ECM Technology

Dot Net Framework issues!

2009-10-26T10:39:00.002+03:00

I've been trying to install dotNet Framework 3.5 SP1 on my laptop recently, but with no luck at all..

I have my laptop running for more than 2 years, and I managed to survive major Virus attacks, and all kinds of performance problems with continuous tweaking and determination to avoid formatting and re-installation of everything! I just refuse to be defeated by a Virus or some OS failures :)

anyways, during my searches, I bumped to this site, and this tool which "resets" the status of my different dot net Frameworks, enabling 3.5 SP1 to be installed on a clean ground!

I only cleaned up 3.5 and 3.0 Frameworks, then.. Everything went fine!

I wonder why doesn't MS release such things, or embed it in the tools instead of the useless apologize messages!

here is the link:
http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2006/05/30/611355.aspx

Let your community fix it!

2009-10-18T00:09:00.003+03:00

As companies develop new products, weather it was a software, a car, a furniture or even some sort of food, they put their efforts to bring the best to the end user, unfortunately "the Best" is a relative concept, which is usually coming from the vendor's point of view..

Here comes the power of the community, as people start using this product, they start to think of additional uses that they would like to have, they like the product, but hey want it to have some additional features! This is very obvious in the software industry.. So, people start to customize those products to fit their needs & expectations, which results in enhancements that the original vendor couldn't think of!, additionally different people have different tastes & expectations, which will result in different customizations and enhancements that could fit any audience starting from the same base product.

I've been a windows mobile user for 5 years, and it was limited in it's out of the box features, but the powerful community of Microsoft developers, the extensive APIs & the ability to extend anything in the core operating system filled any gaps that Microsoft had, the community has built (both commercially & freely) many programs & system extensions that promoted the OS to a higher level of usefulness for its users!

On the other hand, I became an iPhone owner a couple of months ago, and as much as I adore the device, as much as I'm angry of Apple! You have created a revolutionary device that turned the industry upside down.. But yet, no system is perfect.. And in a very strange move, prevented your community from filling your gaps.. Restricting developers from many of much needed access to some system resources. I find it very awkward if I need to add a reminder or alarm in my custom application I would need to send it as a push notification through the Internet! I can't add my alarms to the system notification queue!And there is no way to extend, override, or customize a system behavior.. So, limitations cannot be fixed!

of course this is with the legitimately developed applications!.. but Jailbreaking the device removes all those limitations, & brings the power of a very skilled community that developed some incredible extensions to the OS, such as inline spell checker when writing emails, scroll bars, true multitasking ( keep applications running in the background ) .. & hundreds of great applications that can never be done in a standard system ( non-jailbroken ).

Such extensions enhance the products in an incredible way, extending the life of them by keep introducing new extensions & capabilities to the product from the enthusiastic community.

Strangely, apple totally ignores the community power, the device is still great, no limitation in the hardware or design, limits are only forced by apple on the developers!, but the IT & Communications market is changing fast, & such limits could result in there device lagging back behind other innovators that are coming strong such as Google Android!

I don't know, maybe because I see & touch what the community power could do (I'm an E2.0 consultant!) but i think this is a big mistake from apple!

Unleash the power of your loyal community, let them extend your system as they like it to be, let them enhance the product without limiting their creativity, let the community fix your mistakes, this would definitely empower the iPhone, & extend it's competitive life much further, while enabling the creativity of your community to drive the competition war for you!

Pleaseee let your community fix it!

____
This Post has been published on ArabCrunch!
the image used above is credited to http://www.lumaxart.com/

Going to ORACLE FUSION MIDDLEWARE 11g FORUM in Amman

2009-10-14T08:26:00.002+03:00

Going to Oracle Fusion middleware 11g Forum in Jordan today.

The event is being carried out all around the world to introduce the new "innovation foundation" 11g release.

This release is a significant update to Oracle's technology products into a true unified stack, integrating and standardizing on Oracle's Web Logic application server & presenting the technology products as core components that forms the solution's pieces.

I'll have more updates after the event today :)

----

Update:

The new release of Oracle Web Logic Suite attracted the attention of the audience, as the presenter went through the details of the components.

Many Questions where raised around Oracle Coherence, as the concept was a bit new to the audience there (although it is not!)... the integration of Coherence within the Web Logic Suite is quite interesting, where it enables to represent the runtime memory as a "cloud", which enables virtualizing on new levels, and separating the computing virtualizing from the memory!

all in all, we had nice time :)

-- Post From My iPhone

Error ... Too much traffic...

