Wednesday 10 September 2008

Google logs & security of enterprises


with the new release of Google chrome I was very happy & very fascinated with the innovation & the commitment of Google to the glob, but a few blog posts & This Cnet news article which turned the idea into a nightmare, I’ve posted last time about cloud computing & Google’s outage, my point was that I can never ever trust anyone, what so ever, to store my sensitive information inside his "cloud". this was simply for storing info in other's place, but...

I was reading today here & here about Google's changes on their retention policies & defending their selves about privacy & personal security claims!

I paused for a second, and looked to my network of friends, of diverse backgrounds & distinct industries, we're using Google as the primary search engine, that logs all searches and even keystrokes before searching (Google suggest), & using Google chrome to access all our internal & external web pages, where it logs a lot of stuff about us, & can track our usage & surfing pattern, Google desktop to index the hard drive, including business emails & confidential data...

Ok, let me pause here again, Google is one of the truly innovative companies around, those products along with their entire stack of solutions drove innovation into all sectors, & I was very happy with each advancement & product they provided, including the cloud based docs...

But that was for my personal & home usage, nothing important to log or track, nothing top secret... therefore I wouldn't care (much) for the privacy policy as i trust Google very well.

But when we're talking about business & fierce competition it is another story, although I do trust Google, but again, as I said for cloud computing, I can never trust anyone for my business secrets, & after all, seems we brought the cloud to our homes :)

yes, very sad... as much as I’m fascinated by the innovation that Google is doing each day, I just can't ignore the risk of abusing those technologies by the wrong hands, & on the other hand, it's nonsense to ask Google to stop it, as science can never be stopped, if it was not Google, it will be another company..

Btw, reading my post again, I feel like a conspiracy freak!  Oops! I was reading such ideas back in university times, when some "conspiracy freak” said that with the advancement of internet, their is nothing called privacy anymore!! ... I guess that "freak" turned out to be "wise"...

However, this debate will never end, we just have to cope with the changes, & try our best to minimize the risks!


Wednesday 13 August 2008

Google Outages, and Cloud Computing


Probably this is not the area of my speciality, but as a technology fan, I've seen recently several posts and talks about Google Apps and online computing, and was checking out Google Sites, which is a nice product indeed.

things were good until I read this topic from eWeek.

this really brings up some points against complete online business, and cloud computing,


The idea of having your complete documents, data and systems on Googl's servers is really cool, where the users and the entire organization will forget the headache and cost of hardware servers, backups, maintenance, upgrades ... etc.


and also provides access to all users from any system, any where, any browser! especially with the on-going development of
Android, the Google mobile OS platform, users will be able to access their entire documents from their Android powered devices!

But, the main advantage with Google apps and their Cloud computing is also their main disadvantage, where that was clearly visible with their applications outages that happened this month, users thought that Google will be the most reliable online system, but they were shocked with the truth that Google is still a real company, that lives in the real world, where problems DO happen.


In my opinion, Having your data in other's hands is risky, especially when we are talking about sensitive information, or critical data that needs to be available 24x7.


Therefore, When an organization develop their plans and implement their systems (on their hardware) they have complete control on the availability, continuity and disaster recovery plans, and most importantly, the security.

Thursday 7 August 2008

New URL API for Oracle Distributed Document Capture (ODDC 10.1.3.4.0)!


Oracle has recently announced a new release of ODDC (Oracle Distributed Document Capture)… where the guys on the other side of earth has just finished developing a new URL API!

What does that mean?
It means we can send instructions and parameters in the URL during the ODDC call! To directly initiate scanning and pass indexing parameters for example...

I was in a PoC a couple of months ago, where we image enabled EBS using ODDC and UCM, and i was thinking how great it will be to pass index fields using the URL instead of DB tables & SQL workarounds that we had to use!

And the dream came true!!

Now, consultants, partners, and developers can have a very interesting and convenient image enabling approach.

For example, in EBS AP, the user will choose an invoice record, put the hard copy invoice in the scanner, and click on a "scan" button in the EBS toolbar, and the page will be scanned and indexed without any touch from the user!


How it works?
The button calls ODDC and within the URL passes the scan instruction and some parameters from the form such as the invoice number, name...etc. it will look something like below


http://win2k_server/capture/WebCapture.Asp?script=1&ScanAction=2&IndexData=Order%20Number%091234

As a result, ODDC will pop up in a new window, and automatically initiate scanning and populate indexing fields with the sent parameters...further more, since the invoice number (and any other parameter) is already populated in ODDC, it can use DB-Lookups to retrieve (from databases) further related information from EBS or even any other system that matters!

Since the scanned image, with the index fields (metadata) are now stored in UCM, any user can press "retrieve invoice" button from EBS toolbar, and get the scanned image for that particular invoice record!

