Month: December 2007

WordPress fact o’ the day: fun with feeds

I’m browsing through the new WordPress For Dummies book, with the assumption that even though I’ve been using WordPress for a couple of years and am reasonably comfortable hacking small bits of the code, there’s always some tidbit to be learned. It took me until page 147, but here it is: you can get a feed for a specific post (that is, all comments added to that post) or to a category by adding feed/ to the end of the URL.

For example:

These aren’t fancy conditioned feeds like those that I publish for all posts and all comments via Feedburner, but you can copy and paste the URL directly to your feed reader if your feed reader isn’t auto-detected.

By the way, I didn’t have to do anything to my WordPress blog to make this happen, so it should work for any WordPress-based blog that uses pretty permalinks.

Outsourcing the intranet

I’ve told a lot of people about Avenue A|Razorfish and their use of MediaWiki as their intranet platform (discussed here), and there’s a lot of people who are downright uncomfortable with the idea of any sort of non-standard intranet platform, such as allowing anyone in the company to edit any page on the intranet, or contribute content to the home page via tagging and feeds.

Imagine, then, how freaked out those people would be to have Facebook as their intranet.

Andrew McAfee discusses a prototype of a Facebook application that he’s seen that provides a secure enterprise overlay for Facebook, allowing for easy but secure social networking within the organization. According to WorkLight, the creators of the application:

WorkBook combines all the capabilities of Facebook with all the controls of a corporate environment, including integration with existing enterprise security services and information sources. With WorkBook, employees can find and stay in touch with corporate colleagues, publish company-related news, create bookmarks to enterprise application data and securely share the bookmarks with authorized colleagues, update on status change and get general company news.

This sort of interaction is critical for any organization, and once you get past a certain size or start to spread geographically, you can’t do it with a bulletin board and a water cooler any more; however, many companies either build their own (usually badly) or use some of the emerging Enterprise 2.0 software to do something inside their firewall. As Facebook becomes more widely used for business purposes, however, why not leverage a platform that pretty much everyone under the age of 40 is already using (and a few of us over that age)? One company, Serena Software, is already doing this, although they appear to be using the naked Facebook platform, so likely aren’t putting any sensitive information on there, even in invitation-only groups.

Personally, I quite like the idea, although I’m a bit of an anarchist when it comes to corporate organizations.

There’s a lot that would have to happen for Facebook to become a company’s intranet (or even a part of it): primarily sorting out issues of data ownership and export. There’s lots of people putting confidential data into Salesforce.com and other SaaS platforms that I think we can get past the philosophical question of whether or not to store corporate data outside the firewall; it just needs to be proven to be private, secure and exportable.

I also found an interesting post, coincidentally by an analyst at Serena, discussing how business mashups should be human process centric, which was in response to Keith Harrison-Broninski’s post on mashups and process. Although Facebook isn’t a mashup platform in any real sense, one thing that should be considered in using Facebook as a company’s intranet is how much process can — or should — be built into that. You really can’t do a full intranet without some sort of processes, and although WorkBook is targeted only at the social networking part of the intranet, it could easily become the preferred intranet user interface if it were adopted for that purpose.

Update: Facebook launched Friends Lists today, that is, the ability to group your contacts into different lists that can then be used for messaging and invitations. Although it doesn’t (yet) include the ability to assign different privacy settings for each group, it’s a big step on the way to more of a business platform. LinkedIn, you better get that IPO done soon…

BPM drives ROI webinar

I attended a webinar today featuring Ralph Rodriguez of Aberdeen Group discussing their recent survey on how BPM drives ROI. The webinar was sponsored by BEA, so he presented the data sliced to show responses of BEA customers compared to the overall pool. Unfortunately, he turned it into just a shoot-out between BEA and the other large stack vendors (IBM, Oracle, TIBCO) rather than a true examination of the market and what the numbers mean: way too much of “oh, look, BEA ranks higher in the survey than TIBCO on ETL” rather than why ETL is relevant to the market. He also sees the market as having converged from EAI vendors and document-focused workflow vendors, completely ignoring the pure-play part of the market that emerged around 2000 and grew into many of the leaders in the BPMS space today.

