TEAM Informatics, Inc.
3900 Northwoods Drive
Suite 350
Arden Hills, MN 55112
TEAMInformatics.com
P +1.651.222.8326
White Paper — Enterprise 2.0
Company Profile .................................................................... 3
Abstract ............................................................................... 4
Executive Summary ................................................................ 5
Section 1: User Interaction ....................................................... 7
Section 2: Social Environments .................................................. 8
Section 3: Cross-System Integrations ........................................... 10
Section 4: A Secure Work Environment ........................................ 12
Section 5: Adaptability to Change ............................................... 14
Section 6: Manageability .......................................................... 16
References ........................................................................... 18
Terms & Definitions ................................................................ 19
Appendix A: Underlying Approach .............................................. 23
Appendix B: Software Product Evaluation ..................................... 24
Copyright © 2010 TEAM Informatics, Inc. All rights reserved.
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White Paper — Enterprise 2.0
Corporate Headquarters
3900 Northwoods Drive
Suite 350
Arden Hills, MN 55112
Kokomo, Indiana
700 East Firmin Street
Suite 120
Kokomo, IN 46902
Anchorage, Alaska
310 K Street
Suite 200
Anchorage, AK 99501
Sydney, Australia
3.4 / 56 Delhi Road
North Ryde NSW 2113
Phone
+1 651 222 8326
Website www.TEAMinformatics.com
TEAM Informatics (“TEAM”) is a privately held, employee-owned software engineering and systems integration firm. TEAM has delivered solutions with a variety of Enterprise Content Management technologies, including Alfresco,
Google, Oracle, and SharePoint. TEAM continually provides superior information technology solutions to clients as their needs expand and evolve. TEAM is a business partner with Google, Kofax, Microsoft, and Oracle.
To propel their expertise and growth initiatives in 2010, TEAM acquired Frontline Logic, a fellow leader in Enterprise 2.0 implementations. TEAM Informatics is expanding their presence in Australia and New Zealand with key leadership appointments and strengthened geographic support. These advances align with TEAM’s mission to produce high-impact business results for their clients and team members as an innovation leader in software development and professional services.
TEAM partners with clients on enterprise implementations, strategic infrastructure initiatives, managed services & support, and formal training. TEAM sells products and solutions that complement their range of service capabilities. These product connectors, accelerator frameworks, and industry niche solutions illustrate TEAM’s breadth and depth of experience.
The information contained in this document represents the current view of TEAM Informatics,
Inc. (“TEAM”) on the subject matter as of the date of publication. This information should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of TEAM, and TEAM cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication.
This White Paper is for informational purposes only. TEAM MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS,
IMPLIED, OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE ACCURACY, COMPLETENESS OR USE OF INFORMATION CON-
TAINED IN THIS DOCUMENT.
This document is subject to the copyrights of TEAM. Complying with all applicable copyright laws is the responsibility of the user. Without limiting the rights under copyright, no part of this document may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) or for any purpose, without the express written permission of TEAM.
TEAM may have patents, patent applications, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property rights covering subject matter in this document. Except as expressly provided in any written license agreement from TEAM, the furnishing of this document does not give you any license to these patents, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property.
TEAM Informatics and the TEAM Informatics logo are registered trademarks of TEAM Informatics,
Inc. All other trademarks and tradenames mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.
Copyright © 2010 TEAM Informatics, Inc. All rights reserved.
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White Paper — Enterprise 2.0
A recent Harvard Business Review article [1] reveals that the #1 motivation for knowledge workers is “progress”. This multi-year study identifies that s ense of accomplishment relates unequivocally to people’s best days at work. Proper implementation of Enterprise 2.0 solutions can empower employees to “see progress” and feel that they are working to their full potential.
Line of Business Managers (“managers”) who do not embrace the next wave of information productivity tools risk losing their most prized asset – team members and their knowledge. From an organizational perspective, knowledge worker productivity is paramount to organizational efficiency and resulting profit margins.
An increasing number of firms are classifying their Enterprise 2.0 resources as mission critical to the success of the organization.
TEAM Informatics has extensive experience in working with Enterprise 2.0 tools provided by both Microsoft and Oracle. Based upon this experience and a recent in-depth study, TEAM provides insights that compare and contrast these vendors’ products.
This paper is intended for managers responsible for purchasing Enterprise 2.0 systems and ensuring the success of knowledge workers. Although this paper considers business implications of the technologies, comprehensive research underpins the content of this paper.
This paper includes six main sections that provide a comparison of SharePoint
2010 and Oracle Enterprise 2.0. The business benefits of the individual product elements are outlined in these sections.
The software product evaluation (Appendix B) provides a common format of reviewing SharePoint 2010, then reviewing Oracle Enterprise 2.0. This evaluation highlights updates from previous software versions.
Copyright © 2010 TEAM Informatics, Inc. All rights reserved.
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White Paper — Enterprise 2.0
Enterprise 2.0 is a term that has evolved over the past half-decade. Aside from the technologies that encompass Enterprise 2.0, TEAM believes that information
“in context” is the most important aspect of Enterprise 2.0 effectiveness. Allowing knowledge workers to interact fluidly from their primary user environment to business and infrastructure applications is the foundational requirement of these tools.
TEAM views Enterprise 2.0 as a collection of software tools that enable knowledge workers to optimize their work performance. This user experience should provide a unified, contextual awareness of team members and information to support knowledge workers in efficiently accomplishing their work tasks.
Buyers of business technology should view Enterprise 2.0 as an evolution of multiple tools that when combined form the optimum contextual and productive work environment for their knowledge workers.
This paper introduces Enterprise 2.0 and illustrates why managers need to ensure their most valuable asset – knowledge workers – are enabled with the most suitable productivity tools. This paper reviews six key areas of Microsoft Share-
Point 2010 and Oracle Enterprise 2.0, and includes recommendations on the most applicable knowledge worker tool. The following vital aspects of daily knowledge worker tasks are addressed:
User Interaction: Interaction with rich clients and desktop applications is important for a knowledge worker to complete their daily work. Both vendor solutions allow knowledge workers to continue working in their personalized and existing environment. SharePoint 2010 provides tight integration to Microsoft
Office. Oracle’s desktop integration options facilitate integration to a more diverse set of desktop productivity tools – including Microsoft and others. Findability - the ability to locate and interact with the correct data at the required point in time is an essential attribute in assuring the success of any knowledge worker. Both vendors provide excellent prebuilt findability in their respective
Enterprise 2.0 solutions. Technology buyers should be aware that Microsoft has extra costs associated with it to provide an optimized findability experience to the end user. Despite this, the continued integration of FAST technology in the
SharePoint platform shows promise.
Social Environments: A central factor to the success of any Enterprise 2.0 environment is contextual knowledge – the ability to locate the best domain expert is paramount. Social interaction of people and processes can be optimized by the provision of self-service capabilities to the knowledge worker. For example, how to locate and leverage the correct person at the appropriate time and in context cannot be underrated. The tools offered by both solutions can adequately facilitate social collaboration. However for certain use cases, TEAM found that Oracle provides more social software tools and a richer user interaction experience to the knowledge worker.
Cross-System Integration: There is a dizzying array of productivity tools for knowledge workers. The manager who unites this overlap for his employees will reap significant rewards. Given the breadth of tools offered, Microsoft and Oracle are better positioned than most Enterprise 2.0 providers to enable an integrated experience. Microsoft provides a rich desktop experience with Microsoft
Copyright © 2010 TEAM Informatics, Inc. All rights reserved.
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White Paper — Enterprise 2.0
Office 2010, but is relatively limited with business applications. Oracle has made a more concerted effort to enable a contextual experience between a wider variety of systems and solutions.
A Secure Work Environment : Managers walk a fine line between providing appropriate access to business entities (people, processes, and systems) and maintaining explicit security measures. The delineation between internal and external business interaction is rapidly fading, resulting in the need for persistent security throughout the enterprise. Today’s knowledge worker tools have redefined the speed at which business is conducted. Both Enterprise 2.0 products evaluated in this paper provide comprehensive security. TEAM found security in Oracle more applicable to heterogeneous environments, and more suitable for persistent security of data – specifically for external use.
Adaptability to Change: Managers need to be increasingly responsive to employees interacting at the speed of “twitter”. Managers who fail to factor in adaptability as a key aspect of their Enterprise 2.0 solution will be left with a frustrated and unproductive workforce. Given the right budget, any solution can adapt and scale to changing business requirements. TEAM noted that Oracle offers customers a more easily scalable solution – especially in heterogeneous environments.
Manageability : In today’s economy, managers require transparency to their systems to ensure that the maximum productivity levels are achieved. An Enterprise 2.0 solution must provide managers the facilities to safeguard a company’s bottom line in case a system goes down. The solution that can be quickly returned to normal after down time is the cornerstone of enterprise manageability. Microsoft’s self-contained manageability interface offers the fundamentals in this area, though third party add-ons or consulting may be required for enterprise-wide manageability. In contrast, Oracle’s native manageability is readily available across its Enterprise 2.0 tools and other applications. This approach provides organizations more comprehensive manageability tools for visibility across the entire Enterprise 2.0 environment.
