Function1 » PEP

ALI Maintenance Packs Remove Licensing Entirely

matt — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:45:00 +0000

Well, Oracle’s gift keeps givin’: First, they published unlimited license keys for all ALUI products, and now, they’ve release maintenance packs for everything with all the licensing stripped out completely!

Go Oracle!

Update June 9, 2008: Sorry ladies and gents, I just spent the day trying to upgrade our dev environment here. After downloading hundreds of megabytes worth of installer packages that wouldn’t even open in Winzip, I tried again and was able to open them. Sadly, they (at least Publisher and Collab, and I assume the rest of them) still required license keys. I suspect what happened is that whovever uploaded the real updated installers didn’t FTP them as binary files (which would corrupt the files), and they rolled back to the original versions today. I’m sure it’s coming, but I was also a little disappointed in this false start…

Update June 10, 2008: OK, my fault. The link above makes it pretty clear that the delicensed products are on Oracle’s download site and not available through BEA’s download center.

R.I.P. ALI E-Licensing: the wicked witch is dead!

matt — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 01:29:00 +0000

My love for e-licensing at BEA, or lack thereof, was no secret. I was mostly appalled as an employee when I was working at client sites – who completely trusted me with administrative access to their servers – and tried to get a license key. Often this process took days, and occasionally took weeks. In fact, we’ve got a client struggling with trying to wrangle legit keys from eLicensing now, who didn’t even know that that particular product (Analytics) even HAD keys!

Well, no more. The wicked witch is dead. The clouds have parted. Angels are singing. Oracle has released generic license keys to legitimately licensed customers.

Now, people, I’m not saying this gives everyone free reign to steal Oracle products or use them in ways they’re not licensed for. I have no idea what Oracle’s new licensing scheme is – particularly around using instances in development and DR environments (a common sore point with license keys) – so be good with these things. I understand Oracle focuses more on customer audits than oppressive licensing schemes, so make sure you stay legit – contact your sales person if you’ve got any questions!

Without further ado, you can download the generic ALI keys here.

Use them responsibly – our customers always maintained compliance at Plumtree without the keys, and I’m sure you all will again (well, I guess they did: I was just a consultant – what do I know?).

ALUI Pages Quick Start Video

matt — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 13:40:29 +0000

If you’ve been living under a rock for the past 6 months or so, perhaps you haven’t heard of PEP, Bea’s Web 2.0 products (Pages, Ensemble, and Pathways). A lot has already been written about these products – see Bea’s “En.terpri.se” blog site or this introduction by Bea’s own Gerald Kanapathy, so I won’t get too deep into describing them.

What i did want to share with you was this video quick-start showing how easy it is to get Pages up and running (created by Bea for the En.terpri.se site). It’s less than 10 minutes long and should give you a feel for how things are set up.

What I found interesting was that you can enable anonymous administrative access to make demo’ing Pages easier (since you don’t have to worry about creating accounts), and the little trick about “enabling experimental features” at about 6:45 in the video.

While researching these “undocumented features”, I found some documentation on these features :). Check out the Unsupported Tech Preview Features article for info on enabling maps, Yahoo and Google search, and other neat features.