We’ve talked in previous weeks about the key goals of the new release of WebCenter are providing a Modern User Experience, unparalleled Application Integration, converging all the best of the existing portal platforms into WebCenter and delivering a Common User Experience Architecture.  We’ve provided an overview of Oracle WebCenter and discussed some of the other key goals in previous weeks, and this week, we’ll focus on how the new release of Oracle WebCenter provides unprecedented Social Networking and Collaboration.

We recently talked with Carin Chan, Principal Product Manager at Oracle, around the topic of Social Networking and Collaboration. In today’s work environment, employees have come to expect social and collaborative services to augment their work environment. Whether it is to post a blog or to poll fellow coworkers, employees expect and demand access to highly integrated, collaborative work environments that allow them to quickly contribute at work -- whether it is to make informed decisions, contribute on projects, or share knowledge.

Social and collaborative services from Oracle WebCenter add an immeasurable amount of value to achieving a modern user experience. Oracle WebCenter Services provides rich and comprehensive social computing services that include services such as wikis, blogs, instant messaging, presence, activity streams and graphs, and polls/surveys that offer employees access to rich collaborative services to work efficiently.
Employees can create pages or spaces that mix and match collaborative services while bringing in data from other applications to share with groups, teams, or organizations. These out of the box social and collaborative services include:

• People Connections and Activity Streams enable users to quickly assemble and visualize their social business networks and track user activities.
• Activity Graphs tracks all user activities in real-time and gathers intelligence about these users, their connections and the way they use information to make educated recommendations and provide on the spot information discovery.
• Wikis and blogs enable the community authoring of documents and sharing of ideas and also allow for the gathering of feedback and comments on those ideas.
• Tags and links allow users to easily mark, connect and share information with others.
• RSS feeds are available to track new or changed information related to discussion forums, processes or activities in an Oracle WebCenter environment.
• Discussion forums enable sharing of group knowledge and easy creation of communities around specific topics.
• Announcements allow you to manage and publish important news to your user base.
• Instant Messaging and Presence enable real-time awareness and communication with available users in the context of a business task.
• Web and Voice Conferencing enables real-time communication with internal and external business users.
• Lists provide a way to manage list data directly on the web as well as export and import it from and to Microsoft Excel.
• Oracle WebCenter Analytics provides comprehensive reporting metrics on activity and content usage within portals or composite applications.

While being able to integrate into your portal deployment, these services are also integrated into how users are already working. This includes integration with software such as Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Office and mobile devices such as the Apple iPhone.

These services are just a tip of the iceberg regarding social and collaborative services that Oracle WebCenter has to offer your employees. Be sure to keep checking back this week for in future posts, we’ll delve deeper into a few of these collaborative services and discuss how a combination of collaborative services offer a better portal deployment to empower business users.

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