2009-06-04T00:42:00.000+03:00

I've been very busy the last couple of months, and my web activity was severly affected.. unlike GM, it is not related to global economy!...

Anyways, many thoughts in my mind, all half baked.. But.. whenever i try to complete one, or post any... i encounter the
"Too Much Traffic" error... not on the blog, but in my mind :)

hope to resolve this issue soon...

in the mean while... I hope everyone is having good time..

Take Care

Oracle to Aquire SUN Microsystems...

2009-04-20T15:59:00.002+03:00

Today Oracle Announced the news here ...

Sun announced here

and i cannot comment more... the details and roadmaps of SUN's portfolio will be announced later...

good move Oracle!

What is ECM!!

2009-03-24T15:30:00.004+02:00

This presentation is by AIIM which demonstrates what ECM is all about.

in slide 5, the presentation mentions that ECM is not necessarily a single system, but a set of systems that are integrated and working together, to give the complete ECM feeling!

And here is one of the biggest differentiators of Oracle's UCM products!

Oracle UCM provides the complete ECM stack of solutions, including Document Management (DM), Web Content Management (WCM), Digital Assets Management (DAM), Records Management (RM), and all other supporting services such as the Workflow and Business Processes and Content Collaboration.

Imagine the following with me:
we have a website, that consists of several pages, one of the pages has a nice logo in the upper left, and an image of the building on the side, with an article in the middle of the page...
if we dissect this page we will find that the page itself is a content that organizes how other contents appears on the browser using the WCM module, and the image of the building is actually a 10MP image that was inserted into the DAM module, and automatically was converted to a smaller web friendly size and format. While the article in the middle of the page is a word document that was created by the secretary on her desktop, and she dragged it and dropped it into a folder on her desktop using the DM module, which automatically converted it into html, and published it into the web page after the legal department approval!

So, as we see, all modules work perfectly together to provide a final consistent web page within the website, and each module contributes with its services to give the full ECM solution.

In this case, having a separate system for each module means each system will store its data, and it will be redundant across the other systems that use it. This also means that there should be some integration between those systems to finally provide the web page that we talked about.

For oracle, it is one system that manages everything! base content services are shared by all modules that are built on the same code base, means any module can use the services of the other modules natively, thus the process of creation and rendering the web page we mentioned is basically an interaction between the services of only one system, that provides all those services together.

users will have the same experience, since they are using one interface that has all those functionalities, and administrators has only one administrative view of all the ECM functionalities, even the upgrades of the entire ECM stack is basically rolling one patch that upgrades everything together!

I felt that very quickly when I installed the UCM system the first time, and I was really amazed how great were the guys who designed the UCM system to be such piece of art!.

Here is a whitepaper that will explain more why a unified approach is better for you!

Now I will leave you with AIIM's presentation.

What Is ECM?

ArabCrunch Demo 09 event!!

2009-02-16T17:14:00.003+02:00

ArabCrunch is a specialized blog that follows, profiles, and reviews Arab originated technologies.

they're having a great event next week, check below the press release:

"AMMAN, Jordan - (9, Feb, 2009) – Arab Innovation is hardly spotted, but with ArabCrunch DEMO event it will be subjected to change. The event will give Arab startups the chance to present their newly developed products and launch it, in order to get good outreach to target customers and gain access to both investors and media."


here is the complete press release

here is the event website

follow the event on the social web:

....

hope to see you all there!

Oracle Enterprise 2.0 Virtual Conference!

2009-02-16T10:13:00.005+02:00

Join Oracle in its Virtual Conference about Enterprise 2.0

Learn how Enterprise 2.0 will help your organization!

hear from our experts in EMEA!

the event page, agenda, and registration
http://events.unisfair.com/index.jsp?eid=353&seid=26

waiting to see you all!

Google logs & security of enterprises

2008-09-10T11:23:00.004+03:00

with the new release of Google chrome I was very happy & very fascinated with the innovation & the commitment of Google to the glob, but a few blog posts & This Cnet news article which turned the idea into a nightmare, I’ve posted last time about cloud computing & Google’s outage, my point was that I can never ever trust anyone, what so ever, to store my sensitive information inside his "cloud". this was simply for storing info in other's place, but...

I was reading today here & here about Google's changes on their retention policies & defending their selves about privacy & personal security claims!

