Why the New Gap Logo was Awesome

Ok, so not the logo itself. I'm not an idiot who thinks it was a good logo or that crowdsourcing is healthy for the design community. What I'm saying is that YOU'RE an idiot for getting all enraged about Gap's new logo and how much it sucked. Why? Because that's exactly what they wanted you to do.

Any press is good press, right? Well, in this social-media-ridden world where every two-bit wonk has his own soapbox, that phrase should now read: "any trending topic is a good trending topic."

The logo not only had Gap trending for weeks, but it inspired so much passionate vitriol that some one even built a web application to allow you to "crap" your own logo. These logos spread to people's Facebook and Twitter avatars, blogs, web sites. I'm just waiting for "Gap Logo Sucks Freeze-Dried Donkey Bollucks," the song. The t-shirt. The TV mini-series. Jeezus, enough already.

How many web applications were built in honor of the original Gap logo? Exactly.

I can't prove that Gap (and Laird & Partners) intentionally duped the social media community into talking about (almost nothing but) their astoundingly shitty logo for weeks. Perhaps it was a happy accident for Gap. Perhaps it was a bit more Machiavellian than that. We may never know. But one thing is indisputable: it worked. And you were duped. And that was awesome.

Oracle Announces Roadmap for Plumtree / AquaLogic / WebCenter

UPDATE 2: I've incorporated all the great feedback and comments from ex-Plumtreevians, ex-BEA and ex- and current Oracle folks.

UPDATE: A bunch of Plumtreevians are contributing really good comments on this post over on Facebook.

I worked at Plumtree Software, Inc. from June 1998 to December, 9th 2002. In four-and-a-half years, the company grew from 25 employees to over 400 and it had thousands of happy customers before it was purchased by BEA Systems in 2005 for $220M. Here at bdg, we've been supporting dozens of Plumtree/AquaLogic Interaction (ALI)/WebCenter Interaction (WCI) customers since we opened our doors in December of 2002.

Back around 2005, BEA's BID (Business Interaction Division) still had a lot of really smart engineers from Plumtree working on a lot of really interesting things, including Pages (think CMS 2.0), Pathways (kind of an enterprise version of del.icio.us) and Ensemble (the portlet engine/gateway, minus the overhead and UI of the portal itself). They were also working on an enterprise social network, kind of a Facebook for business if you will.

However, there was a lot of wrangling at BEA, primarily between BID/AquaLogic and BEA's flagship product, WebLogic (the world-class application server). Most of the strife came in the form of WebLogic Portal vs. AquaLogic/Plumtree Portal nonsense. Senior management at BEA, in their infinite wisdom, had taken a "let's try not to alienate any customers" policy and in the process they confused all their customers and alienated/frustrated quite a few of them as well. They renamed Plumtree to AquaLogic User Interaction (ALUI), put in place a "separate but equal" policy with WebLogic Portal (WLP) and spewed some nonsense about how WLP was for "transactional portal deployments" vs. ALI for .NET and non-transactional portals, but no one, including BEA management, had any idea WTF that meant. To further confuse the issue, the WLP team, which also had a lot of really smart engineers, built products like "Adrenaline" (which was basically a less-functional and more buggy version of Ensemble) rather than do the unthinkable and integrate Ensemble into WLP so that WLP could finally host non-Java/JSR-168 portlets.

I was really pissed about BEA's spineless portal strategy, their "separate but equal" policy between WLP and BID/ALUI and their waste of precious engineering resources in an arms race between WLP and ALUI rather than just stepping back, growing a spine, and coming up with a portal strategy. Because I can't keep my pie hole shut, I started several loud, messy and public fights with BEA management. Why? Because the real loser here is the customer. And BEA, because management got mired in politics and chose to waste engineers' time on in-fighting and competition instead of building enterprise Facebook, which Steve Hamrick and I arguably already wrote in our spare time. All they needed to do was productize that and they would have owned that market.

