BPM, E2.0 @Oracle

My first blog post in Oracle. So, I’ll start with a tribute to a mentor and a friend.

When I first joined Plumtree 5+ years ago, there was so much to learn: Portal, search, collaboration, publisher, content, architecting the whole set etc. I was thrust deep into an implementation primarily because the deployment was on UNIX and I knew UNIX (at least I knew enough to fumble my way around).

As you can guess, I ran into installation problems (hey that was the old 4.5WS on UNIX after all) and given the baffling nature of these problems, quite a few people stepped up to help me. But one guy stood out by the sheer quality and detailed suggestions to resolve the problems. And his solutions worked. Oh, he was also helping others who had hairy issues too. His name is Gerald Kanapathy.

A couple of months later, we had our first kick-off in Vegas and the PS team had its own breakout sessions. When Gerald was introduced as the speaker, someone behind me muttered with a mixture of both awe and reverence: “Yeah, that’s the Plumtree God”. Since then, Gerald’s reputation was cemented in my mind. In our 2004 kick-off, he was nominated (and won) for Best Employee Award or something similar and one the nominators wrote: “He’s the guy we folks in engineering go to when we are stuck.”

For those of you ALUI (now WebCenter Interaction) afficionados, Gerald used to run a blog on dev2dev@bea where he shared a lot of his invaluable knowledge and experience on technology, the WebCenter Interaction product and Web 2.0 with us lesser mortals. He has graciously shared the posts with me and now I can in turn share it with you. In the coming weeks, I’ll be republishing them here.

I hope they will be useful to you as they have been to me.

Cheers,
Ali