Oracle Virtual Directory

Where have all the developers gone?

Posted by Topper on 8/9/2007
Posted in: BI Server, BIEE, Business Intelligence, Data Integrator, Discoverer, Identity Management, MapViewer / GIS, Oracle, Oracle Access Manager, Oracle Identity Manager, Oracle Virtual Directory, Portal, Technology. 3 comments

In the IOUG Fusion Task Force meeting this week, we were discussing what could be provided to build a better community around the Fusion Middleware world and it’s ever growing list of products and acquisitions. A lot of us are classic Oracle guys that have been doing Java, ADF, App Server, Portal, Discoverer, etc. since its first release. We’ve always known the standard Oracle Metalink, Forums, and ListServs for Oracle help when we need it. Now with so many acquisitions it’s getting incredibly hard to catch up and the communities for many of the new products don’t exist.

One of the big questions that came up was where have all the developers gone. For some reason the term “The Lost Developers” popped into my head, which of course popped the bad 80’s movie “The Lost Boys,” and in turn this bad graphic. (Trust me you don’t want to try and understand whats in my head)

The Lost Oracle Developers

But in all seriousness, where did everyone go. I know a lot of the people went to start their own independent consulting shops, some stayed with Oracle, but what about the rest of the world? What about all the customers and other implementation partners? I went through, looked at the acquisition list, and couldn’t find user groups or message boards for many of them. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places or haven’t been taught the secret handshake yet, but here is the list I came up with:

Agile: Nothing
AppForge: Palm and Windows Media Local User Groups, nothing centralized
Bharosa: Nothing
Tangosol: LCUG (http://wiki.tangosol.com/display/LCUG/Home)
HotSip: Nothing
Siebel (Analytics): ITtoolbox Group (http://siebel.ittoolbox.com/groups/technical-functional/siebel-analytics-l)
SigmaDynamics: Nothing
Sleepycat: Nabble Forums (http://www.nabble.com/Berkeley-DB-f2899.html)
Stellent: Stellentforums.com and regional user groups
Context Media: Nothing
Oblix: Nothing
Octet String: Nothing
Thor Technologies: Nothing
TimesTen: Nothing
TripleHop: Nothing

Yes there are the Oracle boards, but many of them aren’t trolled by the experts of the acquired companies yet. So what happened? Where did everyone go? Right now I’m working on building a lot of pre-built virtual machines for my side project (thanks again for the people volunteering to help), but on the newer components I’m having to learn a ton as I go and it would be helpful to bounce ideas / questions off of people who have already been there and done that. I’m sure a lot of them are having the same problems now trying to deploy on to the Fusion Middleware stack.

So here it is, an open invite to come out of the corners and reveal yourselves. Where is everyone hiding? How can we build a better collaborative Oracle development world? I would love to hear people’s feedback. Maybe we need a myspace or facebook for Oracle people? I’m only half joking here, there sure are enough of us to keep it busy. What features would make it a kick ass collaboration environment? Forums? Wiki? Torrents? Instant Messaging? Desktop Sharing? Blogs Provider? Maybe just an Aggregator? Rent a VM development environments? Calendaring? Mapping? Presence? Ok, enough web 2.0 buzz words (crap, there was another one).

Call me, email me, IM me, post comments here, I just want to figure out how to make it easier on all of us.

Airlines and Oracle World

Posted by Topper on 6/30/2007
Posted in: Identity Management, Oracle, Oracle Access Manager, Oracle Identity Manager, Oracle Virtual Directory, Personal. Leave a Comment

After an eventful week in Seattle, I was supposed to take the red eye back to DC for the weekend.  The flight was supposed to leave at 11:30 pm, well its 1 am now and I’m still an hour from take off.  Which means its 5am in back home time.  I think all the airlines have gone to crap in the last 6 months, I can’t remember the las time I had a flight that went off without an issue.  Hopefully I make it home and can sleep off the rest of the morning, after the week I had lord knows I need it.

On a good note I got an email from my good friends at IOUG that they’ve selected my “Oracle Identity Management: The Total Identity Solution” presentation for Oracle World this year! Woo hoo!!! It’ll be my first time presenting at Oracle World, with the BI CAB meeting and Regional Directors Meeting its already shaping up to be a busy conference.  We’ve been thinking of doing “Ask the experts session” at the conference giving time for people to come by the booth and ask our top people just about anything they want.  Discuss a problem they have, demo a cool project we’re working on, or just shoot the … well you know.  We’ll see, I think it could be a fun idea and give me a chance to meet some really cool people.

Just a quick update…

Posted by Topper on 6/12/2007
Posted in: General, Identity Management, Oracle, Oracle Access Manager, Oracle Identity Manager, Oracle Virtual Directory. 1 comment

Wow, just wow has its been incredibly busy lately.  Over the next few weeks I’ll be bouncing coast to coast every weekend.  This week I’m at Redwood Shores working with the new 11g FMW Beta.  I seriously underestimated the size of this release, just about everything is getting turned on its head for the better.  Thats about all I can say about it… 😉

I got word on Friday that my info has finally been added to the list of Oracle Regional Directors (http://www.oracle.com/technology/community/ofm_directors/index.html#Topper).  I feel honored to be part of the group and can’t wait to start fulfilling all the requirements around it.

Next week I’m in Daytona for the Kaleidescope Conference speaking on IDM, AJAX and WS-Security.  These are the same presentations I did at Collaborate last month and got some decent reviews (also the same ones posted on this site if you can’t make it to the conference).  On a side note, in the spirit of Daytona Dan Norris and myself are planning on renting motorcycles one of the nights we are there.  If anyone else wants to join in the fun let me know, I think the cost for the day was between $100 – $150.

Lastly, I’ve been thinking about starting a website that would link technical people together.  There are a lot of great traveling consultants that are in a different city every week with a lot of Oracle product knowledge that you might not even know are working at the place next door.  Does anyone think building a site around linking technical people up for dinner in an area would be a good idea?  It would be something along with the lines of LinkedIn and It’s Just Lunch.  I’m just thinking out loud, its been something thats been in the back of my head for a while and keeps popping up as I’ve been flying around lately.