On Sunday, September 19th, 2010 at the Keynote Larry Ellison announced the launch of the Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel.  Here are a few pages from Oracle’s site describing benefits, why, etc.:

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/173453
http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/linux/ubreakable-enterprise-kernel-linux-173350.html

The process to upgrade your Oracle Enterprise Linux (now simply known as Oracle Linux) to the Oracle Enterprise Kernel involves a few fairly simple steps.  All of these steps assume you have a current Oracle Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN) Subscription.  A variety of these items have also been made available on the Public Yum Server as well.

First, prepare your ULN Subscription by following these steps:

1. Log into linux.oracle.com with your ULN or SSO ID
2. Click the name of the system you want to upgrade
3. Click Manage Subscriptions button
4. Subscribe to the Enterprise Linux 5 Latest (x86_64) channel
5. Subscribe to the Oracle Linux 5 Latest (x86_64) channel
6. Click Save Subscriptions buttons

Second, upgrade your system by following these steps:

1. Log into the system as root
2. Run up2date -f kernel, wait for checks and installation
3. Run up2date -f kernel-headers, wait for checks and installation
4. Reboot system
5. Log into the system as root
6. Execute uname -r
7. Confirm 2.6.32.x is now running

At this point you will likely want to run up2date oracle-validated or up2date oracle-linux to ensure you have all the latest packages from those configurations as well.

If you are attending Oracle OpenWorld 2010 and you are interested in E2.0 technologies you may find the PDF listed below handy.  It is a short list of keynotes, sessions and parties so you can be “in the know”!

http://www.oracle.com/us/openworld/oow10-focuson-enterprise-166860.pdf

Some of you may have used or even still have an excel spreadsheet which can be used to update metadata. This spreadsheet was originally provided by the former content server creator, Stellent. I am actually unaware of the name or names of the original author or authors and as such have not credited them here. Leave your name to take credit!  Some people love it.  Some people hate it.  Either way, it has been useful to me. 
The original style sheet allowed users to specify additional custom columns named after their custom metadata. It offered two buttons. The first was “submit query’ which invoked the user defined query string located to the left of the button. The second button “update’ would cycle through each of the result records from the query and update the metadata based on the values in the spreadsheet. 

I have updated the spreadsheet in two ways. I have added a login button which simply causes a prompt for user credentials. The importance of this button is the reduction in steps needed to update secured content. With the original spreadsheet the user first had to search on public content only and invoke an update which then prompted for credentials after which the user could conduct another search which would then have the credentials to access secured content. With the login button we can now skip this cycle. The second change is a new worksheet which contains configuration variables for the searches. Currently there are three configuration variables including ResultCount, SortField and SortOrder. 


Additionally I often get asked how one can use this spreadsheet to update metadata only check-in’s. The trick is an additional column named createPrimaryMetaFile. This column should be set to TRUE if that record represents a metadata only check in. 
  

This file and all updates to it are presented here as-is with no support implied or otherwise. As always, use at your own risk.

I attended Brian "Bex" Huff's session entitled "Enterprise 2.0: What it is and How You'll Fail". At first attendance was a little sparse, but by 20 minutes in we got more than 15 people in the room. One of the biggest themes of the message was about focus. Focus on Culture versus Technology. This is one of those points that is so foundational to the concept at hand that once you hear you say to yourself, "Well sure, that's obvious", but you would not normally come up with it on your own.

We also heard an echo from the old Stellent days when he reminded us of the importance of "Getting the right information at the right time to the right people in the right format and context". This reminded me of the big launch of Profiles with 7.5.x Stellent Content Server. It was true/relevant/important then and it still is today.

There were a lot of concepts presented in the presentation and of them all the concept of Social Capital was my favorite. This was somewhat new to me. The concept was not new, but being able to linguistically wrap a name around the subject was a neat discovery. The concept of Social Capital is described on Wikipedia. Basically it can be thought of as referring to the value of the connection between employees and potentially even vendors. People like to work with their friends and so projects get done quicker or more thoroughly.

In the end, I wonder how much push back corporate America will engage in when liability of all this Enterprise 2.0 culture and technology come to bear. While companies may accept it at first, I am concerned about a backlash that comes from committing so much of what would have been hallway conversations, water cooler talk, quick phone calls, etc., into a written, searchable, liable format.

All in all, great talk. It is certainly though provoking.

Brian "Bex" Huff and Andy MacMillan delivered a session called "A Pragmatic Strategy for Oracle ECM" which pushed some of the integration and cooperative concepts that have been pervasive among the keynotes and sessions today. They describe their approach to content management as more realistic than the message presented by many vendors as "Hey, we will do it all". Their approach is also more tolerant of your existing content repositories and your investment in those elements.

They describe a situation where a client has several existing content repositories. Some of these can be consolidated into your new strategic content management repository. Some of them cannot. This can be due to technical issues or the fact that you have spent a lot of money on those repositories and/or users are entrenched in using that repository already. These previously existing repositories that perhaps service tremendous load or importance but are not capable or selected as the strategic repository are termed tactical repositories.

The session then moved on to discuss federated software solutions to help control and integrate your existing, tactical repositories with the feature set of your new strategic enterprise wide solution. Examples of these federated software applications included Secure Enterprise Search and Information Rights Management.

Additionally, these two guys are writing a book together, potentially entitled "Transform Infoglut: A Pragmatic Strategy for Oracle Enterprise Content Management" and it will hopefully be delivered sometime around January 2009.