John Brunswick is a Consulting Solution Manager at Oracle Corporation. Prior to this he was a Practice Manager within BEA System's Business Interaction Division Professional Services Group. He managed their Enterprise Portal and Business Process Management practices in Canada and New England, helping Fortune 500 companies create solutions to a wide range of business challenges.

He actively contributes to the enterprise software business community and has authored a series of articles about optimal business involvement in portal, business process management and SOA development, examining ways of helping organizations move away from monolithic application development.

In 2006, he developed ServiceMountain, a commercial software package to help manage small service businesses, which was acquired by a medium-sized software vendor.

John actively leads the Boston Computing Review user group which he founded in 2005, educating members about emerging technologies and industry trends. Prior to working at BEA Systems John was an Implementation Manager at Plumtree Software. Before working at Plumtree Software, John directed Jniche Technology Associates, a small web application development and networking group. John graduated from Boston University with a degree in Business Administration with a concentration in Management Information Systems, is a PMP and holds various technical certification credentials.

Extending the Business Value of SOA through Business Process Management
"Business Process Management (BPM) is a natural complement to Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and a mechanism through which an organization can apply SOA to high-value business challenges. Both SOA and BPM can be pursued individually, but the two approaches in concert offer reciprocal benefits. This article will address the benefits of implementing BPM on top of a SOA foundation. Those benefits include a more agile, flexible, enterprise, one that can more easily proliferate across divisions and geographies, and is more resilient to changes in underlying IT systems. In addition to discussing how the complementary disciplines of BPM and SOA inherently promote radical cooperation between business and technology groups within an organization, this article will discuss how to enrich the services delivered from within a SOA."

Unlocking the Value of Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration and Authoring Tools
"A new breed of end user-driven collaboration tools is now available, promising significant return on investment. Enterprise software vendors have delivered, or are working on delivering, some flavor of first-generation, Web 2.0-influenced product suites containing blogging, wiki, and mashup capabilities to fill a gap in the traditional enterprise application space. These tools usher in forward-thinking, edge-of-the-Web feature sets that blur the lines of how we commonly associate business value with applications.

This article examines how end user-centric authoring environments, influenced by the Web 2.0 movement, fit into an enterprise, and how to govern their usage, educate users, and use these tools to generate business value."

Principles of Natural Participation
"Blogs, wikis, and other Web 2.0 components are powerful tools born out of the consumer Web. At this point, a growing number of people have had exposure to tools like Flickr, del.icio.us, and Blogger in their everyday lives. As enterprise software vendors move to deliver toolsets that allow for similar contribution within the enterprise, a new range of possibilities emerges - the cornerstone being the further empowerment of an organization's business analysts.

This article looks at how natural participation can help an organization build applications in a more agile manner, using increased collaboration and communication between business analysts and developers."

Middleware in the Downturn - Create your Springboard
It is no secret that the world economy is facing a wide scale downturn. Companies are looking to reduce costs and IT is generally viewed exclusively as a cost center. The current economic environment offers an opportunity for IT to...

Enterprise 2.0 Success - Focusing on Business Needs
As a consultant within a major software vendor and a seasoned user of consumer facing web 2.0 tools, I am constantly asked by companies as to why they should implement blogging, tagging or wiki platforms. Given the loud buzz around...

Tagging for Business Applications
The next wave driving business value via tagging is here and it is being done through creative design and deployment. At this point the value proposition of tagging enterprise artifacts by and for knowledge workers is generally understood. Given this,...

Maximizing Portal ROI - Education, Production Capacity and Stewardship Delegation
"Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime" -Chinese proverb If you have never read Seven Habits of Highly Effective people you are missing...

Niche Cooking for Intranet Success
Creating a winning recipe for an internally facing corporate portal is a daunting task. At the onset of a project there is a natural tendency to think that having a large target audience is the route to success and value...

Intranet Page Usability
A great web page is structured like a good dinner party - not everyone can be the center of attention at the same time. To maximize effective participation it is best to have small pockets of focus exist throughout the dinner that people can engage with. In order for those pockets of focus to stand...

