When I'm filling out web forms -- especially ones with financial data -- I find myself frequently missing the ability to use Excel-like math syntax. For example, you could type this into an Excel field:

And the moment you moved to another cell, it would calculate the answer, and place 333 in the cell for you. This is extremely handy, but alas, very few web sites allow this feature. So much power in web browsers, and yet this little touch of usability is relatively absent. It reminds me of the scene from Futurama, where Phillip J. Fry and Bender the surly robot are trying to hammer out their monthly budget:

    BENDER: Now to figure out how much money I'm raking in off those twerps!  
                (Scribbles out some numbers with a pencil and paper) 
                Awwwwww, I need a calculator.
    FRY:    You are a calculator!
    BENDER: I mean a good calculator.

In an effort to help make web sites more like "good" calculators, I'd suggest adding some simple JavaScript to turn any number field into an Excel-calculator field. It's pretty simple, really... just capture the "onBlur" and "onKeyPress" events. If the user moves to a new field or hits "return", the code evaluates if the cell begins with a "=" character. You can try it out in the fields below... The relevant source code follows.

<script>
	// create the always useful 'trim' function
	function trim(str) {
		return str.replace(/^\s+|\s+$/g,"");
	}

        // check to make sure the JS code is 'safe'
        function isMathProblem(str) {
                return ! str.match(/[a-z,A-Z]/);
        }

	// check to see if the 'return' key is pressed
	function isReturnKeyPressed(e) {
		var isReturn = false;
		var characterCode = 0
		if(window.event)
			characterCode = e.keyCode;
		else if(e.which) 
			characterCode = e.which;
		if (characterCode == 13)
			isReturn = true;
		return isReturn;
	}
	
	// evaluate the math, if it starts with a '=', ignore errors
	function doExcelMath(field, e) {
		if (typeof e != "undefined" && !isReturnKeyPressed(e))
			return;

		var val = trim(field.value);
		if (val.charAt(0) == '=' && isMathProblem(val)) {
			val = val.substring(1);
			try {
				val = eval(val);
				field.value = val;
				field.focus();
				field.select();
			}
			catch (ignore) {
			}
		}
	}
	
</script>
<form name="excel-webform" method="get" action="#">
<b>Value 1</b> <input type="text" name="value1" onBlur="doExcelMath(this)" onKeyPress="doExcelMath(this, event)"></input><br />
<b>Value 2</b> <input type="text" name="value2" onBlur="doExcelMath(this)" onKeyPress="doExcelMath(this, event)"></input><br />
<b>Value 3</b> <input type="text" name="value3" onBlur="doExcelMath(this)" onKeyPress="doExcelMath(this, event)"></input><br />
</form>

If this doesn't catch on, I might have to make a Greasemonkey script instead to cram this code into every web site I use...

NOTE: it can be risky to allow a user to call the JavaScript 'eval' function on arbitrary input data. They could accidentally munge up their page, or insert cookies into their browser. In most cases this will not lead to a successful cross-site-scripting attack... but depending on what you keep in your cookies, you should run some penetration tests to make sure nothing bad can happen.

UPDATE: My presentation on Site Studio Performance Tuning is now posted online.

It will be hosted by the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) I'm going to be talking about general web site performance challenges; some of which will probably surprise you. I'll also cover what kinds of hardware and software that will speed things up, as well as little-known Site Studio features that you can take advantage of.

• Date: Thursday, August 13, 2009
• Time: 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm Central Daylight Time
• Location: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/703524377

If you can't make it, don't worry! We'll be posting it IOUG archived webcasts page as well.

"... the problem with object-oriented languages is they’ve got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding a banana AND the entire jungle." -- Joe Armstrong

Ahhh... them Lisp bigots never change! Until they turn into Erlang bigots... but the guy has a valid point.

Folks who write Ruby and Python based web frameworks kind of understand the "banana problem" and work very hard to overcome it. They use principles like late binding, code injection, Don't Repeat Yourself, etc... But a lot of Java frameworks for web sites seem to not care about the banana problem at all... which leads to these kinds of layers:

1. Database table
2. XML Schema definition of table
3. Auto generated Java objects with attributes matching table columns
4. EJB Business Object Interchange Layer
5. EJB Business objects
6. GUI Interchange Layer
7. HTML Scripting Form
8. Finished HTML Page

That's pretty much like saying... "Well, as long as we dragged the entire Jungle along with us, we might as well make you swing from every tree before we give you a banana!"

Oh, and watch out for the Gorilla...

