SOA & E2.0 Partner Community forum Utrecht summary

The past few days I was in Utrecht for the SOA and E2.0 Partner Community forum. It was hosted by Capgemini and they presented a very nice auditorium and other rooms.
It was very nice to finally meet some guys I have mailed a lot.
We saw some impressive implementations about SOA, WebCenter/UCM, WebCenter/BPM and learned a lot about the future of those products.

The first day Jürgen Kress and Hans Blaas welcomed us to the forum. They were very excited with the number of registrations. There were almost 200 people which is nice for such an event. They also addressed the importance of specialization and it appears they will do a lot of effort to help their partners get specialized. Once you get specialized as a partner, you will get a recommendation on their site or they even will help you with the RFI's.
Partners who already got their specialization got their plaques during the event so they can hang it in the office.

There was also a very impressive session about exalogic. The numbers we saw about the tuning tests were really impressive. One size doesn't fit all but exalogic really does make a good chance to fit most of it.

Vikram from Infomentum brought a case about a WebCenter and UCM implementation they did. I was really impressed about it. One of the key features of that implementation was personalized content. They build a nice feature to link content in such a way that you can easily crosslink content without needing to tag it. It was like a "3d tagging" model so you don't need to add dozens of tags in order to show the content. I believe the terminology he used for this was ontology. They used it in other implementations as well and it looks very nice. Something i definitely want to know more about.

On the second day we could choose between different breakout sessions. As an enterprise 2.0 specialist, i went for the E2.0 sessions while my colleague went for the SOA related sessions.

The first one was with Michelle Huff and Peter Moskovits talking about the new features of WebCenter PS3. I already knew these features but still it was nice to hear them talk about it and see what the vision of Oracle is for the portals.

A second session I attended that day was one from Andrejus Baranovskis. He talked about the integration between WebCenter spaces and BPM. I never have used BPM so it was really nice to see how the integration went and what features Oracle provided for this. It was a very nice session that was well brought by Andrejus. The demo he showed was quiet impressive.

The last session I followed was one about ECM 11g. It was brought by a product manager of Oracle and he told us about the new features of ECM and what was planned in the future. I never used 11g that much so it definitely learned a lot from that session.

Beside the sessions we had a lot of time networking with other partners. On Tuesday evening we even had a social event in the center of Utrecht. We first visited a brewery and then had a nice dinner with live music. It was a very good opportunity to meet with other people and talk about the technology.

Conclusion: it was a very nice event and i had a great time. Thanks to Jürgen en Hans for the effort they put in this event. It is really appreciated!