Wow, "Renault's Championship Formula One Team Powered by Oracle CM"

Wow, Renault's Championship Formula One Team Powered by Oracle Content Management.



Renault's Championship Formula One Team needs to use and process data in nearly 100,000 documents, and this documents shared across 2 factories and 2 mobile teams. Also The team needs to access documents containing car designs, technical specifications, testing data, and race data; these documents stored in different locations and applications like shared drives, local drives, intranet, and also may be stored on emails.

The team wants to be able to search inside documents, tracking modifications (by creating version for every modification), and secure access to secret documents like car designs and race related information using Oracle Information Rights Management which encrypt documents and track every access trial.

Why did the team choose Oracle Content Management solutions (UCM & IRM)?

• Ease of use
• Rapid development
• Ability of access from multiple locations
• Support metadata search
• FullText search
• version control
• Single and unified repository
• Advanced access control using Oracle Information Rights Management

By luck I have read this success story, and I wish it will be helpful for you, and give you more confidence with UCM capabilities.

Gartner: MarketScope for WCM

Gartner Said, "The WCM market commands revenue of approximately $750 million. With an estimated compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15% between 2007 and 2012, it is growing faster than the overall ECM market."


You can see Oracle has been evaluated positive, and in the report MarketScope for Web Content Management, Oracle has been recommended for shortlisting with the leading best-of-breed equivalents.

Also, Gartner Said, "The trend for increased outlay on WCM is strongest in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia/Pacific."

As we know WCM is part of ECM market, and as I am Oracle UCM developer, I like WCM module (Site Studio). But in middle east sales are focusing on other ECM solutions and especially Document Management, and I wish they can focus on selling WCM solutions which is very valuable for big organizations.

Green ECM

Green Technology, I like this word and I am glad because I am working in ECM field that supports green technology concept by default. Implementing document management solutions in your organization will move your company steps toward green initiatives, this by reducing as an example the consumption of electricity and paper.

When you implement document management solution, you want your organization

• become paperless and removing paper bottlenecks
  this will reduce trees cutting, usage of oil, and emissions of carbon
  
• reduce paper storage
  this will save space, that would require energy consumption for heating, lighting, and humidity control
  
• centralize paper management and accessibility
  this will allow accessibility of documents from any location, which will reduce paper printing, and number of employees who are commuting to an office (which will save oil)
  

Do you know

• 1 tree makes 16.67 reams of copy paper or 8,333.3 sheets
• 1 ream (500 sheets) uses 6% of a tree

Document management will not only save money to your organization but also will help your organization to become green organization.

As I am Oracle Universal Content Management guru, I recommend you to try to Oracle Content Management Green Calculator

What's ECM?

What Is ECM?

From: norwiz,
4 days ago

What Is ECM?

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: management' web)

The presentation provides you with an overview of Enterprise Content Management, and related concepts such as document management, collaboration, workflow, electronic records management, and web content management.

SlideShare Link

I am Oracle Connected

I am Oracle connected, what about you!

If you want to be connected with Oracle experts, I recommend you to join Oracle Mix community. It is like Linked In, but you can become connected with anyone of Oracle employees, and that connections will help you in taking decisions faster, and get up-to-date products information.

I hope you can catch me there, find me by my name Hisham Galal.

Integrating Universal Content Management with Active Directory

Here I will list steps for integrating Active Directory with Universal Content Management, then I will list troubleshooting tips for this integration. I wish it will be helpful for someone.

Integration Steps

1. Create organization unit in Active Directory named Stellent

2. Create a sub organization unit under Stellent named Roles

3. Under Roles create AD Security Groups with the same name as UCM Roles (like contributor, and admin)

4. In Content Server Home Page, open Admin Server page

5. Open Content Server instance that we will integrate on

6. Open Internet Configuration page

7. From Use Microsoft Security options choose Active Directory Security option

8. Restart Content Server for the current instance

9. In Content Server Home Page, under Administration tab open Filter Administration page

10. In front of Active Directory Security, click on Configure link

11. Under Role Prefix, add the following “OU=Roles,OU=Stellent[1]”

12. Click Update, at end of the Filter Administration page

13. Restart Content Server, and IIS (restart IIS from Servcies)

Troubleshooting Steps

If you faced any problem after the above steps, check the following

1. In IIS, open Direct Security, for Content Server website, then edit Authentication and access control, then ensure that Anonymous access and Integrated Windows authentication are enabled. After modification restart IIS

2. In Active Directory and Active Directory Configuration page (in Content Server Home Page) ensure that you didn’t misspell organization units names and AD security groups

3. In Active Directory Configuration page (in Content Server Home Page) ensure that you didn’t but spaces between words under Role Prefix

4. If you still face a problem restart IIS (from Services, not from Administration), and Content Server.

5. At last, if you still face a problem ensure you did the above steps well, and Restart Windows

ECM spending Cuts; God help Us!

