Last week I attended ODTUG KScope23, the premier Oracle Developer conference of the year, where Oracle experts and enthusiasts gather to share knowledge and insight into the world of Oracle technologies. After a pause of 3 years I finally was able to attend and present again, making this my 7th appearance as a speaker at KScope. The event was in Aurora (Co.) next to Denver. It was great to see many friends from all over the world again and also to make some new.
My presentations
I presented 2 sessions. The first one was about chatbots, and how to integrate Oracle Digital Assistant into APEX. In this session, I delved into the integration of Oracle Digital Assistant (ODA) in APEX. Oracle Digital Assistant (ODA) is Oracle’s enterprise solution for Chatbots. It has been around for a while and has evolved into one of the most advanced chatbot solutions currently available. There are many ways to use it. One of them is to integrate ODA with Oracle APEX. In this session you will learn fundamental concepts of ODA, how to setup a Digital Assistant and finally how you can add this DA to an APEX application. I highlighted some of the key characteristics of ODA and explained how to develop a Digital Assistant. I started with some of the basic concepts of ODA before going into the key integration concepts. All of this was backed by real live demo’s and in the end I shared some advanced features as take aways.
My second presentation was about extending Oracle SaaS (Software as a Service) with Oracle Visual Builder Studio (VBS). I explained how to work with Oracle SaaS and the more or less integrated Visual Builder Studio environment. After explaining how to create an extension with Visual Builder, I finished by showing a demo of going even on step further: Create your own custom Oracle JET component, publish it to the Oracle Component Exchange in your VBS, and next us it in your SaaS extension. Great demo for which I got some good feedback. Details of this particular demo can be found here: https://www.bohort.nl/2023/01/30/using-the-oracle-component-exchange/
From Oracle there is a great live-lab to attend so you can also try to extend SaaS yourself: https://apexapps.oracle.com/pls/apex/r/dbpm/livelabs/run-workshop?p210_wid=3431&p210_wec=&session=12873107027006
Social Stuff
Meeting people, networking and having a couple of beers obviously is also a very important part of conferences. For this the Oracle ACE Dinner was a great opportunity, as was the special event organised by ODTUG. Great food and fun at the Denver Aquarium.
Finally
Overall the attendance wasn’t as big as in the past. Apparently the world of conferencing in the post COVID era has changed, or, people still need to re-discover the value of on-site and in-person events. My presentations where in two new tracks at the conference; Emerging Technologies and Extending Oracle SaaS, which both are my core expertise areas. As this where two new tracks, it was interesting to see how the attendees would receive them. Both my sessions did not get a very big crowd, but as these where new tracks the attendance was not too bad. This was similar in other sessions in this track. I am curious how this will be next year and will try to work with ODTUG to make these tracks a success.
