As Published In November/December 2006

Innovators and leaders drive the content of Oracle Magazine.

Each issue of Oracle Magazine includes similar types of content: Oracle product, partner, event, and community news; features about Oracle products and customers; hands-on information on how to use Oracle technology; and community commentary.

The specific content that becomes each issue, however, travels a long road, through nomination, scrutiny, creation, more scrutiny, revision, and, finally, print. Input for this content comes via Oracle product managers, Oracle subject matter experts, customers, initiatives, technology events, authors, and more.

Most of the time, it's what's new, innovative, and leads the market that drives our content. New technologies, new Oracle technology and industry solutions, customers succeeding with new Oracle solutions, new application architectures, and new applications are what most of our customers want to read about, so that's what we want to cover in Oracle Magazine.

It's Good to Have Options

The July/August and September/October 2006 issues of Oracle Magazine included articles about Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Enterprise Manager Management Packs, Oracle Partitioning, Oracle Content Database, Oracle Records Database, Oracle Database Vault, Oracle Advanced Security, and Oracle Label Security. All of these offerings have something in common—they are Oracle Database options, powerful extensions to Oracle Database. I highly recommend that you follow the link in nextSTEPS to read more about them.

Now, we did not specifically plan to cover Oracle Database options in these last two issues. We ran these articles because the Oracle people behind the technologies, Oracle customers, and our authors demonstrated the technical innovation of these options and how these technologies lead the market.

And as much as technology innovation drives the content of Oracle Magazine, we do not plan a magazine issue just a few weeks before publication based on the newest technology. We generally start work on an issue six months before the issue date, and we don't start an issue without a content plan. We create an editorial calendar with issue content outlined more than a year in advance. (We posted our 2007 calendar in August 2006.) On this calendar we identify some content areas, such as security, high availability, and content management, as well as some specific products, such as Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control. We revise the editorial calendar continuously, sometimes moving articles to accommodate product release schedules and sometimes switching from a content area to a specific product (or vice versa).

With some of the newer Oracle Database options that we've recently covered—specifically Oracle Content Database, Oracle Records Database, and Oracle Database Vault—we were planning articles on content management and security many months before these options were in production. Their introduction, as well customers' success with beta versions, put these new options on our revised editorial calendar.

And as much as we are involved in deciding on the article topics and producing the finished articles, I don't think we actually dictate the technologies that we cover in each issue. To me, compelling Oracle technology solutions nominate themselves for coverage in Oracle Magazine and vote for themselves with their features and competitive qualities. We editors simply recognize the innovation in the winners.

People Win

Next Steps READ more about Oracle Database options VIEW the Oracle Magazine editorial calendar

In the same way that we recognize the strongest Oracle technology solutions with articles in Oracle Magazine, we recognize the people who bring these solutions to life in the enterprise with the Oracle Magazine Editors' Choice Awards.

The Editors' Choice award candidates do not nominate themselves; rather, Oracle and Oracle partner representatives nominate them. The representatives complete a lengthy form with information about a candidate's leadership and innovation, and these completed nomination forms are exercises in passion that demonstrate each candidate's successes.

To choose the winners, all the editors need to do is recognize the leadership and innovation in the candidates. All the candidates are leaders and innovators, but even amid elite company, the winners stand out. And we're proud to recognize them one more time.

Tom Haunert, Editor in Chief
tom.haunert@oracle.com