In 2008, Oracle inherited this clusterfuck of a portal strategy when they bought BEA for $7B+, giving me new hope that cooler heads would prevail and fix this mess. The first thing they did was fire all the impotent BEA managers who were afraid to make any decisions. (I won't name any names, but you know who you are. I just hope that you learned, for the sake of your new employers, that it's worse to make no decision than a bad decision.) It took Oracle a while, but alas, they have finally arrived at a portal strategy that makes sense. I first learned about this strategy when I crashed the WebCenter Customer Advisory Board last Thursday.

First of all, let me say this: under the leadership of Vince Casarez, current (and future) customers are in good hands. I realized when he said "everyone still calls it Plumtree" that this was going to be a bullshit-free presentation. He also said something regarding the "portal stew" at Oracle that puts all of my ranting and raving in perspective: "Oracle did not buy BEA for Plumtree or WLP, just like it didn't buy SUN for SUN's portal product." To rephrase that, Oracle bought BEA for WebLogic (the application server, not the portal) and Sun for their hardware (not for Java, NetBeans and all the rest of Sun's baggage).

So, let's face it, portals are a relatively insignificant part of Oracle. However, they've finally did what I called for 2008 and what BEA never had the wits to do: pick a single portal strategy/stack and stick to it. SO, if you're a current Plumtree/ALUI/WCI or a current WLP customer, you have a future with Oracle. Here's the plan, as I understand it.

1) All roads lead to Web Center (not Web Center Interaction, but Web Center)

At the heart of Web Center will be WebLogic's app server and portal. Plumtree/ALUI as a code base will be supported, but eventually put into maintenance mode and retired. You get nine or twelve years of support and patches (blah blah blah) but if you want new features, you need to switch to the new Web Center, powered by WLP. CORRECTION: WebCenter will not be "powered by WLP." At its core will be the Oracle-developed, ADF-based WebCenter Portal running on WebLogic Server.

2) All the "server products" (Collaboration, Studio, Analytics, Publisher) will be replaced by Web Center Services or Web Center Suite

Publisher will be subsumed by WCM/UCM (Web Content Management / Universal Content Management, formerly Stellent). The other products will be more-or-less covered by similar offerings in Suite or Services.

3) What about Pages, Ensemble and Pathways?

Pages is dead as WCM/UCM does it better. Pathways is getting rolled into the new Web Center somehow, but I'm not sure how yet. Perhaps I can follow up with another blog post on that. Ensemble has been renamed "Pagelet Producer" -- more on that below. CORRECTION: Pathways is now called "Activity Graph" and it will be part of the new WebCenter. Think of an enterprise-class version of the Facebook News Feed crossed with Sales Force chatter and you'll be on the right track.

4) What about .NET/SQL Server, IIS and everything else that isn't Java?

This is a really interesting question and the key question that I think drove a lot of BEA's failure to make any decision about portal strategy from 2005-2008. Plumtree had a lot of .NET customers and some of the biggest remaining Plumtree/ALUI customers are still running on an all-Microsoft stack. In fact, one of them told me recently that they have half a million named user accounts, two million documents and 72 Windows NT Servers to power their portal deployment.

So, let's start with the bad news: Oracle doesn't want you to run .NET/Windows and they REALLY don't want you to run on SQL Server. (That will change when Oracle acquires Microsoft, but that's not gonna happen, at least not any time soon.) WebLogic app server and WLP/WCI, to the best of my knowledge, will not run on SQL Server. They will, however, run on Windows, but I would not recommend that approach. I think it's inevitable that large enterprises will have both .NET and Java systems along with a smattering of other platforms. So, if you're a .NET-heavy shop, you'll need to bite the bullet and have at least one server running JRockit or Sun's JVM, one of Oracle's DB's (Oracle proper or MySQL), WLS/WLP/WCI and preferably Oracle Enterprise Linux, Solaris or some other other flavor of Un*x. CORRECTION: WLP will run on SQL Server. Not sure about the new WebCenter Portal, but my guess is that it does not.

