Tag: customers

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The Social Collective

my.SXSW Goes Mobile

South by Southwest (SXSW) Music, Film and Interactive Conferences and Festivals has launched the official mobile social networking and scheduling tool for their 23rd annual event, which begins Friday, March 13th. Powered by the industry-leading whitelabel conference software application, The Social Collective, the mobile site integrates seamlessly with my.SXSW’s networking, messaging and calendaring features. Open to registrants of the film, music or interactive events, the site can be accessed by loading http://my.SXSW.com in most mobile phone web browsers, including Blackberry, iPhone, Andriod, Treo and other handsets with modern web-browsing capabilities.

SXSW teamed up with The Social Collective to provide anywhere/anytime access to all the official films, music showcases, parties, interactive panels and other events via my.SXSW.

People who have phones with web-browsing capabilities can use my.SXSW’s lightweight and highly optomized mobile web experience. People who do not can still build their personal schedules using my.SXSW via a full-blown web browser and then use the provided iCal synchronization to push events to Apple’s iCal, the Google Calendar, or any other iCal-compliant software, which can then be synchronized with virtually any mobile device. my.SXSW also supports personal schedule export into Microsoft Outlook, which can be synchronized with many other types of phones including Blackberry and Treo devices. Finally, in leiu of (or in addition to) using a mobile phone calendar, registrants can use my.SXSW to sign up for SXSW Alerts, which provide realtime schedule updates via SMS.

“We didn’t want people to feel that they needed to lug their laptops around at SXSW,” said founder and CEO of The Social Collective, Chris Bucchere.

“Nearly everyone is already going to be carrying some sort of mobile device and we didn’t want to leave anyone in the dark.”

“So if you have an overacheiving ‘smartphone,’ you can use my.SXSW through your phone’s web browser. If your phone is more of a C-student, you can probably still synchronize your calendar using iCal, Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook. If your phone is more of the ‘beauty school dropout’ variety, at least you can still use SMS.”

The launch of my.SXSW’s mobile experience will make finding contacts, finding great events, and finding the locations of the different venues dead-simple, quick and portable. With The Social Collective’s modular design, enabling the mobile version of the hosted software was easy and painless. The resulting mobile web application carries the SXSW trademark and brand, just like the rest of the integrated social networking, messaging and scheduling features of my.SXSW.

“Our goals were simple: provide SXSW-branded social networking and scheduling capabilities to the greatest number and variety of mobile devices possible,” said Scott Wilcox, CTO of SXSW.

“Between The Social Collective and SXSW Alerts, we can easily reach nearly all of our registrants and provide a great user experience.”

SXSW opens Friday, March 13th with the concurrent film and interactive festivals. The music festival starts Wednesday, March 18th. Find out more about SXSW at http://my.sxsw.com

The Social Collective provides whitelabeled social networking, messaging and calendaring for events of all shapes and sizes. Visit http://thesocialcollective.com to find out how they can help you grow and serve the community around your next event.

Categories
The Social Collective

Feedback Loop

We’ve been keeping a close watch on what people are saying about my.SXSW and trying to respond to as much of the feedback as possible, either directly from us or via the folks at SXSW.

It’s no surprise — in this “2.0” world of hypersharing and total transparency — that we’ve seen literally hundreds of blog posts and tweets about my.SXSW, but we’ve only received a handful of e-mails.

We don’t really like e-mail anyway, so this is cool.

The SXSW help desk has received a lot of support requests via e-mail, with issue #1 being that the welcome e-mails and password reset e-mails aren’t showing up, most likely due to downstream spam filters. Ah, the irony! Again, this is why e-mail sucks, but it’s sort of something that’s hard to live with and also hard to live without.

So, how are we tracking and responding to feedback?

We’re using a jury-rigged system of free tools: search.twitter.com (remember Summize?), Google Alerts and Google Reader.

This “system” only takes a few minutes to set up and it can be used to track virtually anything being said about anything in a public space on the interwebs.

Basically, you can set up “comprehensive” Google Alerts and have them “delivered” via feed (or e-mail, but you already know how we feel about that). You can do the same with search.twitter.com.

Simply plug the feeds into Google Reader, organize them into folders/tags and voila, your feedback tracking system is ready to roll.

