Check out our logo on the BEAWorld sponsors page. We’re the first AquaLogic User Interaction partner to sign up (and the only one so far)!
Tag: shameless self-promotion
I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve been selected by BEA to be one of their featured bloggers on dev2dev, BEA’s product community site for developers by developers. You can read my dev2dev blog for all the Plumtree/ALUI tips that you’re used to finding here, but continue to check this space for news about bdg.
Also, stay tuned for a new Plumtree/ALUI podcast . . . coming soon!
I’m very pleased to announce that I will be the featured speaker at the Washington DC BEA dev2dev User Group on May 11th. You can read the official invite, but here are the basics:
BEA AquaLogic User Interaction Development, Demo & Roadmap
Date: May 11 2006
Time: 6:30pm – 9:00pm
Location:
Tenleytown Ballroom
Embassy Suites Hotel at the Chevy Chase Pavilion
4300 Military Road N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20015 (map)
Metro Red Line – Friendship Heights (take the hotel exit)
Description:
Back in October of last year, BEA purchased the market-leading pure-play portal vendor Plumtree Software to provide a user interface to their AquaLogic product line. Hear former Plumtree employee and 10-year portal industry veteran Chris Bucchere explain how Plumtree fits into the AquaLogic framework, how to configure and develop for this revolutionary new platform, and what the future holds for ALUI, including integration with BEA Workshop and the WL Portal. See a demo, do some real-time ALUI portlet development, and get your technical questions answered.
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!
Categories
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.
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’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.