Now, for the good news: the new WCI, powered by WLP and in conjunction with the Pagelet Producer (formerly Ensemble) and the WSRP Producer (formerly the .NET Application Accelerator) will run any and all of your existing portlets, regarless of language or platform. This was arguably the best feature in Plumtree and it will live on at Oracle. .NET/WRSP and even MOSS (Sharepoint) Web Parts will run in WebCenter through the WSRP Producer. The Pagelet Producer will run portlets written in ANY language through what is essentially a next generation, backwards-compatible CSP (Content Server Protocol, the superset of HTTP that allows you to get/set preferences, etc. in Plumtree portlets). So, in theory, if you're still writing your portlets in ASP 1.0 using CSP 1.0 and GSServices.dll, they will run in the new Web Center via the Pagelet Producer. Time for us to update the PHP and Ruby/Rails IDKs? Indeed it is. Let me know if you need that sooner rather than later.

5) How do I upgrade to the new WebCenter?

Well, first off, you have to wait for it to come out later this fall. Then, you have to start planning for what's less of an upgrade and more of a migration. Oracle, between engineering and PSO, has promised to provide migration for all the portal metadata (users, communities, pages, portlets, security, etc.) from Plumtree/ALUI/WCI to the new Web Center, with WLP at its heart. (Wouldn't it have made sense for some of those WLP engineers to start building that migration script in 2005 instead of trying to compete with ALUI by building Adrenaline? Absolutely.) All your Java portlets, if you're using JSR-168 or JSR-286, will run natively in WLP through a wrapper in WebCenter Portal. Everything else will either run in the WRSP Producer (if it's .NET) or in the Pagelet Producer (if it's anything else). The only thing I don't fully understand yet is how to migrate from Publisher to UCM, but I'm due to speak with Oracle's PSO about that soon. Please contact me directly if you need to do a migration from Publisher to WCM/UCM that's too big to do by hand.

The only other unanswered question in my mind is how the new WebCenter will handle AWS/PWS services -- the integrations that bring LDAP/AD users and profile information/metadata into Plumtree/ALUI/WCI. I wrote a lot of that code for Plumtree anyway, so if Oracle's not working on a solution for the new Web Center, perhaps I can help you with that somehow as well. CORRECTION: User and group objects are fully externalized in Web Center, so there is no need for AWS/PWS synchronization. (Thanks, Vince, for pointing that out.)

So, that's my understanding of the new portal strategy at Oracle. Kudos to Oracle's management for listening to their customers, making some really hard decisions and picking a path that I think is smart and achievable. I'm here to help if you have questions or need help with your portal strategy or technical implementation/migration.

Q&A

(Some other notes about discussions that have spawned from this original post.)

Q: What's the future of the Microsoft Exchange portlets (Mail, Calendar and Contacts) and the CWS for crawling Exchange public folders. Retired and replaced with something Beehive related? Still supported? For how long? Against what versions of Exchange?

A: We've got updated portlets for Mail & Calendar in WebCenter now for Exchange 2003 & 2007. We don't have a Contacts portlet but it could be added quickly if we see a large demand. Crawling public folders can be done with an adapter we have for SES [Oracle Secure Enterprise Search] already. We're working but aren't done with a new version of KD on top of the new infrastructure that will come out post PS3. (Contributed by Vince Casarez.)

Q: If migration scripts are provided to move WCI metadata into WebCenter, I understand that a portlet is a portlet, but what about pages and communities, users and groups, content sources and crawlers, etc.? Do they all have analogous objects in WebCenter or is there some reasonable mapping to some other objects?

A: Pages and Communities follow a model where we extract/export the meta data and data, then run it through a set of scripts that create a WebCenter Space for each Collab project/community and a JSPx page for every page. Users and Groups will come out of the LDAP/AD directory they are already using and the scripts associate the right permissions to each of the migrated objects. I don't recall what we did about crawlers but since we use SES directly, all the hundred or more connectors we ship for SES are now available for direct usage. The scripts go through a multiphase approach to move content, then portlets, then pages, then communities so that dependencies can be fixed up versus trying to do a manual fix up. (Contributed by Vince Casarez.)

