We updated the web site today to include bios for Howie and Steve as well as new information about the Plumtree partnership.
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I am very pleased to announce that Steve Markoff, an outstanding software engineer with over 10 years of product development experience and a background in Plumtree and open source, has joined the bdg team.
Steve has already been working on a Java- and Plumtree-based product licensing application for one of our marquee customers, Wind River. He also led an effort at Boeing to develop reference documentation and performance testing plans for their Apache and Tomcat configurations.
Prior to joining bdg fulltime, Steve worked on mission-critical applications for Wells Fargo and built a distributed music encoding application for Netscape/AOL that handles millions of records and several terabytes of data. He also integrated web services and caching middleware using a Java and open source stack.
His first encounter with Plumtree was back in 2001 when he designed and built Plumtree’s bug tracking system from the ground up using SQL Server, JDBC, Java, XML, Tomcat and Plumtree. Given that his customer was the incredibly bright and demanding Plumtree engineering team, he had his work cut out for him and he did a stellar job. (I can speak from personal experience, because I used this system myself for several years.)
Prior to contracting at Plumtree, Steve built J2EE web applications on behalf of a startup company called Emerald Solutions that served customers in the gaming, outdoor adventure, and biotech industries. Prior to his startup experience, he spent almost five years working for IBM Global Services where he built client/server and web applications in Java.
Steve graduated cum laude from the CS Honors program at Hamilton College in 1995.
I speak for all of us at bdg when I say that I’m extremely excited to add Steve to our team. Please join me in welcoming him to bdg!
I am very pleased to announce the addition of the newest member of our team, portal industry veteran and consultant extraordinaire, Howie Bagley.
Howie will be continuing his distinguished career in the world of enterprise portal consulting by taking over the West Region as Vice President of Sales and Service. Howie has over 13 years of professional IT project management and consulting experience spanning multiple industry verticals and horizontal products but has spent the past 6+ years focusing on enterprise portals.
Prior to joining bdg on Monday, Howie served as a Manager for Deliotte Consulting in San Francisco, where he worked on various Plumtree proposals and projects. Before that, he spent a year as a Solution Architect at CIBER, leading deployments at several Plumtree customer sites including The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), The City of Eugene and San Francisco Municipal Railway (MUNI).
Howie also spent more than three years working for Plumtree’s PSO, where he created over 30 Plumtree demo sites, including the ones that won over Starbucks, Boeing and Pfizer. He also led Plumtree implementations at Guess Jeans, Chevron, Sequoia and Johnson & Johnson. At several of his implementations, he also managed the complete design strategy for their portal deployments. When not working with customers, he taught training courses in Portal Strategy, Portal Administration, Portlet Development with the EDK and UI Customization and developed a CSS layer that was integrated into Plumtree to help ease customization of the UI.
Prior to his PSO career at Plumtree, Howie built a portal from scratch using Microsoft technologies for the US Navy while a consultant for Pricewaterhouse Coopers.
Howie is fluent in Java and .NET and an expert in all versions of all the Plumtree products. He knows both the Microsoft (Windows, SQL Server, IIS) and Java (Solaris/Linux, Oracle, Tomcat/Weblogic/Websphere/Aapche) portal stacks and can provide expert analysis of any portal deployment from a strategic or a technical perspective. He also has working knowledge of SAP, Documentum, Oracle Financials, PeopleSoft, Interwoven, Siebel, Lotus Notes and Lexis-Nexus.
Howie earned his BA in Political Science from the University of Utah and his MA in Advertising from Syracuse.
I speak for all of us when I say that I cannot even begin to express how excited I am to bring someone of such caliber and with this level of experience and track record on to our already talented and dynamic group.
Please join me in welcoming Howie Bagley to the bdg team!
I usually don’t take much interest in legal matters, but I found this tidbit quite interesting and even a bit entertaining.
Two weeks ago, in an appellate court ruling, Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker wrote that a patent infringement suit filed by Datamize against Plumtree Software should be essentially thrown out the window (by what’s called a summary judgment) based on the fact that the words “aesthetically pleasing” make Datamize’s patent invalid.
Intrigued? I was.
It turns out that Datamize filed patent 6,014,137 back in early 1997, right around the same time that Plumtree founders Joe McVeigh, Glenn Kelman and Kirill Sheynkman were dreaming up version 1.0 of the Plumtree portal and getting Plumtree Software, Inc. off the ground. The patent tries to lay claim to the act of “developing and maintaining user interface screens for multimedia kiosk systems” that can be “customized quickly and easily” while following “good standards of aesthetics and user friendliness.”
