Adventures in home working

I might be stretching a point a little (well actually quite a lot) with the title,  but just like Software as a Service gets rid of all the redundant effort that goes on in every enterprise delivering software,  so Architecture as a Service is doing the same thing.  A few examples of AaaS arrived in the RSS reader today:

1. Microsoft started a BETA process to design a set of documentation for the delivery of SoftGrid solutions and Server Virtualization,  hopefully by using the feedback processes associated with software beta’s they will be able to hone their documentation set collaboratively to the point where the amount of duplicate work within every enterprise is greatly minimized.  You can sign up for the beta at http://connect.microsoft.com/ using code IPDM-QX6H-7TTV
2. VMware have gone one better and setup a wiki to serve the same purpose, maybe more as it addresses the whole lifecycle from plan through to manage allowing the community to share everything right down to scripts, reports and tools, excellent!  You can find it here http://wwwa.vmware.com/www/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Its also worth remembering that Microsoft have this cool technology in the works that allows you to model your infrastructure in Visual Studio and then provision it onto your utility computing infrastructure,  I wrote about it here.  And there are managed hosting alternatives that actually allow you to provision a whole virtual infrastructure on demand from a GUI development environment.

Now I know that architecture is really about developing a solution to meet business requirements,  which are often unique, but at least these initiatives and others are slowly chipping away at all that redundant work that goes on that doesn’t have to be unique, but is - just because there was no mechanism to share best practices across customers.

In this interesting post Mike Gotta asks “Will Microsoft Become Facebook for the Enterprise?” I think the answer is a definite YES.  Whilst I think there is a role for LinkedIn or FaceBook for inter-enterprise social networking I still think that Intra-enterprise social networking is hugely important and I think that the needs within the enterprise are much richer.  I’m pretty confident that Microsoft has everything it needs. 

SharePoint 2007 strikes me as an excellent foundation upon which to build,  its extensibility seems impressive and the fact that it already includes basic versions of all the main elements, blogs, wiki’s, personal pages and people search provides them with a great learning platform.  Mike scores Microsoft pretty poorly so far:

• Blogs:B-
• Wikis:C+
• Tag/Social Bookmark System: N/A
• Social Networking: B+
• XML Syndication: N/A (feed aggregation and management)

but my point is that it’s just a matter of time,  Microsoft has all the technology infrastructure they need, all the research, all the resources and their B- existing infrastructure is giving them all of the practical experience (Microsoft thrives in practical experience). 

I am a little surprised that Microsoft haven’t purchased NewsGator though,  it seems a perfect complement to their ambitions (both within Windows/Office Live the enterprise) and and it’s all based on their technologies.  Makes me think they must have something up their sleeves.

It won’t be long though, I suspect we won’t even have to wait for a new version of SharePoint (but I have no inside information).

Worklight – an enterprise RSS provider – have a really useful white paper on secure RSS, which complements and extends some of my previous posts on this topic.  Other posts on this topic can be found here.

I have recently been thinking a bit about Enterprise RSS and getting frustrated by key features that seem to be missing, confusing or partially implemented, two examples being:

• Lack of unread status syncing between multiple clients of the Windows Common Feed Store
• Lack of support for basic authentication in the Windows Common Feed Store

I have also been thinking more broadly about security and management issues in general, so I was pleased to come across this post on the Collaborative Thinking blog which provided a useful list of topics to consider concerning enterprise RSS, my additions are in bold:

Security

• Ensure support for SSL and related authentication methods
• Ensure support for basic authentication over SSL as well as NTLM and Kerberos (which are mainly of interest in a Microsoft environment only)
• Some way to authenticate to RSS feeds that are protected by forms based authentication, common when enterprise portals are involved
• Browser add-ins should run “Internet zone” or “restricted sites zone”
• Require Windows XP SP2 Attachment Execution Service support
• Ask about block lists, content filtering, and handling of malformed feeds
• Outline how RSS enclosures are managed
• Require ACL’s per feed at group/user levels integrated via AD and LDAP
• Ability to encrypt the feed store and enclosures,  a lot of enterprise data is going to end up in this store, especially if enclosures are used
• I am also interested to see if some form of DRM could be applied to enclosures, with the digital rights acquired for the download user at the same time as the enclosure is downloaded.  I am concerned that enclosure enabled document libraries will result in very efficient document hoarding and resulting data leakage.  This may be a scenario that’s supported by Outlook and SharePoint 2007 IRM,  but I suspect that the common feed store DOES’ NT acquire the rights for the logged on user as part of the download process, which will make it difficult impossible to view the enclosures offline.

De-duping

• Assess how multiple updates to posts are handled and impact to read/unread marks
• Synchronization
• Check to make sure read/unread marks are managed across clients and devices

Storage

• Primarily a concern when feeds are sent into e-mail systems
• Potentially a compliance concern   

Network Utilization

• Assess download schedule management
• IE7 “salting” the interval (is it good enough)
• Is the RSS 2.0 Time To Live (TTL) tag honored
• Use of / support for Incremental feed updates (RFC 3229 (“Delta Encoding in HTTP”))
• Compression of feeds and enclosures

Management

• Ability to associate automatic feed subscription with LDAP directory group memberships, this really is going to be essential if feeds subscriptions becomes important to process compliance, e.g. a person gets informed when their Quality Management System is updated via a RSS feed.
• Ability to track usage

Personalized Feeds

• Not really an easy feature to implement at this time

Attensa and Newsgator seem to be addressing several of these issues,  but Microsoft and IBM don’t so it will be interesting to see how enterprises get on when they deploy Office System 2007 and Notes Hannover.