This is nice to see... my former boss Sam White was named an "Oracle Innovator:"

• http://www.oracle.com/innovation/innovator-samuel-white.html

That's pretty cool... only 23 people in all of Oracle are "innovators," which is pretty impressive considering the company probably has 100,000 employees. That's like the top 0.02%!

I personally thought this product was innovative because of how Sam took a very holistic view of the problem. Way back in the 1990's he saw how people were misusing Java as an "applet" platform... when it was really excellent at being a server. He invented this component plug-in architecture that was way ahead of its time. Only in the past few years have people recognized this model and labeled it as the "Inversion of Control" pattern... but few still understand its power. Not to mention that the entire system was based on web services, before there was even a word for it!

Sam also eschewed "object oriented programming" in favor of "data-driven programming," which was also against the grain. People sometimes look at me sideways when I bash object oriented philosophy... but once you work a lot with "pure" objects you see what a maintenance mess it can be. In addition, Alan Kay -- the inventor of object oriented programming -- also agrees that the currently philosophy is not what he intended and easily leads people into the weeds.

Congratulations, Sam!

Blogs, Wikis, and other Web 2.0 goodies have an important place in a broader enterprise content management strategy... but some caution is advised. As I mentioned in last year's talk "Enterprise 2.0: How You Will Fail," I think it might be more important to focus on the practical realities.

The free-flow of information is great and all, but does it translate into actual productivity? Or are you just creating faddish tools that will eventually be abandoned by users, after the novelty wears off?

Let's take blogs for example... Technorati's State Of The Blogosphere 2008 report claims that there are 133 million blogs in the world... Sounds great so far... but only 7.4 million (5.6%) of these blogs posted an article in the last 4 months! A mere 1.5 million (1.1%) posted an article within the last week, and about 900,000 posted in the last day (0.68%).

If these numbers are reflective of what you would find in a corporate blogging initiative, the outlook is fairly bleak. Assume you have a large push to get your employees blogging, and you succeed in getting 1000 bloggers in your company. If these statistics hold, that means that only 6 blogs out of 1000 will have useful, up-to-date information! Another 50 may have useful information, but it could be up to 4 months old... and possibly stale.

The rest of them could very well languish as "blorphans." One or two posts initially... but then only updated when the author is bored. In general, these posts will be tiny gems of knowledge strewn about your enterprise; usually outdated, and frequently without context.

So much for using blogs to measure the "pulse" of your company!

If you start a corporate blogging initiative, please do no attempt it without a strategy for giving people the tools and encouragement they need to keep going:

• Have lots of helpful info on how to blog, perhaps coupled with a training program.
• Give incentives for blogging... not monetary, but have public rankings of hot topics, hot bloggers, most linked content, most forwarded content, and the like.
• Have a "blog for blogs," where people can exchange tips on blogging, and teach each other on the benefits of blogging.
• Have a "president's club" for bloggers, elected by their peers, for bloggers that genuinely helped them. This could be for the best tips and trick, best breaking news, or the best analysis.
• Use blogging tools that are easy to use, and which allow people to track their popularity, and how people tag their blog.
• Rate improvement in blogging skills on yearly employee review forms, and be sure to give them time to blog.

Most people agree that public blogs help companies by making them more "transparent." Even if customers love your products, they will always have the fear that you might "go away" and not be able to help them in the future. Blogs from real people with real passion can help your customers feel more connected to the "pulse" of your company... even if that "pulse" is filled with stale information.

However... for internal people, the best way to keep everybody up-to-date is likely a more formal knowledge sharing process. Or you can just stick to rumors an innuendo, since company rumors are 80% correct anyway...

For a long time, folks have been asking for a SourceForge-like site for Oracle consultants where they could share free code snippets. I've been trying to get one of these going for a while... but I knew it would be nothing without Oracle branding and an internal push. Well, Oracle recently announced this site:

• https://www.samplecode.oracle.com/

You need to be either an Oracle employee, or an OTN member in order to use it. It's backed with Subversion (yay!), so you'll need hat to contribute. The number of projects is still fairly small at the moment... and it doesn't have a category for Oracle UCM yet. However, once it does, I'm sure we could get the number of projects there up to 20 or so ;-)

There's been some chatter lately about how the next version of HTML 5 might make Flash irrelevant. And not only Flash, but also Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight, and Oracle JavaFX might similarly become useless.

This is because the latest version of HTML has a lot of features that were previously confined to advanced animation plug-ins... the three I like the most are:

• The <audio> and <video> elements, which allow for embedding rich media directly into the browser; the #1 use case of Flash.
• The <canvas> element, which allows for images and vector-graphics to be directly rendered with JavaScript, which allows simple animations; the #2 use case of Flash.
• Offline data storage so your users can keep a 5Mb database offline, manipulate data, and re-sync the data later; an uncommon use case, but vital for rich internet application that you can use on an airplane.

