Announcement: UKOUG DE SIG 14-JUN-2007

It's just over four weeks until the second DE SIG of the year. It's the June meeting so it must be the Midlands; specifically the Oracle offices at Blythe Valley Park.

The agenda is focused on Web Services and Service Oriented Architecture. I didn't really plan it that way. It just so happened that the range of presentations I was offered seemed to coalesce around this space. There has been a lot of hype around SOA for several years. This intensified a couple of years ago when Oracle acquired Collaxa BPEL Server (now BPEL Process Manager). I think it's fair to say that the buzzstorm was met with a certain amount of scepticism from the more jaded amongst us. However, SOA and BPEL are still here, and probably most of us have at least considered using a web service to share data or functionality between disjunct systems. So now seems like a good time to catch up with what's going on.

Jon Ellard from Oracle kicks off the SIG with a presentation on their offerings in the E-Content Management arena. Then Grant Ronald continues his crusade to pull Forms users into the twenty-first century with a presentation on integrating BPEL with Oracle Forms. From the opposing camp we are going to have Xen Lategan from Microsoft talking on integrating applications with BizTalk; I'm not sure what the Oracle spin is on that one, but I'm assured there will be one. We have a yet-to-be-named speaker, this time from Rocela, presenting on securing Web Services. This is a very interesting area, because I think the apparent insecurity of web services has been a barrier to more widespread adoption. We have a third speaker from Oracle, Danny Roach (who has obviously got a taste for presenting) giving us a case study on embedding web services within web-based applications.

It would be nice to see lots of people in BVP on June 14th. Every organisation which has a UKOUG membership can send one delegate for free to this meeting, so petition your boss to attend. It's not a jolly, it's training on the cheap ;-) If your organisation is based in the UK and uses Oracle but isn't a member of the UKOUG, why the heck isn't it?

Update

Xen's talk on Microsoft BizTalk now has a title which makes plain the Oracle spin: BizTalk Integration and the Oracle NET 3.0 Adapter Experience. I hope to understand what that means by the end of the SIG ;)