While both Microsoft and Oracle have advanced their respective product lines considerably with the recent release of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Oracle WebCenter 11g, TEAM found the Oracle 11g products more suitable for organizations requiring broad enterprise capability and infrastructure extensibility. Microsoft, however, remains a viable alternative for clients with modest content volumes and Microsoft-centric infrastructures. The following sections detail the TEAM research study in more depth. The appendices contain details of the findings.
Copyright © 2010 TEAM Informatics, Inc. All rights reserved.
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White Paper — Enterprise 2.0
Enterprise 2.0 will help knowledge transfer between people and groups — specifically knowledge & experience transferred to a younger work force. The
Bureau of Labor Statistics
November 2009 report [7] indicates that the labor force is aging and growth is slowing. Organizations need to retain knowledge and intellectual capital especially from those with the most experience.
Organizations using Enterprise 2.0 software are varied. Different industry segments have different goals and business constraints. What is common between different industry segments is the need for knowledge workers to draw from others’ information sources, experience, and even opinions. This is achieved through the interaction between users and related business processes. The interaction works best when the user interaction consists of a unified contextual experience – one that best maps to how people work and think.
Managers are looking for competitive advantage in many forms — speed, opportunity cost, and reduced time interacting with and locating information.
Organizations that focus on optimizing services for user interaction will be operationally efficient companies and save time. Organizations that provide rich user interaction tools will be more productive at locating information, and will excel at delivering information to the correct audience at the right time.
This section of the paper covers TEAM’s experience with the User Interaction options for both solutions. The areas below focus on ease of use for the Enterprise 2.0 system for knowledge workers:
Desktop Integration – the ability of the solutions to integrate with the users’ desktop applications
Findability – the ability to locate content across the enterprise
Analysis
Both vendors’ software integrates well with desktop applications; allowing knowledge workers to continue working in their existing environments. This ensures that managers don’t worry about overhead such as retraining for different or new software tools.
SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010 integration is improved from previous versions. SharePoint 2010 has gained differentiation in this area with integrations such as Backstage and PowerPoint content sharing over the web from within those applications. SharePoint 2010 also offers the consistency of a common user interface across Microsoft Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010.
Naturally, Oracle does not match Microsoft’s advanced Microsoft Office application integration. Oracle Enterprise 2.0 facilitates substantial integration with many desktop productivity applications (including Microsoft Office) via the Oracle Desktop Integration Suite (included in Oracle Enterprise 2.0). TEAM found Oracle Enterprise 2.0 to be a more suitable solution for heterogeneous desktop productivity environments or large, geographically dispersed companies. Team noted that Oracle’s ability to offer a desktop agnostic solution enabled better interaction among knowledge workers in a wide variety of departments and specialized units that may require non-mainstream applications, e.g. OpenOffice.
For customers looking at options in place of large Microsoft CAL costs, the
Oracle Desktop Integration (DIS) suite is worth reviewing. It is included free with the Oracle Enterprise 2.0 Suite.
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White Paper — Enterprise 2.0
Findability has improved in both vendors’ solutions. They both provide an enterprise scalable search platform. Search has improved within SharePoint
2010. Microsoft provided updated features and improved integration from the powerful FAST search platform, FAST Search Server 2010. The addition of this technology to the SharePoint 2010 platform has enhanced its findability and mirrors Microsoft’s renewed focus on search – in both the enterprise (via the
FAST acquisition) and consumer search (via Bing).
Unlike Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, the search indexing component in SharePoint 2010 can now be scaled; servers or farms can now be added to improve its search performance in large organizations. However,
TEAM thinks customers will be surprised at the cost - Microsoft treats internal and external search as separately priced options in SharePoint 2010. The outof-the-box pricing model for SharePoint 2010 Search fails to cover search for external websites.
Oracle includes a pre-integrated findability option for end users in its Enterprise 2.0 solution - Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (SES). The pricing model for search in Oracle Enterprise 2.0 is more conducive to enterprise deployments. Larger enterprise deployments may require a complete Oracle SES license. Oracle’s Secure Enterprise Search engine has expanded to include prebuilt integrations to various file types and data sources. Oracle provides free connectors to SharePoint environments. Connectors to 3 rd party repositories may require an additional cost.
Social software encompasses a range of solutions that permit users to interact and share data in a real time and collaborative manner. While social media has been in use on a personal basis for some time with sites like Facebook and
MySpace, the concept of applying social software to enhance business productivity is growing in popularity.
LinkedIn is validation of popular social software gaining a foothold in a business context. As reported by Mashable.com [9] in October 2009, the user base for LinkedIn had grown to over 50 million users and saw a 5.68% user growth for September 2009. This is in contrast with personal social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, where growth is flattening out. This one data point validates the notion that social software is transitioning from innovators to early adopters and is setting the stage for the early majority in the work place.
In February 2010, Gartner, Inc. published five predictions around social software [2] . One stood out as contrary to being supportive of the social media movement:
“Through 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail.”
Gartner’s point is: organizations that simply deploy a technology infrastructure will not hit the mark. Organizations investing in social software for the workplace should focus on creating a solution that provides business value and
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White Paper — Enterprise 2.0 on ensuring that end users have a vested interest in the system. When evaluating technology platforms, managers should look for those that offer a wide variety of social software tools and that support the contextual application of information as it pertains to daily work tasks.
Collaboration between users allows the knowledge worker to be more productive. Organizations that supply rich self-service capabilities in the social environment will be successful because there will be less disruption and incorrect collaboration between knowledge workers. This allows knowledge workers to focus on their core job. This leads to happier knowledge workers because it increases their ability to focus on job tasks that are measurable to their success.
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Oracle Enterprise 2.0 each offer social software options for an Enterprise 2.0 environment. These are covered in this section.
Analysis
Both products provide similar social networking capabilities. Basic functionality like tags, relevance, comments, wikis and blogs are new and improved in the SharePoint 2010 release. They do not seem mature in comparison to the functionality within Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g. Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g offers the same social software tools as SharePoint 2010, but also provides knowledge workers social services in a greater variety of use cases. For example, WebCenter Suite 11g provides the ability to offer profile aggregation in the Social Software environment directly from a Human Resources system.
SharePoint 2010 offers new Expertise Location capabilities in its social software portfolio – called “ Ask Me About ”. In addition to the User Profile offered, this new feature in SharePoint 2010 provides custom indexing and search ability related to personal capabilities and interests through tagging and keywords. There are some limitations around this social software service from SharePoint 2010. SharePoint 2010 does not yet analyze email attachments or other types of content from Wikis and Blogs to aid in profile generation. Keywords need to be published explicitly by users.
Oracle Intelligent Collaboration includes the analysis of email attachments as well as other data sources (Wikis, Blogs, etc.) to build an expertise profile.
Oracle Intelligence Collaboration automatically adds keywords to define the expertise of a knowledge worker. Oracle Intelligent Collaboration is available as part of Oracle Enterprise 2.0, but is priced as an extra component.
TEAM thinks that Oracle Enterprise 2.0 tools meet social computing needs better than Microsoft because of the broader integration with business applications—such as eBusiness Suite, PeopleSoft, etc. This capability makes for a more complete contextual experience. Combine this with the strong Oracle content management capabilities, and the user is able to find the necessary content items from within an integrated interface. This unified approach to contextual awareness of information provides knowledge workers with a more centralized view into their daily work tasks. The next section on Cross-System
Integration explains more about the benefits of the in-context experience with business application integration to the social work environment.
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White Paper — Enterprise 2.0
As referred to in the abstract, sense of accomplishment relates unequivocally to people’s best days at work.
The level of integration between social software and business applications from Oracle is encouraging. Oracle has done a good job of focusing on prebuilt integration to many business applications. This is an obvious strength in their
Enterprise 2.0 solution and bodes well to address knowledge worker productivity. TEAM is interested in seeing Oracle continue this industry leading position, and to more fully combine their social software features with their business application integration approach. This will further the knowledge worker’s contextual experience.
In today’s economy, managers are under pressure to produce more with fewer resources – including fewer employees. Enterprise 2.0 solutions enable employees to do more with less by supporting integrated team collaboration.
Cross-system integration provides better visibility across the company as disparate systems are better connected. Having a unified view allows managers to make timely and informed decisions. Continuing to be productive and progressing toward important work tasks keeps knowledge workers engaged. Having integrated tools to communicate and interact provides employees with the ability to monitor their progress and to complete their work.
Integrating multiple knowledge worker tools within an organization can add value by saving managers time and the expense of monitoring disparate systems. It is not an easy task to integrate business applications with other productivity tools to create a consistent experience for knowledge workers. As organizations seek solutions using Microsoft SharePoint 2010 or Oracle Enterprise 2.0 technologies, communication between a wide variety of productivity tools will be important to understand.