I’d love to see the full results of the survey rather than this highly-filtered — and not very informative — view of them.

Update: Gabriel (in the comments) posted that the replay for the webinar can be found here.

ALBPM together with other BEA products

A couple of updates on last week’s post about BEA’s ALBPM:

  • Peter Laird of BEA has published a how-to on integrating ALBPM into WLP (WebLogic Portal), specifically how to use the ALBPM user interface as portlets. He thoughtfully includes both a link to the official integration guide as well as his notes on how to actually make it work.
  • ALSB (AquaLogic Service Bus) now provides out-of-the-box integration with ALBPM. I picked this up on a CBR news feed as well as BEA’s press release; it appears that this brings the design-time environments closer together. The CBR article claims that this allows you to store ALBPM processes in the ALSB repository and orchestrate them directly using the ESB environment, although it’s not clear to me that that’s a step forward in terms of aligning business and IT.

links for 2007-12-18

Last day for early bird rate for Gartner BPM summit

It’s not like me to post twice about Gartner in the same day, but I noticed that today is the last day to get the early bird price for the BPM summit that’s coming up February 4-7 in Las Vegas. I’ll be blogging live from there, as I have for the last several Gartner BPM summits.

Gartner 2007 Magic Quadrant for BPMS

So late in the year that I was sure they were going to call it the 2008 edition, Gartner has released their latest magic quadrant report for BPMS. Pega, undoubtedly proud to be at the very top right of the chart, is offering it for free (registration required).

I haven’t had time to review it in detail, but it seems that the top right quadrant has become incredibly crowded this year, with 10 participants, after the 2006 quadrant that removed all but four players from it. Note that the 2006 MQ came out in January 2006, giving almost a 2-year gap between reports; I suspect that Jim Sinur’s departure from Gartner earlier this year may have disrupted the schedule a bit.

There’s a few new (to me) vendors on the chart, like AuraPortal, and a few vendors that I’ve know for a while but haven’t seen on the MQ before, like Intalio.

Upcoming BPM events: the Great White North edition

The BPM vendors know that none of us like to travel much over the holiday season, and send a deluge of invitations to webinars and local seminars instead. Here’s a few that are coming up:

BEA recently had the analyst firm Harte-Hanks Aberdeen Group conduct a survey on how BPM is being used effectively by the best-in-class organizations, and is holding a webinar to discuss the results next Wednesday, December 19th, at 2pm Eastern.

On January 9th, ebizQ is hosting a webinar on the new paradigm for business intelligence — collaborative, user-centric, process-embedded. Sponsored by SAP, this features Don Tapscott and two other speakers from New Paradigm, a think tank that was just acquired by BSG Alliance (a company name that always makes me think about Starbuck and Apollo), and the BI team manager from Molson. Given that Tapscott and his colleagues are Canadian, a beer-themed BI event seems appropriate. In case you missed the brilliant “I Am Canadian” Molson ad campaign a few years back, you can watch it below as a warm-up for the webinar:

If you’re eager to get out of your office, Fujitsu is hosting live seminars in Toronto and Ottawa in January: Toronto on the morning of the 22nd, and Ottawa on the afternoon of the 23rd. These will be fairly introductory, with an introduction to BPM and some ideas on quantifying ROI, plus a demo of Fujitsu Interstage. I just found out that the speaker will be Carl Hillier, a friend from my FileNet days and a very passionate and knowledgeable speaker. However, I’m pretty sure that Carl, a Brit who’s spent the last several years in southern California, is not ready for Ottawa’s January weather — does he know how people get to work in the winter there?

On a logistical note, BEA was the only one that provided a link to add the event to my Outlook calendar in the confirmation email: if I have to do this manually, I forget to do it half the time.

ALBPM 6.0

I’m long overdue in reporting on BEA’s ALBPM 6.0 release; I heard the details during a technical deep dive session at BEAParticipate, but the information was embargoed at the time (in spite of being presented in front of a room full of customers). This post is a combination of my notes from that time, an interview with Jesper Joergensen at the time of the product release in August, and other bits of information gathered along the way such as Alex Toussaint’s post on ALBPM and ALSB.

