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.

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.