Integration between content and the productivity tools, which creates actionable information, is key to the success of an organization. The ability to use data, whether structured or unstructured, is critical. The ability for knowledge workers to easily manipulate content in context of the user productivity tools or business application is a foundational Enterprise 2.0 requirement.
This section illustrates how content from a variety of disparate sources can be integrated and surfaced in a single environment for the knowledge worker.
AIIM Fast Facts state,
“Professionals spend up to 15% of their time reading information, but up to 50% of their time finding the information of importance.” [3]
Analysis
Both Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Oracle Enterprise 2.0 technologies have the ability to integrate with internal and external applications. Microsoft applications focus primarily on content generation for Microsoft productivity application users. Oracle’s applications provide a broader foundation to manage content generated from a wide source of productivity tools.
Microsoft has not invested many resources in prebuilt connectivity to business applications beyond its own Dynamics GP. This can mean that managers looking for speed and completeness of integration between SharePoint and business applications have to wait for customization from their IT department or external consultants.
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White Paper — Enterprise 2.0
It is worth noting that Microsoft has promised increased attention on SAP business application integration through the joint Duet initiative from SAP and
Microsoft. Duet Enterprise is planned for release the second half of 2010.
Oracle’s recent investment in prebuilt connectivity to its business applications makes them suited to managers seeking a unified experience for knowledge workers between business applications (Enterprise Resource Planning, Supply
Chain Management, etc.) and Enterprise 2.0 tools (Oracle WebCenter, Oracle
Universal Content Management, etc.). One example of an enterprise-wide infrastructure capable of storing millions of content items is the latest Oracle
Imaging and Process Management connector to PeopleSoft.
Since the Oracle Enterprise 2.0 Suite offers strong prebuilt integration in the areas of business application integration, this is one area where leveraging a unified platform can aid customers’ business continuity strategies. Those who rely on the software vendor’s development and release process have an advantage in ensuring the organization’s infrastructure is synchronized with future technology versions.
Oracle’s end-to-end focus on business process automation includes the key components of capture, image & document management, and workflow to augment the out-of-the-box automation provided in Oracle applications. Customers have the flexibility to further automate their systems using technologies such as Oracle Forms Recognition. TEAM technology evaluators saw value that the above technologies are available within a unified Oracle Enterprise
2.0 platform.
From a Microsoft perspective, creating a workflow in Visio allows participation by non-technical knowledge workers. It puts creation directly in the hands of the subject matter expert. SharePoint Designer is the tool needed to edit the workflows after they are created in Visio. Windows Workflow Foundation is the Microsoft engine that implements workflows executed in SharePoint 2010.
Further development of this engine by Microsoft will be key in moving this product to becoming a mature contender in the market.
Oracle’s workflow capabilities are included as part of the base Enterprise 2.0 products and TEAM found they scale appropriately. Some prebuilt Business
Process Management (BPM) integrations to Oracle Enterprise 2.0 modules such as UCM and E-Business Suite (EBS) exist and allow the solution to address advanced use cases with less IT involvement. This is accomplished through the use of business process modeling to create a given workflow. Oracle BPM
(included in Enterprise 2.0) has the capability to allow non-technical knowledge workers the ability to create models that graphically represent the business process.
Copyright © 2010 TEAM Informatics, Inc. All rights reserved.
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White Paper — Enterprise 2.0
A secure work environment is of key importance to an Enterprise 2.0 environment. Findability and self-service are primary attributes that ensure the success of an Enterprise 2.0 system – but only provide a limited competitive advantage if not secured. To enable these attributes, security needs to persist in order to protect mission critical data.
In this section, TEAM provides our analysis on three key areas of security for both solutions:
Authentication: Confirming the knowledge worker is who they claim to be
Authorization: Controlling permission levels to system resources in an organization nal
Analysis
Overall, the security capabilities for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Oracle
Enterprise 2.0 are comparable. Microsoft and Oracle offer a wide variety of authentication and authorization options that are suitable for almost any security requirement. The actual implementations and methodologies are different when it comes to securing content in the application, but the end result is similar. Though Microsoft offers Rights Management to secure knowledge worker data, it is not as completely integrated as Oracle’s offering.
One main authentication advantage offered by Oracle WebCenter 11g is its clean integration with an existing Oracle environment – Oracle Access Manager. This technical integration is due to the fact that both products are integrated together out-of-the-box as part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware stack.
SharePoint 2010 integrates cleanly with the users’ Windows productivity tools
– where the credentials can be easily taken and applied to the application.
WebCenter 11g and SharePoint 2010 both integrate with multiple back-end user repositories, making both Enterprise 2.0 solutions suitable for organizations with a variety of data sources.
Authorization is administered differently by Microsoft and Oracle, but both products offer the ability to inherit security from a higher-level object in the system (Group Space in Oracle and Sites in Microsoft). Applying unique security to lower level data objects reduces repetitive tasks regarding security inheritance. This allows an organization to implement a wide range of security models from very simple to extremely complex that can cater to varying degrees of security across an organization’s different departments. Handling the security model as defined by the external user stores can be described as security policy management or governance. The authorization function of the
Enterprise 2.0 system is what enforces the defined security policy.
Based on requests from TEAM customers, there is a growing demand for better security policy governance and a tightened security model. There is much talk in industry today regarding the need for strong governance around the implementation and subsequent monitoring of SharePoint. Industry forums, con-
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White Paper — Enterprise 2.0 tent management practitioners, software technology vendors, and client application owners have raised this issue through a common message that creating a strong security model and policy from the beginning is important in order to minimize the chances of sprouting rogue SharePoint “dandelions”.
The WebCenter 11g model and SharePoint 2010 model appear to be designed with differing thoughts around the default installed security policy. While
SharePoint 2010 includes some basic default groups with each Site created, the default permission levels need to be combined with library or list permissions to account for organizations actual security model. The default WebCenter 11g security policy more closely matches the common message outlined above by our clients and communities of practice.
Figure 1 illustrates TEAM’s view of how SharePoint 2010 and WebCenter 11g address existing known requirements for strong security policy implementation and the associated ability for organizations to easily implement a workable policy. The spots marked with the boxes in each case represent the out-of-thebox (default) policy settings as related to the two axis variables.
Copyright © 2010 TEAM Informatics, Inc. All rights reserved.
Figure 1
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White Paper — Enterprise 2.0
Both Oracle Information Rights Management (Oracle IRM) and Microsoft Active
Directory Rights Management System (AD RMS) allow content to be encrypted and protected once it leaves the intranet environment. Oracle IRM is superior in that it can be deployed on multiple operating systems (versus Windows only for AD RMS). Oracle provides organizations with better persistent security once content moves outside the firewall to partners or customers. Oracle IRM provides a richer security solution with its ability to protect a wider variety of files used by a company. This helps organizations avoid purchasing additional solutions from third parties thus keeping an organization’s bottom line in focus. Please see Table 1 for further detail on how Oracle and Microsoft compare on their ability to secure different types of unstructured business content:
97-2003 file formats for Microsoft
Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft
PowerPoint
Office Open XML formats for Microsoft Office Word 2007, Microsoft Office Excel 2007, and Microsoft Office
PowerPoint 2007
Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 forms
TXT
RTF
CSV
HTML
XML
XPS
PNG
GIF
JPEG
MOV
MPEG
Yes Yes
Yes Yes
Yes No
No Yes
No Yes
No Yes
No Yes
No Yes
No Yes
Yes Yes
No Yes
No Yes
No Yes
No Yes
No Yes
MP4 No Yes
Table 1
As the trend continues for Enterprise 2.0 systems becoming more mission critical, so does the trend continue of increasing volumes of unstructured data.
The ability for an Enterprise 2.0 system to scale and adapt from a departmental system is vital to ensure the system meets changing business requirements
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White Paper — Enterprise 2.0
IDC notes, “While transactional data is still projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 21.8%, it’s far outpaced by a 61.7% CAGR predicted for unstructured data in traditional data centers.” [5] such as growth into new verticals or markets. As projected, managing unstructured data needs to adapt as organizations evolve. Being able to handle the entire organization’s content structure is crucial for a succinct and successful solution.
A company’s Enterprise 2.0 solution needs to have the infrastructure backbone to quickly adapt to the changing business climate. The solution must be able to scale to address large number of users, e.g. if a company merges, the system should be ready to scale rapidly to accommodate the growth in business; resulting in knowledge workers experiencing minimal interruption to their environment and hence, ensuring productivity. Managers need to factor in changes in business direction and ensure they invest in an Enterprise 2.0 system than can adapt in unison with changing business needs. Enterprise 2.0 systems must be architected to expand if a company enters a business area that involves large unstructured data sets such as drawings or large contracts.
Scalability of a system must be designed to ensure user adoption – solutions that cannot scale to meet business objectives will almost certainly decline in use by knowledge workers, creating the threat of a “shelfware” investment.