Q: Will any existing WCI-related products that are slated for retirement (e.g. Publisher, Collab, Studio, Analytics, etc.) be re-released with support for Windows Vista, Windows 7, IE 8, IE 9 or Chrome?

A: For Publisher, we are planning a set of migrations to quickly move them to UCM. For Collab & Studio, we have new capabilities in WebCenter Spaces to match these functions. For Analytics, we've also rebuilt it on top of the WebCenter stack with over 50 portlets for the different metrics and made sure we provide apis/ access to the data directly. These analytics data also feeds the activity graph in providing recommendations for people on the content and UIs that are relevant to them. These are tied into the personalization engine that we brought over from the WLP side. So there is a rich blending of the best features from WLP with WCI key features. As for Neo [the codename for the next release of WCI], we are certifying the additional platforms. On the IE 8 front, we've just released patches for WCI 10gR3 customers to be able to use IE8 without upgrading to Neo. (Contributed by Vince Casarez.)

On Open Letter to the Java Community

In the wake of the Sun acquisition by Oracle, the much-lambasted Oracle vs. Google lawsuit over Google's alleged JavaME patent infringement, and the rumblings I've been hearing at Oracle Open World / JavaOne / Oracle Develop 2010, I have a message to the Java community:

Quit your bitching and moaning and start doing something productive!

Now that I've offended all the Java fanboys/girls out there, let me explain:

1. why I'm qualified to give you all one big collective kick in the ass, and
2. why this collective ass-kicking is coming from a place of love, not hate.

My first experience with Java was in 1994/95, when Stanford started switching its Computer Science curricula from C/C++ to Java. After struggling with memory management, segmentation faults, horrific concurrency problems and the other ways I kept shooting myself in the foot, Java was a breath of fresh air. My first corporate experience with Java was working as a summer intern for JavaSoft (a former subsidiary of Sun) in 1997 porting Patrick Chan's Java 1.0 sample applications (remember Hangman?) from JDK 1.0 to JDK 1.1.

I went on to join Plumtree. Originally, they were a Microsoft darling. I helped lead the charge to switch them from COM/DCOM, ASP 1.0 and SQL Server to Java and Oracle.

In 2002, I started a Plumtree-focused consulting firm, helping 50+ customers install, maintain and grow their Plumtree deployments. In all but a precious few of those accounts, I wrote all of the code in Java/JSP.

Since about 2008, we've been using Ruby on Rails for most of our software. When Rails hit the scene, I had a similar "breath of fresh air" moment similar to when I first encountered Java.

But this letter is not about Ruby or about Rails; it's about Java. A language I've used since it's very first iteration in 1994/95 and up to the present day. A language where I've written at least half a million lines of code, most of which still run in production today inside Plumtree/AquaLogic User Interaction/WebCenter Interaction, at major customer sites in the corporate world and in the federal government.

So, fast-forward to today, this is what I'm hearing about Java, in a nutshell:

1. Oracle's going to kill/close-source/fuck up Java
2. Life's not fair!
3. Blah blah blah

All of this bitching and moaning starts right at the top with Java grandfather and CEW (Chief Executive Whiner) James Gosling, who is showing incredibly poor leadership, lousy judgment and massive immaturity with his totally irrelevant, outdated and hateful anti-Oracle bitch-fest.


I've heard people whining about everything around them that's not running on Java: mobile applications, web sites, conference tools, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

I even saw someone complain on Twitter that the Black Eyed Peas, who Oracle paid an undoubtedly handsome sum of money to entertain your sorry asses last night, gave a shoutout to Oracle and not "The Java Community." Seriously?
Give it a rest, folks! There are lots of choices of development stacks and people are free to choose the one that works best for them. Embrace that freedom; don't fight it. And the word Oracle doesn't mean "database" anymore. It is an umbrella term that could refer to thousands of different products.

Let's take a look at some of the advantages of Oracle owning Java.

