Thursday, July 31, 2008

What Looks Good To Me - Oracle OpenWorld 2008

I've recently been reading lots of articles on various blogs about planning for Oracle OpenWorld 2008. Looking at my calendar, I realized OOW is coming up fast...which means I need to get off my ample posterior and post my "What Looks Good To Me" article for this conference. So this be that. May I begin by sharing a couple of thoughts for your consideration?

First, the sessions that appeal to me relate directly to what I hope to get from OOW this year. The conference has become so large that my best approach for getting maximum value is to determine a few subject areas that are important to me, then consider sessions only in those subject areas (yes, I sometimes miss the old AppsWorld days in San Diego, where the conference was small enough that anyone could just float from session to session and see what looked interesting). Your important subject areas could be different than mine, so different OOW sessions may look better to you. My important subject areas this year are:
  • Getting updated information on the strategic direction of Fusion Applications
  • Learning about about creative customer use cases on extending the E-Business Suite with Fusion Middleware
  • As a customer using only the Oracle E-Business Suite, determining whether the Application Integration Architecture really holds any value for me
  • Gathering info on the Identity Management product suite (I'm currently the project manager for an identity management-type of project, so I'd like to see if Oracle offers any potential solutions)
  • Getting deeper into Web 2.0 and Composite Apps (I suspect that a composite UI will be a large part of the solution for that identity management-type project)
  • Getting updated on new features with Oracle Support, as keeping Oracle products running at my shop is a significant part of my job
Second, I've made no attempt to resolve schedule conflicts between two or more good sessions. Hey, one of the signs of a good conference is being forced to make difficult choices about how to spend your time.

Third, as always, I've limited this article to session presentation available for Full Conference Pass attendees. Not doing the Developer sessions this year, so I can't comment on those. The "Sunday SIG" sessions still seem a little unsettled as of this writing, so I've opted not to include those. Nor am I sharing here where I'll be or what I'll be doing in the evenings. Follow me on Twitter (fteter) if you want to track me down.

Fourth, from an apps perspective, I'm strictly an E-Business customer. I can't comment on sessions important to users of PeopleSoft, JDE, Siebel, Retek, or other product lines under the Applications Unlimited umbrella.

Fifth, a little housekeeping regarding the format for the list. I've broken the sessions out by my important subject areas. Other than that, the listing is in no particular order. The listing format is Session Id, Session Title, Presenter (Company Name). You can look up the location, date and time for any session by Session ID on this year's OOW Schedule Builder.

Okie-dokie, here we go now with what looks good to me...

