By Gil Yehuda

I had a conversation with a client the other day about Blogging at work. The question came up, as it often does, how to ensure that employees blog appropriately at work. We spoke about corporate policies regarding appropriate use of the intranet, discussing if they really make an impact on behavior, or if they only exist as leverage when it comes time to take action.

It occurred to me that there is a simple analogy that all professionals can relate to, which brings clarity to the issue: How do you determine what to wear to work?

At every company I have ever worked in (with the exception of Forrester, ironic), there was an explicit policy about dress code. In some organizations, men are expected to show up in a pressed shirt, perhaps a tie and jacket. In others, the code is more lax, but denim jeans are verboten. Of course, men have it much easier, we have fewer choices and they all work pretty well for us. In my last company, a memo forbidding open-toe shoes angered many women in my team, including my boss, who loved her shoe collection. Why forbid open-toe shoes? Perhaps it could lead to sandals – or, heaven forefend – crocs!   Crocs in the workplace – oh my word, that could be terrible!

By Boris Evelson

When Business Objects got acquired by SAP earlier this year, it made a statement that it plans to continue to remain an open, heterogeneous BI vendor, treating all partners equally. Apparently, all partners are not created equal – and, as we suspected and long predicted, this Business Objects strategy does not extend to its own parent.

Well, the cat's finally out of the bag. Efforts are already underway at SAP to improve the existing connectivity between Business Objects products and SAP applications. The improved connectivity that may result from these efforts will be very much optimized for Business Objects products only. SAP states that "SAP customers who instead decide to move forward with non-SAP third party BI tools will not benefit from these types of improvements and enhancements."

As predicted
by Forrester, New
CEO Paul Maritz announced this week that VMware will drop the price of ESXi (their base server
hypervisor) to $0 (from $495).
This obviously comes in response to Microsoft Hyper-V
pricing ($28 per server) and as competition to the free open source Xen
hypervisor.

Support is not included with the free ESXi; if you want that
it starts at $495/server
per year.

[Posted by Laura Ramos]

I dug Dave Taber’s latest newsletter edition about “The Life of a Lead”.  I mean, I really “Dugg It”.  The article includes a link to digg.com, so I clicked it, registered, and voted for his document. Not simply because I like his ideas, but because I want to experience the “wisdom of crowds” firsthand and see how communal voting might apply to B2B marketing.

Find out what it means to product managers in the long awaited research document about the the job of product management. Here's the link.

In it, you'll find the interesting survey results about the difference between what product managers do, and what they think they should be doing. You'll also see some other important demographic information, such as who makes product decisions, where PM fits into org charts, and most interesting of all, what challenges PMs face. (Spoiler alert: They struggle with their own organizations far more than the challenges of the outside world.) The document also provides some recommendations on how to better respect the most important work of product management, and how to better organize and run a PM department.

Coming very soon is another article on a related subject, what makes the technology industry special. The extremely short version: By necessity, technologists talk a lot about innovation and competition, but what's missing from this conversation is the "A"-word.