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IT for Gen Y: Social Media and the Net Generation

4 Posts tagged with the bmc_communities tag
Anirban Dutta

- by Anirban Dutta, Web Producer

 

Thanks Blake for leading me on to this.

Whether I am blogging or coding I always am on music. The tunes lubricate my whole productivity mechanism.
This post is for those of you who like to groove while you work.


I became highly motivated from Alena's last post and decided to get myself rolling since my personal blogging outage.
So to get started I took a stroll around the hall with my ipod.

 

When at the gates of our Community, the first thing that you got to do is to get yourself registered as a user.

If you've arrived as an experienced community chief, there's high levels of action hormones flowing in your blood, we have an elaborate webform to ensure that your identity is well accounted for. A dose of Megadeth is already tipping your equalizer bars. Thrash metal is something I have always naturally attributed to the moment when you've crouched tight for a leap into the action ahead. You face your own music if your login credentials are verified to be inappropriate, so the song might as well be one of your die hard favorites.

 

Place to start is the Communities home page

I would consider this place as the concierge of the entire Community - you might expect an instrumental fill the air to complement the classic oak interiors, a Chopin, Beethoven, Paganinni or any the masters of concerto. This place showcases the building highlights - like the hotel floorplan. There is a Featured content section which gives you a contemporary pick of a video or audio podcast from the industry illuminaries.


First stop - the BMCDN room

"Welcome to the BMC Developer Network, where members who leverage BMC technology can find resources to solve critical business problems. This community provides forums, blogs, documents, and downloads that enhance the value of your BMC Software solutions."

 

This is a busy zone with lots of activitiy. I would rather compare it to the NY Stock Exchange.
There are games to play, party's to attend and forums to participate and you collect points for your engagement.
So nice chicken pickin country music a picture of floors always filled with scuffling feet.

 

About BMC Communities

"The About BMC Communities area is your place to find help, frequently asked questions and offer feedback on the BMC Communities. You'll also discover employment opportunities in the technology field."

 

This lounge is very contemporary because of its drapery of recent content where you have panels of Popular Tags, Recent Activity and a list of Top Participants for our Community which might suggest this place could have a lounge track like Alphawezen "Speed of Light", or a DJ shadow track

something that has a drone but also gives you a feel of being in progression with times.

 

The IT Management Community

"Welcome to the IT Management Community, where business and technology intersect."


This is serious stuff and Lots of it in the offering. This is the business center of the hotel.

This is the place to hang around if you want to keep a tab on the daily pulse of the IT business. So be prepared with your gadgets and a notebook when you are around here, music cannot be too much of a flurry - at the most I can suggest the ticking of a metronome or a basic instrumental instructional .midi file soundtrack. So you wont find lofty speakers around here.

 

The Thought Leadership Council

"The Thought Leadership Council is composed of individuals who are industry experts in a variety of strategic areas that impact IT organizations and their business customers."

 

So this is basically a room for great thoughts, this is our Spa. Sound of conch and wind instruments - this place would have the oriental ambience. This place is really the pagoda for industry knowledge so I'd imagine a backdrop of a Japanese garden and the music to go along with it.

 

Enterprise leadership

"Enterpriseleadership.org is a thought-leadership forum to help Global Fortune 1000 C-level executives improve their business impact of  information technology in delivering products and services to customers and other constituencies; enhancing improved business processes, and enabling of individual productivity and group productivity."

 

This is a place where the human intellect is music itself. As the site features podcasts, the audio-out of your sound system can only contain the wisdom of the great thought leaders of our industry, not to mention the intro and the outro bits to the podcasts. There are articles to read as well and if you are like me, need an excuse to swing to the beats, try some Buddha Bar, or new kid in the scene of lounge music - Ryan Farish - and let all the wisdom dawn in on you.

 

Solution Provider Portal

This is again a massive arena, it is a community in a community, like a China town within your city. Bustling with activity this place demands rich engaging music, the likes of John Mayer or a Stevie Ray Vaughn blues.