Analysis
From a vertical and horizontal scaling approach, TEAM found that both Share-
Point 2010 and WebCenter 11g scale nicely. This means that the ‘horsepower’ of the solution can be applied as needed and the user experience will be pleasant, i.e. fast. To achieve vertical scaling, organizations have the ability to beef up hardware infrastructure (cost analysis not included) to create an appropriate solution. Horizontal scaling allows for the addition of machines to the overall solution to make it more highly available and faster. SharePoint
2010 and WebCenter 11g can address both forms of scalability.
TEAM reviewed the environments offered by both vendors and how conducive it is to scaling the system. WebCenter 11g is system agnostic, and will run on both Windows and UNIX/Linux based systems. Comparatively, SharePoint 2010 is limited to running on a Windows platform with only SQL Server as the sole option as a content repository. This may hinder existing organizations that have a heavy investment in UNIX/Linux servers and/or Oracle databases to house existing applications. This is depicted in the Table 2:
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White Paper — Enterprise 2.0
One significant item to note is repository scalability. Clearly
Oracle’s content repository scales better than
Microsoft and is capable of immeasurable quantities.
Supported Element SharePoint 2010
Operating Systems Windows
Application Server Microsoft only
Database
File Storage
Microsoft SQL Server
Database
WebCenter 2.0
Windows
UNIX/Linux
Oracle
IBM
Microsoft (including ISS for Web Tier)
Oracle DB
Microsoft SQL Server
IBM DB2
Database
File System
Unlimited Repository Size 100GB recommended size limit per site
Table 2
As earlier noted in the abstract, An increasing number of firms are classifying zation.
their Enterprise 2.0 resources as mission critical to the success of the organi-
Charles Kettering was a pronounced American inventor and founder of Dayton
Engineering Laboratories (DELCO). He often stated that, “A problem well stated is a problem half solved” [6] .
Enterprise management tools which support this paradigm are increasingly important to growing organizations. Knowing what problem to solve is half the battle with managing enterprise systems.
One of the most important factors in the successful growth of Enterprise 2.0 systems is transparency into the management of those systems. Rich management capabilities are key in an Enterprise 2.0 solution; if a mission-critical system goes down for a short amount of time, productivity and the bottom line of a company is adversely affected. The ability to quickly diagnose problems allows managers to ensure the enterprise’s bottom line is not affected and allows knowledge workers to continue their productivity levels.
Managers need to understand the activities required for an Enterprise 2.0 system, and invest in a solution that can be optimally managed to ensure maximum return on IT investments. Managers who are enabled with an Enterprise
2.0 solution that provides the ability to configure, monitor, and manage multiple business resources, (e.g. workflows, ERP systems, compliance systems) will be better positioned to ensure maximum productivity.
If a manager can thoroughly understand his/her IT investment across multiple systems, with a focused support staff, he/she realizes the tangible benefit of less IT staff overhead and savings to a company’s bottom line.
Finally, managers should be concerned with service levels to external customers. The Portal or Web Site aspect of the Enterprise 2.0 system is more than likely the face of the business. The opportunity cost of downtime to Enterprise 2.0 systems may not only affect the company’s financial health, but
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White Paper — Enterprise 2.0 more detrimentally, create brand damage.
This section of the paper reviews the management of Microsoft SharePoint
2010 and Oracle Enterprise 2.0 systems.
Analysis
SharePoint 2010 and WebCenter 11g both offer a rich set of administration tools for their relative products. Microsoft SharePoint 2010 administration is centralized through the “SharePoint Central Administration”. Oracle’s design offers a similar consolidated administration option that allows managers and their IT counterparts to diagnose IT bottlenecks across applications.
Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM) offers the ability to manage multiple applications simultaneously. EM is included free out-of-the-box with Oracle Enterprise 2.0. Oracle UCM provides its own management capabilities to monitor all content processes.
Both vendors’ products can be extended to manage additional third party applications. Today, Oracle Enterprise Manager can be used to manage complementary solutions for an Enterprise 2.0 environment, e.g. it can also manage the security of users. Oracle’s ability to offer administration for the Enterprise 2.0 environment and related business systems provides organizations a differentiator over Microsoft. SharePoint’s Central Administration only allows the administration of the products/services associated with the SharePoint implementation. A partner solution will be required for management beyond the SharePoint 2010 environment.
The credibility of an organization is at stake if an external facing and missioncritical system should fail. TEAM’s research supports that managers using Oracle Enterprise Manager have an opportunity to quickly diagnose adverse conditions for a wider range of business systems. Oracle proves an advantage here because it provides monitoring and management to both the Enterprise 2.0 environment and related systems that communicate with it.
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1. Amabile, Teresa M., and Steven J. Kramer. "What Really Motivates Workers." Harvard Business
Review January-February 2010 (2010): 44-45. Print.
2. "Gartner Reveals Five Social Software Predictions for 2010 and Beyond." Press Release - STAM-
FORD, Conn., February 2, 2010 . Gartner, Inc., 2 Feb. 2010. Web. <http://www.gartner.com/it/ page.jsp?id=1293114>.
3. Mancini, John. "8 Reasons You Need a Strategy for Managing Information - Before It's Too Late..."
8 Reasons You Need a Strategy for Managing Information - Before It's Too Late...
(2009): 6-15. 8
Things E-book Series . AIIM, 2009. Web. <http://www.aiim.org/forms/8-reasons.aspx>.
4. Oracle Enterprise Content Management Suite Extreme Performance, Extreme Scalability . Rep.
Oracle Corporation, 2010. Print.
5. Pariseau, Beth. "IDC: Unstructured Data Will Become the Primary Task for Storage." IDC: Unstructured Data Will Become the Primary Task for Storage . IT Knowledge Exchange, TechTarget, 29
Oct. 2008. Web. <http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/storage-soup/idc-unstructureddata-will-become-the-primary-task-for-storage/>.
6. "Remembering "Boss" Kett - News Article - Kettering University." News and Information about Kettering . Kettering University, 13 Oct. 2009. Web. <http://www.kettering.edu/visitors/ storydetail.jsp?storynum=2935>.
7. Toossi, Mitra. "Labor Force Projections to 2018: Older Workers Staying More Active." Monthly Labor Review November 2009 (2009): 30-51. Print.
Kelly. . Rep.
Microsoft Corporation, 2010. Print.
9. Warren, Christina. "LinkedIn Surpasses 50 Million Users." Social Media News and Web Tips – Mashable – The Social Media Guide . Nov. 2009. Web. <http://mashable.com/2009/10/14/linkedin-50millon>.
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Access Control List (ACL): With respect to a computer file system, an access control list (ACL) is a list of permissions attached to an object. An ACL specifies which users—or system processes—are granted access to objects, as well as what operations are allowed to be performed on given objects.
Active Directory (AD) : Microsoft’s Active Directory
Application Development Framework (ADF): Oracle’s Java based software framework which is used by developers to implement the standard structure of an application for a specific development environment.
Blog : A shared on-line journal where people can post diary entries about their personal experiences and hobbies; postings on a blog are usually in chronological order.
Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) : An OASIS standard executable language for Web Services interactions.
Business Process Management (BPM): An organizational process optimization approach to standardize best practices, improve process cycle times, provide work task traceability, and enable workflow change.
Business Process Management Suite (Oracle BPM Suite): Oracle’s Business Process Management
Suite is an integrated set of products to model, automate, manage, simulate, optimize and execute business processes across organizational divisions, systems, and applications.
Client Access License (CAL): Microsoft’s Client Access License model where server software requires user licenses usually found with some amount of volume licensing.
Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR): The year-over-year growth rate of an investment over a specified period of time.
Consolidated Search: The ability to search the immediate unstructured data in the Enterprise 2.0 environment and also additional repositories and data sources, e.g. structured data in ERP or SCM applications, structured and unstructured data from third party data stores.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Software that allows organizations to coordinate marketing, sales, and customer service.
Desktop Integration Suite (DIS): Software package offered by Oracle that integrates the use of UCM into the user’s desktop. This allows the user to work with content items stored in the UCM repository from applications like Windows Explorer, Microsoft Word and Outlook.
Oracle Composer : A tool used at run time to customize WebCenter Spaces site.
Digital Rights Management (DRM): This is a Microsoft term regarding the encryption of documents to secure them once they leave the secure repository.
E2.0: Oracle Enterprise 2.0
Enterprise 2.0: A collection of software infrastructure tools that enables knowledge workers to optimize their job performance.
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Oracle Enterprise 2.0: A suite of products offered by Oracle to incorporate increased worker productivity through the use of collaboration and social networking.
Enterprise Content Management (ECM): Per AIIM, ECM is the strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization's unstructured information, wherever that information exists.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP): A computer based-system used to manage internal and external resources including tangible assets, financial resources, and human resources.
External Applications: Applications that are developed by third parties or customer organizations.
Group Space : A collaboration space, or site within WebCenter allowing group members to collaborate on content, blogs, wikis, etc.
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP): A client-server computing protocol specific to web browsers and web servers.
Information Rights Management (IRM): Software offered by Oracle that allows for the encryption/ protection of documents once they leave the secure repository.
Internal Applications: Applications that are developed by the same software organization (Microsoft/
Oracle).
