Is oracle.com cool again?

After last year's Oracle Open World I asked if Oracle was cool again and that post was picked up by eye on oracle and created quite a bit of debate. Now we are approaching Open World again and I see Oracle has put it's mix social network front and center taking over the oracle.com home page with the Oracle Listens campaign. Already @monkchips thinks it's cool.

Not as cool as google? I don't want to go there again. In fact there is a huge amount of buzz on twitter from many people, Oracle and non Oracle alike. I like the cynical take by @jknoll

I don't think Oracle has run out of ideas, I just think they are admitting that customers and partners might have some equally good ideas that we should listen to.

I'm browsing through the ideas and there's an amount of noise as you might expect, but there seems to be a new idea submitted about every five minutes. That amount of feedback is immense.  Credit to the Oracle marketing team for driving this, I see Justin is answering a lot of the ideas right now and other Oracle folks are jumping in too.  Expect to hear a lot more about this next week.

My opinion is this is a bold move and Oracle has convinced me its cool again this year. Do you agree or think it is just a gimmick? Make your voice heard in the comments.

Got my OOW badge

I collected my badge here at Oracle HQ, so I can avoid the crowds at the Moscone. Now what I don't have is a ticket to the Party on Wednesday Night, which is held on Treasure Island with UB40, Seal, Elvis Costello and some Country artist who's name I don't recall (sorry - but I only dislike two kinds of music; Country and Western). People may not know this, but Oracle employees in general do not get a ticket to the party even if we have DEMOgrounds or Speaker ribbons on our badges. So there's normally a load of Oracle folks asking customers for and spare tickets. The past few years friends have sorted me out, but this year I have no leads...I will be in the DEMOgrounds Wednesday and Thursday mornings so you can drop by there to chat or contact me if you want to arrange to meet some time.

I plan to do updates via twitter and post here on the blog regularly throughout the conference so stay tuned.

Also check out the official Open World Blog, they're getting great content on there this year and I'll be watching that closely.

Financials Sessions at Oracle Open World 2008

A lot of people are asking when various sessions are, readers of this blog are probably interested in Oracle EBS financials, Helle posted on Oracle Mix a couple of useful links. I recommend looking at this pdf which lists all the financials sessions including demogrounds, apps lounges, presentations etc.

My session is listed there, I look forward to seeing some of your there.

Thursday 25th, 3:00 p.m.

Moscone West 2006

Are Intercompany Processing and Reconciliation Currently Pain Points for Your Enterprise?

David Haimes, Oracle; Helle Hennings, Oracle

I blogged last year about the meet the Experts Lounge, well this year it has been renamed to Applications Lounge. I haven't been asked to attend this year, so if you want to ask me any questions or provide feedback you'll have to come to the session above, find me at the DEMOgrounds, the Blogger Meetup or follow me in twitter, or use this blog all year round - remember customer interaction is not just for Oracle Open World, it's for life.

Still time to vote for blogging

If you read a lot of Oracle blogs you can't have missed the news that you get to vote for some of the sessions at Oracle Open World this year on Oracle Mix. There's a lot of great sessions suggested and although I'm about to plug my own I would encourage you to check out the other suggestions and vote often.

My suggestion is for a session inspired by the series I started on Why product development should blog, which only got as far as three part:

Why Product Development should Blog - How blogging will help your customers and YOU

A bold claim, but one I'm pretty confident I can back up. I'd also be interested in getting input form other bloggers within and without Oracle so I can share some of your wisdom in this session too. So add your comments and remember to go and vote.

Friday Night Writes

My primary reason for starting this blog was to discuss issues customers asked me a lot at about at Open World and on various forums. My rationale being that if I blog about our products we might help people understand them and a) Make informed choices implementing them, get more value from them and maybe log less support calls and bugs for us to look at; b) Learn how people use our apps, or why they can't use them and be in a position to engineer better apps. What I didn't have in mind was being able to sound off about whatever I want to on a Friday night and people actually read it and link to it from other blogs, which is dangerous because it just encourages me. I was also encouraged this week reading Meg's girl on a rant, nice to see other people getting things off their chest too. The last few days I've been thinking about what I wrote about Google last week. Why? Because on Monday I was asked by Terrance if I could go to the Google office and talk to them about Intercompany. Doh! My first question was,