These features have been necessary for a long time... and even though HTML 5 is not yet a finished standard, most of it is already supported in major browsers: Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 8, and Safari 4. This means that you can create a HTML 5 application right now! Probably the most famous HTML 5 application out there is Google Wave for email, which we are all just dying to try out!

I feel that this kind of competition will be healthy... I'd wager that 90% of what people currently use Flash for could just as easily be done in HTML 5. Also, by being standards compliant, you'll have fewer concerns about vendor lock-in. What happens if Adobe gets into trouble, then is bought out by Computer Associates? No more Flash for you!

However, there is still a problem... currently HTML 5 compliant browsers are only 60% of the market... I know quite a few enterprises that are still on IE 6, fer crying out loud... Flash has the distinct advantage of working on older browsers, and has about a 95% market penetration. Although, last year at this time only 5% of users had a HTML 5 compliant browser, so maybe by May 2010 HTML 5 will be as popular as Flash?

Hard to say...

UPDATE 1: Well, it's now May 2010, so I redid the numbers... and according to the browser numbers from W3Schools about 75% of the market is using HTML5 compliant browsers. Now that Google has dropped support for IE6, I'd wager this number will be close to 95% in May 2011...

This question came up recently in the content management universe... a few weeks back EMC/Documentum unveiled their latest UI at the Gartner conference on Portals and Collaboration... and it was a pretty slick Flex-based UI. A daring move... However, slick UIs don't need Flex. Billy and I got a demo from Jason Bright about Media Beacon's latest app. It was very flashy, and uses pure HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. As Jason told CMS Watch:

"Flex, like ActiveX, Silverlight, and Java Applets before them are, in a sense, replacements to the browser. Each replaces the web browser in a proprietary way. While I love Flex as a technology, I do not think it is a good strategic decision to throw out the traditional browser for a new client-server model no matter how attractive"

The problem boils down to this: there are millions of people dedicated to making the web better; but only one small part of Adobe is dedicated to making Flash better. The same holds true for Silverlight and JavaFX.

If I were writing a one-off rich internet application, I might choose something like Flex, because Flex development time is half what it would be for a similar HTML/CSS/JavaScript app. There are so many browser bugs, and oddities in JavaScript, that its always a long slog to debug it. With the possible exception of the Google Web Toolkit, there really are no good ways to easily design a flashy HTML/CSS/JavaScript application... whereas designing application with Flex is relatively simple.

But... if I were making an application for resell, or one that I intended to have other people maintain, I'd be more hesitant to use anything but web standards. HTML 5 is right around the corner; product development cycles are long; and HTML 5 browsers could reach 90% market saturation in 12 months.

All things considered, the best option now is HTML 5...

UPDATE 2: in case you have been living in a cave, and missed the launch of Apple's new iPad, you might have missed the fact that the iPad will not support Flash or Flex. I'm uncertain whether this new device will really take the world by storm, but if it does, it will be one more reason to switch to an HTML 5 code base.

UPDATE 3: it appears that Steve Jobs has gone on records about why the iPad and iPod will NEVER support Flash. Steve-o brings up a few more reasons I did not cover here: Flash is a power hog, it doesn't support "touch" interfaces, and it crashes a lot. Steve Jobs ends with a plea: Adobe should use its brainpower to make a cross-platform IDE for HTML5, and stop trying to cram Flash down our throats. If they don't, then the "next Adobe" certainly will...

A while back I blogged about the lack of Oracle UCM "vertical applications". A vertical application is an add-on to an existing product or platform, but one that is industry specific. A lot of Oracle UCM consultants have created very general add-ons, and have sold them along with their services.

On occasion, Oracle implements one of these general features, and the add-on product becomes obsolete. Unsellable... and this can cause some grumpiness... but it doesn't have to be this way.

Joel on Software has recently had a similar rant about people who make add-ons to platforms... but in this case, he's referring to the iPhone. Similar to Oracle UCM, the iPhone is a platform... so you'll get some folks who just "fill the gaps," and others who create entirely new markets. A lot of gap-fillers had their profits crushed when the new iPhone OS rendered their add-ons obsolete. Some quotes:

A good platform always has opportunities for applications that aren’t just gap-fillers. These are the kind of application that the vendor is unlikely ever to consider a core feature, usually because it’s vertical — it’s not something everyone is going to want. There is exactly zero chance that Apple is ever going to add a feature to the iPhone for dentists. Zero.

Or, more succinctly, as Dave Winer once said:

Sometimes developers choose a niche that’s either directly in the path of the vendor, or even worse, on the roadmap of the vendor. In those cases, they don’t really deserve our sympathy.