Java: Java is a programming language expressly designed for use in the distributed environment of the Internet. It was designed to have the “look and feel” of the C++ language, and enforces an object-oriented programming model.
Knowledge Repository : The sum of all data stores across the company that contain structured and unstructured data that is the Intellectual Property of the company.
Knowledge Worker: Organizations’ team members who use information to accomplish work activities.
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) : Application protocol for querying and modifying data using directory services running over TCP/IP.
Metadata : “data about data.” The use of metadata is an emerging practice with close ties to information management.
Microsoft Composites: SharePoint 2010 building blocks for integrating business solutions.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Services (MOSS): 2007 version of Microsoft SharePoint
.NET
: The Microsoft .NET Framework is a software framework that can be installed on computers running Microsoft Windows operating systems. It includes a large library of coded solutions to common programming problems and a virtual machine that manages the execution of programs written specifically for the framework.
Oracle Access Manager (OAM): An Oracle user repository and single sign-on technology.
Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM): Oracle product allowing for the administration of many other
Oracle FMW products.
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Oracle Fusion Middleware (FMW): General term for a line of several Oracle products, including Web-
Center, UCM, OAM, etc.
Persistent Security: Continuous security applied to the Enterprise 2.0 system, processes and users – inside and outside the firewall.
Portlet : Pluggable user interface software components that are managed and displayed in a web portal. Portlets produce fragments of markup code that are aggregated into a portal page.
Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML): XML-based standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data between security domains, that is, between an identity provider (a producer of assertions) and a service provider (a consumer of assertions).
SharePoint 2010 : Microsoft’s Business Collaboration Platform for the enterprise and the Internet.
This Enterprise 2.0 application allows groups to set up a centralized, password protected space for document sharing. Documents can be stored, downloaded and edited, then uploaded for continued sharing.
SAP : Multinational software development and consulting corporation, which provides enterprise software applications and support to businesses of all sizes globally.
Secure Enterprise Search (SES): Oracle product that adds search indexing capabilities to many different types of sources, such as UCM, file system, database table, external web sites, etc.
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA): A flexible set of design principles used during the phases of systems development and integration. A deployed SOA-based architecture will provide a loosely integrated suite of services that can be used within multiple business domains.
Single sign-on (SSO): Application that allows for a single authentication for the user allowing them access to several separate applications.
Supply Chain Management (SCM): The management of organizations raw materials, inventory, and products from supply to end-consumer.
Task flow: Used within WebCenter. A packaged set of functionality that the user can add to his/her personal space. These can also be added by the site administrator to any of the page definitions.
Task flows make up the majority of the Spaces functionality and the power is the ability to use only the ones needed.
Universal Content Management (UCM): Oracle software package offering a secure repository to store content, allow for workflow approvals, revisions, search, etc.
User Interface (UI): General term referring to the user’s graphical experience in working with an application.
Visio: A program for Microsoft Windows that uses vector graphics to create diagrams.
Web Parts : Also called a Web Widget, is an ASP.NET server control which is added to a Web Part Zone on Web Part Pages by users at run time. The controls enable end users to modify the content, appearance, and behavior of SharePoint web pages directly from a browser.
Web 2.0: The second generation of the World Wide Web, especially the movement away from static web pages to dynamic and shareable content and social networking.
WebCenter: Oracle’s portal based technology which is the catalyst to their Enterprise 2.0 product set.
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WebCenter Spaces (WCS): The spaces component of Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g is an out-of-the-box social networking solution that enables business users to create and manage group projects, dynamic online communities, and personal work environments.
WebDAV: Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning. A set of extensions to the HTTP protocol allowing edit and management of files through web servers.
Wiki : Website that allows the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor.
Workflow: Consists of a sequence of connected steps. It is a depiction of a sequence of operations, declared as work of a person, a group of persons, an organization of staff, or one or more simple or complex mechanisms.
Web Service Definition Language (WSDL): An XML format for describing network services as a set of endpoints operating on messages containing either document-oriented or procedure-oriented information.
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Microsoft and Oracle have both recently released new versions of their software:
▪
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 – Sites, Communities, Content, Search, Insights, Composites
▪
Oracle Enterprise 2.0 – Oracle ECM Suite and Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g
Much of this technology has been released in the last few months. Timing is appropriate to evaluate and share TEAM’s experience with the above solutions.
Although this paper considers business implications of the technologies, in-depth research underpins the content of this paper. Technical aspects and details of this information will be forthcoming separate from this paper.
Of the many product components offered by both software companies, TEAM focused this analysis on user interaction, content tools, collaboration, portals, business applications and workflow. Enterprise
2.0 is a broad term and can include areas beyond these topics. Some areas that are beyond the scope of this paper include: real-time communication tools (IM, voice, web conferencing, and E-mail), business intelligence, and performance indicators/data reporting.
TEAM considered the following aspects for generating and assembling the information presented in this paper:
1. TEAM’s experience with implementing the respective software tools.
2. TEAM tested the current software versions (as listed in the Purpose section) in our lab environment.
3. TEAM interviewed members of Microsoft’s testing team and individuals from Oracle’s product management.
4. TEAM validated certain components of our analysis against available sources such as TEAM client contacts, industry analysts’ reports (listed in the References section), publicly available product information, and TEAM’s Enterprise 2.0 practitioners.
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Microsoft
This is an area where SharePoint 2010 provides improvements over Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
2007. The User Interface (UI) in the web browser has been revamped and now presents the users with the ribbon interface. This is consistent with all Microsoft Office applications. This allows knowledge workers to remain in their Microsoft desktop productivity applications of choice - despite the release of a separate Microsoft product (SharePoint 2010). The UI remains consistent across both products.
SharePoint 2010 is integrated with all Microsoft Office 2010 applications including Visio and InfoPath.
Some of the new features include:
▪
Office Backstage – This provides users with rich integration with Microsoft Office apps. The user can gain access to many SharePoint functions from within the Office app by using this function (e.g. updating content metadata from within Office).
▪
PowerPoint Broadcast – This allows users to share presentations from within the PowerPoint application.
▪
Document Co-Authoring using Office 2010 – This allows multiple users to work on different sections of the same document. This feature is handled through the Internet Explorer browser interface. Simultaneous edits by different users require that each user wishing to participate in the co-authoring process have Microsoft Office 2010 installed on their local machine.
▪
SharePoint Workspace 2010 to Manage Offline Documents – Offline documents can now be managed from workspaces in the browser interface compared to Microsoft Office Outlook in the previous version.
This is an area in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 with some noticeable improvements over Microsoft Office
SharePoint Server 2007. The core search capability of SharePoint 2010 is still limited to the repository and people search. This limitation means that knowledge workers may potentially waste time searching in a SharePoint solution for information that they expect to find in a consolidated search. The bigger picture here is that an employee may recreate information that already exists in the company’s knowledge repository.
The FAST Search adds capability to enable users to search content not only across the SharePoint repository and external systems, but also allows users to search other data sources, such as file shares,
Web sites, or line-of-business applications. However, it involves the overhead and extra license cost of an additional search product from Microsoft called ‘FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint’. Determining if additional software costs are involved means understanding the license model between
SharePoint 2010 editions: Foundation, Standard, and Enterprise.
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Oracle
Oracle Enterprise 2.0 provides connectivity into a host of different desktop productivity applications, enabling knowledge workers to be more productive. The Oracle Desktop Integration Suite (Oracle DIS) offers the capability to integrate UCM and WebCenter Suite with desktop applications like OpenOffice,
IBM Lotus Domino, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Outlook, and Windows Explorer.
Using Oracle DIS, the user is able to check in, update, and open documents directly from UCM while working in these native applications – without having to step outside their desktop productivity tool of choice. This enhances productivity for knowledge workers who interact with multiple file types (e.g. lawyers, architects). This is a smart way for organizations to implement a robust content management solution with a high degree of user adoption.
Oracle offers prebuilt findability in its Enterprise 2.0 product set. Oracle Enterprise 2.0 has a wide variety of objects associated with it. These include documents, people connections, discussions, wikis, announcements, etc.
Search – Oracle Enterprise 2.0 natively integrates its enterprise search solution, Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (Oracle SES), to provide knowledge workers with a search or “findability” tool that spans the various types of data and repositories that are critical to daily work tasks. For example, Oracle SES can search the following (Table 3) items in out-of-the-box with Oracle Enterprise 2.0.