With respect to OpenWorld, the Java Community got:

1. Your own conference with around 400 sessions
2. Your own tent
3. Your own street closure (Mason Street)
4. Invited to OTN Night, one of the best parties at OpenWorld

More importantly, with Oracle Corporation, the Java community gets:

1. Cemented into the infrastructure of nearly all of Oracle's products, meaning that nearly all of their customers -- most of the Fortune 1000 -- are now Java shops (if they weren't already)
2. Stability, stewardship, thousands of really bright engineers and nearly unlimited resources
3. One of Corporate America's most powerful legal teams backing you up
4. A secure and promising future, including a just-announced roadmap for JDK 7 and 8

And, with all that being said, guess what? Java is still open source. Do you know what that means?

Let me answer that question with another question: what brilliant phoenix rose out of the ashes of the debacle that was the AOL acquisition of Netscape in 1998?

It was Firefox, a free, open source-based browser that literally revolutionized the massively screwed up browser market and gave the dominant browser (IE 5, and later, IE 6) a true run for its money. From wikipedia:

"When AOL (Netscape's parent) drastically scaled back its involvement with Mozilla Organization, the Mozilla Foundation was launched on July 15, 2003 to ensure Mozilla could survive without Netscape. AOL assisted in the initial creation of the Mozilla Foundation, transferring hardware and intellectual property to the organization and employing a three-person team for the first three months of its existence to help with the transition and donated $2 million to the foundation over two years."

IBM's beneficial relationship with Eclipse is another great example.

So, dear Java community, to ensure your own survival, please, in the name of Duke, stop complaining and start thinking strategically about how you can "pull a Firefox" here. You're all brilliant engineers, so start putting all the effort you're wasting in complaining toward something productive.

I love you all and I love all your passion and energy, but I hate your bitching -- use that energy to go save the world, Java style!

Google Blog Search Doesn't

Google is a search company, right?

Then why is it when I tried to use the blog search box, I never get any results? Click the image to try the search for yourself.



Yet when I do a site-specific search on Google.com for the very same blog, I get 28 results for the same search terms.



I just thought of a really easy way for Google to fix this problem. Oh, for gosh-dang-darn, I forgot it! Wait, it'll come to me. Ick, still drawing a blank. Well, they're smart; I'm sure they can figure it out.

I would call Google support, but they don't deign to provide any such thing. So, what gives?

Sound Business Advice from Jerry Garcia

Photo credit: Wikipedia Commons

Today would have been Jerry Garcia's 68th birthday. Musically, politically, emotionally and spiritually, he has probably had more of an impact on me than any other human being whom I never knew personally.

As I was perusing YouTube today looking for some footage of him that I hadn't seen already, I found that he was a pretty sage businessman as well. In his 1982 appearance (with Bob Weir) on The Letterman Show (full video embedded below), David asked him why he allows taping of his live shows when it obviously leads to fewer commercial sales of their official recordings. His response?

"The shows are never the same. Ever. And when we're done with it, they can have it."

Jerry was the not the creative force behind the lyrics of most of the music he played. Of their 420 original songs, only maybe 75 or 80% were truly originals; many others were adaptations of traditional bluegrass, folk or blues songs (in much the same fashion as Led Zeppelin, at least as it pertains to the blues). On the remaining originals, poet/lyricist Robert Hunter wrote the words and Jerry composed the music.

However, Jerry really did have an uncanny efficiency with his words, packing in multiple meanings into short, pithy phrases. In his response to Letterman, he's really saying (at least) all of the following:

1. No, it's not impacting our record sales negatively


2. The experience of seeing The Dead live is dramatically different each time


3. I don't own the music once I have released it from being; rather, by playing it live, I set it free to be enjoyed by whomever is listening


4. In many ways, this philosophy actually results in more record sales


5. No price tag can be assigned to the value of the community of fans that has grown organically around our music and our culture

These lessons are raft with really important business advice, especially since we're living in the age of social media. In many ways, Facebook, Twitter, et. al. have created communities that are just like the traveling circus of hippies that followed The Dead (and, later, other jam bands like Phish) on their tours, perhaps without as many drugs nor as much free love nor rock'n'roll and certainly a bit more personal hygiene. Okay, so maybe they're not really that much alike. But the sense of belonging to something larger than oneself is the same. How else can account for the explosive growth of Deadheads, the community around Burning Man and social sites like Facebook?