We’re searching for terms like “SXSW,” so obviously we get a lot of false positives. However, it’s easy to manually “star” or “share” items in Google reader and then publish the resulting list of shared or starred items back out as a feed to share with your team via a web page or, if you like, put it back in Google Reader. (Yikes! We know that sounds like it might be infinitely or mutually recursive, but actually, it works — trust us, we’ve tried it.)

So, here it is: a pretty comprehensive list of all the good, the bad and the ugly things people are saying about my.SXSW. Hey, it’s all public information on the interwebs anyway, so why not republish it all in one place?

Categories
The Social Collective

BIL Conference 2009 Selects The Social Collective to Provide Conference Social Network

(I-Newswire) – Long Beach, CA

The second annual BIL Conference, scheduled to take place on February 7th and 8th, 2009, announced today that they have selected Herndon, VA-based BDG‘s white-label conference social networking platform, The Social Collective, as their provider for conference registration and social networking services.

BIL is an ad-hoc conference for people changing the world in big ways. It’s a place for passionate people to come together to energize, brainstorm, and take action. Last year’s BIL had over 300 attendees. This year, almost twice that have already signed up on the social network. Confirmed speakers include TED Prize winners Cameron Sinclair of Architecture for Humanity and Eric Rasmussen of InSTEDD.

Other proposed talks include Silona Bonewald’s (founder of The League of Technical Voters) “Transparent Government Starting With The Federal Budget” and Ben Huh’s (of I Can Has Cheezburger) “What’s Funny About The Interwebs.”

BIL’s “unconference” format permits anyone to speak, so interested parties may sign up to give a talk.

The talks are then “favorited” to the main stage by peers, or remain in a breakout room if they don’t receive enough favorites.

“We chose The Social Collective because it’s a great way to herd smart people,” said BIL Conference co-chair Todd Huffman. “In addition to posting new talks and adding talks to their favorites, people can create and join groups, engage in discussions, make a new network of friends and keep their new relationships alive post-conference. The format was a great fit for BIL, but I can see it working well at more structured events, too.”

“We’re really enjoying the experience of watching and participating in the growth of the online BIL community, powered by The Social Collective,” said BDG chief and one of the The Social Collective developers, Chris Bucchere. “The BIL team has been a pleasure to work with and the community has been very supportive of our efforts. The outstanding content and people involved should make BIL one of the must-attend events of 2009.”

For additional information or to register for free, visit the BIL Conference web site.

Categories
bdg The Social Collective

SXSW to Use The Social Collective for SXSW 2009!

sxswithe_social_collectiveI am very pleased to announce that today bdg and SXSW have decided to partner to use The Social Collective to create a new registrant community for SXSW 2009.

More details will follow soon. But for now, please join me in a collective w00t for the entire bdg team while we celebrate this amazing milestone for us. We all look forward to seeing The Social Collective in action at SXSW 2009!

Categories
bdg The Social Collective

SXSW to Use The Social Collective for SXSW 2009!

sxswithe_social_collectiveI am very pleased to announce that today bdg and SXSW have decided to partner to use The Social Collective to create a new registrant community for SXSW 2009.

More details will follow soon. But for now, please join me in a collective w00t for the entire bdg team while we celebrate this amazing milestone for us. We all look forward to seeing The Social Collective in action at SXSW 2009!

Categories
bdg dev2dev Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

Middleware for the REST of us

bea_think_oracleI’m sitting in my third Oracle Fusion Middleware briefing, this one at the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC. Thomas Kurian has been going through all the products in the Oracle stack in excruciating detail.

First let me say this: Thomas Kurian is a really smart guy. He holds an BS in EE from Princeton summa cum laude (that’s Latin for really fucking good). He holds an MBA from the Stanford GSB. He’s been working for Oracle forever and he even knows how to pronounce Fuego (FWAY-go). I’m dutifully impressed.

Unfortunately, all those academic credentials and 10+ years in the industry is barely the minimum requirement for getting your head around the middleware space. Either I don’t have enough (0) letters after my name, or I just don’t get it.

For starters, there are way too many products — the middleware space is filled with “ceremonious complexity” (to quote Neal Ford). App servers, data services layers, service buses, web service producers and consumers — even portals, content management and collaboration has been sucked into this space. Don’t get me wrong: the goals of the stack are admirable — middleware tries to glue together all the heterogeneous, fragmented systems in the enterprise. Everyone knows that most enterprises are a mess of disparate systems and they need this glue to provide unified user experiences that hide the complexity of these systems from the people who have to use them. That makes the world a better place for everybody.