Object Types
▪ Documents
▪ Wikis
▪ Blogs
▪ Group
▪ Tags – all Web-
Center “services” participate in the search – either live or crawlbased search
Data Sources
Business Applications
▪ Financial
▪ Human Capital Management
▪ Employee
▪ eLearning
▪ CRM
▪ Supply Chain
Management
Unstructured Data
Management Systems
▪ IBM FileNet & Lotus
▪ MS
▪ OpenText
▪ EMC-Documentum
Table 3
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Microsoft
Microsoft 2010 has improved the social software aspects of SharePoint 2010 to provide knowledge workers with more “Web 2.0” savvy tools to complete their daily work tasks. For example, extended profile management allows knowledge workers to provide a billboard like advertisement of their areas of expertise. This self-service delivery mechanism allows knowledge workers to explicitly outline their area of expertise thus reducing intrusion to their daily work tasks – ensuring higher levels of productivity. Microsoft has updated other key components of their Social Software offering in SharePoint
2010. They include People Connections, Wikis/Blogs, Discussions, and Activity.
SharePoint 2010 provides basic personalization options to the users. There is little improvement in this area compared with the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 version; Table 4 highlights some of the functions that users can perform:
My Site
Users can configure and choose the information that would be displayed to others on their ‘My Site’. They can add features like wikis, blogs and social networking on their site.
Support for
Multilingual User
Interface
If the SharePoint site administrator installs the required language packs and activates the Multilingual User Interface (MUI) service, then people can switch between languages.
Audience Targeting Users can target content to any SharePoint groups or distribution lists.
Web Parts
SharePoint 2010 builds on the Web Part model of the previous version and includes some new Web Parts to allow users to customize their
SharePoint sites and Web pages.
Table 4
Users can add their own personal information to ‘My Site’. Users can change the content and design of their ‘My Site’ and include a public profile where they can share details like contact information and colleagues. Key features include:
User Profiles - The user profile allows users to self-administer both personal information and business knowledge. This enhances knowledge worker productivity because they do not have to contact and wait on IT resources to create a web site with the information.
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Ask Me About – In this section users can add keywords or tags to their profiles allowing for additional search capability related to personal capabilities and interests.
This is an area of improvement in SharePoint 2010 and includes the following updated functionality: tagging, bookmarks, rating, and commenting (note boards). Table 5 elaborates on these updates.
Feature Update Tagging Bookmarks Ratings
Overview Two types of tagging are available to the users -
Social and Expertise.
Provides functionality for social bookmarking and allows users to share bookmarks within their groups.
Users are able to rate the content within the repository on a five point scale. They can also attach their comments to the content.
Business
Applicability
Social tagging adds metadata to content and expertise tagging adds metadata to person’s profile, thus increasing findability.
Allows people to share bookmarks and build knowledge within an organization.
Ratings help increase the search relevance and comments are searchable as well.
This increases the findability of information.
Note Boards
This is a Web Part in SharePoint 2010, which provides users a place to post comments or discussions.
Allows increased and easy communications across business units.
Table 5
These new features provide the following updates. Wikis allow more self service delivery for knowledge workers from a one-to-many audience without having to involve IT – thus knowledge workers can disseminate their information to the target audience in a faster and personalized manner.
SharePoint 2010 provides functionality to start discussions on group sites or on a content item. The discussion comments are posted as replies to the topic and are later available in the search results.
This allows managers to capture the tacit knowledge within users’ minds. As more and more discussions happen online, more knowledge is captured and is available in the search.
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Figure 6 identifies that SharePoint 2010 allows users to share the following:
Table 6
Oracle
Oracle Enterprise 2.0 offers several social software options where a user can interact with other collaborators or knowledge workers. This allows for improved work performance because the social software tools allow for faster and more convenient action on collaborative work tasks. WebCenter
Spaces (within WebCenter Suite 11g) offers several social software options that permit a user to collaborate with others in context of their work environment. This can assist in preventing information overload and can boost productivity. Oracle Enterprise 2.0 enables targeted interaction with peers and provides the self service option to personalize the work environment for knowledge workers – thus providing them with a more focused work environment.
Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g offers several ways for the user to personalize their experience. These are accessed from the personal space sidebar, allowing the knowledge worker to stay in the Oracle
Enterprise 2.0 environment without switching applications on their system. This also saves organizations from having to train employees on separate systems. These different ways of personalization are outlined in Table 7:
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White Paper — Enterprise 2.0
Personal Tags
Saved Searches
Tags applied to content or tag clouds. This allows a user to add custom metadata tags to content to make it easier for them to search at a later time.
Any saved searches within WebCenter the user has created can be reused.
Use Oracle
Composer to:
▪ Add/remove task flows in personal space – using the Composer application (where permissible) the user can add or remove task flows to the page. This allows them to see only their relevant items.
▪ Reorient task flows – the user can reorder the task flows on a given page. This allows them to put the items most accessed/most important at or near the top of the page.
▪ Change the layout of the page.
Buddies
Accessed from the sidebar, this is a list of users only visible to the creator. These are the WebCenter users who the currently logged in user has included to chat with using the integrated instant messaging system (like Oracle WebLogic Communication Server or Microsoft Live
Communication Server)
Watched
Discussions
Personal Notes
Recent
Documents
A user can specify discussion topics to watch, which are easily accessible from the sidebar.
The user has the ability to store small text notes for easy retrieval. This allows them to quickly store and retrieve small bits of information that would not typically be stored in a document. These are visible only the creating user, so they are able to store secure information here as needed.
Allows the user to quickly see the most recently viewed documents.
Also provides a quick link to their personal folder where personal content is stored.
Table 7
It is worth noting that Oracle Enterprise 2.0 has prebuilt integration with Oracle Real Time Decisions.
Oracle Real Time Decisions adds advanced user segmentation for presenting information to Oracle
Enterprise 2.0 Suite. This is a separately licensed product from Oracle Enterprise 2.0.
Oracle Enterprise 2.0 provides departments with a central location to focus on collaboration and social networking – while identifying the right set of people in a business network. WebCenter 11g provides rich out-of-the-box profile management services for knowledge workers that can aid in enhancing the social intelligence of the business group (e.g. profile aggregation from HR systems that is an out-of-the-box feature.)
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Some of this data is visible inside the People Connections service (see next section). The user has the ability to edit all of their personal information from the application – thus minimizing any
“bottlenecks” waiting for a response from IT. Figure 8 depicts which data elements are available:
Visual graphic or photo identifying the individual
Display name, department, email address, etc.
Employee type, employee number, etc.
Phone numbers, addresses, etc.
City, home address, etc.
Table 8
People Connections allows users to invite other users of the application to be included as a part of his/her social network. People Connections also allows the user to stay connected to other users, giving him/her ability to email/instant message quickly from within the context of application interface.
This also allows the user to search for others without having to involve IT since this information is stored in the organization’s integrated Active Directory/LDAP. Keeping users connected allows for easier collaboration on common work items, thus improving overall work performance.
Oracle WebCenter Spaces includes wikis and blogs as task flows that can be added to a page. This allows for WebCenter security to be applied to these items, creating tighter integration within the overall application.
Wiki style content and blog entries can be added to a group space and read by all group space members. This content is secure since only the appropriate users can view/edit the content. Finally, the content contained in wikis and blogs is included in search results, giving the user a single search source to find all necessary content. This is a powerful collaboration tool and adds to WebCenter’s social computing experience.
The Discussions service adds the ability for users to participate in a text-based conversation on a given topic, and to add watches to particular discussions of interest which appear as sidebar icons.
The discussion can be scoped to a particular group space or to the entire application. Topics are created to logically separate the discussion; users add content/comments to the discussion topic. The capability available with this feature is basic in nature. Consider using this content in context with other functionality and making it available within search to improve the utility benefits.
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Several items in WebCenter can be shared with other users. This allows for quick and effective collaboration.
Table 9 identifies the items that can be shared in WebCenter Spaces:
Table 9
Microsoft
Most organizations require solutions for their various lines of business. At this point, the business decision makers turn to their in-house IT development team or to an external implementation partner to develop the customizations for the business unit. This more than often results in the classic “IT as a bottleneck” situation.
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 delivers the concept called “Composites”. This allows users to create solutions using out-of-the-box SharePoint components and tools — without writing code or involving the IT team. It also allows IT teams to focus on higher priority projects and let’s the business owners focus on supporting business processes and promoting collaborative teamwork.
The concept of Composites within Microsoft SharePoint 2010 includes functionality like Business Connectivity Services, SharePoint Designer 2010, Workflows, Access Services, InfoPath Forms Services, and Sandbox Solutions.
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 has several strong integration capabilities with native Microsoft technologies such as Active Directory, Windows Server, Microsoft Office Suite, InfoPath, Silverlight, and Visio.
The main business application integration offered by SharePoint is connectivity with Microsoft Dynamics GP (formerly Great Plains). This prebuilt integration contributes to a productive experience for employees using those systems to complete work tasks. Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010 include Microsoft Business Connectivity Services as an option for companies to connect to data located in sources beyond Microsoft data stores.
Duet has been available since 2005 to provide users with interaction between SAP and Microsoft Office environments. Duet Enterprise is planned for release the second half of 2010. It is offered to extend
SAP business data & processes through Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010. The joint product from SAP and Microsoft boasts configurable templates and building blocks available with the product, in addition to “ready to use” capabilities for collaboration to SAP workflows and reports.
