Chris Bucchere is President & CEO of bdg, a portal consultancy specializing
in deploying AquaLogic User Interaction and building integration between
ALUI and other enterprise software products. His background includes almost
five years at Plumtree, finishing his career there as a Lead Engineer in the
Integration Products division and responsible for the development of the
Microsoft Excel and Siebel Portlet Frameworks and the IMAP, Exchange and
Documentum Portlet Suites.
Chris was a featured speaker at the 2005 Plumtree Odyssey & Advanced
Developer Conference, at the San Francisco State University School of
Business and at several NovaJUG/BUG events. He also hosts the world's only
ALUI
Podcast. Chris's 10 years of experience in Plumtree/ALUI and in
enterprise portals, combined with his business acumen and keen wit, make for
an interesting blog about the many
ways to install, configure, integrate and deploy AquaLogic User Interaction.
He's not afraid to get his hands dirty -- you can expect code snippets and
excerpts from config files along with detailed instructions on how to make
the most of your ALUI deployment.
There's nothing better than reviewing usage data for an application you just launched, especially when those data show that people are loving it!
In our first week since the application went live, we've had more than 300 account registrations. That alone is a significant accomplishment. But it gets better. Here are some more stats:
350+ messages sent (Rumbles and Private Messages)
200+ podmob (Twitter) messages
100+ shout-outs (pokes)
100+ links and feeds added
200+ groups created
500+ mob adds (contacts)
3000+ breakout session registrations
3500+ notable actions (that have appeared in the Observation Deck feed)
We've also had almost 6000 page views since Monday and over 10,000 page views last week, our first week "in business."
Here's a great chart, courtesy of AquaLogic Analytics Server:
What's even more encouraging is that I've seen a surge in shoutouts, messaging and group activity as the conference approaches. And it hasn't even started yet! I expect our heaviest usage to come during the conference, although hopefully not the way it did on Twitter during Sarah Lacy's SXSW08 interview of Mark Zuckerberg.
Announcing the Launch of the Social Applications for BEA Participate.08
You've heard the phrase "social applications" being kicked around by BEA and bdg. But what exactly does that mean?
In a nutshell, it means that your experience at BEA.Participate.08 will be like that of no other conference you've ever attended. In fact, it may change the entire way you feel about technology conferences.
If you're registered for the conference, you can visit this link to sign up to get started. (If you're not registered yet, you can register for the conference here.) You'll be directed to a web site where you can help us kick off this grand social experiment. During registration, you'll be asked to fill out a corporate profile by selecting or adding your company, your department, your title and some biographical information. You'll be asked what products (from BEA or elsewhere) you're currently using and what products interest you. You'll be able to "pimp" your profile with an avatar or photo, links, and RSS feeds. Finally, you'll be asked to take a stab at registering for different Participate.08 breakout sessions. (Don't worry, you can always come back later and make changes to your breakout session agenda.)
At this point, you'll be directed to a highly-customized installation of BEA ALI 6.5 backed by a host of bdg-designed and engineered Ruby on Rails applications which form the core of this groundbreaking social system. Log in and you'll be presented with a simple, elegant UI for:
browsing and selecting tracks and sessions,
viewing other people's company and personal profile pages and adding them to your "mob,"
sending "shout outs" other users (a playful way to get people's attention),
sending private (mail) or public (podmob) messages to other people,
browsing and interacting with product pages,
asking questions at a breakout session (through the session rumble),
joining and leaving interest groups focused on industries, products or "whatever,"
updating your status (to let others know where you are, what your mood is, etc.),
browsing an aggregate feed (the observation deck) which allows you to see what others are doing prior to, at (and even after) the conference.
On top of all this social application goodness, everyone who attends Participate will receive an iPod Touch, with 802.11b/g wireless baked in. (Of course, the conference hotel will have lightening fast free wireless internet access.) In addition to a sleek full-sized browser experience, most of the applications will also be optimized for the iPod Touch (or iPhone) form factor. This means that wherever you are at the conference -- sitting in a session, wandering the halls or the partner pavilion, even taking a bathroom break -- you'll be able to network, network, network with your fellow conference attendees.
