Categories
bdg Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

Upcoming Oracle Web Center Interaction Training

Just wanted to let you know that I (formerly Plumtree’s Lead Engineer, worked with hundreds of different Plumtree, BEA and Oracle customers and now an Oracle ACE Director) am leading a public training course over the next two weeks and if you’re interested, there are few available slots left.

We’re partnering with training provider Peak Solutions and you can find the full details on their web site. Here’s the critical information:

THIS Monday, May 3rd and Tuesday, May 4th in Harrisburg, PA
Oracle WebCenter Interaction Administration – $1,200
Deployment planning, installation, configuration, maintenance, troubleshooting, etc.

NEXT Monday, May 10th, 11th and 12th in Harrisburg, PA
Oracle WebCenter Interaction Portlet Develoment in Java and .NET (also Ruby and PHP) – $1,800
Hello world all the way through advanced portlet dev concepts like setting preferences and using caching

Please drop us a note if you’d like to attend. There are only 4-5 slots left, so please act now to reserve your space!

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

The Enterprise Relevance of Web 2.0

Register Now!

The concepts behind Web 2.0, social networks, and collaboration are now poised to transform your enterprise, providing solutions such as collaborative mashups, expertise discovery and social search to enhance your existing portal.

According to Gartner, Web 2.0 will have a major impact on a broad range of traditional enterprises. Gartner states that “positive business model change will result in unexpected ways, and enterprises must prepare for this transition.”

Register to attend this exciting seminar on Wednesday, November 14th, 6:00 pm and hear how BEA’s three new products will “two-dot-oh” your company’s Web along with other topics that include:

  • How Web 2.0 can bring true value to your business
  • How to differentiate between Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0
  • How to implement new Web 2.0 concepts like blogging, wikis, tagging and social networking into your business and allow IT governance and control
  • How to enhance your existing portal infrastructure

Enjoy free hors d’oeuvres and an open bar along with presentations that define Web 2.0 and show how BEA’s new social computing products Pages, Ensemble and Pathways can deliver true business value from Web 2.0 and bdg’s newest products that bridge the gap between Web 2.0 and the enterprise.

Attendance is limited, so please take a moment to register now. I look forward to meeting you at the event.

Date: Wednesday, November 14th
Time: 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
Location: Marriott Tyson’s Corner

8028 Leesburg Pike
Vienna, VA, 22182
(703) 734-3200

Directions

Register Now!

Comments

Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first)

  • I’m sorry I missed this! If you have a notification list for events like these please include me, I’d love to hear about future events you guys sponsor. [email protected] Thanks!

    Posted by: geoffgarcia on January 17, 2008 at 1:33 PM

  • Hi Geoff! The event was down here in Tyson’s Corner, VA, so we focused on local attendees. I’ll make sure to include you next time, even though if my memory serves me correctly, you’re up in NY.

    Posted by: bucchere on January 17, 2008 at 6:47 PM

  • Oh, I almost forgot. If I can find the time, I’ll put together a video podcast of the event. I have the footage; I just haven’t had the time to do the editing. 🙁

    Posted by: bucchere on January 17, 2008 at 6:48 PM

Categories
bdg Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

BEA Participate 2008 Announced

From an e-mail I just received:

product-page-short-bg-1Mark your calendar today to attend a gathering of BEA customers, partners and product experts in Chicago, Illinois from May 12-15th, 2008.

BEAParticipate 2008, is a 2 ½ day event for our user community of innovators, to share experiences and best practices around the adoption of business process management, collaboration, portal and social computing technologies.

This coming year will feature more networking opportunities than ever — from industry roundtables, lunches, and evening receptions, to a partner and solution pavilion and product focus groups. This is a sure-fire opportunity to form lasting connections with your peers, and gain valuable insights from shared experiences in a hands-on, energetic setting.

Whether you are just starting out or have a long docket of active projects, this is the best forum to meet with BEA executives, engineering and product leaders, pick up useful tidbits from other innovative customers, and acquire new strategies for optimizing your business, improving knowledge worker productivity and increasing IT efficiency.

Don’t miss this interactive and social event! If you are interested in participating, have suggestions for topics, or have any questions, please send an e-mail to Participate.

Save the Date:
BEAParticipate 2008
May 12-15, 2008
Hyatt Regency
151 East Wacker Drive
Chicago, Illinois 60601

To learn more about the Hyatt Regency in the heart of Chicago, click here.

Stay tuned for registration information, agenda and pricing details in the coming weeks.

Categories
bdg Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

Upcoming AquaLogic Training Classes in DC

bdg is hosting an AquaLogic (Plumtree) Training Class in Washington, DC the week of September 24th.