Business Connectivity Service (BCS) is introduced as the next generation of the Business Data Catalogue (BDC) by Microsoft with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. BCS is available as one of the services in Microsoft SharePoint 2010. BCS allows users to connect to external data sources such as
SAP, Siebel, and Oracle. It enables retrieval of external data from back-end business systems into
SharePoint so that end-users can work with the data in a SharePoint environment.
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Microsoft Business Connectivity Services solutions use a set of standardized interfaces to provide access to business data. As a result, implementing solutions can be accomplished without the requirement of learning programming practices for a specific system or adapter for each external data source. Microsoft Business Connectivity Services also provide the run-time environment in which external data solutions are loaded, integrated, and executed.
Note: Microsoft Business Connectivity Services team has a useful blog site that contains use case type articles for developers and technology implementers. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bcs/
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 uses Windows Workflow Foundation as its workflow engine. Windows Workflow Foundation was first introduced in 2005 and is based on .NET Framework 3.0. A notable improvement in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is sending and receiving messages with external systems through predefined programming methods in the Windows Workflow Foundation.
Visual Studio 2010 allows the developer to create and modify workflows, allowing them to deploy these directly to the SharePoint server. Visio 2010 can be used to create the models and supports the
Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) standard. Once created in Visio, these workflows can be edited further in SharePoint Designer 2010. Note that this means Visio licenses are required at an extra cost for the users modeling workflows.
Oracle
Oracle Enterprise 2.0 is integrated with a number of closely related solutions. These integrations provide managers with a contextual and familiar work environment for their employees. Oracle has placed emphasis on integrating Oracle Enterprise 2.0 with a host of related systems, e.g. Financial,
CRM, Identity Management, and Business Process tools. The latest release of Oracle UCM 11g focuses heavily on prebuilt integration with line of business applications and the social aspect of the Oracle
Business Process Management Suite 11g. The combined integration of Oracle Enterprise 2.0 with Business Applications and Business Process Management systems saves managers considerable time and budget by not having their IT equivalent build connectivity to provide context.
Managers can fulfill knowledge workers’ needs with Oracle Enterprise 2.0 for other use cases also. An example is the “Paperless Office” via Imaging and Forms Recognition technology. Oracle provides the ability to intelligently read the contents of the data and leverage it in the right context and correct business application – Financial, Supply Chain, Human Resources (HR) or others. Oracle Enterprise 2.0 integrations provide knowledge workers a panoramic and contextual view of the tools required to get their job done – without having to move to a different environment.
One significant value-add to Oracle Enterprise 2.0 is the existing prebuilt integration to a host of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) business applications.
This leads to effective implementation of the technologies, aids in best practice around process and use, and helps with reduction of staff training in additional systems.
There are several prebuilt software packages offered with Oracle Enterprise 2.0. These range from business applications like E-Business Suite, to workflow productivity tools that allow employees to benefit from prebuilt work processes. Oracle Enterprise 2.0 offers knowledge workers a central location to perform their daily work tasks. For example, Oracle Enterprise 2.0 allows end-users to stay in the user interface yet access content from the financials module of Oracle E-Business Suite or HR files in PeopleSoft. Oracle also offers the inverse – knowledge workers in Siebel CRM can access unstruc-
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White Paper — Enterprise 2.0 tured content associated with a sales deal without leaving the Siebel application. Customers can access Oracle Universal Content Management and Oracle WebCenter Spaces data without even leaving their existing application interface.
In context, document image processing and document access solutions increase the efficiency of line of business operations, while providing a scalable and consolidated enterprise-class content management infrastructure that is easy for IT to manage in support of the organization’s business application needs. All this leads to satisfied knowledge workers and a productive organization.
Financial processes are often distributive in nature, requiring many approvals. They generate very large document volumes that are difficult to manage effectively. TEAM found that Oracle’s Content
Management offers managers prebuilt connectivity to optimize process automation by coupling multiple knowledge workers’ resources (documents) with advanced business processes. This enables knowledge workers and decreases dependency on the IT group and thus the time to turn around IT task items for knowledge workers.
TEAM’s experience with Oracle Enterprise 2.0 and Business Applications integration greatly assisted in the following two uses cases:
▪
TEAM noted that in financial departments there is an opportunity to noticeably decrease costs and cycle times, while increasing process visibility and compliance readiness. Organizations that have already deployed Oracle ERP solutions understand the benefits that can be achieved by automating key pain point aspects of procure-to-pay operations - from gaining early control of outstanding liability and expected cash flow requirements, to ensuring that early payment discounts are realized.
▪
TEAM’s experience with Human Resources customers notes that processes in the HR system are bogged down with paper - from recruiting and onboarding, to performance appraisals and benefits processing. The time and effort spent on managing paper documents decreases departmental productivity while increasing costs. For example, HR department users should be able to quickly locate and access an electronic copy of an applicant’s resume instead of hunting through a filing cabinet, and be able access online all of an employee’s documentation attached to their HR employee records rather than having to access disparate systems to try to find the associated documents.
TEAM found that Oracle provides a ‘one-source dashboard’ to end-users, where they can view data for a wide variety of applications to help ensure a more productive knowledge worker requiring less IT involvement. This in turn frees IT resources for more mission critical IT tasks. Oracle Enterprise 2.0 has prebuilt integrations for PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, E-Business Suite, and Siebel.
Oracle Enterprise 2.0 offers workflow to enhance productivity via two key options – UCM Workflow and Oracle Business Process Management Suite.
UCM workflows are flexible options for managers to leverage automation of tasks for communicating with their teams for review/approval of these types of content items, regardless of their origin. Examples of this type of workflow use are approval of contract updates or review and gating of customer project proposals.
Sample workflows exist in Oracle Content Management for AP processing and exception handling to augment the in-context experience. These can help customers save valuable cycle time in viewing, in data entry, and in instances where invoice processing exceptions need to be managed. These sample workflows are customizable to map to an organization’s specific processes. Continuous process improvement can be facilitated with the included real-time business monitoring capabilities. The Business Activity Monitoring dashboard views offer visibility to in-flight processes for workload monitoring and to identify line of business process bottlenecks.
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White Paper — Enterprise 2.0
Mashup tools in WebCenter Suite allow for easy creation of information and content driven processes.
The Mashup tools and injection capabilities allow knowledge workers to get business processes synched to business requirements. Oracle offers a new feature in the Oracle BPM Suite 11g called
“Social BPM”. These are prebuilt WebCenter templates to track the collaborative and social elements of evolving business processes. WebCenter encapsulates the Social BPM offering from Oracle.
Business Process Management (BPM) allows for broad implementation of workflows across various process requirements. Oracle BPM Suite includes several components including BPM, Business Process
Execution Language (BPEL), and BPEL Process Manager, and Business Activity Monitoring. User interactive and/or system driven workflows can be created and run using BPM and BPEL methods. These workflows do not need to be tied to specific content, or any applications. These workflows are designed using graphical models created in BPM Studio or in JDeveloper. Oracle BPM 11g supports Business Process Modeling Notation 2.0. BPM is very flexible and can be integrated with almost any application, including UCM and WebCenter. The same modeling tools are integrated with the WebCenter portal and community tools: Oracle JDeveloper. There is no extra license cost for this tool.
Oracle’s BPM tools support a consistent and complete interaction throughout the application development life cycle. This is important to consider when embarking on a BPM project because the tools needed cradle-to-grave are available for use by all constituents within the life cycle. From Business
Process Analysis to providing a view into the process activities is depicted in the Figure 2 below:
Figure 2
Authentication is validation of the user’s logon credentials; allowing them access to a given system.
Knowledge workers prefer fewer security steps to access a system or data. There is a fine line between reducing authentication steps (getting closer to the industry approach of “single sign-on”) and maintaining the integrity of the knowledge workers’ environment.
Authorization applies user permissions to resources within the overall knowledge system. Managers need to ensure knowledge workers experience minimal interruption as new systems and corresponding security options get added to the knowledge workers’ environment. Additionally, managers have to
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White Paper — Enterprise 2.0 ensure the authorization of the system is designed so that knowledge workers do not have access to sensitive files (e.g. their own HR report), and that interaction with the IT Group is not required every time a new tool or solution is provided to the knowledge worker.
Rights Management provides the ability to protect content once it leaves the secure repository. Access to the content can be secured while it is in SharePoint or WebCenter, this function applies to content after it leaves the system (i.e. if the document is included in an email to an external user).
While the technologies offered differ by Oracle and Microsoft, the main theme is to encrypt the document. When the user attempts to open the document, the proper security is applied and the user can only perform actions for which they are allowed - such as view, print, or copy.
Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 and Oracle’s WebCenter Suite both have rich security integrations, and these are detailed below.
Microsoft
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 offers two main authentication methods: classic-mode and claims-based.
Both methods provide strong authentication to ensure the integrity of Enterprise 2.0 systems. TEAM found that most Microsoft customers will require claims-based authentication because classic-mode does not support forms-based authentication. TEAM found Microsoft was able to provide single sign-on to SharePoint 2010 with Active Directory and additional third party products.
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 offers granular use of authorization which provides security on a wide variety of “securable objects”. Default Site Groups and Permission Levels are designed into the system.
