Monday, May 28, 2007
links for 2007-05-28
I love the blog of Eric Newcomer of Iona. Have you ever noticed that he is one of the few CTOs that when presenting on a topic to teach you the salient issues while having enough integrity to not sneak in a thinly veiled sales presentation in disguise? On the topic of WS-*, while I agree with the need for the specification, I also believe that the velocity by which standards are emerging is simply too fast for vendors to implement. Mark Little of JBoss is the brains behind this standard and a fellow co-author of several books yet I feel compelled to mention that I would rather see a vendor in the ECM and BPM communities not implement WS-Transactions in exchange for rapid implementation of WS-Federation within their products. Sadly, most ECM vendors (With the exception of Oracle) haven't even put in basic standard web services support.
John Newton of Alfresco mentions that the content management community must have an interoperable standard for building applications. The AIIM iECM standard effort has disbanded, but that doesn’t remove the need for a language-neutral, remotely accessible standard for content interoperability. Once vendors cooperate on such a standard, the ECM industry is likely to take off the same way that database did. I wonder if John and his team should run in the opposite direction from Documentum and Interwoven while preferring to engage Raoul Miller of Oracle in a conversation around standards in the ECM space. While I know that neither will publicly comment on whether AIIM is relevant, I suspect I already know the answer.
Stowe Boyd commented on a plaxo sponsored survey that uncovered that bloggers are more connected than journalists. The funny thing is that depending on definition of the word connection, I am either extremely connected or alone wandering around in the wilderness. I am surprised that Stowe Boyd didn't ask them to figure out the relationship between being connected and influence?
I wonder if this also applies to all those folks in Fortune 100 enterprises who use industry analyst research to devise their strategies (aka management by magazine)?
Burton Group has some of the best security analysts in existence. Yet, the notion of distinct services seems to get in the way of them adding even more value. For example, Wouldn't it be interesting if Gerry Gebel could not only talk about XACML interoperability but could also work with Chris Haddad and Anne Thomas Manes and figure out which J2EE application servers, ECM, BPM and ESB also implement XACML PEP or which vendors while writing the software actually used secure coding practices?
James Tarbell provides a contrarian view on why enterprises don't need software engineers and how they only add value in geeky silicon valley situations. Feels to me, he is throwing daggers at lots of folks on the left coast and in India
Some people sit and pontificate about whether leaders are made or born. The true leader ignores such arguments and instead concentrates on how to become a better. The funny thing is that I would have prioritized the list a little differently or at least added worthy of followership and that real leaders are keepers of the flame and have unwavering vision. Glad to see that perception management isn't a top five trait though.
Most of the conversation regarding outsourcing is either some low quality American developer who loses their job to a low quality Indian developer due to rate arbitrage or some unpatriotic IT executive whose lineage isn't from a software development background and how outsourcing is inevitable. Daniel Bernier is probably one of the best developers I have ever met in my travels and you should check out his blog for a perspective that is rarely seen. Maybe Indian outsourcing firms should consider hiring him to clean up all their failed projects. While they number into the hundreds, I suspect he can right many of the wrongs.
Apoorv Durga comments that most CMS products boast of multichannel delivery capabilities. I wonder if he considers SOA a channel? If so, then that would invalidate his statement, so therefore choose the answer that doesn't.
Jeff Potts talks about how to integrate Alfresco with LDAP. It is intriguing to see that ECM folks think that one should change how LDAP works in order to make ECM work. What if you already have LDAP via Active Directory and use it for other purposes? Should you break all your other enterprise applications that dont require changes to schema in order to support ECM or should the ECM marketplace get with the program and change their product architectures to better support LDAP as used within the enterprise?
Data deduplication is interesting but wouldn't adding compression be more interesting? If NAS appliances use Windows NTFS, ZFS, etc for file systems then couldn't they expose the compression to the user without the vendor even having to write additional code to support this functionality?
