Welcome to OpenWorld! OpenWorld 2012 got underway today with a series of meetings with the members of the WebCenter Customer Advisory Board. Led by the WebCenter Product Management team, these meetings are a great way for the product team and customers to directly interact and discuss real-life business challenges, product details and to discuss upcoming features and functionality.

This year, board members participated in discussions around live demos around product enhancements that will be featured throughout the coming week. Highlights included a variety of new mobile and social solutions, a great new user interface for WebCenter Content plus new Portal and Sites functionality that makes the experience for the everyday user a lot more pleasant.

The day kicked off with Roel Stalman, VP of Product Management, giving a detailed overview of what’s new in WebCenter. Given all the improvements to discuss, this session went over 2 hours! Roel showcased the brand new UI for Content, Portal and Sites. He also gave live demos of the new mobile apps for WebCenter Content, Portal and the Oracle Social Network.  The attendees then broke into sub-groups in order to deep-dive with Product Management for the Portal, Sites, and Content product areas on specific functionality and application integrations.

If you are here in San Francisco this week for OpenWorld, I definitely recommend stopping by the WebCenter area in the Moscone West Exhibition Hall to see some of this new functionality for yourself. And be sure to check out the WebCenter sessions throughout the week as those give us a chance to discuss direction and strategy, answer your questions and get your feedback and ideas.

For those of you could not make it to OpenWorld this year, we miss you! You can stay in touch with what is happening via this blog and by following #oow and #webcenter on Twitter. Additionally, we will be rolling out details on upcoming products and release info over the coming months via this blog and web seminars. Stay tuned!