GovLoop Project of the Week - Have You Met OraTweet?

While searching for an enterprise micro-blogging tool for my own job, I ran across OraTweet; developed by Noel Portual. I contacted the developer to interview him, but he never responded. However, this tool has so much potential for those working with enterprise systems whom are looking for a micro-blogging solution, I felt it was still important to spotlight OraTweet for project of the week. Currently OraTweet is still in the pilot stage, but appears to be successful and people are using it and it is starting to get a good amount of news coverage.

OraTweet is a micro-blogging platform that allows you to broadcast messages to a wide audience and is built with Oracle Application Express (APEX) which is a rapid web application development tool for the Oracle database.

Some of the key features include:

* Fully scalable.
* Fully customizable.
* Oracle SSO Integration.
* Group creation.
* Set your current Status.
* URL Shortner
* Extendable API.
* IM Integration*.
* Twitter integration.
* TinyURL integration.

Noel states the following on his blog:

"User adoption is also a plus since users can use their existing IM clients to interact with OraTweet. OraTweet also has the option of sending and getting updates from Twitter with PL/SQL, thus giving the user the option to post to the world or just internally."

The Beginning of OraTweet:

"From the beginning I got great feedback from our own Web 2.0 AppsLab adoption team and got some great pointers on corporate adoption. Since this is a side project I let OraTweet sit for a few weeks without much advertisement while I was doing improvements (and my actual work!). But Meg Bear and the Fusion Talent Management Products team stumbled over OraTweet while looking for a solution to bridge the communication gap within their global team. They contacted me, and we worked together on some improvements and launched a pilot.
At this point Carl Backstrom from the APEX team offered to help me. Now thanks to him we have a working API, and we have plans to deploy OraTweet globally once it is ready. Having this API lets OraTweet work as a global messaging system allowing third parties and platforms such as OpenSocial interact with OraTweet users.

After one week of alpha/beta life and not much internal advertisement OraTweeters numbers went from a dozen to the hundreds and is still growing, which shows that there is a hidden demand for internal communication tools like this. I like the fact that OraTweet flattens enterprise hierarchies and opens communication between all levels.

Now the best part is that I'm planning to release OraTweet for free as an APEX package once all the beta wrinkles are out. It works great next to the other free packages such as ARIA, which is our internal employee directory."

What Noel visions for OraTweet:

"What I envision as I release OraTweet is seeing companies, universities, and organizations running their own OraTweet instance, allowing them to keep their information private yet strengthening their own internal communities. It should be the same way we do email and instant messaging: We manage our own information, which allows us to broadcast messages safely in our own microcosm."