Skrocki's Blog: Sun, Social Networking, Random Thoughts...

@WillSnow (the well-connected Paris Hilton of the geek world -- seriously! He gets invited to invite-only geek parties with free fancy drinks & food!) hooked me up with the coolest chick's geek tee ever!

Props to the JavaFX folks for not only ditching the mens only tees approach, but taking it one step further and adding some sweet bling! With tees like this, you know they've gotta be doing something über cool.

It's been five amazingly successful years for blogs.sun.com as of today. The success of this site has often been the focal point of corporate blogging done well and while the physical site, statistics, and sensible guidelines are impressive works of art, it's the the less tangible accomplishments that matter most to me.

Similar to the sentiments attached to my childhood home address, "http://blogs.sun.com/lskrocki" is not only the cornerstone for my digital footprint and where I first blogged, but it's where I learned that protecting ones professional voice is worth fighting for. It's a place where I am encouraged not only to communicate openly with the market place and the world about my focus at Sun, but as stated on the front page of this site it's also a place where I'm welcomed to "write about anything". It's through many of us writing about "anything", that I've met people near and far whom I respect, admire, learn from and consider friends.

In my post one year ago today, I wrote "What's in store for Sun Blogs in the future? More great blogging, of course." Facing that same question today amidst micro-blogging and a pending acquisition, I can't really begin to venture a guess at what's next for this site, but what I do know is something I've said in many conversations when asked about providing social tools in the corporate space -- whether tools are conveniently placed in front of them or not, people will find a way to connect and communicate. It's in our DNA.

A million thanks to the Sun Blog founders and anyone who has contributed to this great conversation via a blog post, a comment, or even a leisurely read!

More posts on this topic.

David Berlind with InformationWeek has an excellent podcast where he interviews Michelle Dennedy, Sun's newly appointed Chief Governance Officer in the Cloud Computing Organization.

Michelle is spearheading an effort to organize a collaborative cloud privacy governance alliance to define a cloud governance framework (What is it? What needs to be regulated?) in the short term with a long term goal of building cloud trust via transparency, open standards & interoperability that is regulated by the cloud governance framework & governments/legislators around the world.

Well worth a listen...

Podcast: Sun Looks To Start Privacy And Governance Alliance For Cloud Computing Industry

A million thanks to Deirdré Straughan, Sun videoblogger extraordinaire for organizing a very successful 1st Colorado Front Range Girl Geek Dinner, held at Sun's Broomfield campus last week. Thanks also to my boss, Will Snow, Sr. Engineering Director, for helping to fund the event.

In case you missed it, Jodi Brooks with CBS Denver News and Deirdre have posted summaries.

If you are a woman in tech in the Denver metro area, please join @DeirdreS and me as we co-host a Girl Geek Dinner at the Sun Microsystems campus in Broomfield. Here are the deets:

Thursday, March 5, 2009
6:00pm - 9:00pm
Sun Microsystems Broomfield Campus
Sun Conference center, Building 1
500 Eldorado Blvd.

Please RSVP via the Facebook page or the wiki.

We look forward to seeing you!

A notable milestone for Sun Forums was reached today in the form of seeing it's four millionth post.

I've been lucky enough to be a part of the team the last few years and as a result have engaged directly with the community -- it's been an invaluable education in the community space. If you're looking for a lesson in community dynamics, community policy building, community moderation, or just want to learn to be an effective community contributor, I recommend you find a forum that interests you and engage. You'll find the experience and the rewards are different from any other community site. For example, forums conversations are faster-flowing than blogs, yet more focused and organized than super fast flowing micro-blogging sites like Twitter.

In terms of annual page views and visits, Sun Forums is by far Sun busiest community site. To offer context, here's a quick glimpse of traffic for Sun forums, blogs, wikis for 2008:

	Views	Visits	Site Age
Wikis	4.6M	1.3M	<2 yrs
Blogs	21.8M	12.2M	<5 yrs
Forums	66.4M	36.0M	<8 yrs

That's a lot of communication going on! If you are a Sun employee, chances are the project you are working on has a forum dedicated solely to that topic -- an excellent opportunity for you to engage with the folks who share that commonality. Let us know if you're interested in becoming a Sun Moderator of a particular forum or if you'd like to nurture a forum on a new topic.

I also want to give a shout-out to the Sun Forums Lead Engineer, who has been committed to the site since day one, always has a positive disposition and a "can do" attitude...Congrats & a million thanks Ramsci!

Via the Doodle Blog, this made me happy. Doodle, one of my favorite sites -- & one that I use at least once daily -- is a member of Sun's Start Up Essentials Program.

"The Sun Startup Essentials program is designed to help startups get off the ground fast, at lower cost, primed for rapid growth and success. Sun supports startups with hardware, software, training, and support. The partnership with Sun is an obvious step for Doodle because major components of our technical architecture are maintained by Sun: Java and MySQL."

If you haven't used Doodle to poll meeting/event participants for a meeting time that works for the majority, you must try it out at least once. It's super quick & easy to use.

I'm no storage expert, but when one of my favorite uber geeks (a term of endearment used to describe a guy who has run massive sites for decades) tells me "This is the greatest [bleeping] thing since sliced bread!", I know it's a big deal -- not the kind of "Oh, Sun released another new product" kind of deal, but more of a "This has never been done before and changes the whole ball game" kind of deal.