According to ChangeWave Research Report ECM market will face great cuts in spending.

I think Gulf region will not face that problems, but in other places in Middle East atproblem will apply, like in my country Egypt, because when companies think in savements and limiting their budges, IT department will be the first one affected.

I ask myself why people didn't think in ROI, where most solutions will improve companies quality and employees efficiency.

Gartner said

Gartner said
"Oracle still faces significant challenges in competing with IBM and EMC for large ECM deals"
Also they said
"More than 54% of the market, as measured by total software revenue, is held by just three vendors — EMC, IBM and Open Text."

I am as an Oracle ECM consultant, I wish they succeed in their compition in ECM market. I work in Middle East and we face lake in ECM knwoledge either from Oracle Partners or Oracle Customers. I wish Oracle focus in improving ECM knowledege not only in technical but also is business needs and uses.

Oracle WCM training

Last week I provided Oracle Web Content Management Training under Oracle university. It was the first one in the Middle East, and I am happy for that, and I think I did it well.

I wish I will provide all Oracle Content Management Courses, and I wil e able to improve ECM skills in Middle East

By The I didn't take any course in Oracle Content Management, where I depened on myself. I think self learning is very useful but most companies will wait and most people have not this skill.

Leadership and Management

‘Leadership is doing the right things, Management is doing things right’

I heard and I read these words a lot. Although they are easy words, I think they are confusing too for most of us. I will explain them in my opinion next and I hope it will be helpful.

Managers are leaders, so managers should do the right things, which means they take the decsion, they are decsion makers.

Managing our work or our tasks is different where we have things needs to be done, we should do them right. But we didn't choose these things, leaders did.

Leaders manages and leads, but normal employee manages their work only.

I think good leader need not read about this, because he is a good leader and he knows that intutively.

Rats are the first jumpers

When the ship is drowning, rats are the first jumpers

I think they jump because they are not fool, it is drowning, they are not fools or cowards, but they working in background, I don't like that.

I am seeking for a job

Really I am seeking for a job in content management field, where I resigned. I took a risk by working in new company for the third time, and I think it is not easy to have a company in Egypt that can grow quickly. May be this is the first time I begun searching for a job most of the time, I have been offered the job and I accept it. But I want to get some stability this time by working in a big enterprise, I wish I can find the job that I want and that can make use of me. I want to be consumed and awarded in the same time :) I mean I want to work hard in professional environment.

Sharepoint versus Oralce UCM

I have been asked a lot aboout the difference between Oracle Universal Content Management, and I even asked myself. I am Oracle Content Management developer, but I have not developed or used Sharepoint either as content management platform or collaboration platform. But I heard that Sharepoint is not strong as UCM, but no evidence I read. I found a research paper that talks about that difference and I support it, I quote the following from it

Microsoft does not have the goal of delivering information lifecycle management. So it is not at all surprising that Microsoft does not offer an enterprise-scale content management platform or product. We have heard from some clients that they were expecting robust content management from the SharePoint product, but SharePoint was never intended to provide this. What it does provide is a set of collaboration services that can be leveraged within SharePoint to allow groups to use content interactively either through integration with Outlook or corporate intranets.

For more click here, wrote by Tony White and produced by The Gilbane Group

Wordle

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. Try it and Create you own word cloud, click here.

Heads won't get out of the sand

I work currently on a project in Saudi Arabia and my company faces some problems related about closing the project which took too much time, the problems is not technical ones but managerial ones. This made to think about the problem which I faced before in other projects.

The problem is that managers put their heads on sand when we talk about IT projects requirements and implementation. Also they interrupt you if you left them, i.e. you made some effort to get requirements and begin in implementation, then they interrupt you (they raised their heads from the sand but, just for a moment) and ask you to make some modifications, then they put their heads in sand again.

May be because they think IT projects are the responsibility of implementation companies only, and the IT projects are not important like other projects. So there are a magic solution to force them to get their hands out of the sand, which can be done by creating Concept of Operations document.

This document is like a magic wand, where it will contains all details you need people to know about project implementation, but note I don't mean technical document, I mean a document contains requirements analysis, recommendations about implementations, deliverables and other related info. For sure you need to get approve from managers that they received and reviewed that document. In projects like ECM projects, this document should be sent to CEO and Executive board too, because it s a strategic projects for all company departments.

If any care about content management, I recommend for him to join this community made by AIIM



Visit Information Zen

A Formula to Measure Business Agility

Business Agility = (Visibility + Motivation) x Training

Thanks for Michael Hugos

UCM un-logical error

I faced a bug from days, it takes two days to discover it even though it is a smple thing, but I took that time because I thought logically and the bug is un-logic.