Yes... If you make a general add-on to Oracle UCM, you have a wider possible audience... but that doesn't mean you'll be able to sell to it all! You'll have a tiny bit of market penetration, and then one day Oracle will just write a clone of what you did.

When it comes to add-ons to platforms, verticals are almost always more profitable. The market might be smaller, but it is much easier to highlight the need to your market, and the competition is less. If you make something good, odds are you'll be able to sell it for a looooong time.

Oracle -- as you know -- plans on purchasing Sun and all their Java-licious technology. This includes the open source Glassfish application server, which is a free competitor to Weblogic, which Oracle obtained in the Sun BEA acquisition... and they both competed with OC4J, which was Oracle's application server prior to 2008.

I -- along with everybody else -- am very curious to see how all this plays out... It certainly appears that OC4J has lost favor, and Weblogic stole the show... but now Oracle "owns" an open-source alternative to Weblogic as well. So which one should you choose? Naturally, this depends a lot on what out-of-the-box features and integrations you need... But if I were a developer creating a new application from scratch, I'd probably go with Glassfish. Besides being open source, they will soon have built-in support for JRuby/Rails and Jython/DJango web frameworks. To me, that says the people behind Glassfish really "get it" when it comes to delivering web frameworks that make developers more productive...

According to Vivek Pandey's blog, the latest preview release of Glassfish v3:

1. Provides GlassFish v3 connector and deployer as OSGi module. Which means that deployment of a Python application will trigger Jython Container code.
2. Wire up the HTTP request and response at very low level by implementing a GrizzlyAdapter, hence resulting in better runtime performance and scalability using grizzly scalable NIO framework.
3. WSGI (Web Services Gateway Interface) is a Python standard to wire a Web Server to Python web frameworks such as Django or TurboGears etc. Jython Container implements WSGI interface and so it would be pretty easy to add support for various Python web frameworks. Currently, we have Django and we will have others such as TuroboGears, Pylons etc.
4. Currently Jython Container is available thru GlassFish v3 Update Tool. In the future it may appear with GlassFish v3 core distribution.

His blog also has step-by-step instructions about how to enable Jython and DJango... with luck, this will be rolled into the final release, so these steps will be easier.

I'm also curious to see what Jake and the AppsLabs boys might think about Glassfish... those guys are building some of Oracle's most "social" applications, and they are big JRuby/Rails fans. I'm more of a Python/DJango guy myself. I've said many times that if I were to rewrite the Oracle Content Server from scratch, I'd probably have picked DJango as the core framework... But DJango in a Java container??? That's even better! Quick coding, easy modifications, plus the reliability of Java.

But that's just for my needs... others may prefer the "Weblogic way" for different reasons.

Sorry for the lack of blogging, folks... Last week was IOUG Collaborate, and I was usually indisposed. For those who didn't make it, you can check out my presentation on Slideshare. I gave my talk on A Pragmatic Strategy for Oracle ECM, as well as my Top 10 Ways To Integrate With Oracle ECM.

Billy put up some of his talks as well. The How To Be A Rock Star with ECM talk was well received... although the slides don't quite capture the whole presentation.

Overall, I was pleased with the turnout... I was kind of bummed out that there wasn't a bigger Oracle ACE presence there. I saw Dan Norris a few times, but there wasn't an 'official' ACE briefing. Oh well... I guess I'll need to wait for Oracle Open World in the fall. With all the new Sun customers and partners, that place is going to be chaos.

If you are attending the IOUG Collaborate conference this year, you might want to check out my talks:

• A Pragmatic Strategy For Oracle Enterprise Content Management: Monday, May 4, 2009 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM
• Top 10 Ways to Integrate With Oracle Enterprise Content Management:Tuesday, May 5, 2009 12:15 PM - 12:45 PM

These are both repeats of the ones I gave at Open World 2008 a few months back... although the "Top 10 Ways" have changed a little bit since the introduction of the RIDC connector... I'm planning on something completely different for Oracle Open World this year. ;-)

I'm also doing a book signing after my "Pragmatic Strategy" talk... It will be at 2:30pm on Monday, at the bookstore. The bookstore is in the middle of level 2, outside the entrance to the exhibit hall. If you'd like a signature for either book, swing on by!

Unfortunately, there aren't any plans for the Oracle ACEs to get together... although I'm pretty sure that Dan Norris and others will be attending.

In case you haven't heard, Oracle bought Sun... after being teased by IBM, and watching its stock price plummet, Oracle began talks with Sun last Thursday about possible acquisition...

