A few days ago I blogged about the how watching blogs.sun.com during the Sun layoffs was an interesting experiment in the ramifications of corporate blogging.

The very next day, Sun's general counsel, Matt Dillon, started a blog and posted about Sun's experiences with blogs.sun.com during the layoff. Very interesting. In addition, perhaps knowing that many of the laid off Sun bloggers would continue blogging, they started a syndication site for Sun alumni. I looked into it, and after a few days of verifying my identity, BPM Blog should now be syndicated over at the Sun Alumni blogs page.

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Corporate blogging is still a largely unexplored frontier. I know that I still stuggle with the etiquette of what to post here. One thing that I'm finding very interesting to observe is the affect of the Sun layoff (aka RIF) on blogs.sun.com. Several bloggers have now gotten the axe and several others have made posts about the day the RIF hit their local office.

I remember companies making sure that RIF'd employees don't have access to email so that they don't send out any negative comments to customers or partners using a company email address. Now, with the proliferation of Sun blogs, we have RIF'd employees with the ability to publicly post to the front page of a Sun website about their "layoff experience". I wonder if PR is watching that site. It doesn't seem like it because there have been a couple of posts I think they would have removed if they had been censoring it.

I think this is a good thing. It shows the professionalism of corporate blogging in general. If you can trust your bloggers in a situation like this, I think that it's a good indicator that bloggers don't need PR babysitters.

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While I'm welcoming Clinton to blogging, I should take a moment to celebrate that, as of yesterday, I've been blogging for two years. Two years ago I was working at Sun and an avid blog reader. I had already been toying with the idea of starting a blog when well known blogger Tim Bray joined Sun and Sun started it's official blogs.sun.com site. So I jumped on blogs.sun.com and began blogging about my experiences at the 2004 Java One conference.

I blogged at blogs.sun.com for about nine months until I decided to start work at Fuego. And, thinking that BPM would be a very interesting to blog about, I registered my own domain and began the original BPM Blog. I built enough traffic at the site to get noticed by the folks at ebizQ and the rest, as they say, is history.

I have to say, I've always struggled writing. I'm too critical of my own writing, and as a result it takes me too long to get anything written. But I do enjoy blogging. I enjoy the emails I receive from customers because of my blog. I enjoy the threads of converation I've had with other bloggers. I enjoy the opportuntity it gives me to be the face of BPM for BEA.

So thanks for reading and making this experiment in blogging worthwhile.

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Welcome to the new incarnation of BPM Blog.

Two weeks ago, the company I worked for (Fuego) was acquired by BEA Systems. In one of my blog posts about the acquisition, I questioned what effect the acquisition should have on BPM Blog. Should I keep BPM Blog independent, or should I make it a part of BEA's Dev2Dev blogging site?

In response to the rhetorical question, I got an invitation to join the ebizQ blogging team. Obviously, I accepted the offer. I knew from my web server logs that many of my readers were ebizQ readers, so joining the ebizQ bloggers seemed a natural fit. (Especially given how much I've been linking to Column2 over the last couple of weeks.

For those of you who are new readers, you may want to to check out the archives at BPM Blog's original home: http://www.bpm-blog.com . I plan on keeping the original site around until I can get all of the content imported into the ebizQ system.

For those of you who are already readers, and are following the link over to here, thanks for reading. You may want to change your feed readers over to the new feed if you are using an RSS reader. Pardon the typical migration struggles as I try to resolve all of the stylesheet issues.

To re-introduce myself, I'm a BPM Systems Engineer. I work for BEA Systems in the Business Interaction Division, which includes the AquaLogic Business Process Management products (formerly FuegoBPM). This means that spend most of my time working with customers in pre-sales. Basically everything from speaking engagements to customer demos to implementation planning and architecture.

In addition to blogging about the BPM industry, I've been known to stray offtopic to discuss the Getting Things Done productivity methodology, the technology industry in general, and even weightlifting. One of the conditions of joining ebizQ was that I post more regularly. Which means that I'll have even more chances to be offtopic. :-)

So check this space in the coming weeks. I'll be posting some more thoughts about the BEA acquisition of Fuego as well as some posts about exactly what I think the future of BPM may hold.

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