Saturday, September 23, 2006

OpenWorld Is Just Around The Corner

Oracle OpenWorld 2006, taking place from October 22 through 26, is just around the corner. Several people have asked my opinion on the value of OpenWorld, so I thought that posting my opinion might be worthwhile for others.

Back in the days of AppsWorld, I enjoyed the opportunities to network and wander from session to session. The networking and wandering opportunities shrank considerably since Oracle combined all their product conferences into one show. There are just too many people at OpenWorld to hope that you'll be able to network on an ad-hoc basis or walk into a session without pre-registering.

I was a bit frustrated in dealing with the logistics of the 30,000-plus attendees at last year's OpenWorld. I found the conference had outgrown my free-wheeling attendance style, and my inability to adjust detracted from the value of my conference attendance. I'm hoping to deal with the teeming masses and increase my take-away value from the conference this year by making more of an effort with advance planning in terms of what I want to learn.

I'm personally limiting my focus areas to Fusion Applicatons, Apps Technology, Release 12, and Project Management. Unfortunately, there are other areas I'd really like to include - Web Services and Financials come immediately to mind - but there too many scheduling conflicts arise if I expand my focus areas any further.

With my focus areas in mind, the following sessions look very interesting (I'm listing session id and session title).

S283031, OAUG Middleware SIG Meeting
S283174, The Path to Oracle Fusion
S284985, User Group Fusion Channel
S284947, OAUG Projects SIG

S281377, Technology Directions for Oracle Applications
S284701, Understand Fusion Applications: What Every Customer Needs To Know
S281415, Service-Enabling Oracle E-Business Suite (not in my focus but too interesting to miss)
S282408, Project Management Best Practices That Deliver Results

S281651, Oracle E-Business Suite Customers: 10 Things You Can Do Now to Prepare for Oracle Fusion Applications
S281709, Using Oracle Application Server 10g with Oracle E-Business Suite
S282316, Understanding the Value of Oracle Fusion for Financial Applications
S282968, An Introduction to BPEL (another session too interesting to pass up)

S281588, Road Map to Oracle Fusion: An Oracle Insight Program to Provide Recommendations on Your Path to Oracle Fusion
S281413, Using Oracle SOA Suite with Oracle E-Business Suite
S282318, Oracle Fusion Business Process Models
S280814, Oracle E-Business Suite Technology Updates
S281383, Deep Dive: Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 New Technology Stack

I also hear rumblings of a Sunday afternoon session to report on the results of the IOUC's Fusion Applications Customer Profiling initiative, but no such session has shown up in the on-line Content Catalog yet. The profiling info is a wonderful set of benchmarking data regarding the current state of Oracle apps customers, so I will be attending this session if it comes together.

So far as networking goes, I'm sticking with more of an ad-hoc approach. You now know my schedule for OpenWorld...look me up and we can swap thoughts on the conference. See you in San Francisco!

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