If you were surprised, don't feel bad... Neither IBM nor Microsoft had a clue this was going to happen.

First thoughts... holy crap! Oracle sure saved Sun from becoming a part of the IBM beast... and now Oracle (more or less) owns Java, and has access to all those developers who maintain it. This is win-win for them both, in my opinion. Sun gets most of their revenue from hardware, which Oracle avoided doing for decades, so overall there's not much overlap in product offerings -- unlike last year's BEA acquisition.

The hardware-software blend is a compelling story... Imagine getting all your Oracle applications and databases pre-installed on a hardware appliance! Not bad... You could even get one of them data centers in a box, slap a bunch of Coherence nodes on each, and have a plug-and-play "cloud computer" of your very own.

Second thoughts... how the heck is the software integration plan going to work? Sun helps direct a lot of open source projects... including JRuby, Open Office, and the MySQL database... not to mention the OpenSSO identity management solution, and the GlassFish portal/enterprise service bus/web stack. The last two are award winning open-source competitors to existing Oracle Fusion Middleware products. Oracle now owns at least 5 portals, and at least 4 identity management solutions... unlike past acquisitions, existing Oracle product lines are going to have to justify themselves against free competitors. I can foresee a lot of uneasy conversations along the lines of:

So, Product Manager Bob... I notice that your team costs the company a lot of money, but your product line isn't even as profitable as the stuff we give away for free... Can you help me out with the logic here?

There are a lot of open source developers shaking in their boots over this... but I'm being cautiously optimistic. Oracle can't "kill" MySQL: there are too many "forked" versions of MySQL already, any one could thrive if Oracle tried to cripple the major player. Likely they will simply try to profit from those who choose to use a bargain brand database. Case in point, Oracle could sell them their InnoDB product, which allows MySQL to actually perform transactions.

Middleware is the big question mark... but with a huge injection of open source developers, products, and ideas, I'm again cautiously optimistic that -- after an inevitable shake-up -- the Middleware offerings would improve tremendously.

And Open World 2009 is going to be a lot more crowded...

Sometimes when I'm working on a big-ish project, I need to quickly whip out a script to alter items in the content server. The old-school way to do this would be to use the IdcCommand application... other folks might prefer a Java application written with the J2EE connectors in the Content Integration Suite (CIS), or maybe even SOAP... but my preference would be to do it all in a scripting language. In particular, Jython.

Jython is a Java implementation of the Python programming language... which is my favorite language these days. Jython did stagnate for may years, stuck on Python 2.2, and more than a little buggy... but the project is alive and kicking and just released version Jython 2.5 beta 3, which I recommend you use. I'd wager that the Jython project was revived partly because of envy about the rise of Ruby and JRuby. Whatever the reason, I'm always happy to have new code to play with.

You can invoke any Java libraries in Jython, so naturally you could use SOAP or CIS to make administrative scripts. However, I think the majority of people would prefer a new-ish Java connector for Oracle UCM: the Remote IntraDoc Client (RIDC). In contrast with both CIS and SOAP, the RIDC connector is very lightweight, very fast, and very simple to use. There's no WSDL or J2EE bloat at all; RIDC is just a "Plain Old Java Object" wrapper around UCM web services... so it's very easy to embed in a Java application.

To get started, download the most recent version of the Content Integration Suite from Oracle. This ZIP file contains two folders: one for the new RIDC connector, and one for the standard CIS connector. I'd suggest you take a look at the "ridc-developer-guide.pdf" before you go any further. The samples and JavaDocs are also very useful, but you can peruse them later.

Next, download Jython 2.5b3, and run the installer.

Next, make a folder to contain your UCM Jython scripts. Copy the "jython" launcher file from its install directory to this directory. On Windows, this file is named "jython.bat". Also copy the RIDC library "oracle-ridc-client-10g.jar" to this folder.

Next, edit your copy of the Jython launcher file to make sure the Java classpath includes the RIDC library. You can set this near where they set JAVA_HOME at the top. On Windows, you would edit "jython.bat" and add this:

        set CLASSPATH=%CLASSPATH%;D:\FOOBAR\oracle-ridc-client-10g.jar

On Unix, your would edit the "jython" text file, and add something like this:

        CLASSPATH=$CLASSPATH:/FOOBAR/oracle-ridc-client-10g.jar

That's it! Now just run "jython" on the command line, and you'll get an interactive shell where you can load Java classes, and use them. Loading them is fairly similar to how you load libraries in Python. For example, the script below will load the RIDC libraries, connect to the content server, run a search, and dump out the results:

Remember: whitespace is relevant in Python, so watch your indentations...