The API has many parameters and instructions, which can be found in the documentation.

I'm very happy with this new feature, and I think it will simplify a lot of direct integrations.

Sunday 8 June 2008

Oracle Sites goes Live with WCM!!

Oracle is now moving it's Oracle.com sites from Oracle Portal to Oracle Web Content Management (WCM), which is part of Oracle's Universal Content Managment (UCM) Platform.


here's the announcement on 26-5-2008:



"

First Oracle.com Site Built on UCM Platform Goes Live

Oracle's CRM OnDemand website has been migrated from Oracle Portal to Oracle WCM. This eight month endeavour was the first pilot project for the migration of Oracle.com to the Oracle UCM Platform; other sites, including the Oracle Partner Network and the Oracle Technology Network will follow. The CRM OnDemand site is running externally (outside the firewall) for customers, and is accessible in different languages. Visit CRM OnDemand

"


This will help a lot in managing the huge amount of internal and external sites, and those sites has a huge amount of pages, documents, contributions, and a lot of other contents.


I was thinking a while ago about this move, as it is much more reasonable to present Oracle as one of the WCM references :)
and it will definatly be one of the biggest WCM references.

Well Done ECM Team, we're waiting the full migration announcement...

Thursday 5 June 2008

ECM, BI, and Enterprise Applications!

I've been thinking lately about my ECM product and how to benefit from other technologies in Oracle's middleware, specifically BI.

I found a very comprehensive and interesting article here about the BI, ECM and Apps written by Billy Cripe & Nick Tuson...

BI has always been there for structured data, that resides in databases and structured systems, helping organizations to visualize what is happening in their environments, and suggesting how best to deal with that. Mostly, BI was targeting enterprise applications such as ERP and CRM, but in the real case, a huge amount of data is still unmanaged, which resides in unstructured data, such as emails, documents, sheets... etc.

those sources where very difficult to include in BI calculations, but since the introduction of ECM systems, the unstructured contents became available in a structured or semi-structured way, where metadata that describes business contents are stored in a database, as well as the full text capabilities available in most of current ECM systems. This created what we call a Content Enabled Vertical Applications (CEVAs).


Another important aspect here is the transactions targeting those business documents, which includes trends of users, types of requested documents, access methods, frequency of access, and other data that are collected and saved within the ECM system, those data are very important to build a complete vision of the organization's environment. Those transactions are directly related to the business and the decisions to be taken.

Let’s take a step back and look at the bigger picture in CEVAs environments, enterprise applications stores direct business records, and ECM systems stores content files related to those records, along with the descriptive metadata, fulltext, and the transactions related to the contents.

To analyze this heterogeneous data, a BI Engine is the choice to provide a comprehensive picture of the business and an effective BI driven decisions.

Oracle Universal Content Management

Oracle UCM can be easily used for this scenario, where all the metadata, and the full text is directly accessible through the database, and the content tracker component does a great job in collecting all transaction related data from the webserver filters and logs, the content server filters and logs and other sources, apply some cleansing on the data, and provide them in special tables to be accessed by Content Tracker Reports, and other reporting tools, and obviously, BI systems.

To make things more interesting, Oracle UCM has a component called Content Categorizer, that is a rule based auto categorization engine, which can fill metadata fields based on some text based rules, for example, assigning a content type according to the repeated occurrence of some keywords, or accessing the metadata in the actual file’s headers.

Those data can greatly help in the classifications of those contents, and give much more meaningful data to the BI engine.


Example of sales analysis

Let’s take an example of a CRM system that is used by a software company, this CRM stores information about customers, and the ECM system is used to store and manage the whitepapers about the sold products, and is also used to build the website that the public, partners, and customers are accessing.

When a whitepaper is viewed, the ECM system stores all related transactions, where the frequency of access to some whitepapers, or type of products can indicate the market trend, and the data in CRM can indicate the type of customers, or verticals interested in this whitepaper.

Enhancing the understanding of the market can help in determining the marketing approach, or even the development direction.


Example of Dynamic ADs..

A great example was discussed in the article about real time decisions, the example assumes that a user googled some search term, and one of the results landed on your WCM based site, where the pages are dynamically built, the system examines the search term used, consults its BI engine, and discovers the topics that are most likely to attract this visitor, and accordingly suggests an ad banner topic to be added, this happens very quickly while the page is being built, and the user sees the page with some AD that attracts him to click on!

The WCM system tracks if the user did click on the AD and notifies the BI system of that, or if the user didn't click on the AD which shows non-interest of the suggested AD. In both cases the feedback goes to the BI system to better tune the selection of the ADs.

In the end

If you are interested in this topic, I highly recommend that you visit the article here, it has much more information, and much more details.