Expand with Shared Services

Shared services provide benefits in both social networking and personal productivity. For example, in a discussion forum topic, a participant could e-mail or IM the author from the context of the discussion forum. The author could also add links to, say, a PDF in the document library that has more information about the forum topic.

The following services fall into both categories:

• Documents service: Enables users to display and manage their documents and files in a content repository. This service can integrate with other tools, such as Oracle AutoVue.
  
  
• Events service: Provides group calendars to enable users to schedule meetings, appointments, and any other type of team event. Additionally, a dedicated Events page is available to every group space where the moderator has enabled the Events service.
  
  
• Links service: Provides an easy way for users to share their knowledge with others. Often, there are many tasks that require users to remember the relationship between different items. For example, an employee might have to remember where to file their expense reports, and also have to remember where the document describing the rules has been stored. Using Links, users can connect seemingly unrelated items together. In this way, they do not have to rely on memory and new users receive the benefit of their work.
  
  
• Lists service: Allows users to create and manage all types of lists. This is an extremely powerful capability for users to keep track of meeting action items, open issues, new product or project ideas, project status, and more.
  
  
• Tags service: Provides a way for users to mark items that they use infrequently so that they can find them quickly when required. In addition, tagging allows for others to find items based on their own labels instead of a corporate taxonomy. The capability to tag items delivers a better organization of information based on how users really use and label the items, often called a folksonomy. Since tags are directly integrated with Searching, users can immediately find what they need.
  
  
• Oracle WebCenter Analytics: Enables users to create usage reports for any custom Web application. Additionally, Oracle WebCenter Analytics delivers a set of usage reports that can be plugged into Oracle WebCenter Interaction and Oracle WebLogic Portal.
  
  
• Oracle WebCenter Ensemble: A proxy and security management system that enables users to add portlets as UI widgets to any container and on any platform, integrate external content into a portal, and create lightweight mashups.