The bug was I have a service that returns a resultset from table in the database and I loop over that resultset, and in the loop I call the function <$getValueForSpecifiedUser(SomeUserName,"dFullName")$> to return the full name of the user in the resultset. I made it and it was working fine for days, then while we prepare to deliver our implementation to the customer, we found the resultset was not displayed correctly just few records is displayed, when you refresh the page multi-times you will got the rest of the records displayed completely (I don't know how this happened).

After removing the function the problem solved. At the end I want to say you should be careful when you deal with resultsets.

One Republic, I will be one of your fans

Really this song is unbelievable, I can listen to it millions times.One Republic I will be one of your fans

Inbound Refinery and Zip Renditons bug

I use ZipRenditionsManagement Component to add attachments functionality in content server, it was working fine but someday a customer reported a bug for me that attachments is not working. I don't like this kind of bugs, I searched for a solution to that bug but failed.

While I am tracing, I queried 'Revisions' table and I found the bug, tow document one takes attachment and the other one doesn't take, the difference between them was in the value of the field 'Rendition1' one took 'z' and the other took 't'. 't' means thumbnail and 'z' means zip renditions which means thumbnails and zip renditions can not work with each other. To turn off thumbnail, turn it off from inbound refinery.

Alexandria Memories

For Memories of Alexanderia and Latino Cafe; the best Cafe in Egypt


me in the middle

Oracle Universal Content Management Wins one Technology of the Year Awards

Oracle Universal Content Management Wins one Technology of the Year Awards

According to InfoWorld, "Oracle Universal Content Management is a unified solution for securely managing documents, images, and other digital assets, plus Web sites...Version 10g R3 has extensive Windows Explorer and Outlook integration, works with Microsoft SharePoint, and includes comprehensive search, not to mention strong information rights and records management."

Oracle has acquired Captovation

Oracle has acquired Captovation, a leading provider of document capture solutions that streamline the process of capturing mission-critical content for access from within business applications and processes.

In all Content Management projects, we need to integrate with a document capture solution, and Stellent provided an integration with KOFAX document capture solution. So Oracle acquiring for Captovation will enhance Content Management Products, and Oracle become the first company that have Document Capture, Content Management, Process Automation and Back Office applications.

Stellent Nationality

Stellent become popular after it is acquired by Oracle in middle east before that it didn't have a good market in middle east, and I heard some people say Stellent is German company , and others say Stellent is British company this happened because of people presenting Stellent in GITEX Dubai were Germans and British. So I took the following paragraph about Stellent from WikiPedia, that tell us Stellent was American company.

Stellent, based in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, USA, was a software development company which provided content management systems.Stellent's main content management product, formerly known as Universal Content Management, was customizable by means of a proprietary scripting language, "iDoc", and was popular because of prepackaged business applications sold by Stellent with the system. Stellent was acquired by Oracle in November 2006. Their content management system is now sold by Oracle under the name Oracle Universal Content Management as a part of Oracle Fusion Middleware.

Egypt Won Africa Cup of Nations for Sixth Time

Congratulation to my country, for the most precious cup, Africa Cup of Nations.

Sample Components for Universal Content Management

You can download samples from

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/content-management/ucm/samples/index.html

The most important one is HowToComponents which contains samples of most customization you will need to do on the content server.

Manually Uninstall Oracle Content Server

To manually uninstall content server

1 - Stop Content Server Admin service and Content Server service

2 - From Registery Editor go to (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Stellent) and delete it

3 - From Registery Editor go to (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\) and delete the key "IdcAdminService [InstanceName]_admin"

4 - From Registery Editor go to (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\) and delete the key "IdcContentService [InstanceName]"

5 - restart windows

IdcoScript vs Javascript

I'd like to explain the difference between IdocScript and Javascript because it is an important step for template pages in Oracle Content Server.

IdocScript is a server scripting language created for Oracle Content Server (formally Stellent Content Server) template pages. It consists of the basic functionality you need to create pages that display content or execute services. We should note IdocScript is designed only for the content server.

Javascript is a client side scripting language, that is executed by the client browsers. Javascript is used for form validations, and for making dynamic display of HTML elements. Javascript. Javascript cannot execute a service or retrieve results from the content server.

The idea is we use IdocScript for executing services and core functionality whether by standard functions, or by custom functions which are a java methods. Which means separating business logic. While Javascript is for the user interface, by Javascript we create functions for validating input data, and creating user friendly user interface. Which means separating user interface design from business logic.

