What impact is social media having on enterprise business
applications?
Information workers today need more agile, responsive, and
context-rich enterprise portals in order to drive innovation and
attain a competitive edge.
With the influence of Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis,
and social networking, employees, customers and partners expect
these rich Web 2.0 capabilities to be included in the applications,
portals and Web sites that they use.
This means that organizations will need to deliver rich,
participatory enterprise portals that make it easy for users to
immediately locate what they need through a variety of ways. This
would help them quickly access and connect with like-minded users
and experts, and directly personalize and customize applications to
meet their specific needs.
According to IDC, in 2011, the Indian market for Enterprise 2.0
will be USD 64.7 million. Thus, Enterprise 2.0 is much more than
traditional portals. It is about bringing Web 2.0 capabilities into
the business environment. Enterprises today need a single
user-interface to provide effective user interaction. Additionally,
young employees are also looking at tools that are easy to use and
possess social networking capabilities.
How is your organization leveraging the power of social
media in applications?
We have introduced a variety of new tools to make it easy for
humans to interact with the business processes. The user can submit
documents to these processes in Office or Adobe Acrobat
format. There is a rich work list that allows enterprises to
view all the approvals coming to the user in a single interface
just like the discussion page on Linkedin.
Because organizations are composed of teams, we can also provide a
pre-packaged team website built on the same foundation that gives
an enterprise to quickly start running by building a team website
for all of the team members. And finally, to deliver this
information to the environment that users want to access it
through, we take the portal and the information in it. We can
deliver this information to an iPhone or a PDA that gets accessed
within the same environment within Microsoft Office and users can
also access it from a variety of other devices. The enterprise can
also extend the portal to engage the end customer. This will help
the enterprise gather customer feedback and grievances.
What kind of application integration can the portal
provide?
We provide pre-packaged integration with lots of different kinds of
systems. Enterprises can take information from their databases and
business processes and bring it into the portal. Enterprises
can integrate information from various content management back-ends
that they have as well as packaged business applications like
PeopleSoft, SAP, E-Business Suite and Siebel.
For business people to do this easily, we take these resources and
publish them to that metadata dictionary, and then using a tool
called Composer, enterprises can quickly browse the business data
catalog that they have in that metadata dictionary and build their
own portal or website.
Can you describe the portal’s content management
capabilities?
Traditionally, the portal is used for content management and
publication. With our enterprise portal, we have integrated the
content management facilities in Fusion Middleware to do three
important elements.
Firstly to provide a rich document repository and document
management infrastructure as well as things like multimedia,
content delivery and rendition management. We have supplemented
this with search capabilities so that the content that’s
published to the portal is indexed automatically and the user can
search it using text searching.
We have also integrated the ability for people to contribute to the
website content or information in a variety of ways. The user
can actually edit rich HTML in place on the website itself.
The user can provide documents written in Microsoft Office and
publish them to the website. We have also added a capability where
the user can use it like a blog, and publish it on a wiki or
website.