If you frequent the Oracle WebCenter blog you’ve probably read a lot about the customer experience revolution over the last few months.  An important aspect of the customer experience revolution is the increasing role that peers play in influencing how others perceive a product, brand or solution, simply by sharing their own, real-world experiences.  Think about it, who do you trust more -- marketers and sales people pitching polished messages or peers with similar roles and similar challenges to the ones you face in your business every day?

With this spirit in mind, this polished marketer personally invites you to hear directly from Oracle WebCenter customers about their real-life experiences during our customer panel sessions at Oracle OpenWorld next week.  If you’re currently using WebCenter, thinking about it, or just want to find out more about best practices in social business, next-generation portals, enterprise content management or web experience management, be sure to attend these sessions:

CON8899 - Becoming a Social Business: Stories from the Front Lines of Change
Wednesday, Oct 3, 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM - Moscone West - 3000
Priscilla Hancock - Vice President/CIO, University of Louisville
Kellie Christensen - Director of Information Technology, Banner Engineering

What does it really mean to be a social business? How can you change your organization to embrace social approaches? What pitfalls do you need to avoid? In this lively panel discussion, customer and industry thought leaders in social business explore these topics and more as they share their stories of the good, the bad, and the ugly that can happen when embracing social methods and technologies to improve business success. Using moderated questions and open Q&A from the audience, the panel discusses vital topics such as the critical factors for success, the major issues to avoid, how to gain senior executive support for social efforts, how to handle undesired behavior, and how to measure business impact. This session will take a thought-provoking look at becoming a social business from the inside.

CON8900 - Building Next-Generation Portals: An Interactive Customer Panel Discussion
Wednesday, Oct 3, 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Moscone West - 3000
Roberts Wayne - Director, IT, Canadian Partnership Against Cancer
Mike Beattie - VP Application Development, Aramark Uniform Services
John Chen - Utilities Services Manager 6, Los Angeles Department of Water & Power
Jörg Modlmayr - Head of Product Managment, Siemens AG

Social and collaborative technologies have changed how people interact, learn, and collaborate, and providing a modern, social Web presence is imperative to remain competitive in today’s market. Can your business benefit from a more collaborative and interactive portal environment for employees, customers, and partners? Attend this session to hear from Oracle WebCenter Portal customers as they share their strategies and best practices for providing users with a modern experience that adapts to their needs and includes personalized access to content in context. The panel also addresses how customers have benefited from creating next-generation portals by migrating from older portal technologies to Oracle WebCenter Portal.

CON8898 - Land Mines, Potholes, and Dirt Roads: Navigating the Way to ECM Nirvana
Thursday, Oct 4, 12:45 PM - 1:45 PM - Moscone West - 3001
Stephen Madsen - Senior Management Consultant, Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development
Himanshu Parikh - Sr. Director, Enterprise Architecture & Middleware, Ross Stores, Inc.

Ten years ago, people were predicting that by this time in history, we’d be some kind of utopian paperless society. As we all know, we're not there yet, but are we getting closer? What is keeping companies from driving down the road to enterprise content management bliss? Most people understand that using ECM as a central platform enables organizations to expedite document-centric processes, but most business processes in organizations are still heavily paper-based. Many of these processes could be automated and improved with an ECM platform infrastructure. In this panel discussion, you’ll hear from Oracle WebCenter customers that have already solved some of these challenges as they share their strategies for success and roads to avoid along your journey.

CON8897 - Using Web Experience Management to Drive Online Marketing Success
Thursday, Oct 4, 2:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Moscone West - 3001
Blane Nelson - Chief Architect, Ancestry.com
Mike Remedios - CIO, Arbonne
Caitlin Scanlon - Product Manager, Monster Worldwide

Every year, the online channel becomes more imperative for driving organizational top-line revenue, but for many companies, mastering how to best market their products and services in a fast-evolving online world with high customer expectations for personalized experiences can be a complex proposition. Come to this panel discussion, and hear directly from customers on how they are succeeding today by using Web experience management to drive marketing success, using capabilities such as targeting and optimization, user-generated content, mobile site publishing, and site visitor personalization to deliver engaging online experiences.

Your Handy Guide to WebCenter at Oracle OpenWorld

Want a quick and easy guide to all the keynotes, demos, hands-on labs and WebCenter sessions you definitely don't want to miss at Oracle OpenWorld? Download this handy guide, Focus on WebCenter. More helpful links:

* Oracle OpenWorld
* Oracle Customer Experience Summit @ OpenWorld
* Oracle OpenWorld on Facebook
* Oracle OpenWorld on Twitter
* Oracle OpenWorld on LinkedIn
* Oracle OpenWorld Blog