I heard from someone on the inside that at noon on Thursday, October 20th, Plumtree officially becomes the AquaLogic devision of BEA.
Author: Christopher Bucchere
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Episode 1: A Nickel Goes a Long Way
This first episode features Papa Len telling a story of what you could get for a nickel in New York city in the early 20th century. It also explains how he got into stamp collecting, which became a lifelong passion.
Download and listen to “A Nickel Goes a Long Way.”
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Meet Papa Len
Leonard W. Leeds was an amateur historian and news aficionado with amazing archival skills. He was also my grandfather-in-law. Although I only knew him for a short time, he left a lasting impact on me.
He captured major world events of the past 60 years on reel-to-reel, cassette tape and video (when it became available). It’s only suiting to his amazing legacy that he should have his own podcast!
Mr. Leeds, affectionately known by his grandchildren as “Papa Len,” passed away on May 13th, 2005. He is survived by his two sons Rick and Steve; a daughter Judith; four grandchildren, Michael, David Jennifer and Allison; and one great grandchild, Penelope.
I was going through the possessions Papa Len left behind and found a set of five 90 minute tapes that were, like all his tapes, meticulously labeled. But unlike most of his tapes, which captured historical events, these were labeled “LWL Memoirs.”
What I uncovered was a treasure trove of remarkable, heartwarming stories told by a phenomenal storyteller.
These oral memoirs were recorded by Leonard in September of 1987. On them, his dear friend Jane Abrams interviews him on 90 minute Maxell magnetic cassette tape.
I am currently editing the first episode and I will be releasing it in the near future.
My wife Allison (Papa Len’s grand daughter) and I sincerely hope that you enjoy these incredible stories so that you may share in Papa Len’s legacy.
Here I am just seconds after stepping into the Booth of Pain and before the booth was bombarded by projectiles and Silly String. 
I figured I would post a picture before I started sweating profusely.
I figured I would post a picture before I started sweating profusely.I’m very pleased to announce that bdg has officially kicked off our very much irregular and irreverent Plumtree podcast!
Please download and listen to our first episode, which talks about the background of your host, yours truly, Chris Bucchere; gives a rundown of recent news in the Plumtree world including G6 features and an Odyssey recap; and ends with a trivia challenge.
See if you can be our first winner by answering the question at the end of the podcast. Enjoy!
With a resounding victory this morning in the Booth of Pain, bdg put the wraps on what will probably be the last Plumtree Odyssey.
We sent five people this year: me (President & CEO), Eric Bucchere (Account Manager) and Rich Weinhold (Plumtree Developer) representing the East Coast and Howie Bagley (VP Sales & Service) and Steve Markoff (Plumtree Architect) representing the West Coast. We had the opportunity to meet many of you at our booth – thank you for stopping by and introducing yourselves! In the upcoming weeks we’ll be raffling off the iPod Nano that was on display in our booth. If you asked us to follow up with you, expect to receive a follow up call or e-mail in the next 2-3 weeks.
Although the official feedback has not been tallied up yet, the talk we gave with Wind River was standing room only and I personally received lots of positive comments including one person who said that our session was the highlight of this year’s Odyssey. Another piece of feedback I got from Jack Jones of DTIC was that without our training (given in 2004), they would have gotten nowhere with their Plumtree project.
Winning the Booth of Pain competition was the icing on the cake. Despite the heat, the claustrophobic booth and numerous distractions from David Meyer (including scaling my booth, firing projectiles at me and scrawling the word “LOSER” across my booth with Silly String), I was able to compile and assemble the PTMingle application in about 25 or 30 minutes and then give a demo, which was very well received by the audience. In a humorous moment, I clicked on a del.icio.us hobby link related to “Romance Novels” and it displayed a half naked, hunky long haired dude with a cheesy smile (think Fabio). I quickly closed the window amid quite a bit of laughter from the audience.