You can easily expand on this to create scripts to run archives, batch update metadata fields, resubmit items to the indexer, or run them through a converter to generate PDFs or HTML. Also, there are multiple ways you can set up the security if you don't want to send the password with every request, or if you want to use SSL instead of clear-text sockets. See the RIDC documentation for examples.

Enjoy!

On my recent book tour, I presented some real-world examples of successful UCM strategies. It included some tips and warnings that Andy and I used to help us write the book... and shared some hard return-on-investment numbers from existing UCM clients. I uploaded the presentation to Slideshare, for those of you who were interested... or the lazy can just view it below:

I spent some time talking about the basics... what problems does ECM solve? What causes initiatives to fail? How do you define and measure success? And what are some tips for ensuring success? This is more strategy than technical, so hopefully everybody on your ECM team will get something useful out of it.

The hard numbers for cost savings came from the Survive or Thrive With UCM talks that Oracle has been touting recently. There's a lot of good information in those webcasts, which I won't repeat here. I'll just strongly encourage you to check them out.

Naturally... the people who had the best success to report were those who were the most disciplined in taking metrics. How much less paper are we printing? How much time is saved because the process is now automated? How much easier is it for employees / customers / partners to find the information they need? How much faster can you deploy new web sites? How much faster can you perform comprehensive audits? How much extra revenue can we credit to the system? How can you prove value to your boss?

If you don't ask the hard questions, and make measurements before and after, it will be difficult to ever quantify success...

Last week Bob Rhubart interviewed Billy Cripe, Vince Salvato and myself about Enterprise 2.0. Bob will be releasing it in three chunks, which you can download with the links below:

• PART ONE: we began by discussing the importance of "social media," both in and out of the enterprise. We also touched on the importance of a Web 2.0 infrastructure to enable the "right kind" of collaboration. I spent a tiny bit of time discussing the importance of social search, in contrast to typical enterprise search, but not in the depth that I would have liked...
• PART TWO: this talk was more about collaboration. Bob begins with the question, isn't Enterprise 2.0 just "anarchyware?" Meaning, it might do too good of a job at "flattening" the corporate structure, that it might lead to poor decisions and chaos. We dealt with how you can avoid anarchy, sometimes with a slow adoption that your corporate culture can tolerate, and sometimes by putting extra seat belts in these systems. The best enterprise 2.0 architectures should be natural extensions of systems that allow effective committee-based decisions... believe it or not, there are several good ways a big committee can make decisions, although it takes a bit of discipline. I also challenged Friedman's assertion that "The World Is Flat" with a rant about how The World Is Spiky. Random collaboration is pretty much just noise; true innovation will only occur when you get the right people to collaborate...
• PART THREE: finally, we get talking about the digital natives: the latest generation of workers versus the baby boomers. The former will love the latest E 2.0 systems, because they will help them expand their influence, whereas the latter will hate changing their habits and sharing their knowledge so close to retirement... which is a shame, because that is exactly what businesses need. Luckily, systems like Facebook and Twitter are becoming so fun, that there's still hope to bring similar systems into the enterprise. We also discuss why should architects care at all about enterprise 2.0?

It was fun to put these together... and thanks a lot to Bob for editing all of our ramblings into easy to follow chunks! Feel free to comment on these podcasts below...

If you watched Michelle's Oracle ECM Community Call on March 10 -- or you spotted one of the leaks in the twitscape -- you would have heard about the new site for Oracle ECM announcements: ECM Alerts.

She worked really hard to put this together and promote it, and already its Google Rank is impressive...

The goal behind the blog is to give a forum for Oracle ECM Product Managers to announce the latest news about each of their products. It will contain product release information, integrations, samples, and general how-tos for most of the products in the Universal Content Management suite. The site makes a good use of tags and categories, so you can subscribe to only the product announcements that matter for you. And because everything is piped through Feedburner, you can subscribe to alerts by email or RSS.

The product managers seem to like the idea, and already there are a good number of product alerts. I'd wager that it will take a few more weeks to get everybody on board with this... after which it will likely be the best place to get Oracle ECM Announcements.

For existing ECM customers who were used to the Stellent customer newsletters, this will be a welcome addition.

The White House just launched their latest Democracy 2.0 web site: Recovery.gov. It helps you get up-to-date info about how your stimulus money is being spent. Its pretty slick, although it appears to be down right now. Its running the open source Drupal content management system... which is the same CMS I use to run my own blog.

As Alex noted in the comments, they are using a customization of theme recovery_v3, and they appear to have re-written a lot of the components from scratch. Might they contribute their customizations back to the Drupal community?