That was also, not coincidentally, one of Plumtree’s founding principles and the concept — integrating enterprise systems to improve the user experience — has guided my career since I got my lowly undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Stanford in 1998.

So, it’s a good concept, however, if you’re considering middleware because you’re trying to clean up the mess that your enterprise has become, you need to ask yourself the following fundamental question:

Does middleware add to or subtract from the overall complexity of your enterprise?

Your enterprise is already insanely complicated. You’ve got Java, .NET, perhaps Sharepoint, maybe an enterprise ERP system like SAP and say, an enterprise open source CRM system like SugarCRM or a hosted service like SalesForce.com. The bleeding edge IT folks and even (god forbid) people outside of IT are installing wikis written in PHP (e.g. MediaWiki) along with collaborative software like Basecamp written in Ruby on Rails. I’m not even going to mention all the green-screen mainframe apps still lurking in the enterprise — wait, I just did. This veritable cornucopia of systems just scratches the surface of what exists at many large — and even some mid-to-small-sized companies — today.

So clearly there’s a widespread problem. But what’s the solution?

At the end of his impressive presentation, I asked Thomas the following question:

“How can middleware from Oracle/BEA help you make sense of the fragmented, heterogeneous enterprise when you have existing collaborative (web 2.0) technologies written in PHP, Ruby on Rails, etc. running rampant throughout IT and beyond?”

(Okay, so I wasn’t exactly that pithy, but it was something close to that.)

His Aladdin-esque answer came in the form of three choices:

    1. “Take control of” and “centralize” your IT systems by replacing everything with Oracle Web Center spaces
    2. Ditto by migrating everything to UCM (Stellant)
    3. Build a services framework and aggregate everything in one of four ways:
        1. Use a Java transaction layer (JSR 227)
        2. Use a portlet spec like JSR 168 or WSRP
        3. Build RESTful web services
        4. Use the WebPart adapter for Sharepoint

      I like to call answers one and two “The SAP Approach.” In other words, we’re SAP, we’re German, wir geben nicht einen Scheiße about your existing enterprise software, you’re now going to do it the SAP way (or the highway).

Will companies buy into that? Some companies may. Many will not. ERP is a well understood space, so this approach has worked for SAP. Enterprise 2.0 is not terribly well understood, so that means even more diversity in the enterprise software milieu.

So the only approach that I believe in is #3: integrate. Choose the right tool for the right problem, e.g. the WebPart adapter if you’re using Sharepoint. Use REST when appropriate, e.g. when you need a lightweight way to send some JSON or XML across the wire between nonstandard or homegrown apps. Use JSR 168/286 for your Java applications. Even use SOAP if the backend application already supports it.

Keep things loosely coupled so that you can plug different components in and out as needed.

This requires a lot of development — the glue — but, I don’t think there’s any way around that. (You should take that with a grain of salt, because my company has been supplying the government and the commercial world with exactly that kind of development expertise since 2002.)

As for the overarching, user facing “experience” or “interaction” product — that’s where I’ve always used Plumtree (or AquaLogic Interaction).

Will I start using Web Center Spaces? At this point, I’m still not sure.

If it can be used as the topmost bit of the architectural stack to absorb and surface all the enterprise 2.0 software that my customers are running, then perhaps. If it’s going to replace all the enterprise software that my customers are running, then no way José.

This conundrum really opens up a new market for enterprise software: I call it “Middleware for the REST of us” or MMM (not M&M, 3M or M3, because they’re already taken): “Mid-Market Middleware” — similar to the way 37signals approaches (with a great deal of hubris and a solid dose of arrogance) the “Fortune Five Million” by marketing their products toward the whole long-tail of small and medium-sized companies. Maybe the world needs a RESTful piece of hardware that just aggregates web services and spits out a nice UI, kind of like the “Plumtree in a Box” idea that Michael Young (former Plumtree Chief Architect, now Chief Architect at RedFin) had back in the last millennium.

Oracle Web Center Spaces might be the right choice for some very large enterprises, but what about the REST of us?

Categories
bdg dev2dev Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

BEA Participate is Only Two Weeks Away

There’s still time to register for this great conference and take part in a one-of-a-kind social computing experiment.

Register now!