Technology Alliance Program

"(TAP) Private Community - where members who leverage BMC technology can find assistance in building solutions that solve critical business problems."

 

This is again a thought provoking room. Where ideas and technologies combine to give rise to new solutions. This place is much like the bar where bitters, fruit, soda, ice, sugar, honey, milk, are all mixed to serve new cocktails. A dash of Indian classical fused with Western to fire up your drink. You cannot tie down the ambience to a particular genre but that is the case when highly creative minds come together.

 

Partner Directories

"This Directory features the entire community of BMC Partners - Strategic Alliances, Solution Providers, Consulting Partners, Government and Education Partners, Technology Partners and BSM Certified Partners. The BMC Partner Network includes Partners with extensive IT solutions expertise and geographic coverage."
This place is the speciality restaurant with an elaborate menu. the offerings have been put together by years of culinary experience and is well structured in accordance to the orientation of taste. The theme to this restaurant should hence be pure and time tested. I'll leave this part to have the current track on your play-list. And if you are out of ideas, try some Tommy Emmanuel.


The BMC TV zone

This is the entertainment room of our hotel and has an engaging audio visual experience to what our partners and customers have to say about their experiences with BMC. So that is filling the room here. If thats not, Collective Soul is - let music be the reason

 

There is a growing collection of blogs, articles and podcasts that offer the richness of a Pink Floyd melody, lots of stuff to participate and engage in, forums to attend and trails to pick up. And if you want to get down straight to business, just whistle your favorite tune, tap on your desk, see how our typing habits has made us all into musicians of some extent. So when you feel like you've something to add to the burgeoning conversations in this place, just log on, hit that play button on your player and let your thoughts trickle like the notes of Musica.

 

Music is such an inspiration and pleasant insistent distraction; I enjoyed composing this post with words and music and I hope you have a tuneful stay at our Communities hotel.


Till next time, this is your DJ Anirban from BMC Communities, signing off.

The postings in this blog are my own and don't necessarily represent BMC's opinion or position.
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0 Comments Permalink Tags: bmc_communities, secure_partner_portal, technology_alliance_program, spp, tap, music, bmc_tv, enterprise_leadership, bmcdn, it_management, partner_directories, thought_leadership
Alena Hitzemann


- by Alena Hitzemann, Associate Web Editor


One of the most challenging and enjoyable things about working in IT is the learning curve. There is always so much to learn. I think mine has been particularly steep, coming from a decidedly non-technical background, but I believe that everyone in the industry needs to stay perpetually on their toes to keep up with the quickly changing world of technology.


For example, one of the current buzzwords in BMC-land and in the online world is Cloud Computing. Suddenly, Cloud Computing is everywhere. I'm in meetings about Cloud Computing, promoting podcasts on Cloud Computing, creating a new Cloud Computing Community, and seeing the phrase pop up all over my Twitter and iGoogle pages. When this first started to happen, I just played along. I could do my job without a complete (or, umm, remote) understanding of what Cloud Computing actually meant, so I did. But eventually I decided that having only the dimmest idea of what I was marketing probably wasn't that smart. So I started digging around.


Of course, I started with Wikipedia. which says:

Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet.[1][2] Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the "cloud" that supports them.[3]


Ok, fine. I guess I understand that. But I wanted more, so I found a couple other articles that explained it more clearly (see list below.) But I still wanted more- I wanted context. I wanted these definitions and discussions of a pretty ephemeral topic to mean something to me.


So I started Googling around for Cloud Computing and social media. Bingo. Here were the articles that piqued my interest, taking a really big concept and breaking it down in terms of specific ideas, implications and use cases. Turns out the Cloud is extremely relevant to social media. All these years that I've been Facebooking- I've been using Cloud technology! But what I found even more interesting were the ways that various organizations are using Cloud Computing to further internal communication and collaboration. It intuitively makes sense to me that centralized, virtualized space is key to a large number of people effectively working together. This is social media at its finest- not just a podcast or video that might become "social" IF people choose to interact around it, but a true network of engagement and interaction. Wow. Pretty cool stuff.