I paused for a second, and looked to my network of friends, of diverse backgrounds & distinct industries, we're using Google as the primary search engine, that logs all searches and even keystrokes before searching (Google suggest), & using Google chrome to access all our internal & external web pages, where it logs a lot of stuff about us, & can track our usage & surfing pattern, Google desktop to index the hard drive, including business emails & confidential data...

Ok, let me pause here again, Google is one of the truly innovative companies around, those products along with their entire stack of solutions drove innovation into all sectors, & I was very happy with each advancement & product they provided, including the cloud based docs...

But that was for my personal & home usage, nothing important to log or track, nothing top secret... therefore I wouldn't care (much) for the privacy policy as i trust Google very well.

But when we're talking about business & fierce competition it is another story, although I do trust Google, but again, as I said for cloud computing, I can never trust anyone for my business secrets, & after all, seems we brought the cloud to our homes :)

yes, very sad... as much as I’m fascinated by the innovation that Google is doing each day, I just can't ignore the risk of abusing those technologies by the wrong hands, & on the other hand, it's nonsense to ask Google to stop it, as science can never be stopped, if it was not Google, it will be another company..

Btw, reading my post again, I feel like a conspiracy freak! Oops! I was reading such ideas back in university times, when some "conspiracy freak” said that with the advancement of internet, their is nothing called privacy anymore!! ... I guess that "freak" turned out to be "wise"...

However, this debate will never end, we just have to cope with the changes, & try our best to minimize the risks!

Google Outages, and Cloud Computing

2008-08-13T20:09:00.008+03:00

Probably this is not the area of my speciality, but as a technology fan, I've seen recently several posts and talks about Google Apps and online computing, and was checking out Google Sites, which is a nice product indeed.

things were good until I read this topic from eWeek.

this really brings up some points against complete online business, and cloud computing,

The idea of having your complete documents, data and systems on Googl's servers is really cool, where the users and the entire organization will forget the headache and cost of hardware servers, backups, maintenance, upgrades ... etc.

and also provides access to all users from any system, any where, any browser! especially with the on-going development of Android, the Google mobile OS platform, users will be able to access their entire documents from their Android powered devices!

But, the main advantage with Google apps and their Cloud computing is also their main disadvantage, where that was clearly visible with their applications outages that happened this month, users thought that Google will be the most reliable online system, but they were shocked with the truth that Google is still a real company, that lives in the real world, where problems DO happen.

In my opinion, Having your data in other's hands is risky, especially when we are talking about sensitive information, or critical data that needs to be available 24x7.

Therefore, When an organization develop their plans and implement their systems (on their hardware) they have complete control on the availability, continuity and disaster recovery plans, and most importantly, the security.

New URL API for Oracle Distributed Document Capture (ODDC 10.1.3.4.0)!

2008-08-07T10:37:00.000+03:00

Oracle has recently announced a new release of ODDC (Oracle Distributed Document Capture)… where the guys on the other side of earth has just finished developing a new URL API!

What does that mean?
It means we can send instructions and parameters in the URL during the ODDC call! To directly initiate scanning and pass indexing parameters for example...

I was in a PoC a couple of months ago, where we image enabled EBS using ODDC and UCM, and i was thinking how great it will be to pass index fields using the URL instead of DB tables & SQL workarounds that we had to use!

And the dream came true!!

Now, consultants, partners, and developers can have a very interesting and convenient image enabling approach.

For example, in EBS AP, the user will choose an invoice record, put the hard copy invoice in the scanner, and click on a "scan" button in the EBS toolbar, and the page will be scanned and indexed without any touch from the user!

How it works?
The button calls ODDC and within the URL passes the scan instruction and some parameters from the form such as the invoice number, name...etc. it will look something like below

http://win2k_server/capture/WebCapture.Asp?script=1&ScanAction=2&IndexData=Order%20Number%091234

As a result, ODDC will pop up in a new window, and automatically initiate scanning and populate indexing fields with the sent parameters...further more, since the invoice number (and any other parameter) is already populated in ODDC, it can use DB-Lookups to retrieve (from databases) further related information from EBS or even any other system that matters!

Since the scanned image, with the index fields (metadata) are now stored in UCM, any user can press "retrieve invoice" button from EBS toolbar, and get the scanned image for that particular invoice record!

The API has many parameters and instructions, which can be found in the documentation.

I'm very happy with this new feature, and I think it will simplify a lot of direct integrations.

Oracle Sites goes Live with WCM!!