We’ll be sticking with the format we used last time:

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday: ALI Administration
Wednesday, Thursday and Friday: ALI Portlet Development

Wednesday will be a “double up” day when we do advanced administration for admins and introductory administration for developers.

Training will run 9AM-5PM each day with a break for lunch. The location will be as follows:

Nextec Corporate Headquarters
465 Herndon Parkway, Suite 200
Herndon, VA 20170
Please contact us at [email protected] to sign up!

ALI Administration (Mon, Tues, Wed)

This course provides a comprehensive overview of all the most commonly used aspects of AquaLogic Interaction (ALI). Students will learn how to install, configure and administer the ALI 6x portal. It is also for the person wanting to understand how to conduct an ALI implementation project. In three days you will implement a portal that can be used as a departmental solution. All aspects of ALI are reviewed including MyPages, Automation Servers, Search, Web Services, Portlets, Communities, Experience Definitions, the Knowledge Directory, and best practices to keep the portal up and running smoothly.
Course Modules
  • ALI Architecture
  • Basic Troubleshooting of the ALI Environment
  • Configuring the Automation Server and Jobs
  • Performing Routine Portal Maintenance
  • Creating an Administrative Hierarchy
  • Configuring Portal Access and Permissions
  • Implementing Advanced Object Security
  • Community Fundamentals
  • Creating a Community
  • Advanced Community Topics
  • Building Subportals
  • Configuring ALI Web Services
  • Importing Users and Groups
  • Extending the User Profile
  • Adding Content to the Portal
  • Maintaining the Knowledge Directory
Exercises
  • ALI Enterprise Planning Role Play
  • Using PTSPY and the Migration Utility
  • Using the Admin Hierarchy
  • Creating a Community
  • Creating a Subportal
  • Registering an Authentication Source
  • Registering a Profile Web Service
  • Managing the Knowledge Directory
After the training, the student should be able to:
  • Register Automation Servers
  • Create, run and troubleshoot Jobs
  • Perform routine Portal maintenance
  • Use PTSPY and the new Migration Wizard
  • Create Users and Groups in the Portal  Set up Activity Rights for users
  • Manage permissions using Access Control Lists
  • Create Communities
  • Create Projects in Collaboration Server
  • Create Experience Definitions and understand their use
  • Configure Web Services
  • Configure an AD Authentication Web Service
  • Configure a User Profile Web Service
  • Understand all of the content management objects in the Portal
  • Create a Crawler to allow access to external content through the Portal
  • Maintain Portal content and its search index
  • Implement Portal best practices

ALI Portlet Development

This course is an all-inclusive portlet development course that will coverbasic through advanced ALI Portlet development concepts. Although there is a small lecture component, the course is primarily exercise-based. Students who meet the prerequisites and who successfully complete all of the exercises will leave the course ready to design and write enterprise class ALI Portlets.
Prerequisites:
Basic understanding of the Plumtree Portal, MPPE & Portlets; proficiency in Java or C#; proficiency in web programming.
Course Modules/Exercises
  • Introduction to ALI, the MPPE, Portlets & C#/.NET or Java
  • Demonstration of ALI Portal and Integration Products
  • Install a Java IDE and come up with an idea for a new Portlet
  • Design an ALI Portlet and create a associated objects; add to MyPage and Community
  • HTTPGP/MPPE & the Gateway
  • Yahoo! Search Portlet: Design a portlet that allows the user to issue a search in Yahoo!
  • TCP Tracing: Use a free utility to trace TCP activity on port 80 (HTTP); observe CSP in action
  • Interaction Development Kits
  • Gateway Specific Configuration
  • Design an ALI Portlet that uses a Gateway Setting
  • Introduction to Settings
  • Change Font Color: Use a Portlet Setting to allow the user to personalize the Portlet with a font color
  • My Bookmarks: Design an ALI Portlet that displays an end-user customizable list of bookmarks to web sites
  • Settings Review
  • Community Bookmarks: Design an ALI Portlet that allows the community manager to set a customizable list of bookmarks to web sites
  • Introduction to Portlet Frameworks and Database-driven Portlet Design
  • Database Schema: Design database schema for a Data
  • Entry and Browse Framework Portlet
  • Administrative Settings Review
  • Administrative Settings: Design the Administrative Preferences page for a Data Entry and Record Browse Framework Portlet
  • Data View/Entry Form: Design Data View/Entry Form for a Data Entry and Record Browse Framework Portlet
  • Record Browsing: Design Record Browsing for a Data Entry and Record Browse Framework Portlet
  • Portlet Caching, Performance and Scale-ability
  • Caching: Add ETAG/IF-NONE-MATCH caching to Data Entry and Record Browse Framework Portlet
  • Enhance Record Browsing with Pagination, Sorting and Filtering
  • Internationalization/Localization
  • Create a Localized Portlet
Categories
bdg Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

ALUI (Plumtree) Training Postponed

We had some conflicts, so we postponed the Herndon, VA-based training to next week. It’s now 4/16-4/18 for administrators and 4/18-4/20 for developers. We’ll be accepting registrations until 4/13, so if you’re interested, please send a note to [email protected].

