About me

I've been working with Oracle technology since 2006. I first started working with Oracle Portal 10g. I learned the ins and outs about PL/SQL and PL/SQL portlets in Oracle Portal. I was always interested in the new stuff on the web. I first heard about the Web 2.0 buzz when I was working for the Chancellery of the Prime Minister in Belgium. I was immediately hooked to it and I wanted to know more.

As a web specialist I tried to introduce new technologies in our portal projects like AJAX to improve user friendliness. Meanwhile after my hours I was experimenting with Drupal and its Web 2.0 capabilities. Those Oracle Portal projects were kind of straight forward and I wanted more. I wanted to use new technologies.

In 2007 I started working for Contribute. A company that innovates by using the newest technologies. As soon as I started I learned about the magical world of WebCenter 10g. Oh my the horror. Pages of instructions, just to enable WebCenter in the OC4J Container in JDeveloper. I found the idea of such a product very nice but it didn’t took me a long time to see that WebCenter wasn’t mature. I also specialized in UCM. I followed a few courses, toyed around with the Content Server and made some prove of concepts.

After a while I could start on a large Portal project so WebCenter and UCM were pushed back in the background. I kept reading about it and sometimes I tried experimenting with it.

After 2 years of hard work and creating lots of PL/SQL portlets in Oracle Portal, the project was done and I had time for WebCenter again, lots of time! I created a few prove of concepts with WebCenter 11g and experimented with WebCenter services.

Then suddenly I could do a WebCenter project at a customer. It was a very large prove of concept. The idea was to acquire requirements for a new portal environment. I than implemented those requirements into WebCenter as a prove of concept. By doing this project, I learned a lot about WebCenter.

In the beginning I needed to ask a lot of questions on the WebCenter Framework forum but almost never I could find an answer. Google or other search engines didn’t help me either, I had to find out the hard way and find it out myself.

After a while I learned enough so I could start answering other people’s questions. This felt nice because I actually could help people with the knowledge I acquired. I also knew how frustrating it was to not find answers.

One thing led to another… After months of being very active on the WebCenter framework forum I became the top contributor in the forum and was almost the only person who actually gave answers. That’s why I came up with the idea to share my knowledge so I started writing a few papers. Because of this, I got contacted by Packt Publishing asking me to write a book about WebCenter. Could you refuse such an offer? I couldn’t so I wrote the WebCenter 11g Administration Cookbook.

I also started to think on how we could elevate the community so people could find answers more often. People told me about the ADF methodology group and maybe it should be a good idea to have such a group for WebCenter so I started asking questions and after a few weeks, the WebCenter EMG was born.

I’m also the Enterprise 2.0 SIG leader for OBUG (Oracle Benelux User Group). Becuae of my recent move to the UK I will no longer be able to organize events in the Benelux although it would be nice...

As of Februari 2012 I got nominated for Oracle ACE. This is a big achievement for me. I am very pleased to see that Oracle acknoledges my work and gives me that status. I will not let them down and will keep on working hard and providing usefull information to the community!

Currently I am always thinking on how to help the community and how can we spread the knowledge.

This is a short story on how I rolled into the world of WebCenter and Enterprise 2.0

Beside WebCenter I of course have a live… Although WebCenter consumes a lot of my time, I do have hobbies… WebCenter for example. Oh wait, let’s not talk about WebCenter for a few second please…

Alright, I have a very lovely wife called Celine. We just got married the 2nd of July 2010. We lived hapily in Ghent, Belgium but because i joined InfoMENTUM in September 2011, we moved to Surbiton, London. I must say, I have to thank my wife very much. Without her support, the big chance in our life would not be possible!

Besides WebCenter I have another large passion being astronomy. I have my own telescope which I love to set up on clear and dark night. I am specialized in astrophotography which of course also involves a lot IT… A lot of wires to connect, difficult software to configure and lots of time and patience is needed… A good picture can take up from a few hours to even a few nights… You can take a look at the pictures I shot on my other blog Passero.be. It is in Dutch but photos don’t speak a language I guess. I'm also the vice-president of our local start gazing club. From time to time I organize lectures about astronomy or give them myself.

That’s about it… If you want to know anything else than you just need to ask me…