Another stimulus-related web site you should check out StimulusWatch.org, which lets citizens vote on prospective city projects that might get some of the federal money. These are not yet approved by the federal government, so voice your opinion before its too late!

Naturally, I would have gotten a warm fuzzy if Recovery.gov used Oracle ECM, but I'm just jazzed that they are using version control at all! I'd like to take this to the next level, and force Congress to use something like Subversion to write legislation... Then we'd know exactly who to blame for specific bills ;-)

Jake recently had a good post over at Apps Labs about the importance of "Social Search". He has promised a part 2 today... so I encourage you to check it out.

The question is, how do we make enterprise search better? Some people complain that enterprise search should behave more like Google search, which I vehemently disagree with, for one primary reason: enterprise search is a FUNDAMENTALLY different problem than internet search. Here are some examples:

The internet search problem is like this:

• Heavily linked pages, which can be analyzed for "relevance" and "importance"
• Spam is a constant problem
• People don't want you to monitor their behavior
• People obsess about their Google Page rank
• People obsess about their hit count
• People aren't looking for the answer, they are looking for an answer

The whole problem reminds me of a scene from The Zero Effect:

Now, a few words on looking for things. When you look for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad... because of all things in the world, you only want one of them. When you look for anything at all, your chances of finding it are very good... because of all the things in the world, you're sure to find some of them.

Internet search is like looking for anything at all... whereas enterprise search is like looking for something specific:

• People don't want general information; they want the 100% definitive answer
• The trust level is usually higher between co-workers, than between random web surfers... or at least it should be. Otherwise, you got bigger problems than information management.
• You know exactly who is running the search
• You know exactly what department they are in, and what content they are likely to need
• You know exactly their previous search history, possibly even their favorite "tags"
• Spam is minimal, or non-existent
• Content uses few, if any, hyperlinks to help determine relevance
• People usually write content because of obligation, and do not usually care about making it easy for their audience to understand

Trying to solve both problems with the same exact tool will only lead to frustration...

Now... Solving this problem with social tools is a much easier, and arguably better approach. People usually don't want to know the answer, people usually want to know who knows the answer. This is an observation as old as Mooer's Law (1959) about information management:

“An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it.”

Fifty years later, and folks still don't quite seem to get it... The average user does not want to read enterprise content! They don't read documentation on the subject, nor do they read books on the subject, nor do they read blogs on the subject... In general, people don't care to actually learn anything new; they just want the quick answer that lets them move on and get back to their normal job. Most people look for information so they can perform some kind of task, and then they'll be more than happy to forget that information afterward. Its a rare individual who learns for the sake of knowledge... These folks are sometimes called Mavens, and everybody wants to be connected with these Mavens so they can do their jobs better. As a result, these Mavens will always be overwhelmed with phone calls, emails, and meeting invites.

As those mediums became flooded, some of your resources fled to other places -- like Twitter, or Facebook, or enterprise social software -- and forced would-be connectors to follow. This constant movement (or hiding) helps a bit... but its only a matter of time before those mediums get flooded as well, and the noise overwhelms the signal.

In order to truly solve the enterprise search problem, you need to first understand why people may choose to never use enterprise search, no matter how good it is... then try to bring them back into the fold with socially enabled enterprise search tools. Don't just help people find information; help them find somebody who understands what the information means. Connecting people with mere words can easily backfire, and might actually make these people a burden on society. Instead, connect them with real, live humans who are eager to teach the knowledge being sought. At the same time, you need to work hard to protect these Mavens, so they don't flee your system in favor of another.

This is a problem that Google's search engine cannot solve -- mainly for privacy and trust reasons -- but it is 100% solvable in the enterprise. I'm just wondering why so few have done it...

There's a great developer site out there called 99 Bottles Of Beer. It shows you how to output the lyrics of the oh-so-annoying camp song in well over 1000 different programming languages.

Woah... 1000 languages, you say? Yes, there are well over 1000 known programming languages, but please keep in mind how developers think. Most of these languages are klunky, impractical, or intentionally impossible to use. These are sometimes called esoteric languages, or even Turing tarpits. Here are some of my favorite bizarre programming languages:

• Whitespace: no letters, no numbers, no symbols... the only valid syntax is tab, space, and carriage returns.
• LOLCODE: the syntax looks like something you'd see on a LOL cats poster. I HAZ A BEERZ ITZ 99! IM IN YR LOOP! IZ VAR LIEK 0? KTHXBYE!
• Piet: just damn pixels on a screen... no letters even!
• Cow: instead of number and symbols, you only get moOmOOmoOmOoOOM.
• Brainf**k: trust me... you do NOT want to maintain code written in this language...