For this week's Friday Round-Up, I'd like to pass on the information that helped me understand and contextualize this fuzzy, fascinating Cloud. Enjoy.


What the heck is Cloud Computing?


One Year or Less: Cloud Computing from the 2009 Horizon Report – great overview of what “cloud computing” actually means and how it impacts business, education and media.

 

Five Truths (or Lies) About Hosting in the Cloud – Cloud Computing rumors and myths debunked.


 

How the Big Guys are using the Cloud:

 

The Intersection of Social Media and the Cloud – insightful look into how the big players (Microsoft, Google, Sun,  Amazon, Apple) are incorporating the Cloud into their strategies

 

Intel Chip Chat: Cloud Computing – podcast with Intel’s director of Cloud Computing.

 

 

Cloud Computing for social networking and collaboration:

 

How Cloud Computing Will Change Business – BusinessWeek provides several examples of companies using Cloud technology to connect and make business run more smoothly.

 

Social Networking and Cloud-based Collaboration Tools – quick look at how cloud-based applications are changing and will continue to change corporate collaboration.

 

Avon Calling: Cloud Computing Social Networks – how Avon has used the Cloud to connect its diverse and dispersed work force.

 

Cloud Computing Enhances Enterprise Development – an IBMer explains how the Cloud enhances development and test groups in the enterprise.

 

Government Social Media Reputation Management in the Cloud - discussion on the implications to accountability that stem from using the Cloud.



The postings in this blog are my own and don't necessarily represent BMC's opinion or position.
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0 Comments Permalink Tags: social_media, cloud, cloud_computing, collaboration, bmc_communities, twitter, bmccloud, social_networking
Anirban Dutta

- by Anirban Dutta, Web Producer

Tidal wave?

The concept that has sent a Wave of excitement through the tech and non tech community alike comes from the innovative giant on the web – Google.

They’ve named it Google Wave.

Google Wave logo.

Founders of the Google wave are Lars Rasmussen, Jens Rasmussen (brothers) and Stephanie Hannon - the same team that came up with the Google Maps application.

 

As Lars Rasmussen, co-founder of Google Wave highlights, email was created some 40 years ago, before the creation of the Internet its self and it was done without the experience and knowledge we now have of things such as wikis, social networks, sms, instant messaging and so on. He introduces the Wave as “Google Wave is what email would look like if it was created today”. He says as opposed to emails which try to instantiate a point to point conversation, the Google Wave is "one metaphor for hosted conversations" object hosted on a server somewhere.

 

The Wave concept typifies an utopian Web 3.0 world where we have all the caliber of Web 2.0 ie emails, IMs, wikis, blogs, bulletin boards, Social networking, sharing and collaboration merged with a much more real time focus; so we have all of the cool stuff happening in a single browser session in a single pane with more enhanced features like we never imagined!

 

So how does this Sci-Fi set look?

Google_Wave_snapshots_inbox.png

 

Features like real time translation in 40 languages, contextual spell check, grammar checking and all in one drag drop file sharing, document creation, sharing and editing, starting forums. It certainly packs the thrills of a Spielberg flick!

 

Plus a very cool feature is its Playback option which lets you refer back to a conversation trail and see which participant added what and at which time and locate the origin of the Wave - each conversation is a wave.

 

Open Source and the Wave

Google shared its baby with the world at Google's Developer Preview forum Google I/O May 2009

Watch the launch video

Google has actually invited the developer community to participate in the Google Wave program by throwing open a forum to contribute to its features. Majority of the Wave's code is open source and the developers would be given accounts in a sandbox within Google's system  to start developing add on features and extensions to coincide with the launch. This is way too cool.