Comments

Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first)

  • I heard some rumors that this event is going to demo some seriously killer app love that will blow people away. OK – they’re not rumors. It’s just common sense when you put this much brain power and off the wall creativity in one spot. I’m all for long fireside chats about protocols and geek plumbing (/swoon), but what really excites me about Participate is the ability to kick back with developers, product managers, and engineers and talk about business challenges and solutions – then arm you with the tools and tricks to get your business humming. Got a problem? Chances are these pros have a suggestion that will make your life easier and your business users that much more productive. Food, folks, fun, and forward thinking. You just can’t beat that.

    Posted by: ewwhitley on April 29, 2008 at 5:16 PM

  • Tada! The triumphant return of Eric Whitley to dev2dev!

    Posted by: bucchere on April 30, 2008 at 12:33 PM

Categories
bdg Business Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

Enterprise Relevance of Web 2.0 (in six parts)

Back in November of 2007 I gave a one-hour talk in Tyson’s Corner, VA entitled “The Enterprise Relevance of Web 2.0.” There were probably about thirty people in attendance. Since then, I’ve had several people tell me that they were sorry they missed the talk, etc. If you were one of those people, these next six posts are for you.

Why I am delivering this content in a six-part series?

I don’t have a video streaming server set up nor do I care to put one up and pay for the bandwidth. So, YouTube is an obvious solution to the hosting and bandwidth problem. Unfortunately, YouTube has a ten-minute limit on the length of uploaded videos. So, I needed to edit my talk into six, ten-minute clips.

Therein lies the problem.

What I’m learning in the process is that HD video editing is hard, even on a Mac. The first problem is space: I’ve got about five gigs of raw footage. My conversion program, Voltaic, was choking near the end of each 2 Gb conversion, so I switched to a PC (for shame!) and used the software that came with the camera (a Sony HDR-SR5) to convert from MTS (raw AVCHD format) to MPEG-2. Then I needed to buy a program from Apple for $19.99 (thanks for nickel-n-dime’n me, Steve) to convert from MPEG-2 to MOV (QuickTime format). Now I’m importing into iMovieHD. Each one of these conversions takes about two hours and has an output between 2x and 12x the size of the original MTS file! That means, just to be safe, you need like 15Gb of scratch space to edit a 1Gb movie! On top of the space issue, I’ve hit Google already dozens of times to figure out how to deal with things like frame rates, aspect ratios, sound compression, format conversion, and so on, ad infinitum.

And this is supposed to be easy! I’m on a Mac for goodness’s sake!

So, why am I ranting about my video editing woes in a post that’s purportedly about the enterprise relevance of Web 2.0? Because I think there’s a lesson to be learned from all this.

If personal computing is this challenging, that does not bode well for the enterprise, where everything is 10-100 times more expensive and 10-100 times more complicated.

Is this a good thing? For me and my company, maybe, because we’re making a living trying to make sense of the complexities of the enterprise and building user interfaces that help abstract people away from all the complexity so that they can do their jobs effectively.

But to truly bring Web 2.0 to the enterprise, we need to take these concepts — abstracting, simplifying, beautifying and “social-ifying” — enterprise applications down to the point at which they’re simple, beautiful and fun to use, all the while maintaining their power and utility. The experience people have using corporate software should mirror the experience they have using well designed, functional sites like Netflix, Facebook, Wishlistr, Dopplr and Kayak.

Most people writing corporate/enterprise software these days — with a few notable exceptions like 37 Signals (the makers of Campfire, Basecamp and Highrise) — are stuck in a function-over-form rut that’s really hindering the process of bringing Web 2.0 to the enterprise. Those of you who have had the pleasure of using AquaLogic Pages know that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Software can be both fun and functional at the same time.

So that’s an awfully long-winded and angst-ridden introduction to my six-part series on bringing Web 2.0 to the enterprise. If any of the above struck a chord with you and resonated even a little bit, then I highly recommend that you check out the forthcoming videos.

That is, assuming that I actually succeed in producing them!

While you’re waiting for the videos, you can check out the slide deck.

[metaslider id=954]

 

Comments

Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first)

  • Chris, enjoyed your post. I’ve got a little one on the way so I imagine I’ll have to understand all of the video nuances of encodings/converstions soon for youtubing for the grandparents. It doesn’t look like it’s going to be as easy as I thought! James

    Posted by: jbayer on January 23, 2008 at 7:44 AM

Categories
bdg dev2dev Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

One Portal to Rule Them All

I won’t rehash what’s already been said by everyone in the press and the blogosphere — Oracle is buying BEA. I wrote almost three years ago that this was inevitable, and now it’s upon us.