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

Portals and SOA: Portals in a Service-Oriented Architecture

I’ve been invited to give the following talk at BEA Participate:

Why is a Service-Oriented Architecture important to an IT infrastructure and what are the elements and products needed to build out an SOA? These questions answered, plus a discussion on how portals are the practical starting point to leveraging SOA.

Quite honestly, the title and abstract make it sound like an invitation to engage in a lively game of buzzword bingo, but I assure you this talk will be light on the trite — you won’t hear me use the acronym SOA more than once or twice — and heavy on the real deal, rubber-meets-the-road stuff about how mere mortals/human beings are actually accomplishing the sort of things that SOA evangelists are preaching these days.

So, here’s what you can expect: I’ll talk a bit about some of the challenges of building integrated user experiences in today’s enormously complex and heterogeneous IT environment and show how a software developer — without superpowers — can piece together an integrated true-to-the-principals-of-SOA application using ALUI, ALDSP (Data Services Platform) and ALESB (Enterprise Service Bus). This will culminate in an actual, real-life demo.

I will of course make sure to sacrifice a chicken to the Almighty Goddess of Demos or do whatever else I have to do to make sure my demo doesn’t crash. Scratch that, I’ll just run it on Linux and everything will be fine.

So, all joking aside, if you have any ideas for items you’d like me to include in (or exclude from) my talk, please post your comments here. I’ll be sure to give anyone who makes a good suggestion a “shout out” during my presentation. They’re actually giving me a whole hour this time, so they’ll be room for plenty of tomfoolery, geekspeak, silly anecdotes and still time to answer your insightful questions at the end. As one of my good friends and business partners said following my talk at last year’s BEA World,

you never know what to expect during one of [Chris Bucchere’s] talks.

I’m not sure exactly what he meant, but of course I took it as a compliment.

In closing, while we’re on the subject of BEA Participate, I just wanted to say thanks to Christine “Obi” Wan for giving me the opportunity to present and, more importantly, for putting together such a great-looking agenda, which you can review if you like, because now it’s posted on the BEA Participate site.

In the meantime, do your best to convince the powers that be at your company/organization that they will finally discover the secret to “leveraging SOA” if they send you to this conference. Also, please don’t mention that every past Odyssey has had several open bars.

Comments

Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first)

  • Working with Aqualogic we all know how it’s easy to plug in our portlet into Aqualogic. We don’t need Aqualogic portal running on our own computer to do this, we don’t need special IDE, we don’t need upload wars into portal. It took time to explain this to my experience J2EE collegaes that got some experience with IBM Websphere. Here what they do there:
    http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/techjournal/0410_barcia/0410_barcia.html
    A lot of steps pretty much the some but have a look at step 11. Here is the core difference. So at least one benifit of SOA is that we don’t need to do step 11.

    Posted by: Bryazgin on April 13, 2007 at 7:03 AM

  • >Quite honestly, the title and abstract make it sound like an >invitation to engage in a lively game of buzzword bingo True, I have the some issue. In my article (for russian development network) I want to stress SOA architecture of Aqualogic, but I don’t want to use SOA word. Audience is pretty techical so they all pretty much feed up of this word. Hmm, may be I will end up with this:
    Avoid nightmare of step number eleven !
    At least, “what the hell this guy talking about?” will be more predict reaction. 🙂

    Posted by: Bryazgin on April 13, 2007 at 7:25 AM

  • Hi Dmitri! Thanks for your insightful comments.As I’m building the demo for my talk, I’ve noticed that these SOA tools encourage you to loosely-couple everything. And that’s a good thing. As you pointed out, ALUI fits into this nicely with its loosely-coupled portlet architecture. The evil “Step 11” (too bad it wasn’t “Step 13”) is: “Select the Browse button and navigate to the WAR file for your portlet, then select Next (Figure 17).” Step 11 has some pretty awful implications for the enterprise. First off, it assumes that everything is Java, which, as much as I love Java, is just wrong wrong wrong in the heterogeneous enterprise. Secondly, it tightly couples your portlets to your portal, which is contrary to SOA.As an aside, I was listening to some Web 2.0 podcasts in the car the other day, and this guy who worked on Google Maps talked about “seams” in an architecture. To paraphrase, he basically said that everyone misuses the word “seamless.” Seams, just like in the textile industry, are critical to enterprise architecture. Just as seams hold swaths of fabric together and separate one bit of fabric from another, they also help define boundaries in the enterprise architecture that are equally critical to SOA. Without seams, everything must be homogeneous — applications must be bought from the same vendor, run on the same OS, be written in the same language, etc. — and this is completely contrary to the reality of enterprise software and systems and completely anti-SOA.