PTMingle at this point is no more than a concept application/prototype, but expect to see the code used in the Booth of Pain competition up on the Code Share within the next few days. Plumtree data visualization in hyperbolic trees, profile integration with del.icio.us and Google maps integration are all hot topics right now and all areas of interest that bdg would like to pursue, so you should keep an eye out for more offerings from bdg that exhibit these features.
In closing, I wanted to send a resounding THANK YOU out to Yi Hong Xu of Wind River for her help with the presentation, to Mattias Cudich for plugging this blog during his Holland presentation (more on this later), to all of you who attended our presentation or the Booth of Pain, to all of you who stopped by our booth and last but certainly not least to the stellar team of bdg-ers who made this event a huge success for bdg.
On a personal note, this year’s Odyssey had a bittersweet feel for me. It was my sixth Odyssey, having attended four as a Plumtree employee, two as a bdg-er and missing just one (in 2003) and it will most likely be the last. We do, however, look forward to seeing all of you again next year at BEA World in San Francisco.
Look for more posts from me regarding the material presented at Odyssey, especially on Project Holland, which has exciting implications for future BEA/Plumtree offerings.
We’re going for a big splash this year at the final Odyssey+ADC while Plumtree is still, well, Plumtree.
Plumtree just released the onsite guide showing bdg in several places, so I figured it was time to announce our plans for this great user conference, which takes place Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of next week.
For starters, we’re sponsoring at the bronze level, which includes a booth in the partner pavilion. At the booth, we’ll be handing out bdg mouse pads, marketing literature about PTSkinz and the PHP EDK, giving demos of PTSkinz and giving away an iPod Nano!
In addition to our booth presence, we’ll be co-presenting on Monday at 3:30 PM in the Regency 2 ballroom with Plumtree and bdg customer Wind River. The topic of our presentation is “Keeping it Simple: Best Practices in User Interface Design and Customization.”
Lastly, we’ll be competing in the Booth of Pain, a coding competition that will show attendees how to assemble a composite application in Plumtree from source code. That takes place at 10:15 AM on Wednesay in the Diplomat 3,4 & 5 ballrooms.
Please stop by our booth, pick up a free mouse pad, register to win an iPod Nano and join us for our presentation with Wind River and/or the Booth of Pain.
We look forward to seeing you at Odyssey!
Or IBM? Or Oracle?
The author of this brief article seems to think that all three companies have BEA in their sites.
Interesting . . . .
Late yesterday, Plumtree announced the release of their G6 line of products. They have made everything generally available for download for partners and customers at portal.plumtree.com.
A couple things have been renamed. The Portal has become the “Foundation,” Content Server has become “Publisher,” Authentication Web Services have become “Identity Services,” Crawler Web Services have become “Content Services,” the .NET Web Controls have had the word “Consumer” tacked on the end, and the EDK (once known as the GDK), is now contained within something called the PDK. Not sure what happened to the WSRP container, but the JSR 168 container has been updated for G6 as well.
The major difference is that the Foundation product and many of the services are now entirely Java-based or entirely C#-based. This means some interesting things, including the fact that although Plumtree is only officially supporting RedHat Linux 3 ES Update 3 right now, there’s a good chance that the Java version will run (and run well) on other versions of Linux and even on Solaris or even Solaris X86.
On Windows, the support matrix includes IIS 6.0 and SQL Server 2000 SP3a.
For the non-Microsofties, Oracle 9i and Oracle 10G (with or without RAC) are supported along with Tomcat 5.0.28, IBM WebSphere 6.0.1 and of course BEA 8.1 SP4.
If you’re just silly like that, you can also run any of those configurations on Windows, but I’d have to ask you “why?!?” if you did. 😉
Major feature differences include a re-tooled (and now web-based) object migration, enhanced subportals (now called user experiences), improved user syncrhonization, enhanced Snapshot Queries and Best Best, and improved tools for integrating existing web applications into the portal.
Everyone at bdg is excited about this release and we look forward to helping our customers upgrade to the latest and greatest, starting whenever they’re ready.
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bdg web site updates
We updated the web site today to include bios for Howie and Steve as well as new information about the Plumtree partnership.