Oracle sneaks out E-Business Suite 12

Oracle has quietly released E-Business Suite Release 12 to customers a few days in advance of a big launch event planned for next week in New York City.

The update to its suite of business applications is available for download now in all supported languages, said Steve Chan, Oracle’s director of applications technology integration, in a blog posting Thursday.

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How about a Freeware Solution?

Numerous DMS, CMS and ILM products compete for the favour of the customers. Only rarely is taken into consideration also to look for open source and freeware products. Mostly, the argument of the hesitant users states as follows: further development, professiency and rights are not sufficiently preserved. This, however, does not hinder open source products to further spread. In the end, it is desisive how big the community attending an open source product is.

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Skype adds new features to business-oriented service

Skype has expanded its Skype For Business package to include features for improved central management and IT administration, as well as optional add-ons, the company announced Thursday.

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For Success in the Enterprise, Think ‘Platform’

Automate a mess, and get an automated mess. Service-oriented architecture has released many of the constraints on incompatible systems and silos that have hampered cross-enterprise automation efforts over the years. Now, Web 2.0 — and by extension, Enterprise 2.0 — promise similar benefits, at a far faster pace than SOA. Do we risk automating messes even faster than before?

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Oracle’s ‘Web 2.0′ interface coming this month

Oracle plans to release WebCenter Suite before the end of the month, a product for building application interfaces that incorporate content from a variety of sources as well as “Web 2.0″ tools such as blogs and wikis.

The software aims to make workers more productive by providing access to a variety of content and services from one screen, so they don’t have to flip between different applications. Other vendors including IBM and Microsoft are working on similar functionality.

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Interview with Andrew McAfee - Harvard Business School

Kathleen Gilroy spent some time last week with Andrew McAfee at HBS discussing the subject of enterprise 2.0. You can listen to her podcast interview with him on fastforward.com.

The most interesting aspect of this interview was the discussion of management and leadership in the 2.0 enterprise.

Business apps giant SAP gets Web 2.0 bug

Business applications giant SAP this year will be rolling out enhancements meant to make end users more productive through easier collaboration, according to company executives.

These additions are being designed around so-called Web 2.0 technologies, such as shared Web pages called wikis, as well as online forums and mini applications called widgets. The goal is to make it easier for knowledge workers who use SAP products to collaborate.

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Citizendium - The Citizen Compendium is online

Citizendium the counterpart to Wikipedia has opened the doors.
In contrast to Wikipedia it is only be possible for “experts” to write articles for Citizendium.

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Words that Work: Search Words Versus Website Words

Do people search using basic, simple, old words? But when they arrive at a website are they moved to action by more emotive, sophisticated words?

The Web is the land of the word. Getting your words exactly right can mean the difference between success and failure.

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IBM’s Social-Network Experiment

IBM (Quote) announced today that customers will be able to attend its annual Lotusphere conference virtually on Second Life, a 3-D virtual-reality world.

Taking a MySpace and Facebook page from the consumer world, the company is pushing the use of social-networking software to illustrate how businesses can use lessons learned from virtual worlds to solve real-world business problems.

According to IBM CTO Irving Wladawsky-Berger, “using such virtual, highly visual capabilities to help us design, simulate, optimize, operate and manage business activities of all sorts is going to be one of the most important breakthroughs in the IT industry over the next decade.”

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