Author: John Cartan, Design Architect - Oracle Applications User Experience

Editor's note: The author attended Oracle OpenWorld at San Franciscos Moscone Center the week of November 11, 2007. This is the fourth in a series of four reports from the show floor.

When I first heard about Oracle WebCenter, I thought it was an application and wanted to see a screenshot. I discovered that WebCenter is better understood as a set of tools and a philosophy, so asking for a screenshot is like asking for a screenshot of the Web itself.

WebCenter embodies the philosophy that I wrote about in my previous posting: Enterprise 2.0. The goal of WebCenter is to provide a new platform for user interaction that is multi-channel, that is integrated, and that unifies access. In other words, WebCenter is a platform that enables you to make your own mashups and build personal and community "spaces", in which the end user can personalize or customize almost everything.

The key to making this work is an underlying framework that is based on a service-oriented architecture built using open standards. This approach is a core concept for Oracle Fusion and is also being woven into the Oracle Applications Unlimited ecosystem. Using open standards is crucial, because the real power of mashups is in the ability to draw from the ever-changing ocean of new services out on the Web.

One demo of the WebCenter Composer tool illustrated this power by showing how an end user could quickly assemble her own task-oriented start page. To assemble a list of contacts for an ongoing project, she clicked on names from her personal LinkedIn network. WebCenter scraped this information and produced a contact table which automatically incorporated chat services, through which you could immediately see who was online and simply click a contact name to start chatting. Notice the assumption behind this use case: Enterprise 2.0 projects increasingly draw talent not only from fellow employees, but also from partner and customer contacts as well.

Another demo illuminated the dissolving barrier between corporate Web applications and the user's everyday desktop applications. A user starts a project in a WebCenter group space. He exports an initial list of group issues to Excel and finishes it offline.  When he returns to the group space, his new issues are seamlessly integrated into the existing table. A set of newly assigned activities on that same page are broadcast through RSS and show up in another member' s Google desktop gadget. Upon logging into Outlook, the items automatically appear in the user's task list.

WebCenter's commitment to the power of open source social networking was echoed in other OpenWorld presentations.  In his Applications Unlimited strategy overview, Jesper Andersen announced that Oracle was working on an open source reports repository, sort of a Flickr for report templates of any kind. He also announced Oracle Mix, an open site for Oracle users to network and share ideas. This site grew out of Oracle AppsLab, an internal think tank developed to explore Web 2.0 concepts.

To those of us in User Experience, WebCenter and sites like Oracle Mix signal the end of laying out controls on fixed screens or pages. Our challenge now is to develop easy-to-use modules, widgets, portlets, and services that fit together in ways that adapt to the individual needs of each user and each task.