SharePoint 2010 provides list-level, folder-level, and item-level permissions. SharePoint provides options such as Permission Inheritance. This allows the IT Group to provide a highly flexible and tiered security model to managers. As a result, managers are better empowered to easily provide employees of different rank in an organization varying levels of data access. SharePoint 2010 provides default groups for the team site template. Those groups are Viewers (view only), Visitors (read), Members
(contribute), Designers (design), and Owners (full control).
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 does not offer native external security for SharePoint content. Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS) that is bundled with Windows Server 2008, will also need to be licensed separately. Managers that require security for their data outside the firewall have to ensure that the IT Group takes a few relatively easy steps to integrate SharePoint with AD RMS.
Oracle
In WebCenter Suite 11g users can avail of the self service option to update their password. This eliminates the need for the IT group involvement, and allows end-users to focus on more job specific tasks and less on “logistical” tasks. Oracle also provides single sign-on, enabling managers to provide transparent access to different tools in the Enterprise 2.0 environment.
Oracle mandatorily requires WebLogic Server for authentication of WebCenter users.
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White Paper — Enterprise 2.0
Authorization provided in Oracle WebCenter Spaces 11g offers granular governance to various tools within the Enterprise 2.0 system, e.g. Group Spaces, Document Management (Oracle UCM), Calendar
Events, Wikis, and Discussions. Oracle provides logical security elements that can be applied to the role, like Moderator (group space), Participant (view/edit to content), and Viewer (view only). This allows managers to have controlled security for use of the Oracle Enterprise 2.0 solution.
Tools such as Oracle Composer enable a self-service approach to content contribution for joint Team
Workspaces in Oracle Enterprise 2.0. User group membership offered in WebCenter Suite allows managers to better control groups of users and their access to different Enterprise 2.0 tools (select applications) or resources (certain Workspaces).
User security is integrated with the content repository (Oracle UCM). Users will only see the content that they have rights to, whether accessed directly in Oracle UCM or in WebCenter via the document manager task flow.
Oracle Information Rights Management (Oracle IRM) is available as an Oracle Enterprise 2.0 and Oracle
Fusion Middleware technology. Oracle IRM is licensed separate from WebCenter Suite 11g. Oracle IRM can be integrated with the content repository to provide an additional level of security. It also runs on
Oracle WebLogic Server and can be deployed to both Windows and UNIX based operating systems. This allows managers to enable external security of their unstructured data with less dependency on the company’s IT group. Oracle IRM also offers full text search capability for the encrypted content in both Oracle UCM and SharePoint —as well as in the file systems of the end-users desktops.
There are two main types of scaling – vertical and horizontal.
Vertical scaling is adding additional resources to a given machine running the application, such as additional CPUs and/or memory. Horizontal scaling calls for adding additional machines to the architected solution. As long as the application can take advantage of multiple machines, horizontal scaling usually provides greater benefit from a performance improvement standpoint. Horizontal scaling also offers embedded disaster recovery, where if one machine fails, the other machine can take the full load until the first machine is back online.
Microsoft
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 offers four main modes for the architected solution. Each mode is applicable to a certain type of deployment; from development to a full enterprise wide solution. The four main modes are as follows:
2. Small Farm Deployment
3. Medium Farm Deployment
4. Large Farm Deployment
Two of these modes are described below.
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White Paper — Enterprise 2.0
This deployment consists of one server running both Microsoft SharePoint 2010 as well as SQL Server.
This is appropriate for very small implementations, such as an evaluation or a development instance.
The deployment would look like the following (Figure 3)
.
Figure 3
A small farm deployment introduces a multiple machine solution. In this scenario, the database is housed on a single (or clustered instance), while SharePoint is hosted on two machines. This offers limited high availability and fail-over.
The medium size architecture builds on the small farm deployment with three distinct tiers to the solution: the web-tier, the application-tier, and the database-tier. This solution can be scaled horizontally as needed to meet the needs of the organization as additional servers can be added to any tier. This medium farm deployment is the most common architecture and is pictured on the next page
(Figure 4).
Figure 4
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White Paper — Enterprise 2.0
Oracle
WebCenter can be deployed in a single node environment where all the components are running on a single instance – as depicted in Figure 5 below .
Figure 5
In Figure 5, all of the WebCenter components (Spaces, Portlets, and Services) are hosted in the same instance of WebLogic Server and are all on the same physical box. The MDS (metadata repository) can be located on the same box, but typically is located in the organization’s database farm. This architecture is relatively simple, and the scalability is limited to the amount of resources that can be applied to the machine (i.e. how much RAM and the number/speed of CPUs applied). This architecture does not support any high availability or disaster recovery solution. This typically is a good solution for a development environment.
WebCenter can be deployed in a clustered environment, where the application is running on multiple machines. A load balancer can be used to direct traffic to the appropriate machine based on the algorithm set. This is pictured figure 6 below.
Figure 6
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White Paper — Enterprise 2.0
The above architecture has all the applications running in the same instance of WebLogic server on both physical hosts; i.e. this has identical solutions linked on two machines that allow for greater performance. This leverages horizontal scaling, and is typically the best approach to enterprise wide extensibility. This solution allows multiple machines to serve the same application to end-users, providing improved performance. Disaster recovery and high availability is natively built into this architecture. If one machine fails, another machine in the cluster can pick up the load until the failed machine is brought back on line. Finally, scaling WebCenter in this horizontal fashion allows an organization to easily add additional machines to the architecture to take on additional application loads.
See this white paper for more scalability details on the UCM/ECM content repository. [4] www.oracle.com/us/products/middleware/content-management/ecm-extreme-performance-wp-
077977.pdf
Systems management is not limited to performance monitoring, restarts, and system level connections (databases, external applications, etc.). Depending on an organization’s resources, a technical administrator (Network or Infrastructure Specialist) may perform systems management and application business rules management tasks – though organizations that can afford a more business savvy administrator may often realize more business value.
Microsoft
Administration across Microsoft SharePoint 2010 has improved and provides visibility into fundamental aspects of the Enterprise 2.0 system. Here is a snapshot of the new and improved management capabilities in SharePoint 2010:
Access Service – This service allows IT staff to manage the Enterprise 2.0 solution from a remote location and, in essence, provides the option for 24/7 support to managers for mission critical Enterprise 2.0 systems.
Managed Metadata Service – This new service in SharePoint 2010 allows contextual use of the Enterprise 2.0 system by allowing users to contribute metadata (data about data) and by allowing IT administrators to manage this metadata in a centralized manner.
Search Services – The vastly improved search service in SharePoint 2010 crawls knowledge worker data and indexes it for a faster response time.
User Profile Service – This service adds support for ‘My Site’ Web sites, profile pages, and social tagging – thus permitting knowledge workers to be more responsive in their role and independent of IT to execute on work tasks within the Enterprise 2.0 system.
Web Analytics Server – This service has improved in SharePoint 2010 but lacks some key components required for advanced reports. Analytics in SharePoint 2010 provides managers numerous channels of feedback, including how well a business web site is getting traffic, and the ability to search reports on key topics for employees, etc. – that all serve to provide a better Enterprise 2.0 “service” to employees.
Overall, SharePoint Central Administration provides the ability for a system administrator to work effectively with a manager to manage all workflows and applications in the SharePoint 2010 environment.
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White Paper — Enterprise 2.0
Oracle
The management of the Oracle Enterprise 2.0 environment is a combination of product specific tools (within WebCenter Suite and UCM) and Oracle Enterprise Manager. The Oracle Enterprise Manager tool is included with Oracle Enterprise 2.0 out-of-the-box and is a comprehensive tool that provides breadth (management of applications within and outside of the Enterprise 2.0 environment) and depth (advanced security and diagnostics).
Oracle Enterprise Manager is not limited to providing management for Oracle Enterprise 2.0. It provides management of supporting (Fusion Middleware) and related (Fusion Applications) processes and applications. This ability to provide wide level management enables managers to make both technology and related business decisions more holistically. Due to the fact that Oracle Enterprise
Manager can manage resources beyond Enterprise 2.0 solutions, IT staff roles can be consolidated.
Oracle Enterprise Manager can save managers money by providing visibility into more IT resources within the IT environment, thus allowing IT staff to understand what IT resources (hardware, applications, storage, etc.) are being utilized – or underutilized. This level of transparency allows IT staff to better communicate to managers on how to optimize use of the Enterprise 2.0 environment.
TEAM Informatics, Inc. is a Minnesota-based software engineering firm with 200+ customers worldwide. TEAM specializes in Enterprise 2.0 areas such as portal, enterprise content management, and business process management.
Offerings include expert professional services, managed services such as support and data center hosting, formal training, and a growing set of Enterprise 2.0-related products. TEAM is privately held, owned by its 75 employees, and has experienced a 75% compounded annual growth rate over the past decade.
3900 Northwoods Drive, Suite 350 - Arden Hills, MN 55112 +1 651 222 8326 sales@teaminformatics.com www.teaminformatics.com
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