Fusion Applications and Fusion Middleware
  • S299488, Roadmap for Oracle Fusion Middleware Application Server Infrastructure, Will Lyons (Oracle) and Mike Lehmann (Oracle)
  • S298374, 10 Things You Can Do Today to Prepare for Oracle Fusion Applications, Nadia Bendjedou (Oracle) and Debra Lilley (United Kingdom Oracle User Group)
  • S298383, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) as Part of an Application Upgrade Strategy, Nadia Bendjedou (Oracle), Basheer Khan (Innowave Technology), and Markus Zirn (Oracle)
  • S298467, Oracle Fusion Applications: Applications for the Next-Generation Organization, Part 1, Steve Miranda (Oracle)
  • S298494, Oracle Fusion Applications: Applications for the Next-Generation Organization, Part 2, Chris Leone (Oracle)
  • S300260, City of Las Vegas: A Case Study Using Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), Basheer Khan (Innowave Technology) and Pat Dues (City of Las Vegas)
  • S300271, Extending BI Dashboards with Oracle's BI Portfolio in a Heterogeneous ERP Environment, Michael Rulf (USi)
  • S298463, What's New with Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher: The Standard Reporting Platform for All Applications, Tim Dexter (Oracle)
Web 2.0 and Composite Applications
  • S299162, Web 2.0 Technologies in the Enterprise: Lessons Learned, Tips, and Tricks from Oracle AppsLab, Paul Pedrazzi (Oracle)
  • S299672, Composite Applications: The New Face of Oracle Applications Integration Architecture, Munazza Bukhari (Oracle)
  • S299480, Build Composite Applications Your End Users Will Actually Use, George Maggessy (Oracle) and Maiko Rocha (Oracle)
Support
  • S299729, Harness the Power of Oracle Diagnostics with Oracle E-Business Suite Support Tools, David Warhoe (Oracle) and Hiran Patel (Oracle)
  • S299730, Best Practice Tips for Your Upgrade to Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12, Chris Warticki (Oracle) and Michele Corvino (Oracle)
Identity Management
  • S300245, Oracle Identity Management: Making the Most of Your Oracle Human Resources Data, Niklas Iveslatt (Arisant) and Jenny McGurk (Douglas County Public Schools)
  • S298922, Identity Management for Oracle E-Business Suite, Stephen Lee (Oracle)
  • S298924, Recent Trends and Standards in Identity Management, Uppili Srinivasan (Oracle) and Prateek Mishra (Oracle)
  • S298195, Implementing Identity Management for External Users at AARP, Craig Williams (Oracle) and Vikas Mahajan (AARP)
Applications Integration Architecture
  • S299685, Bridging the Oracle Applications Unlimited/Oracle Fusion Applications Gap with Oracle Applications Integration Architecture, Julie Butterfield (Oracle) and Michael Seymour (Oracle)
  • S299692, Oracle Application Integration Architecture for Oracle E-Business Suite, Rimita Bewtra (Oracle) and Rajesh Devakumar (Oracle)
  • S298472, Leveraging Oracle Application Integration Architecture Foundation Pack to Build a Best-of-Breed E-Commerce Landscape, Michael Rulf (USi) and Nadia Bendjedou (Oracle)
E-Business Suite
  • S299521, Oracle E-Business Suite Applications Strategy and General Manager Update, Cliff Godwin (Oracle)
  • S298375, Upgrade to Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12: Get Your Technical and Functional Questions Answered by This Panel, Nira Mitra (Oracle), John Stouffer (Triora Group), Sandra Vucinic (VLAD Group), and Farrell Bullock (Oracle)
  • S299990, Oracle Running Oracle, Bret Fuller (Oracle)
  • S298388, Using Oracle Application Server 10g with Oracle E-Business Suite, Steven Chan (Oracle)
  • S298389, Advanced Deployment Architectures for Oracle E-Business Suite, Steven Chan (Oracle) and Ivo Dujmovic (Oracle)
  • S299953, Extending Oracle E-Business Suite with the Hyperion Acquisition, Andy Seferta (Fujitsu) and Debra Lilley (Fujitsu)
Well, there ya go...I'm hoping that sharing my thoughts might help someone else have a richer OOW experience. Now that you know what I'm thinking, let me know what you're thinking by leaving a comment.

5 comments:

Jake said...

Hope to see you there. I only say hope b/c I'm not approved to attend yet :)
I may co-speak with Paul, maybe bring my "what if someone posts pr0n" content. I lobbied hard for that title, but alas.

Anyway, thanks for blogging the interesting sessions (and including ours). With such a huge conference, you're doing your readers a big favor.

fteter said...

@jake: Not approving OOW attendance for one of Oracle's strongest advocates for social networking seems more than a little irrational to me. Have 'em call me, I'll straighten things out ;)

BTW, I like your title better...

Jake said...

Well, I think it's just a formality, filtering through the approval chain.

I like my title better too, probably get way more attendees.

justadba said...

Floyd,

Quite the schedule there with, unfortunately, a lot of overlaps. We'll need to coordinate when you have your schedule finished.

See ya at the show. Introduce me to Jake if he makes it...:-)

thx,
John

fteter said...

@justadba: yup, tons of overlap. Like I keep sayin', one sign of a good conference is the need to make difficult choices about how you'll spend your time...we'd probably need to extend OOW to two weeks or more in order to avoid conflicts between the most interesting sessions.