Although they did add some end-user and business analyst features, most of the release has focused on improving the technical strength and enterprise scalability — not surprising when you consider that this is the first major release since BEA acquired Fuego in 2006, and some of that time was spent ensuring proper cross-pollination of the BEA and Fuego teams. The 2008 release will refocus on the usability side.

For the 6.0 release, there are some main themes:

Process intelligence:

  • They’re adding  through enhanced business rules capabilities built into ALBPM, allowing for reuse of rules across processes and some BRMS functionality such as versioning of rules independent of process versioning. For those who have outgrown the usual limited capabilities of a BPMS’ expression engine, this provides a good stepping stone before a full-on BRMS is required. I still, however, believe that it’s better to separate them so that business rules can be used by applications other than the BPMS.
  • They’re also adding some smarts to capture analytics on the manual decisions that are made by users in a process in order to provide feedback on the probability of any particular decision, and even trigger exception handling or further review if someone makes a decision that is different than the usual decision at that point. This also helps to identify decisions that can be automated.
  • Improved Flash graphics in the BAM functionality using FusionCharts. BAM will see some major enhancements in the Condor release as well.

Standards support:

  • XPDL 2.0 and BPEL 2.0 are natively supported in the process engine, although no mention of BPDM
  • Enhanced BPMN 1.0 support; the previous version does not do a full BPMN implementation
  • WS-Security for seamless identity propagation.
  • UDDI 3.0 Publishing for processes that are being exposed as web services

BEA integration:

  • WorkSpace extensions for JSF and ALUI. Since I’m not familiar with these products, I’m not sure of all the implications here, but it does provide things such as plug-and-play authentication, and easy deployment of processes within the portal environment.
  • They’re adding RSS feeds to ALBPM to be able to get a feed of a work list or a pre-defined query on process instances — this has huge implications not just for integration with BEA portals, but with any feed reader or other application that can consume feeds, on any platform. I’ve been pushing for this on this blog for over a year now, and finally starting to see it emerging from a couple of the BPM vendors.
  • Integration of ALBPM and ALSB (Service Bus) for enhanced services capabilities such as seamless publication and subscription, and WS-Security support for authentication. Although customers are already using BPM with the service bus, this integration is intended to make it easier; effectively, they plug together so that ALSB acts as a UDDI for ALBPM. And for services consumed by ALBPM from ALSB, they’re using RMI to boost the performance over the usual web services calls.

Usabilty and infrastructure enhancements:

  • Forms creation is improved with a simplified flow, and also have a CSS-based look and feel.
  • They’re moving to an Eclipse platform for the IDE by providing ALBPM plug-ins for Eclipse 3.2: the Designer/Studio will run in Eclipse, and there will be Studio Eclipse plug-ins for BEA Workshop, which provides more seamless integration with other BEA development environments. Like other products that I’ve seen go this route, they’ll have three different personas (including a new  business modelling persona), so that business analysts aren’t stranded in a developer-type environment, but developers have full access to the Eclipse functionality. Their goal was to provide full functionality in the Eclipse-based version so that there’s nothing that needs to be done in the old version; this will definitely help to encourage early migration from the old to new toolsets. By being in an Eclipse environment, that also means that development can be more easily shared with developers who are working in Eclipse but not familiar with ALBPM.
  • Improved web services support, with support for web service Doc Literal, and extended PAPI-WS.
  • Enhanced deployment methods, including simplified J2EE deployment and full JVM 1.5 support.
  • Simulation using historical production data.
  • Mobile device support.

The 2008 release, Condor, will be focused on the following themes:

  • Business and developer tool enhancements, including a web-based modeller (initially limited functionality), and enhancements to BAM.
  • Enhancements to the engine to allow it to be embedded as an OEM process engine.
  • Better integration with BPA tools (IDS Scheer and Proforma were mentioned) to support round-tripping.
  • Additional collaboration and social computing functionality via integration with other BEA tools.

Since this is forward-looking information, none of the Condor functionality listed above is guaranteed to be in the next release.

Overall, BEA is concentrating on three main areas: SOA, BPM and social computing. They’re seeing about 20% crossover between their SOA and BPM clients, and I’m sure that they’ll be pushing to increase those numbers.