the recommendation came from the results of a survey that can be found here. The survey itself is very good - but is not controlled (i.e. 1000 users were asked about their experiences).

My response to the team was quite simple: Accessibility is not a feature of the tooling - it's what you have to, as a responsible developer (and by that I mean anyone involved in the production of software) consider when designing, writing, testing your application. If you don't design the UI to cater for the needs of different individuals - then there is nothing that Flex/AIR/ADF/JSF/AJAX can do to improve that. Likewise, it is not the function of one department to add Accessibility to your product either.

Andrew Kirkpatrick of Adobe has posted a brilliant write up on the use of Flash and Accessibility. I recommend that you read it, especially when the next person starts pressing the alarm bells over the use of Flash.

Andrew's blog can be found here: WebAIM Screen Reader Survey: A closer looks at Flash and PDF results

Just over a year ago we created Siebel on Oracle VM. It was quite amazing feat - we had just announced Oracle VM at Openworld and we thought it would be beneficial to offer Siebel in a Virtualised form. I had a chat with Richard Exley from the High Availability Architecture Team and "Siebel to Go" was born. The task - "to have Siebel in a form that could be downloaded ready to run within an hour". Richard built the solution (in his garage...) and it was tested by Uma Welingkar (who stripped down a number of machines she found in the office, to create a networked virtualised environment). {Note: we don't normally build software this way]

Siebel on Oracle VM was released last year at LinuxWorld.

If you want to know why we did it - here is the really short slide deck I created when when we pulled the covers off the solution. Don't expect any technology slides. It's all about the business benefits.... you should read it as it focuses on Green computing more that the tech.

[First posted on wiki.oracle.com June 2008]

Oracle CRM OnDemand has a great feature that allows you to set up a workflow process that will detect an Event and associate a series of Actions for that event.
We're going to take one of those actions, send an email, and publish a message out to our Twitter account. All without writing a line of code....

There may be several reasons why you want to do this:

a) you want an alert when someone changes some data that you are interested in
b) the alert has not been set up by your dev or IT folks - and you don't do code
c) you want your friends (well sales team and work colleagues) to know about the changes as well
d) you use Twitter today ...

Of course, you have to be careful about the data that you are publishing.
It is still Enterprise data - subject to the same data privacy laws that is exercised today on your CRM data. But with a bit of common sense - you can get much value from Twitter without exposing data that should remain private (even if the data is public - there may be restrictions on the disclosure of that information)

Use case: you are going to set up a rule that will publish any change to a contact's job title to your Twitter feed. (Should anyone you know get promoted - you can give them a call and congratulate them...). Of course - this assumes that someone else in your network has updated the system based on knowledge that they have discovered. (Or you could have an intergration to LinkedIn or another professional social network).

Step 1: Set up your workflow to create an email

This is straight forward - if you have never done it before it will take about 5 minutes.
We will create a workflow that gets triggered whenever one of our contacts changes job title - either they got promoted or changed jobs - and someone else has updated the job title ...

part i) Set up a workflow to generate an event whenever someone changes a JobTitle.

From the Main CRM On Demand screen - Select 'Admin' then 'Administer Workflow Rules'
Create the new Workflow with the following settings

Workflow Name: JobTitleEventFeed
Record Type: Contact
Active : (set as active)
Trigger Event: When modified record is saved
Workflow Rule Condition: (PRE('') <> [])

Quite simply - whenever a modified record is saved, and the Job Title has changed - then fire off the action.

part ii) Set up an Action to be triggered whene the workflow conditions are met

Once you have created the workflow - you need to create an action (any number of actions). We will use the 'Send Email action'.
Create a new action. Set the following properties.

Action Name: Send to Blogger
To: Valid Email Address
Set the email address as to a unique mail-to-blogger address e.g. myusername123.twitterfeed@blogger.com.
Subject: %%%[]%%% has changed Job title
Message body : %%%[]%%% of %%%[]%%% has changed jobs from %%%PRE('')%%% to %%%[]%%%

(If you had not figured out by now - %%%[]%%% is a way of saying 'replace this string with the ContactFullName value.)

Make sure the Action and the Workflows are Active

Step 2 - set up your blogger account
We are going to create a blogger account where we can send the email.

a) create a blogger account - e.g. http://mycrmupdates123.blogspot.com
b) set up your 'mail-to-blogger' address (go to Settings -> Email) - e.g. myusername123.twitterfeed@blogger.com. You will use the 'mail-to-blogger' address defined in Step 1.
c) Make a note of the RSS feed URL. In this example it will be http://mycrmupdates123.blogspot.com/rss.xml. You will use this in Step 3

Step 3 - set up your twitterfeed account
d) go to twitterfeed.com and associate the feed URL to your twitterfeed account. In ths example it will be http://mycrmupdates123.blogspot.com/rss.xml

All you need now is a good Twitter client (I use Twirl an AIR desktop gadget - which means it works on Windows, Linux and Mac).

So - go ahead - change a contact's title ... - it will get published to your Twitter account... (twitterfeed has a lag of up to 30 minutes)

There may be a more efficient way of doing this - I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has a better way ...

Now creating animations to explain a concept. role or product - is so simple! It took about 40 minutes to create the animation below.....

GoAnimate.com: RESTful webservices ...


Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

A while ago I came across a brilliant web cast by Steve Souders (he subsequently wrote a book, that I bought and I recommend that you buy as well ...: here).
Here's another brilliant web cast by Douglas Crockford talking about AJAX Performance.

Here is my Openworld 2008 presentation. The session does not talk about the features of specific Social CRM applications - but seeks to educate the audience as to why social media is critical to their business and to understand some of the aspects of social media that drives aggressive end user consumption.