I’m hopeful that the BEA/Oracle management crew can take what they learned from the Plumtree, Fuego and Flashline (for BEA) and Siebel, PeopleSoft and Oblix (for Oracle) acquisitions and apply it to the challenges their own merger presents.

Over the past three years, Oracle has acquired dozens of companies. The most notable were probably PeopleSoft (which had just acquired JD Edwards, if I remember correctly), Siebel and Oblix, which gave them a great suite of HR apps, CRM apps and identity management, respectively. These were all enterprise software products that Oracle had, with a modicum of success, built on their own from the ground up, sold and supported as “Oracle Apps.”

Of course, with almost every major company they’ve acquired, Oracle has picked up a portal product. (And with BEA, there’s a special bonus — they get two: WLP and ALI.)

That’s going to create a portal soup consisting of at least the following ingredients:

  • Siebel Portal
  • JD Edwards Portal
  • PeopleSoft Portal
  • Oracle Portal (part of Oracle Fusion Middleware)
  • WLP
  • ALI

Oracle won’t want to endanger existing customer relationships by terminating support for the non-horizontal portals from Siebel, PeopleSoft, etc. Besides, the word “portal” really only loosely applies there, because those “portals” are really just web UIs into Siebel, PeopleSoft, etc.

But what about the horizontal portals: Oracle, WLP and ALI?

They are all playing in the same space. It’s already questionable that we need all three in the market now. And three under the same circle-shaped roof that is Oracle? Absurd.

What will Oracle do with this portal quandary?

Well, I think they’ll do the only thing they can do and support all the products. So that covers legacy customers, but what about future customers? If I’m an Oracle sales rep and my customer wants to buy a portal to front their SOA stack, what on earth do I sell them?

In my opinion, which is just that — my opinion — post-merger, there need to be some decisive acts from Oracle regarding the future direction of their portal strategy.

And, again, IMO, this is where the ALI portal and the ALUI suite of products (formerly Plumtree) can really shine. Why? Because not only can you front Java, .NET, Rails, PHP and any other web application stack with ALI, but ALI already has integration kits for Siebel, PeopleSoft, JSR-168, WSRP and five different flavors of SSO, including Oblix! (Not to mention the obvious fact that since day one, ALI has run beautifully on Windows and *nix systems using Oracle’s bread-and-butter product, their database.) So naturally, if you’re an Oracle shop running a clustered Oracle DB for storage, Siebel for CRM, PeopelSoft for HR, Oracle Financials for the books and Oblix Identity Management, no other product under the sun has more pre-packaged, no-brainer integration and integration options than ALI.

It may be a hard, bloody battle to get Oracle to drop it’s own beloved portal product in favor of AquaLogic Interaction, but I think it’s a battle that needs to be fought.

Same goes for WLP. In fact, I think every product acquired by Oracle has to fight for it’s life and fight to be the #1 product in the space, retiring the others to “maintenance and support” but focusing all futures on the product that is rightfully #1. And I think — and hope — that Oracle has the good sense and the wherewithal to encourage this.

It may cause some near term pain, but taking a longer-term view it’s the right thing to do.

Comments

Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first)

  • Interesting post, Chris. Obviously this is something we ALUI consultants have been considering in the past few days. One monkeywrench I have for you: as far as I know, Oracle offers their portal product for free to existing customers, whereas we (obviously) charge for it. I wonder how that kind of business model might change the landscape of how the ALUI portal is distributed/used.

    Posted by: rbrodbec on January 18, 2008 at 7:02 AM

  • Funny you should mention the price issue. About two years ago, we had a customer switch from ALI to Oracle portal for that exact reason. Why pay for licenses and support for ALUI products when Oracle gives you the portal for free? That customer still calls on us for ALUI support, so apparently the migration hasn’t gone exactly as planned.Two old adages come to mind here:
    1. You get what you pay for.
    2. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

    Regarding #1, the products really don’t cover the same feature set — Oracle portal cannot be the gateway to SOA that we all know ALUI is, so it’s really not an apples-to-apples comparison.

