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What You Need to Know About Putting Web 2.0 to Work
The new internet power users in your organization are already using Web 2.0 services every day in their personal use of the Web. Now they’re itching to put them to use at work. It’s time to give your IT department the tools to deliver Web 2.0 to your enterprise.
Leveraging Web 2.0 services with your existing IT infrastructure and enterprise applications can empower your users to combine relevant information into a single location so they can be more productive. It also allows them to form ad hoc associations with other users inside and outside an organization as part of a “social network” that allows for faster and more meaningful collaborations and improved processes and business performance.
The challenge, of course, is that Web 2.0 services like wikis, discussion forums, blogs, and mashups are traditionally unstructured and uncontrolled, whereas IT applications are inherently structured and controlled. To inject Web 2.0 into your enterprise, you must allow structured and secured interactions that don’t impede the ad hoc nature of this new user model.
The Power of Making the Right Connections in Real Time
One of the many powerful advantages of Web 2.0 in the enterprise is enabling people to create linkages, make connections, and communicate in real time in easy-to-use, intuitive ways. For example, discussion forums, blogs or even wikis are ideal ways to enable your users to fully participate, make connections and communicate by discussing topics and sharing ideas and opinions. Participants can be geographically dispersed, living and working in different time zones.
In a Web 2.0 scenario, the discussion forum becomes even more valuable if other related pieces of information can be referenced directly—for example, a document, a customer case in another application, or a Web service—as attachments to the discussion thread. The document or customer case in another application being discussed would “know” that it had been referenced and would indicate the reference with a connection back to the information in the discussion thread.
In addition, the identity of a discussion forum participant could be linked with his or her presence status on an instant messenger and viewed by others. Others looking at the thread could be allowed to contact the person directly via IM or easily identify the appropriate communication mechanism based on the user’s presence status – perhaps email or mobile phone.
Another aspect of Web 2.0 is accessibility of services. Today’s information workers are a very mobile workforce and need to access enterprise systems from anywhere and any device. Modern communications technology allows services to follow a user. Cell phones, mobile devices, and even inter-network routing (for example, from IM to phone) provide an unprecedented level of service availability and access to applications.
With the introduction of “over IP” services, such as voice over IP (VoIP), and channel-independent communication protocols, such as session initiation protocol (SIP), the endpoint and communication channel become irrelevant. Communication requests are routed between different types of devices, whether phones, IM clients, or other SIP-enabled devices.
Intelligent routing, in combination with aggregation of services, ensures that messages and information end up where they need to be—where users are.
Integrating Web Services; Integrating with Your IT Infrastructure
Effective Web 2.0 applications are driven by a tight web of semantic connections between technically unrelated objects. It is common for a user to switch between different applications—and hence change context multiple times—while working on a single business case. And, connecting unrelated services is usually a challenge for the IT department. Integrating each service with the relevant infrastructure, and then maintaining the connection with the reliability and availability expected in an enterprise application, is a costly proposition.
To effectively put these valuable Web 2.0 services to work in your enterprise means that they need to be capable of being tightly integrated into your IT infrastructure. The answer for most IT departments is to leverage existing assets using a service-oriented architecture that is enabled by pre-integrated middleware.
Oracle’s product strategy is geared to help you do just that. Oracle Fusion Middleware is a comprehensive family of integrated middleware that includes Oracle SOA Suite for building and managing service-oriented architectures, Oracle WebCenter for building Web 2.0-enabled composite applications, Oracle Service Delivery Platform for creating IP-based communications, and Oracle Content Management for managing structured and unstructured content in the Oracle Database, and much more.
Web 2.0—Putting the Pieces Together
Web 2.0 is not about inventing something new; almost all of the pieces that comprise the concept have been around for some time. It’s about how to leverage existing tools and services in new ways; it’s about how to reflect contextual relationships between apparently unrelated services to produce a holistic view of things—to create systems that people want to use, rather than have to use.
Learn more about preintegrated, hot-pluggable Oracle Fusion Middleware
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