The beauty of the new Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems is it solves for major cost AND efficiency issues...the coolness factor is the icing on the cake.

Anywho, check out the video below for more info. If you're on Twitter, you saw that Hal is memorizing his notes to present at CEC, but if you're not there, you can join a discussion with him & the storage engineers on Blog Talk Radio at 5PM PT today.

For those bargain bin shoppers, like me, you can try the new storage systems for free for 60 days then, get a discount OR...check out the fine print on the Big Cheese's blog post for a chance to win one for F-R-E-E (as in no I.O.U...ever). Good luck!

The new look for Sun.com just rolled out! Be sure to check out the "Community Voices" link in the upper left corner -- that's where the good stuff is (per my biased opinion ).

Huge props and congrats to the extended Sun.com Team!

By now, many of us have possibly met our saturation point on the topic of weathering the economic storm, but if you have room for one more perspective, this one is worth a look.

It's not all gloom and doom, but is a solid perspective with some practical ideas that individuals and companies (of various sizes) can do to find stability and perhaps prosperity in the current economic climate.

Tim has a few blog posts on the topic in case you are interested in joining the conversation.

It's always good to lift one's head up from the trenches, take a look back and soak in the glory of progress. That's what I did today on behalf of the amazing engineering team I get to work with and here's what I saw:

Over the last two quarters, between 4 Application Engineers, 1 Development Manager, 1 QA Engineer, 1 Program Manager (me!) & one part-time Search Program Manager, working on 6 applications, the team drove the following to fruition:

• 30 application upgrades
• 225 change requests
• supported 6 of Sun's applications that saw ~60 million page views and 21.4 million search results

All while infusing respect and humor into our day-to-day activities. I consider myself lucky to be on a team with these guys. Congrats Allen, Igor, Matthew, Rama, Ramsci, Rob, Shawn and our leader who enables our pace and delivery, Will!

To see the goodness for yourself, check out Sun Forums, Wikis, Mediacast, Planets, Search and of course this very site Sun Blogs.

In case you missed it, BusinessWeek ran a story on 18 CEO's who use twitter. Sun's CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, was among the 18 -- in addition to a couple of my favorite twitter users, Tony Hsieh, Zappos.com CEO, and Loic Lemur, Seesmic CEO.

Jonathan's response to how Twitter helps him run Sun:

"Communication is a key part of leadership—as CEO, I need to engage the market, inside and outside Sun, with whatever technology affords me the greatest possible reach. Through blogs, online news, social networking sites, or Twitter, the Internet has fundamentally changed how we communicate with one another. Today, we have thousands of employees participating, engaging customers and developers across the world, 24 hours a day. And whether it's via a half-hour streaming video or a 140-character Tweet, we need to reach everyone in the forum and format they choose—not what we choose."

There's obviously a style difference between how the the 18 CEO's profiled leverage Twitter -- some use it to emote, others use it to inform, and yet others use it as a combination of the two+. Jeremiah Owyang asks:

"@SunCEOBlog twitter account is so unpersonal, for a company that preaches being so open, this isn't living the brand, agree or disagree?"

Jerimiah is one of the most interesting and informational Twitter users that I follow, but I had to disagree with him on this one:

"@jowyang -1 on this one. @SunCEOBlog (not @SunCEO) simply tweets his new blog posts. His blog is his general communications channel."

I think it would be odd and unnecessary to expect all/any fortune 500 CEOs to maintain multiple social media profiles while effectively driving the success of their companies. It's also not necessary if they have at least one channel where they can hold open conversations and syndicate those conversations for ease of engagement -- as is done by Jonathan using his blog for widely distributed conversations then having posts syndicated via Twitter.

Similar to Lee LeFever, thanks to Twitter, I use it as a combination of a chat, micro-blogging, and feed reading tool. The few feeds that are most important to me are fortunately syndicated on Twitter. So, I rarely check my full feed reader anymore.

Setting up a feed for syndication on Twitter, is super simple. Check out Twitterfeed for the details.

Medicast.sun.com has gotten a lot of love in the form of new hardware, a database upgrade, and today it will receive a new look and new highly demanded features -- my favorite is the embed code feature that enables users to easily copy code for embedding mediacast-hosted media into their blogs, websites, etc. Full release notes are posted on the wiki, but here's a before (top) and after (bottom) glimpse:

I was just chatting with ThinGuy about the following video. Truth be told, I'm turned off by many technology videos because I find them boring, but you have to watch this one. Scott McNealy (Sun Chairman) and Terry Matthews (Mitel Chairman) are such compelling communicators, they could be talking about dirt and the conversation would be worth a listen. But, that's not all. Following their intro, is an incredibly cool demo of the Sun Ray and Mitel telephony system solution -- I WANT ONE!

Which reminds me (apologies for the side note) of a conversation I had with another colleague today about how Sun and non Sun social networks have triggered me to have a deeper awareness of Sun initiatives (like this one) that are not directly related to the focus of my role. I got to know ThinGuy through his blog which triggered an opportunity to meet him and his lovely wife for dinner. Though we live in different states, my husband and I have become great friends with them...and I know more about Sun Rays than I ever expected.

He's still the king of the one liners...