2008-06-08T13:07:00.002+03:00

Oracle is now moving it's Oracle.com sites from Oracle Portal to Oracle Web Content Management (WCM), which is part of Oracle's Universal Content Managment (UCM) Platform.

here's the announcement on 26-5-2008:

"

First Oracle.com Site Built on UCM Platform Goes Live

Oracle's CRM OnDemand website has been migrated from Oracle Portal to Oracle WCM. This eight month endeavour was the first pilot project for the migration of Oracle.com to the Oracle UCM Platform; other sites, including the Oracle Partner Network and the Oracle Technology Network will follow. The CRM OnDemand site is running externally (outside the firewall) for customers, and is accessible in different languages. Visit CRM OnDemand

"

This will help a lot in managing the huge amount of internal and external sites, and those sites has a huge amount of pages, documents, contributions, and a lot of other contents.

I was thinking a while ago about this move, as it is much more reasonable to present Oracle as one of the WCM references :)
and it will definatly be one of the biggest WCM references.

Well Done ECM Team, we're waiting the full migration announcement...

ECM, BI, and Enterprise Applications!

2008-06-05T15:20:00.000+03:00

I've been thinking lately about my ECM product and how to benefit from other technologies in Oracle's middleware, specifically BI.

I found a very comprehensive and interesting article here about the BI, ECM and Apps written by Billy Cripe & Nick Tuson...

BI has always been there for structured data, that resides in databases and structured systems, helping organizations to visualize what is happening in their environments, and suggesting how best to deal with that. Mostly, BI was targeting enterprise applications such as ERP and CRM, but in the real case, a huge amount of data is still unmanaged, which resides in unstructured data, such as emails, documents, sheets... etc.

those sources where very difficult to include in BI calculations, but since the introduction of ECM systems, the unstructured contents became available in a structured or semi-structured way, where metadata that describes business contents are stored in a database, as well as the full text capabilities available in most of current ECM systems. This created what we call a Content Enabled Vertical Applications (CEVAs).

Another important aspect here is the transactions targeting those business documents, which includes trends of users, types of requested documents, access methods, frequency of access, and other data that are collected and saved within the ECM system, those data are very important to build a complete vision of the organization's environment. Those transactions are directly related to the business and the decisions to be taken.

Let’s take a step back and look at the bigger picture in CEVAs environments, enterprise applications stores direct business records, and ECM systems stores content files related to those records, along with the descriptive metadata, fulltext, and the transactions related to the contents.

To analyze this heterogeneous data, a BI Engine is the choice to provide a comprehensive picture of the business and an effective BI driven decisions.

Oracle Universal Content Management

Oracle UCM can be easily used for this scenario, where all the metadata, and the full text is directly accessible through the database, and the content tracker component does a great job in collecting all transaction related data from the webserver filters and logs, the content server filters and logs and other sources, apply some cleansing on the data, and provide them in special tables to be accessed by Content Tracker Reports, and other reporting tools, and obviously, BI systems.

To make things more interesting, Oracle UCM has a component called Content Categorizer, that is a rule based auto categorization engine, which can fill metadata fields based on some text based rules, for example, assigning a content type according to the repeated occurrence of some keywords, or accessing the metadata in the actual file’s headers.

Those data can greatly help in the classifications of those contents, and give much more meaningful data to the BI engine.

Example of sales analysis

Let’s take an example of a CRM system that is used by a software company, this CRM stores information about customers, and the ECM system is used to store and manage the whitepapers about the sold products, and is also used to build the website that the public, partners, and customers are accessing.

When a whitepaper is viewed, the ECM system stores all related transactions, where the frequency of access to some whitepapers, or type of products can indicate the market trend, and the data in CRM can indicate the type of customers, or verticals interested in this whitepaper.

Enhancing the understanding of the market can help in determining the marketing approach, or even the development direction.

Example of Dynamic ADs..

A great example was discussed in the article about real time decisions, the example assumes that a user googled some search term, and one of the results landed on your WCM based site, where the pages are dynamically built, the system examines the search term used, consults its BI engine, and discovers the topics that are most likely to attract this visitor, and accordingly suggests an ad banner topic to be added, this happens very quickly while the page is being built, and the user sees the page with some AD that attracts him to click on!

The WCM system tracks if the user did click on the AD and notifies the BI system of that, or if the user didn't click on the AD which shows non-interest of the suggested AD. In both cases the feedback goes to the BI system to better tune the selection of the ADs.

In the end

If you are interested in this topic, I highly recommend that you visit the article here, it has much more information, and much more details.