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John Bimson

With 8+ years of portal development, implementation, architecture, and strategy experience, John has amassed a wealth and variety of knowledge of the portal space. Having spent five years in the WebLogic Portal group at BEA, John has been on both sides of "the wall" dividing portal vendors from implementers. This knowledge of software products' inner workings gives him a unique perspective as he strives to get the best out of technologies applied to business problems. Since joining Perficient, John has been involved with several full-scale portal implementations, focusing on content integration and security. Now, in the National Portal Practice John works to guide clients' strategic portal direction, create new Perficient offerings, and keep apprised of the latest portal and web trends.

Blogs from this Author

Oracle OpenWorld Just Around the Corner

In a little over a month, the annual Oracle OpenWorld (OOW) will kick off in San Francisco.  If you’ve never been, it’s a sight to behold.  40,000 or so people show up to learn about all things Oracle, which has been a rapidly expanding set of “all things.”  Within the last two-plus years, Oracle has […]

Using GIMP for Quick and Easy Wireframes

Recently, at a client, I was presented with the problem of creating updates to an existing UI (important note: “updates” not complete redo).  To aide overall understanding of the goals of the project, I set out to create some wireframes.  None of this is unusual, of course, but I had a choice to make as […]

Learning Oracle ADF and WCF

If you want to get started with Oracle’s “strategic” portal offering, WebCenter Framework (WCF), it’s best to start by gaining an understanding of Oracle’s Application Development Framework (ADF), because ADF forms the foundation of WCF.  The ADF is Oracle’s development framework that will be used internally for their own application development (i.e. most to all […]

JDeveloper on Fedora Gotcha

Recently, I ran across a mystifying situation while working with an ADF application in Oracle’s JDeveloper.  In all fairness, I was working on an unsupported platform (Fedora 11) to see how well the free operating system would work as a development environment. When firing up the Oracle Business Component Browser, none of my changes to […]

The Implications of Reusable Components

In the early days of automobile manufacturing, buying a complete car was not possible.  Instead, a buyer would purchase a chassis from a chassis manufacturer and then hire a coachbuilder to build out a body and fit it to the chassis.  As production became more sophisticated and manufacturers did more of their own coach-building internally, […]

Cloud Computing Categories

I spent a day this week at an Oracle Cloud Computing event in Minneapolis.  One of the interesting points made was a distinction between various types of cloud computing.  I hadn’t thought much about it before, but I think it’s a really useful model to help people start to understand the new and somewhat amorphous […]

When to Use a Portal

As you may have gathered, Mike is at the Gartner Portals, Content, & Collaboration Conference this week.  I’ve been here as well, th0ugh busy with some other things, so this is my first post on the subject. At one of the early sessions of the week Gene Phifer stated something to the effect of “If […]

Oracle OpenWorld Part 2: Portal

Since Oracle’s acquisition of BEA last year, Oracle Portal has been working through its strategy and messaging.  Things have become clearer over the last 12+ months. As I mentioned in a recent post, WebCenter Spaces was released in early July of this year.  Now, the general marketing push is behind WebCenter Spaces and WebCenter Framework. […]

Oracle OpenWorld

While Mike spent last week at IBM’s Portal Excellence Conference, I was in San Francisco at Oracle OpenWorld (OOW).  As always, it was an enormous, overwhelming celebration of all things Oracle.  Of course, I spent my time focusing on a few technologies in the portal; identity and access management; and governance, risk, and compliance spaces. […]

WebCenter Spaces

With the release of WebCenter Spaces on July 1 of this year (as part of WebCenter Suite 11g), Oracle has made an interesting statement.  When you look at Spaces, it seems to do a lot of the things that WebCenter Interaction (formerly BEA ALUI and before that Plumtree Portal) does.  The key difference is that […]

The Whole World is Not a Nail (and What We Should do About it)

I’ve been thinking lately about the relationship between portals and other applications that they expose.  I find it strange when people want to recreate a viable application in a portal.  Just because it’s possible doesn’t make it a good idea.  It’s amazing how pervasive this idea is. Until now, I’ve always thought of a portal […]

Netbooks

I’m a believer in the explosion of Netbooks into the PC marketplace over the last year or so (for those of you that don’t know what a netbook is, an excellent rundown on their history can be found on Wired). As a proud cheapskate, the idea of a $300 – $400 laptop is very appealing. As a […]

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