When developing on top of a portal platform to support an intranet or extranet, a portion of the development time is spent adjusting the out-of-box user templates to adjust the look and feel of the platform for your organization. Generally your deployment will not need to look like anything like the sites posted on http://cssremix.com/ or http://www.webcreme.com/, but will meet business needs by adjusting basic elements like navigation, color palate and logo placement.

Ok - so this evening whilst surfing blog waves I came across Andrejus Baranovskis’s Blog.
First I have to say the logo for Red Samurai is awesome!!
And from what I can see Andrejus Baranovskis’s is definatley a ninja / samurai developer - dedicated to improving Oracle and producing some great detailed guides in his blog - [...]

So I was a bit bored over the weekend and decided to do the Oracle geek thing and watch a few presentation..
To my surprise; I actually stumbled across quite a good video on Vimeo to do with WCI by Chris Bucchere.
He walks you through quite a few real-world mashups of open source applications written in [...]

Good news - the Retire Phase is actually more fun than the Manage Phase.

I hope you guys enjoy this latest skin - as you can see its based on the original white design - I did back in December with a few slight alterations.
No I didn’t reskin firefox aswell, before anyone comments
Search for NASA Night Launch to download the firefox skin if you really like it..
Yes I [...]

CMS Report has an interesting rant about micropayments, and how they never got off the ground... many people have tried to convince me to pay a quarter or a nickle to view their online content, but I've never done so. Every few years, somebody comes up with some master plan based on the theory that "this time it's different!!!" But sadly -- and totally predictably -- they failed.

That’s right its a WhatchaMCallIt…
Yes, yes wierd random blog post - I was playing with photoshop last night and randomly came up with the above.

I have no idea as of yet what I`m going to use it for - but I`m sure there is a project or two I can use this with and maybe  [...]

Another UCM blogger Andre Almar on the scene and he even has a UCM 11g screenshot!!
Here today … gone tomorrow.. [Screenshots have now been removed booo..]
Real or fake I don`t know as I`m still waiting to get my hands on it through the early adopter program - knowing my luck I`ll get it same [...]

For those of you investigating how to skin spaces or ADFs here are my recommended useful quick links
Oracle Composer Component Properties and Files
Defining and Applying Styles to Core Customizable Components for 10g documentation incorrect!!

Customizing Page Skins at Runtime in WebCenter Spaces (11.1.1.2.0)
WebCenter Customizable Components API Reference
ADF Faces Rich Client CSS API
Apache MyFaces
Extending WebCenter [...]

One of the first things I do when it comes to skinning WebCenter Spaces is to disable the CSS Compression option.
By default this option is turned on - converting any readable class name::
.af_panelFormLayout_label-cell {
color: #534741
}
to a small obfuscated string::
.x123 {color: #534741}
One thing I was surprised to see is that although the css compressions strips all [...]

I had a chance to share some of my thoughts around implementation using the latest E2.0 technologies from Oracle. It would be great to hear people's thoughts about them.

Most people would probably agree that creating content is the enjoyable part of the content life cycle. Management, on the other hand, is generally not. This is why we thankfully have an opportunity to leverage meta data, security and other settings that have been applied or inherited in the prior parts of our governance process.

If your taking that next step and upgrading Site Studio there is one major upgrade note you should know about.. Which isn’t really documented in detail within any of the OTN docs.
Version 10.1.3.3.3 Build 8.x/9.x+ or site studio now updates the xml schema of data files to come in line with 10gR4.
So if you are [...]

A lot of folks have been waiting for Oracle to release their 11g version of their ECM suite. We were told to expect it calendar year 2010... which I guess means early late February!

In this installment of our Minimalist Approach to Content Governance we finally get to the fun part of the content creation process! Once the content requester has addressed the items outlined in the Request Phase it is time to setup and begin the production of content.

Stumbled across a relatively new blogger in the scene Ge2orge Magessy - check out his blog quite a lot of useful blogging info here on Webcenter.
I`ll be subscribing to his blog - I especially like his guide on setting up Jdev on a mac!! how great is that.. and there was me starting it up [...]

Its now been around 2 weeks of Oracle officially owning Sun - Its going to be an interesting year; as far as I can see with which apps will be dropped and which will be kept on both sides of the fence…
As some of you know, Sun have a very nice portal app “Glass Fish” [...]

Fusion ECM 

Man... I was just blogging last week about how social search systems like Aardvark would completely change the dynamic of search engines... particularly for mobile users. I said that it was perhaps the best sales model for folks like Twitter and Facebook to challenge the dominance of Google.

For each project, regardless of size, it is critical to understand the required ownership, business purpose, prerequisite education / resources needed to execute and success criteria around it. Without doing this, there is no way to get a handle on the content life-cyle, resulting in a mass of orphaned material.

Oreilly has an interesting article about the future of search engines...

Let's be honest - content governance is far from an exciting topic. BUT the potential of a very small intranet team creating and maintaining a platform that provides an organization with relevant, high value information, helping workers to get their jobs done with greater accuracy and in less time is exciting.

We all know UCM Stellent never really follows standards.. Sigh..
So when it comes to trying to call a field to set an event against it in javascript it can be quite tricky as the field IDs are dynamically generated..
If your not using any JS frameworks like JQuery and want a simple solution to be able [...]

Last month I was over at the Oracle offices in Reading; redeveloping the Avitek Sample Portal working to achieve a design that would be more appealing to future  clients and help show the potential of what could be done with WebCenter.
We all know that Oracle always provide powerful functionality over aesthetics and a  good interface [...]

CMS Watch was recently asked should I let my implementation consultants pick my ECM vendor? That's a pretty tough one to answer. On the one hand, your system integrator would have a fairly informed opinion about what software would work best for your problem. On the other hand, they may have a financial incentive to push you towards one vendor over another... so even if the vendor merely guides the process, there could be danger.

Tremendous value and cost savings can be realized by rationalizing multiple, existing content repositories into a single platform.

Well, that took long enough! The European Union finally approved the merger... so now it's official that Oracle owns Sun (and Java!). Oracle is having a press conference about their Sun strategy this Wednesday, January 27, at 9am Pacific Time. They covered a lot of this at Open World 2009... but now I guess it will be official.

This book is -- hands down -- the best book on probability and randomness written for the general public.

Happy new year bloggers!!
Unfortunately I came down with the dreaded swine flu.. not a great start for me in the new year.. sigh..
But I`m just about mended and coming out of quarantine..
Anyways.. Its a new year and new things to do and explore..
For you Oracle guys..
Check out Peter Moskovits blog:: Updated White Paper [...]