    Regarding #2, with any free software, whether it’s from a large company like Oracle or from the Apache Software Foundation, you always need to think about Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). If you need to build services integration points in Oracle Portal to talk to all of Oracle’s other products, that adds to your TCO. Moreover, if somebody is giving something away, what sort of quality expectations do you have about the product? What happens if you need to request support from Oracle or ask them to develop a patch for you? All of a sudden, the fact that you didn’t pay for the software comes back and bites you in the butt. 🙂

    Posted by: bucchere on January 18, 2008 at 7:23 AM

  • I guess I agree with you, since I’m not an Oracle portal consultant (not yet, anyway); but I think the bigger question is how Oracle will assimilate these new portals given its current pricing strategy (aka – the bloody war you speak of). If I were an existing Oracle customer, the first question I’d ask is “how come I can get XYZ portal for free but not ABC portal”. And if I’m Oracle product management, I’m thinking about how my current “free portal” strategy has been working out for me versus the ALUI model of charging for it.

    Posted by: rbrodbec on January 18, 2008 at 8:22 AM

  • You’re right — the big issue is how will Oracle deal with the portals they’re acquiring and will there be a shakedown or more of a graceful assimilation.There’s a similar issue with WLS and Oracle’s application server, although I think in that case the answer is a little less complicated. 😉

    Posted by: bucchere on January 18, 2008 at 8:32 AM

  • Of course you completely forgot to mention Oracle WebCenter. In spite of your assertions, there are only 2 portal products at Oracle. Oracle Portal and WebCenter. WebCenter is the future “face” of Fusion Applications, so any integration of portal products will move in that direction. IMHO….plumtree is as proprietary as Oracle Portal, and its dead. WLP and the folks on the WebCenter team will need to figure out how to integrate the code bases of those two products since they are the most similar in their support of Web 2.0 futures.

    Posted by: Dr. BEA Good on January 20, 2008 at 11:44 AM

  • Thanks for the correction about Oracle WebCenter — I’m not too familiar with Oracle products other than the DB and I should have done more homework before posting this!However, I still disagree that there are only two portals at Oracle. I’m not too sure about JDE, but I remember with 100% certainty that PeopleSoft and Siebel called their UIs “portals.” They’re not truly portals in a horizontal sense like Oracle Portal, WebCenter, WLP and ALUI and I don’t think they’re actually relevant to this discussion, so it’s a moot point.

    Now, given the four remaining portal products, I challenge your assertion that WebCenter and WLP “support Web 2.0 futures” and I’d like to see some examples that support that claim. As far as I know, the only products coming out of BEA that deserve the “Web 2.0” label are AquaLogic Pages, Ensemble and Pathways. (Note I don’t include ALI itself as a Web 2.0 product, despite the fact that ALI 6.5 has some pretty slick social features that might someday earn it that distinction.)

    I also take issue with your calling Plumtree/ALUI proprietary and I’m not sure what makes you make that claim. It’s written in Java and ported to C#.net, so it runs “natively” on IIS (which no other products from BEA or Oracle can do). Its Java version (from the same source base), runs on WebSphere, WLS, Tomcat and probably JBoss and other app servers and it supports both Oracle and SQL Server, so in terms of how and where you can run it, it’s probably the most open and flexible product in the entire 40+ product lineup that BEA boasts.

    That’s just one side of the proprietary vs. open argument. The other is how well one supports standards for plugging in functionality. In those terms, I think ALUI stands out from the pack as well. It supports portlets over two very well supported standards: HTTP and HTML, which again makes it the most flexible portlet development environment on the market. (You can develop ALI portlets using ANY web server that speaks HTTP and I’ve personally done so using Java, .NET, LAMP, Ruby on Rails, Groovy on Grails and even Domino if you can believe that.) It also supports JSR-168 and WSRP. (In reading about WebCenter, all portlet development documentation was Java-centric, so I’m not sure if they support any other kind of portlet development, e.g. .NET. It’s crucial that any product which claims to be the “face of SOA” supports at least Java and .NET development and plugins; however, many would argue that you need to support much more — e.g. Ruby on Rails, PHP, etc.)

    Leaving portlets out of the picture for a moment, consider the other ALUI integration points: AWS, PWS, CWS and SWS. All of them use SOAP, which is a documented open standard. In fact, in my next blog post (which went up last night), I talk about how I integrated a custom MySQL/Ruby on Rails user store with ALI using a Rails-based SOAP-driven web service to interface with ALI’s user management system. It just doesn’t get any more open than that. At last year’s Participate conference, I demonstrated how you could use the ALI “face” to front WLS applications written to run on the WL message bus and communicating with data stores using DSP, proving that you integrate ALUI products with pretty much anything. I would like to see how a WebCenter consultant or a WLS guy would approach integrating Siebel or PeopleSoft, two products now in the Oracle family.