So, in this age of social media and utter disregard for things like "copyright" and End User License Agreements, how can musicians/bands, restaurant owners and other small businesses still manage to make "good bread" (as they called it in the 60s and 70s) in this age of the internet where everyone feels entitled to get nearly everything -- music, software, etc. -- for free?

The answer lies in Jerry's response to Letterman. Give away as much as you can. Think of the community around your business as a empty field. It needs to be tilled, seeded, watered and fertilized before you can reap the benefits of the harvest. Giving your products away for free is akin to planting your seeds. Engaging with your online community is akin tending to your crops. Selling your products and services is akin to harvesting your fields and selling the goods at the farmer's market. But you can get to the farmer's market if you're not taking good care of your farm.

I've heard this argument before. Someone told me once that consultants should take a page out of the professional chef's playbook (pardon the mixed metaphor). Take for instance, Hawaiian master chef Roy Yamaguchi, the creative force behind Roy's restaurants. If you buy his cookbook, you will have nearly all of Roy's recipes, free for you to make at home any time you want. But will you still eat at his restaurant? You betcha!

So what do you think? How does this apply to your business? Can you think of ways that you could give away the goods and still make money? I'd love to hear stories of how you've tried this and it has worked for you (or hasn't), so please leave a comment if you'd like to share.

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!

My Oracle OpenWorld Sessions

I'm going to be speaking in two different Oracle OpenWorld sessions on Sunday. They are OOW-S312303 -- Enterprise-Enable Dynamic PHP, Ruby, Python Apps: Oracle WebCenter Interaction and OOW-S312304 -- Enterprise Ruby on Rails: Rolling with JRuby on Oracle WebLogic Suite.

Here We Go Again: SXSW 2010

I know it feels like we just put the wraps on SXSW 2009, but Panel Picker Voting is already live for 2010! This year they're using the Panel Picker to crowdsource session proposals for all three conferences: Music, Film and Interactive (whereas in the past it has only been used for Interactive).

As you well know, Social Collective, Inc., a company I started to serve the conference industry with better and more social software tools, provided the official social network and schedule builder for SXSW 2009. We're on tap to provide that service again this year -- in fact, the site is already live at my.sxsw.com. We have some exciting new features planned for this year, so stay tuned for announcements on that front as we get closer to the event.

So, even though we're intimately involved with SXSW, I still have to EARN the privilege of speaking there. 30% of that is decided by YOU, the voters. So, in the name of shameless self-promotion, I must ask you to vote for my proposed talks (if you think they're worthy):

SXSW Interactive: Developer from Mars Takes on Designer from Venus
Every great project needs a designer and a developer. Yet sometimes working side-by-side can be about as fun as pulling teeth. A veteran developer and a veteran designer use real-world anecdotes to spar on the dynamics that make it challenging for people in these two disciplines to collaborate effectively.

Neo-patronage: Can It Save the Music Industry?
Starting with the idea that all recorded music should be free (as in beer), I will explore the idea that a system of "neo-patronage" -- think of the way European artists were commissioned during the Renaissance -- can help reinvent the beleaguered music industry to ensure that artists can get fairly compensated in a world where music is free for consumers.

You have until Friday, September 4th at 11:59PM CST to cast your vote. Thanks for your support and see you at SXSW!

ODTUG S672: ACED Sundown Session -- Middleware and SOA

ODTUG S672: ACED Sundown Session -- Middleware and SOA from Chris Bucchere on Vimeo.

ODTUG S680: Top Ten Tips for Java Developers on Oracle WebLogic Server

I just returned from the fabulous ODTUG (Oracle Developer Tools User Group) Kaleidoscope conference in Monterey, CA. I had the pleasure of giving two solo presentations and sitting on one panel.

I recorded both presentations and the panel. Here is the first full recording for your edutainment pleasure.

ODTUG S680: Top Ten Tips for Java Developers on Oracle WebLogic Server from Chris Bucchere on Vimeo.

Stay tuned for two more new videos which will be posted very soon.