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From the M&S Blog...

6 Tips to Prioritize People in a Collaboration Portal (WebCenter)

When people interact with executable processes, collaboration portals need to be built to accomodate their roles and working style. The list below shows guidelines to focus a collaboration portal around usability, relavance, and personalization, while giving mechanisms for the user to understand the bigger picture, deploy collaboration tools, and prevent overloaded work queues.

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Strategy to Create a Usable Multi-function Task List (ADF)

When People Interact with Executable Processes, a key business enabler is the user tools. Not all tasks or activities demand the same type of user interaction. This article describes how to identify different types of tasks to create a a Usable Multi-function Task List

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Oracle OpenWorld OOW 2010 – Middleware

oow2010

As has become tradition, I will be attending Oracle OpenWorld again this year joined by a few other M&S team members focused on Oracle Fusion Middleware. Let us know if you will be around and want to meet up. The most solid agenda items I have are the authors’ seminar for a new WebCenter 11g book we are releasing (more on that to come), a few of the SOA, BPM, Governance, and Enterprise 2.0 events with Product Management teams, and, of course, the concert.

Oracle DBMS_SCHEDULER vs DBMS_JOB (Create, Run, Monitor, Remove)

DBMS_SCHEDULER is a newer, more complex job scheduling engine released in 10g, intended to replace DBMS_JOB going forward. DBMS_JOB, the older job scheduler, as of now is still available for quick and easy DB based job scheduling.

Job scheduling comprises the core of the functionality of DBMS_SCHUDULER, however here are some additional benefits available to DBMS_SCHEDULER:

  • Logging of job runs (job history)
  • Simple but powerful scheduling syntax (similar to but more powerful than cron syntax)
  • Running of jobs outside of the database on the operating system (see below)
  • Resource management between different classes of jobs
  • Use of job arguments including passing of objects into stored procedures
  • Privilege-based security model for jobs
  • Naming of jobs and comments in jobs
  • Stored, reusable schedules
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BPEL Not Good For Rapid Changes

I am excited about BPEL’s proliferation. But for some organizations (specifically, IT shops), BPEL is being used in areas it is simple not well-suited. For example, some places where IT has gotten ahead of the business, it is used as a process modeling tool. True, BPEL “represents” a process, it is my opinion that proper business modeling tools be used prior to orchestration being defined in BPEL.

Another scenario I continue to find is that people are using BPEL for just about every piece of logic that goes into a business process being executed. The fact is, BPEL does very well at integrating with other services where complex — and more importantly, “fast-changing” — logic is executed. So, my advise is to not throw away every other tool in the belt in the face of BPEL. Fast-changing decisions are better handled outside of BPEL, especially as you consider the deployment process for BPEL, and most especially if you have long-running processes. Business rules engines, databases, and external services that perform specific logic/functions should continue to be leveraged in these cases. I’d be interested in hearing from others who are concerned about this challenge or maybe have already faced it.

Dynamic forms and dependent dropdowns in Flex

I had the age-old requirement today to build a data-driven, dynamic form…only this time with my RIA written in Adobe Flex. It was just as fun as normal, and this time it looks very nice with the RIA feel.

This article is part of the recent work short blurb series.

Enterprise Wiki for a Large Oracle Initiative

The Challenge

M&S was engaged by ABC, a publically traded company, for a multi-national Oracle initiative. Upon joining, M&S recognized the need to easily share, collaborate, and centrally publish information.

The Solution

The value of Web/Enterprise 2.0 social software was no longer a secret reserved only for the most cutting-edge — or as some might have labeled them, “bleeding-edge” — organizations.

The Results

Within two weeks of deciding to implement the M&S solution, the application was available to the customer, hosted by M&S Consulting.

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Salesforce.com Integration – Oracle Fusion Middleware SOA and BPEL

Oracle Corporation has recently published a white paper written by M&S Consulting, where we take the opportunity to outline an integration approach to Salesforce.com using Oracle BPEL.

A Technical Case Study – Creating an Oracle BPEL adapter to integrate with Salesforce.com – Feb 2009

Below is the introduction to the article, which goes on to detail (with step-by-step screenshots) how to achieve integration with Salesforce.com…

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