Kidding aside, there's a pretty good argument that learning how to print out 99 bottles of beer is a useful exercise when learning a new language. You need to learn the syntax of variables, conditionals, text output, and loops. Not to mention the fact that every language has nuances that can sometimes help you to further minimize your code base, but not sacrifice clarity... there's probably a dozen ways to write it in each laguage, each with different benefits.

So -- seeing how Oracle UCM was being left out -- I submitted the below code to their site. 99 Bottles of Beer, in IdocScript:

<$numBottles = "99", bottleStr = " bottles "$>
<$loopwhile (numBottles > 0)$>
	<$verse = numBottles & bottleStr & "of beer on the wall,\n" &
		numBottles & bottleStr & "of beer!\n" & 
		"Take one down, pass it around,\n"$>
	<$numBottles = numBottles - 1$>
	<$if numBottles > 0$>
		<$if numBottles == 1$>
			<$bottleStr = " bottle "$>
		<$endif$>
		<$verse = verse & numBottles & bottleStr & "of beer on the wall!\n"$>
	<$else$>
		<$verse = verse & "no more bottles of beer on the wall!\n"$>
	<$endif$>
<$verse$>
<$endloop$>

Nifty, eh?

Naturally, there are multiple ways to do this... you could use resource includes, localization strings, result sets, etc. But that's part of the fun of learning a new language. I'll leave it as an exercise for my audience to make it better.

One of the biggest challenges in social networks is keeping them updated. When you first log in, its a blank slate, and you have to find all your friends and make connections to them. This is a bit of a pain, so sites like Facebook and LinkedIn allow you to to import your email address book. They then data-mine the address book to see who you know that might already be in the network, which helps you make lots of connections quickly.

Ignoring the obvious security and privacy concerns, there are still two big problems with this:

1. These systems find connections, but they ignore the strength and quality of those connections.
2. You have to constantly import your address book if you keep making new friends.

In my latest book, I give some practical advice about how Content Management fits in with social software and Enterprise 2.0 initiatives... One of the ideas that I liked to drive home is that not all connections are equal, and it takes a lot of effort to keep quality information in your social software systems. Who is connected to whom? Which connections are genuine? And who is just a "link mooch" who is spamming people with "friend" requests just to ratchet up his ranking?

That latter one is particularly problematic on LinkedIn... Its littered with sub-par recruiters who send friend request spam so they can get something from you... but they never care to do anything for you.

Luckily, in the enterprise these problems can be solved relatively easily: data mine your email archives for who is connected to whom! By monitoring a host of statistics on who emails whom, about what, and when, you have a tremendously powerful tool for building social maps. You can determine who is connected to whom, who is an expert on which subject, and where the structural holes are in your enterprise. And you never need to maintain your connections! Any time you send a message to a friend, your social map is automatically rebuilt for you!

In order to do so, you'll need to run some data mining tools to find answers to the following questions:

• Who do you send emails to? These are the people you claim to be connected to.
• Does this person reply to your emails? If so, the connection is mutual.
• How often do you email? A one-time email is probably not a connection, but a weekly email might be a strong connection.
• How long does it take them to reply to you? A faster reply usually means your communications get priority to them, and they feel a stronger connection to you.
• How long do you take to reply to them? Again, a faster reply from you means that their communications get priority from you, meaning you feel a strong connection as well.
• Do you answer emails about a topic, or just forward them along? Just because you are the "point man" for Java questions, that doesn't mean you "know" Java... but it probably means you "know who knows" Java, which is sometimes even better.
• Does one person usually do all of the initiation of new emails? If so, then this might be a lopsided friendship, or it might just mean that one person has more free time.
• What are the topics of conversation? In reality, the more often you discuss work, the weaker the connection! If you also discuss gossip, news, current events, sports, movies, family, or trivia, then you probably have a stronger connection. The more topics you discuss, the more likely you are to be close friends.
• What is the flow of email from one department to another? If its peer-to-peer, then these departments are comfortable sharing information. If it always goes through the chain of command, then these departments are socially isolated, and probably unlikely to trust each other.
• Who do you email outside the company? If an employee in the marketing department emailed a friend who works at the company Ravenna, and your sales person is trying to connect with somebody at Ravenna, then these two employees might want to connect.

Unfortunately, many employers have a policy against using company email for personal communications. Ironically, this policy could hurt the employer in the long run, because analyzing the violations of that policy are frequently the best way to determine who is well connected in your company! So, before you deploy any social software in the enterprise, encourage your employees to goof off via email (within reason), and set up some technology to data-mine your email archives (like Oracle Universal Online Archive, or something similar). Then keep tuning your map based on the email messages people send.

That will help you hit the ground running with enterprise social software...