    To illustrate how not being “seamless” is actually a good thing, I’ve designed a demo system that involves bits of LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP), bits of Java, bits of .NET and bits of Adobe Flash all held together with seams built with ALDSP, ALESB and ALUI. I’m still working on the technical side of things, but the use case is simple: a sales rep wants to quote his customer. Behind the scenes, his company is running a LAMP CRM server, a Flash/SQLServer product database, a .NET portal, and a Java-based Collaboration Server. Using a hybrid of ALDSP, ALESB and Java and .NET web services, the user experience is easy and seamless, but behind the scenes, it’s the powerful seams supported by ALDSP and ALESB that make this not only possible, but fairly straightforward.

    If you’re interested in hearing more, register for BEA Participate and [shameless plug]come to my talk[/shameless plug]! By the way, I’m co-presenting with Joseph Stanko, the BEA Engineering Manager responsible for the development of Ensemble (formerly known as Project Runner) — he will run several slides to help you understand the theory behind SOA and I will show the reality of how the AquaLogic stack truly enables SOA in the enterprise.

    Posted by: bucchere on April 14, 2007 at 6:07 AM

  • Alas, I’ve finally finished my demo. I had some configuration issues with ALSB, but ultimately they boiled down to the interface between the keyboard and the chair, i.e. human error. I had the proxy service calling the business service, which, in turn, called the proxy service again. You should have seen the utter wasteland this little tidbit of mutual recursion made of my machine. Actually, I was impressed — Java would spit out a JVM_Bind error once it exceeded some internal maximum, but ALSB (running on WLS 9.2) would actually keep running. Nice.Anyway, now that I’m past all that, I have an ALDSP layer over two disparate data sources (one MySQL DB containing CRM info and one HSQL DB containing product info) exposing data through netui/beehive to a single ALI portlet. (The nifty little portlet uses script.aculo.us to show an interesting new take on the age-old concept of master-detail.) I also included an Adobe Flex-driven portlet. The two portlets use some client-side IPC (inter-portlet communication) to exchange info and then they call a proxy service on ALSB that takes info from both sources and creates a Word document (in the form of a sales quote). The business service also uploads this document to ALI Collaboration so that people can work on it collaboratively before sending it to the customer. (I may replace this last little bit with a .NET web service, just to show that Java and .NET are both acceptable alternatives for writing the “glue” or “seams” in a true service-oriented architecture.)Lastly, the event coordinators have locked in a time slot for us: Monday, May 7th at 4:30 PM in the Technical/Developer Track.

    If you’re “participating” it would great to see you at our talk or at the bdg booth. This year we have a cool — yet practical — giveway that will definitely brighten your day. Looking forward to the conference!

    Posted by: bucchere on April 22, 2007 at 7:52 PM

Categories
bdg Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

Upcoming ALUI (Plumtree) Training — April 9th, 2007

We’re very pleased to announce that we’ve finalized the date for our next ALUI/Plumtree training course, scheduled for the week of April 9th, 2007.

We’re changing the lineup a tad to provide three days of ALUI administration training followed by three days of developer training, but all in a five day week. So how do we plan to pack six days of training into five? The answer is “super Wednesday,” which will be a day when we teach administration for developers. In other words, it’s the last day for the administrators (advanced administration) and the first day for the developers.

Bottom line: to sign up for either class (or the whole week), send an email to [email protected].

Categories
bdg Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

Washington DC Area ALUI (Plumtree) Training

bdg plans to offer a 5-day AquaLogic (Plumtree) Training Course in the Washington DC Metro Area starting on October 16th. 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 IDK. The course will be given in Herndon, VA about 10 minutes from Dulles Airport. All course materials have been updated for the G6 version of ALUI.

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, October 6th and bdg must receive payment by Friday, October 13th. 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.

Categories
bdg Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

Plumtree Odyssey+ADC 2005 wrap-up

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.

Categories
bdg Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction Software Development

Washington DC Plumtree Training

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.