Mark Morrell meets Oracle: update

January 29, 2010 at 9:08 am | Posted in application, intranet, oracle, user testing | 5 Comments
Tags: applications, bt intranet, intranet applications, oracle, usability, user testing

I met with Oracle and other Oracle customers earlier this week. This was the first of what Oracle hope will be regular meetings with their major customers in Europe. The main focus was on content and document management product features and roadmaps.

I left with the impression that Oracle seriously wants to continue improving the usability of Universal Content Management by engaging with their customers through webcasts and meetings. The next release of 11G using Fusion promises to move towards what I would like – a simple publishing experience which needs minimal IT involvement.

I would like the following to happen next:

Oracle should hold frequent webcasts with customers to cover future direction of UCM and other products like E-Business Suite.
Customer representatives should have more business users attending with their IT partners. I was in a small minority at this week’s meeting.
Intranet managers who are Oracle customers should make sure they attend these meetings.
Intranet managers should improve their relationship with their IT partners so they are more involved in decision criteria on products so it covers usability and productivity costs during its lifetime.
Meetings should focus more on how Oracle products can be used by customers than on the components that make up the technology.
An agreed set of usability standards underpin the direction of product roadmaps.

We should never forget the goal is to make it easier for people to do their work by using technology that is giving best overall value to the business not to have the latest whizzy feature which doesn’t.

And that applies to any software from any vendor our organisations buys.

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Having been at Oracle’s roundtable dinner on Enterprise E 2.0 last night it is clear that Oracle sees your drive to get them to connect better with their actual users and improve the usability of their products, as very important in the new 2.0 world. What is fascinating it is to see how your mission – if I call it that – to get third party vendors to address user experience better, is delivering results within these vendors. Oracle seems to treat such inputs as really valuable and the “product people” I met last night want to know what advanced users such as BT really think.

Comment by Paul Miller - Intranet Benchmarking Forum— January 29, 2010 #

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- Paul,
  
  That’s really heartening to hear. I hope other intranet managers take heart from my experience with Oracle when approaching their IT partners and other software vendors.
  
  With the right approach you can improve relationships with your IT suppliers and agree a way forward that helps all parties.
  
  I’m looking forward to this with Oracle in 2010.
  
  Mark
  
  Comment by markmorrell— January 29, 2010 #
  
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We’re a long term Oracle customer (including the Oracle Portal) and after years of Oracle’s dithering on their portal product roadmaps, we’ve dumped them in favor of Apache Shindig. My developers have never been happier and our end users are stoked with the capabilities.

Comment by Bill— February 13, 2010 #

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Mark Morrell Intranet Pioneer