    I may make many “assertions” (as you call them), but they’re backed up by solid facts. I’m open to continuing this dialog because I want to hear more facts about 1) how you perceive ALUI as a proprietary technology and 2) how WLP and WebCenter claim to support “Web 2.0.”

    Posted by: bucchere on January 20, 2008 at 6:10 PM

  • Out of respect of SEC rules, I won’t touch the Oracle topic. But as for WebLogic Portal (WLP)…2) how WLP … claim to support “Web 2.0.”There are a bunch of features that contribute to the overall Web 2.0 story for WLP. Look at the WLP Groupspace application, for example. Web 2.0 is about publishing social applications that get better the more people use them. Groupspace is such an app. It is first a packaged social app ready to go out of the box, but secondly shows off many of the WLP features in the area of “Web 2.0”.

    Groupspace doc link (community framework, RSS, Groupnotes (think wiki), discussion forums, shared document repository, calendar, contacts, etc, etc).

    Also, read up on Josh Lannin’s blog to see what will be out shortly in terms of WLP and REST, more Ajax, more Portlet Publishing (Google Gadgets, RoR, PHP, etc). Lannin’s WLP futures

    Cheers – PJL

    Posted by: plaird on January 21, 2008 at 8:30 PM

Categories
bdg dev2dev Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

Getting Social at BEA Participate 2008

This week BEA launched the Participate 2008 blog and revealed more about their plans for what is shaping up to be a great event. Perhaps the most exciting news is that BEA will be using the conference to unveil a suite of social applications running on a soon-to-be-released version of ALI 6.5 and coded by the developers here at bdg.

Jay Simons writes, in this first post on the Participate blog:

Mobile, social experiment: conference attendees will be provided an iPod Touch (more on this later), and we’re unveiling a suite of applications (built on the soon-to-be-released version of AquaLogic Interaction by partner BDG) that attendees will be able to interact with through the Touch. The applications will be inherently social, allowing you to engage one another directly at the event, in sessions, in hallways, you name it. Social networking, on a mobile device, powered by AquaLogic User Interaction. That’s hot!

Hot is an understatement. Imagine the possibilities. . . .

Instead of raising your hand to ask a question, use your WiFi-enabled iPod Touch to post the question on the session’s wall while the session is in progress. Then, at the end of the session, the presenter can pull up the session’s wall on the projector and field the questions. Like the presenter? Ask him or her to be your contact or join one of your groups! Meet an influential C-level executive who’s an expert in SOA governance and want to get to know him better? You can poke him or leave a message on his wall.

Leave your business cards at home — instead use these great bdg-built/ALI-powered applications!

They’ll be much more info to come on this “social experiment,” so watch this space in the upcoming weeks and months. To give you a little taste, think Facebook tuned for the enterprise with the specific goal of conference social networking in mind. Rich user profiles; mini- and aggregate feeds; user, session and group walls; private messaging/poking; tagging and other popular Facebook-like functionality will all be included.

This is revolutionary, game-changing stuff. And this is why we’re excited about Participate 2008. We hope you are too.

Comments

Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first)

  • Sounds like you could start a spinoff company just on this product! I bet it would be a fun (and useful) tool at ANY type of conference! Where can I find out more information about the “social applications running on a soon-to-be-released version of ALI 6.5”. Any sneak peeks? Are these built upon the Pages/Ensemble/Pathways components or are they new standalone features? Will they be included with upgrades or have any additional cost? Any release date projected? Keep up the good work Chris – you guys inspire us all to want to do more!

    Posted by: geoffgarcia on January 17, 2008 at 1:29 PM

  • Hi again Geoff! Thanks for your kind words. After a hard day of slaving away at code that doesn’t work (yet) and then two hours of driving through ice and slush, there’s nothing like coming home from work and finding nice comments on my blog. 🙂

    As for your questions, I don’t want to speak out of turn because BEA at this point is probably limited in what they can (and want) to say about ALUI 6.5. But I will answer them as much as I can in a follow-up post, after I seek BEA’s approval.

    So, long story short, watch this space and there will be much more, including, at some point, screenshots. Of course, if you want to see the The Full Monty, you’ll need to register for the conference.

    Posted by: bucchere on January 17, 2008 at 6:53 PM