There is also a feedback capturing mechanism if you wish to be updated on whats going on - Fill up the form

I think I can definitely suggest some cool aliens in this movie on the semi technical side straight to the directorial suit.

 

The Wave is a platform in iself and it supports robots to automate tasks and functions, embed Waves into external blogs and web sites, “talk” to popular web services such as Twitter collaborate across different platforms, merge other Google tools and gadgets in short Google calls it a "Game changer".

I enhanced my open source knowledge from whurley's podcasts.

 

I'm not walking the technical line on this red hot topic - there's enough out there on the internet, a particularly good read is the Google Wave guide.

 

Concerns, resistance to change?

Does this mean the end of the world of CCing and BCCing and SMTP mails and the very recent blogging? How would it impact my business/ Do I have to resort to cloud computing? Would the corporate world accept the wave? Would the concept be scalable enough? These are some of the initial questions that make the tag cloud of this mega project but coming from an organization like Google I have full faith on their to realizing abilities.

 

My part of the shock was when I realized the concept of the Google Wave was so massive and yet so simple that Social Media would be turned into a subset of this giant - where I always thought Social networking encompasses all - I feel this Tide has a magnitude of possibly redefining Tim Berners Lee's www into World Wide Wave.

 

Cant wait for the tide to come sweep us over!

The postings in this blog are my own and don't necessarily represent BMC's opinion or position.
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Alena Hitzemann

- by Alena Hitzemann, Associate Web Editor

 

(Sorry, Blake, I stole your line.)

 

Last week, the BMC Communities hit a membership milestone: 20,000 registered users. Yay!

 

It's kind of remarkable, if you think about it. 20,000 people have chosen to join and participate in a vendor-based community. That's roughly five times the population of the town where I grew up, and they're all here to discuss IT, business, technology and BMC. The Communities have become a place to ask questions, find answers, talk shop, poke around, learn more, meet people, and maybe even waste a little time. The site has actually lived up to its name: it is a group of people who support and help each other. Like a physical community, it is also constantly evolving, and we hope that it continues to evolve in an innovative, interesting and helpful way.

 

But all of that begs the question: who cares? What is the value of this new number? What does "20,000 registered users" Really Mean?

 

Of course, as a marketing person, I'm not supposed to ask questions like that. 20,000 users Really Means that we have a nice, round, impressive number to put in our powerpoints and impress our superiors. "Have you heard about our Communities Success? Twenty Thousand People!" Its propensity for propaganda may translate to more press, more visits, more page views, more buzz, more funding. All of those things are theoretically good. But with social media (and as I am learning, metrics in general,) the numbers only tell a very small part of the story.

 

Let's say, for example, that only 5% of that 20,000 engages with the site on a regular basis. There aren't many of them, but they're super active. Is that good? Is that bad? Why is it happening, and where is that other 95% hanging out? Or, what if 80% of registered users visit the site often, but just lurk. No interaction, no engagement... but hey, 17,000 people are still hanging out in our sandbox! In both cases we have 20,000 users, but vastly different use cases. Which one is "better"? Which tells the more complete story?

 

The answer, IMHO, is pretty clear in its murkiness: neither is better. Neither is necessarily more complete. Numbers only offer a particular snapshot into behavior and sentiment, and even when matched with other numbers, will only tell the story in one of many possible ways. Ever seen how Fox News and CNN present the very same information? Mmhmm... then you know what I mean.

 

So, all that being said... metrics and numbers are still obviously important and meaningful and necessary. I'm just starting to really grasp the complexities of web metrics, and I will tell you that they are also fascinating. I just hope that as I learn more, I retain my ability to see through the trees of data into the forest of context, and that my understanding of those trees will make my view of the forest all the more clear.

 

And for now? Time to break out the bubbly. Come on... 20,000 users! Woo hoo!

 

The postings in this blog are my own and don't necessarily represent BMC's opinion or position.
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