Let's face it: are you attending the conference to hear a talking head rattle off lists of features in ALUI or ALBPM? No! You're going to Participate to learn from your peers. And not just in sessions, but in the halls, during the meals, at the evening events and of course, through these amazing social applications.
Here at bdg, we're working tirelessly to bring you a revolutionary social networking application that will drive your interactions with BEA Participate 2008 conference attendees. Here's a sneak preview of what we've been up to!
My wife is arguably my biggest fan, although my mom probably deserves "honorable mention."
If you too are a fanboy or fangirl of someone, like, say Robert Scoble, you may want to know what he's blogging about, pod/vod-casting about, Twittering about, etc. Someone put together this great aggregator called Robert Scoble's Temple of Ego.
I thought, wouldn't it be great if we all had our own Temples of Ego?
Back to my wife. Despite her self-professed fanhood, she's been having trouble lately (well, okay, ever) keeping up with all my web activity. This all stems from the fact that Feedhaus, a site I built and launched last fall, was selected as a SXSW Web Award finalist and I've been blathering about this fact in every online setting imaginable, including here on dev2dev. (Please vote for us, BTW.)
So, with upwards of five different blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader shared items, flickr, YouTube and del.icio.us -- keeping track of my enormous ego is a formidable task. But now, with the power of the semantic web and a great tool called Yahoo! Pipes, you can create your own Temple of Ego in five minutes. Here's mine.
Simply go to Yahoo! Pipes, log in and create a pipe that looks like this:
In the "Fetch Feed" node at the top, simply enter the RSS or ATOM feed from whatever you want to include in your Temple of Ego. For example, I included all my blogs, my tweets (from Twitter), my Facebook posted items, my Google Reader Shared Items, my del.icio.us links, my flickr photos and my YouTube videos. That's a good start.
Now, drag in a "Sort" node and sort by descending pubDate. This puts all the newest stuff first, known to geeks as "reverse chronological order."
Finally, wire together the Fetch Feed node with the Sort node and then the Sort node with the Pipe Output node. (Just look at the picture if that didn't make any sense.)
Now, if you're really egotistical, you can email all your friends a link to your Temple of Ego and encourage them to add the pipe's outbound RSS to their feed reader of choice. (Here's mine.)
So, what on earth does this have to do with ALUI? I'm so glad you asked.
ALI 6.5 -- which the good folks at bdg are using to build social applications for Participate.08 -- has some pretty slick RSS capabilities and some really beautiful user profile pages. Imagine if everyone's profile page had the output from their Temple of Ego embedded in it. How powerful would that be? And, with ALI 6.5 and a little Yahoo! Pipes magic, setting this up in your ALI deployment will be a breeze.
Download and install Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express. As with SQL Server 2000, make sure you select "mixed" authentication mode instead of Windows only.
Open the Management Studio and create your database. Then, right click on the database and set "SQL Server 2000 Compatibility Mode."
Create your database user and grant rights to the new database (just as you would for SQL Server 2000).
Script your database (just as you would for SQL Server 2000).
Open the SQL Server Configuration Manager. Under SQL Server 2005 Network Configuration, select Protocols for SQL2005. Double click on TCP/IP and make sure that it's enabled and set to run on a static port (1433) for all IP addresses.
You should be good to go! (Remember that this is not a configuration supported by BEA, but it works well for development purposes.)
This is the third ten-minute segment in a six-part series about the enterprise relevance of Web 2.0. (Due to my nascent video editing skills (or lack thereof), a small part of the AquaLogic Pages demo is missing -- sorry!)
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. (For those of you who have been living in a cave, YouTube has a ten-minute limit on the length of their videos.) So, I'm in the process of editing my talk into six, ten-minute clips.
Therein lies the problem.
What I'm learning in the process is that HD video editing is a major PITA, 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!