<$i=1$>
<$loop tempResultSet$>
<tr>
<td><b><$i$></b></td>
<$i=i+1$>
<td><$col1$></td>
<td><$col2$></td>
<td>
<input type="button" value="click me" onClick="alert('<$col3$>');window.close()">
</td>
</tr>
<$endloop$>

Here in this code I have a result set called tempResultSet which consists of three columns (col1, col2, and col3), and I loop on this result set to display its values by just getting columns values <$col1$> and <$col2$>, but I need one more thing I need to have a button when it will be clicked, a pop up message with 'col3' value appear which is a Javascript functionality and cannot be done using IdocScript where Javascript can put event listener functions or code to HTML form elements like what we did above onClcik="alert('<$col3$>');", but in the alert method we need to display col3 value, so we just add IdocScript code that return col3 value.

How that thing is done, when I user requests the page contains that code, the request is passed to the web server, and the web server requests that page from the content server, the content server finds the template page which contains IdocScript code and Javascript code, in that point the content server executes the IdocScript code only which returns either HTML code or Javascript code, then the page is sent to the web server which will send it to the client with no Javascript code.

I think that explain gives you a complete picture about what happen, but I need to explain it more.

When The content server searches for the template page, it will find it like

<$i=1$>
<$loop tempResultSet$>
<tr>
<td><b><$i$></b></td>
<$i=i+1$>
<td><$col1$></td>
<td><$col2$></td>
<td>
<input type="button" value="click me" onClick="alert('<$col3$>');window.close()">
</td>
</tr>
<$endloop$>

Then the content server execute the IdocScript code before sending it the webserver, the above code will be changed to

<tr>
<td><b>1</b></td>
<td>value 1-1</td>
<td>value 1-2</td>
<td>
<input type="button" value=""click me onClick="alert('value 1-3');window.close()">
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><b>2</b></td>
<td>value 2-1</td>
<td>value 2-2</td>
<td>
<input type="button" value="click me" onClick="alert('value 2-3');window.close()">
</td>
</tr>

and also the client will get the same result.

I wish this helps you in understanding the interaction and the isolation between IdocScript and Javascript.

Copyright Benefits

From the first day I worked on a computer in Egypt, Most of the software I work on was copyright illegal, in may university our software was illegal, in work most of the time illegal, and of course in home also.

This becomes a part of our culture if we have the ability to buy we will not buy, not because of money, but we used to do that. Let us think, if we didn't do that, we will need either to buy a software which is expensive to most of Egyptians, or to work on open source software which is the right choose.

Working on open source software, will enhance our understanding about computers, and make us need to invent and produce new open source software to fit our needs. But I think big companies need us to become fellows if we don't have money, i.e. if I don't have money to buy windows, I will work on it illegal and I will not work on other operating systems, so when I will go to work on company with others like me, the company will buy windows to us, and really this is what happen.

I wish for us to work on open source software and become contributors on these softwares.

Bugs in Airplanes

Of course I mean talking about computer programming bugs, the story is I was watching a documentary movie about a crash in airplane in Britain. After researching about reasons of this crash they discovered the following

- Pilots mistake in determining a failed engine, they have two engines one of them not working, the pilots closed the Working one.
When we try to solve a bug we must take our time determine the reason of the bug because when we choose the wrong bug reason, we will waste our time and may crash our program.

- Pilots ride a new airplane, with new technology in it, with only one day training, and the training didn’t focus on difference between the old one and the new one.
When we work in technology and especially data centric systems, we must know that the training will put us in safe side we will be able to predict problems and how to solve them, i.e. the probability of bad surprises will be smaller.

- The pilots didn’t complete their review if their decision is right or wrong because the radar man tower told them to down.
This is like losing your second chance to resolve your problem even there is another task to do, if we can compare between the two risks we will make the right decision.

- People in the airplane, i.e. passengers, noticed that the pilot closed the wrong engine, and even the airplane hospitality staff noticed that, but no one told the pilots.
When we work in team we must not be negative, when one of us see an error, he should tell others and even errors from professional ones.

Hijri Date (Islamic Date)

The problem of Hijri Date is that it differs from country to another depending on the view of the moon, for more info click here, I work in a project in Saudi Arabia and they want to use Hijri date for documents dates that came from others but in that project we use Gregorian date.

To solve this problem we want to convert Hijri dates to Gregorian and also get them back to Hijri from Gregorian, but we should have a valid conversion method that is legal in Saudi. We found Saudi research center provides a table with dates from year 1420 to 1450 and this table is approved from Saudi Government, for more info about this table.

I reached here to the reason of writing this post, First thing I noticed in this table is that it is too difficult to get data from it, it is an excel sheet in which to convert from Gregorian to Hijri and vice versa is too hard.

Our way of thinking in Middle East needs some change, we try to prove to ourselves we can do the complex things, while there are easy solutions. Instead of making dates table hard when we didn’t make it simple. Instead of making it a table why we didn’t make it a webservice that convert dates between Hijri and Gregorian and updated every new month. I wish we, in Middle East, change our way of thinking about technology soon.