A month of travel

Forgive me readers, for I have slacked off. It’s been 8 days since my last blog post. I blame the Canadian government, who insist on me doing my personal taxes by April 30th.

I’ve had a number of vendor product demos over the past several weeks, and it’s time to start blogging about them before I start into a month of travel: I’m giving a presentation at the TIBCO user conference in San Francisco next week, then attending the BEA user conference in Atlanta the following week, a few days vacation in Nova Scotia after that, then on to Las Vegas for a presentation at the Shared Insights Portals and Collaboration conference. Watch for live blogging from all three conferences, although not from my vacation.

BPM splog

If you surf around looking for BPM blogs, you may have noticed something strange: my blog posts from here on Column 2 reproduced in their entirety and without permission on the blog of Mark Bean, the VP of Sales for an ECM/BPM-related vendor, Altien. I’m not linking to them or to the fake blog itself, called “Office 2.0 and ECM News”, since I am definitely not encouraging traffic.

This is a clear violation of my intellectual property and copyright, and I’m amazed that anyone who works in this industry would propagate such an openly fraudulent and illegal activity. Maybe that tells you something about how Altien does business in general.

I noticed this a few weeks back, but I only noticed that he started stealing the full posts (as opposed to significant chunks of them) with my Gartner coverage this week. I sent Bean a request this morning to stop stealing my blog posts, and he replied “Sure thing”, like I had asked him for the weather — no apology, no admission that he might have violated blogging etiquette, much less copyright law. I’ve asked him to remove all of my full posts from his site, although obviously there’s no law against him linking to any of my posts and publishing a short excerpt under fair use rules.

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but in this case, it’s also theft.

Update: According to Altien’s CEO, who left a comment on this post, Mark Bean is no longer in their employ. In my communications with Altien, it was clear that Bean’s activities do not reflect their general business practices.

Gartner Day 2: Catching up with BPM bloggers

Lunchtime today was spent chatting with two other BPM bloggers: first, I met with Jesper Joergensen of BEA for a chat about what they’re doing; then I spent some time with Keith Swenson of Fujitsu, mostly talking about BPM standards. Add this to the fact that I had breakfast with Jason Klemow, and there’s been some pretty good BPM blogger networking today.

Sporadic email problems

If you’ve emailed me this week at my kemsleydesign.com address and the email has bounced, it’s because I’m in the process of changing hosting providers and Yahoo (the relinquishing provider) is doing everything in its power to screw things up for me — like not transferring my domain to a new registrar upon request. I’ve updated my MX records to point to my new hosting provider (GoDaddy) while I’m waiting for the domain transfer to happen, and sometimes things get confused.

Email to me at the column2.com address shown on my blog profile page seems to be working fine, even though it redirects to the same kemsleydesign.com address, since the email for that domain name is routed through GoDaddy and it seems to know about other MX records hosted by GoDaddy.

With any luck, this will all be sorted out by the weekend.

Guest blogging on BPMEnterprise.com

If you’re a reader of BPMEnterprise.com, you may have noticed a new blogger on their list today: me! I had the chance to meet Dian Schaffhauser at the ARIS user conference last week, and she invited me to do a few guest posts on their site from the upcoming Gartner BPM conference. I’ll still be doing my usual live blogging from the conference here on ebizQ, and this will remain my primary BPM blogging site, but I’ll post a daily summary of the conference over there.

ProcessWorld Day 2: Breakfast

I don’t usually blog about breakfast, but I happened to end up sitting with Marc Kase of SAIC, whose presentation that I posted about yesterday.

We had a great discussion about how they organize their team of business architects and business analysts, training, collaboration within the team and to their internal customers; Marc obviously has a good handle on how to create and manage such a diverse team of skills.

My question of the week is about integration between ARIS (or any process modelling environment) and a business process execution environment, whether a full BPMS or something that fits more into the SOA layer, and Marc confirmed my suspicions that the unidirectional interfaces are problematic for a variety of reasons, and not used within their environment of ARIS and the BEA AquaLogic BPMS (Fuego). They only provide a high-level process view to the (separate and IT-focussed) BPMS team, who then redraw it in BEA and add a lot of detail required for execution. This creates the opportunity for translation errors between the model and the implementation, although their ultimate QA is against the process models in ARIS in order to reduce those effects. Marc expressed that the lack of round-tripping was a factor in them not using direct integration as well.

I also found out that Vince, the senior business architect who accompanied Marc in his presentation, is Vince Outlaw of AboutEA — a blogger with whom I have exchanged links and comments. We discovered Vince in the internet cafe (of course) for an introduction, thereby creating one more real-world link to strengthen the ties of bloggers.

Blogging slowdown

Between travel, vacation and the Christmas holidays, blog entries will be pretty thin on the ground until about the second week of January. Things should get pretty exciting after that however: Mashup Camp 3 in Boston in mid-January, some in-depth vendor reviews in late January (based on the blog stats, I know that everyone likes those), the ARIS ProcessWorld conference in February, and I’m speaking at ASMI’s BPM Summit in March.

Mini-blogging in Flickr

Here’s a cool twist: Dion Hinchcliffe, whose Web 2.0 writings I have often referenced in the past, has been using his Flickr account to hold the graphics that he uses to illustrate his blog posts. The twist this time, however, is that he’s actually turned this “Seven Habits of Highly Effective Web 2.0 Sites” graphic and its description into a mini blog post. Since I get a feed of all my Flickr contacts’ new photos in my RSS reader, I see this just like any other blog post. Of course, his description also points you to the full article on his real blog.

Very Web 2.0.

Windows Live Writer

I saw a post about Windows Live Writer, an offline blogging tool, on Rick’s blog a couple of days ago, and decided to try it out. So far, I’m pretty impressed, although I haven’t used any other offline blogging tools so don’t have much to compare it to.

I do like that it integrates seamlessly with all three of my blogs: this one, which is uses Movable Type, my personal blog, which uses WordPress, and my wine club blog, which uses Blogger. I now have virtually the same interface for posting to all three blogs, and can even edit previously published posts. It also sucks in all the categories from each of the applicable blogs, so I have my full list of categories for tagging.

I’m sure that I’ll manage to break it soon, and will be ranting about it by week’s end, but so far I’m still having fun.

Just feed me

Email newsletters: the web 1.0 of permission marketing. How many of these do you subscribe to? How many that you receive do you actually read? I receive a number of email newsletters each day, almost all on the subject of technology in some way, but I have to confess that there are over 300 of them sitting unread in my email, dating back many months. I read these selectively, usually sorted by sender, during times when I have no internet access, such as on long flights (although that practice is now under review if I’m not allowed to bring a laptop on board).

RSS feeds, on the other hand, are the ultimate web 2.0 form of permission marketing: I subscribe to feeds that I want, without passing along any personal information that might result in unwanted spamming to my email. I read them online using Bloglines when I’m connected to the internet (which is almost all the time), and since each entry typically is a single subject rather than a collection of topics that I would find in an email newsletter, I can quickly go through them and figure out which ones that I want to spend more time on and which that I want to delete.

What this all has to do with BPM is that a number of the BPM portals (Business Process Management Group, Business Process Management Institute and Business Process Trends) don’t syndicate their content using RSS, but make you sign up for email newsletters. A couple of exceptions are BPMEnterprise.com, and ebizQ (which hosts this blog), a broader-based integration-related site.

A good percentage of you read this blog via the RSS feed — many through the Feedburner feed that provides some extra widgets on each post — so I know that you appreciate my complaint.