The appellate court’s main objection to the patent was the use of the phrase “aesthetically pleasing” because the definition of aesthetics has too much to do with deciding what’s beautiful and what’s not, which is far too subjective to be enforceable. In other words, as we all know, beauty is in the eye of the beerholder, even when it comes to kiosks!
I’m just happy to see another worthless software patent get thrown out for two reasons. One is that I have a particular distaste for overly broad and blatantly obvious software patents (e.g. the classic Amazon one-click ordering example, 5,960,411) and two is that I have sharp disdain for companies that try to use their patents to squeeze money out of the market-leader in their industry simply because they’re losing and acting like sore losers.
If you want to win in this business (or any business), make your product or service better, market it better, sell it better and support it better than your competitors. At least that’s our philosophy at bdg.
I’m very pleased to announce that bdg has been selected by Plumtree as a co-sponsor of this year’s Odyssey+ADC, which is Plumtree’s User Conference and Advanced Developer Course.
For more information on Odyssey+ADC and to see the other sponsors, visit the Plumtree Odyssey+ADC partner page.
If you’re at all interested in Plumtree, I highly recommend that you attend Odyssey to get an understanding of the business and strategy side or the ADC to get the technical perspective.
Hopefully I’ll see you there!
bdg plans to offer a 5-day Plumtree Training Course in the Washington DC Metro Area starting on August 22nd. We’re combining our two most popular courses into one jam-packed week. The first three days will cover Plumtree Administration followed by two days of Portlet Development with the EDK. The course will be given in Herndon, VA about 10 minutes from Dulles Airport.
If you’re interested, you may download the complete syllabi from our Web site.
There are no pre-requisites for the Plumtree Administration course other than a basic understanding of Web applications. The Portlet Development course requires strong programming skills in either Java or .NET including Web programming concepts such as posting forms, retrieving parameters from the querystring and working with basic Javascript for form validation.
The price for this course is $500/day. You may attend the 3-day segment, the 2-day segment or the entire week.
There is a limit of 10 participants. You must sign up by Friday, August 12th and bdg must receive payment by Friday, August 19th. We now accept VISA/MC payments in addition to corporate checks and money orders.
To sign up, please send an e-mail to [email protected]. If you have any questions, please send us an e-mail or call us at 703 234 7910.
I am very pleased to announce that bdg has joined Plumtree’s Synergy Alliance program. Please check out our partner landing page on www.plumtree.com.
We’ve been “drinking the Plumtree Kool-Aid” since 1998, but now it’s finally official.
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We’ve moved!
Effective immediately, bdg’s new place of business is located at 13800 Coppermine Road in Herndon, Virginia, just 10 minutes from Washington Dulles International Airport and in the heart of the Dulles Tech Corridor. You may now reach us at 703 234 7910.
If you’re in the area, arrange to pay us a visit by sending a note to [email protected].
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bdg’s new hires and site changes
All of us at bdg are very pleased to welcome the newest members of our team: Rich Weinhold and Eric Bucchere.
Rich, our resident PHP and Plumtree guru, has made his claim to fame by developing the PHP EDK, which is now available for download on the Plumtree Code Share (requires a login and password) or by contacting bdg.
Eric, bdg’s Account Manager, serves as the main POC for all of our implementations, helping customers get their issues resolved quickly and efficiently.
We’ve updated the Web site to reflect these new additions and also made a few other changes, including adding a page about our committment to open source development, which has come to fruition with the release of the Plumtree PHP EDK 5.1.
I am very pleased to announce that on Friday, 8 July 2005, bdg released the PHP EDK 5.1 to the Plumtree Code Share. Largely due to a Herculean effort on the part of Rich Weinhold, our resident PHP and Plumtree Guru, we were able to take the com.plumtree.remote.portlet.* package from zero to released in just three weeks.
We are offering this code up for redistribution and use under the BSD License, which is the standard for the Plumtree Code Share.
In order to access the code (for now), you’ll need to create a login on portal.plumtree.com. We are currently considering other distribution methods, such as SourceForge, and we’ll make an announcement should we choose to go down that path.
We look forward to seeing some PHP portlets start to emerge for the Plumtree platform. If you’re interested in developing a PHP portlet for Plumtree, let us know — we’d love to hear from you.