Intranet User Experience Design
In the world of corporate web portals user experience tends to take a backseat during a project. After all - with the requirements gathering, coding, configuration and additional tasks that need to be completed, who can bother setting aside time to deal with something wildly subjective like user experience? What intranet team has a dedicated...

Intranet Content Maintenance Tips
Anyone familiar with intranets knows the pain of not applying best practices to content maintenance strategies upfront in an initial deployment. As part of a governance plan it is essential to design the maintenance strategy early on in a deployment. The pain generally becomes apparent when trying to figure out why old content exists...

Large Project Success - Pragmatic Phasing
I marvel at the complexity of various finely made time pieces. I cringe at the complexity of various projects. A timepiece is generally valued by the number of "complications" or moving parts that it has. Conversely, a project is punished by the number that it has. Unfortunately the possible surface area for project issues grows...

Intranet Success Workbook - Winning is not a Guessing Game
Launching a corporate intranet or new initiative within an existing intranet requires investment in the form of labor and capital. Before allocating time and resource to deliver a project, wouldn't it be nice to understand if it has an opportunity to contribute positively by adding business value? Fortunately, achieving intranet project success from...

Facebook Application Development Workshop
Promotional Excerpt - "Join us for an awesome workshop on Facebook application development. We will cover the basics of the platform, dig deeper to learn about the APIs and other nuts and bolts, develop an application together and provide take home code so that you can get started with you own application development. For the meeting we will be using PHP and MySQL for development, but knowing either is optional..."
more on Facebook Development Workshop...

Alfresco Content Management and Collaboration Platform
Promotional Excerpt - "Get ready to collaborate and build content with Alfresco! Jarrett Sloan of the Boston Computing Review will walk us through the fundamentals of Alfresco - from installation to configuration and use. Alfresco is the leading open source enterprise content management system built by the industry experts drawn from Documentum, Vignette and Interwoven. Some people have labeled it a respectable Sharepoint competitor."

Joomla Content Management and Development Basics
Promotional Excerpt - "Join us to learn the fundamentals of the Joomla content management system (CMS) (http://www.joomla.org). The Joomla CMS is designed to let non-technical users create extensive, professional web sites. We will examine it from both a pure WYSIWYG content management / out of box configuration standpoint, as well as what is needed for some basic development on top of the platform and how the platform can be extended with a wide range of add-ons..."

Self Publishing - Blogging Platform Extravaganza
Promotional Excerpt - "Join us to take a look at the nuts and bolts of blogging platforms that have changed the way in which individuals publish to the world..."

Business Process Management
Promotional Excerpt - "BPM tools are quickly becoming some of the most important assets to IT organizations looking to fulfill business needs in an expedient, agile manner replacing hard wired process driven applic..."

Exploring the Semantic Web
Promotional Excerpt - "The web has proliferated at an unprecedented rate since its founding in the early 90's. Since that period, the web has progressed from a simple network of servers housing static content into a global network that supports highly complex e-commerce interactions. Today the buzzward is web 2.0, but the opportunity..."

Propellerhead Knowledge Share / Tech News
Promotional Excerpt - "Get ready to share! Is there a software application or gadget that has been really been outstanding that you would like to chat about? Let's discuss!"

Java Server Pages and Beyond!
Promotional Excerpt - "Get the espresso flowing, it is time for some more development! If you are looking for a good introduction to practical JSP development look no further..."

Ruby on Rails, an Introduction
Promotional Excerpt - "Be ready to learn about Ruby on Rails as I share some great sample materials and talk about what it takes to get online with that technology. In addition I am looking forward to chatting about the latest and greatest in tech news..."

Hamachi, RSS, Time shifting and News
Promotional Excerpt - "Here are the topics that I have gathered for our next meetup: 1. Hamachi - Is this the ultimate in free, easy to use VPN technology? Stay on your own personal network anywhere in the world! 2. RSS - Is anyone really leveraging RSS? Does anyone have any recommended feeds on interesting topics? 3. Time shifting - Not a purely technical topic, but very interesting nonetheless. How can we get more time from our days? 4. News - The latest and greatest happenings in the tech world....