Microsoft reveal a lot of useful info about terminal services improvements in Longhorn in this chat,  I can see myself making a lot of use of this on my lab servers at home as well as for customers:

Brian Madden has a lot of useful comments on each feature, my favourites are in bold.

RSS has grown up on the public Internet and it seems that authentication will be problematic when it moves into the Intranet.  On Intranets expect to find the following authentication mechanisms:

1. NTLM
2. kerberos
3. Digest
4. Forms based
5. Basic (usually combined with SSL)

Only the last of these mechanisms can be assumed (with any confidence) to work with most desktop RSS readers and often web based readers often don’t even support that. 

The essential issue is that the web pretty much assumes that we can cope with all of these authentication mechanisms because all access is interactive, but with RSS it needs to be automatic and transparent.  The following issues spring to mind:

1. NTLM – so far as I know is only supported by IE 7  and the Vista RSS platform and very few servers,  but if you are a Microsoft shop and are only connecting to SharePoint 2007 then this may work for you
2. Kerberos – same as above, but probably even more demanding
3. Digest – hardly ever used in my experience, either on client or servers, but I may be wrong and has the disadvantage that your username and password will need to be stored somewhere on the client, and many enterprise security policies don’t allow that
4. Forms based – very popular server side, but no chance of supporting this in everyday RSS readers.  I have seen a hack which involves browsing to a web page from within the RSS reader, authenticating, getting the cookie and then synchronising your feeds.   VERY VERY messy
5. Basic with SSL – very widely used, supported by most readers and RSS servers, but has the disadvantage that your username and password will need to be stored somewhere on the client, and many enterprise security policies don’t allow that

This leaves us with a problem.  If you are a Microsoft shop you might get away with a combination of 1,2 and 5.  If not then it looks like it’s time to start lobbying your security policy makers to allow Basic over SSL and local (encrypted) credential storage.

When I work on desktop transformation projects I am continually amazed by the number of applications that we find installed in an enterprise.  It’s not unusual to find several thousand in a medium sized company, most of them used by less than 10 people.  However as Rod Boothby points out this is the tip of the ice berg, because once we go beyond packaged applications and include the non trivial spreadsheets, macro enabled documents and databases we find an order of magnitude more.

Now Rod thinks that these ‘Office’ applications will be displaced by tools like blogs, wikis and Microsoft’s Excel services.  I partially agree I think these tools will just complement the traditional Office applications and extend their reach beyond the desktop and the network file server.  Here are some (mostly Microsoft)examples:

1. Applications built by using custom searches, probably encoded in the URL, against Internet and intranet search engines.  Expect to see this particularly in situations where the search engines let you reach into databases and document metadata
2. Applications built using the incredible versatility of SharePoint custom lists and workflow
3. Applications built by combining InfoPath, Word, Excel XML documents with data selectively promoted from the XML into SharePoint lists
4. Applications built processing RSS data from all manner of applications and then mashing it up with other data, or pulling it into Office or web based analysis tools
5. Applications built using the next generation of web based 4GLs like DabbleDb and Coghead
6. Composite applications built by integrating portal components, including some or the above, like Intalio’s, built from Dabble DB, FeedBurner, FeedDigest Flickr, Google Analytics, LinkedIn, Technorati, WordPress,Zoho Writer.

This is the true long tail of software,  traditional office applications enhanced and integrated with web office, collaboration and line of business applications.  However lets not forget the humble desktop application.  Its had a bad reputation in the past – largely because of DLL hell – but as new classes of applications appear that don’t need to be installed in the traditional sense but can just be streamed down to the PC, cached and executed I expect that desktop apps will get a new lease of life in the enterprise. 

Mike Gotta provides an excellent description of the concept of context zones and how they allow us to deal with information in a way that reflects our needs, or as Mike puts it:

the right information, at the right time, in the right context, has been a holy grail for IT organizations for many years

In his article Mike describes 4 zones (my comments in red):

1. Salient Zone: Information directly relevant to the activity that has the user’s attention and primary focus, or fits a user profile that includes topics the person is interested in (with an implied immediacy in terms of awareness and delivery timeliness).   e.g. Project 1 – changes
2. Peripheral Zone: Information that is strongly-to-moderately associated to a set of activities that the user participates in or to their profile (exclusive of the current activity). While there is likely discretion in terms of how and when the user needs to be aware of the information, there is an implied desire for it to be readily “glanceable”.  e.g. Project 1 and Urgent
3. Ambient Zone: Information users should find interesting but could just as easily ignore. The information could be tertiary, having a no strongly patterned relationship to any activity. But it also might have some intriguing synergy with, or some discernable influence on, activities or other user interests. Communication here is more informal, with user no guarantee that users will divert attention and interact with the information.  Research
4. Nascent Zone:  information forming at its early stages that might have some latent relevancy in the future. Users might be interested in cycling through ever so often as part of general awareness and trend analysis.  Email and general feeds

The problem with the single inbox concept for information is that it provides all 4 types of information in a single stream, and it’s very difficult to cope with this by constantly scanning this stream.  Even when you apply methodologies like GTD, which force you to categorize email and other information it’s still difficult to see just the information you need in every particular context unless you are very organized.

RSS has a better chance than email because it arrives pre categorized, according to the feed title, which most aggregators use to deposit each feed in a separate folder.  Even better most aggregators allow groups of feeds to be placed in additional folders.  These groups of folders if structured around based on context will definitely help.

Consider the following folder structure:

• It allows me to click on Projects, and see all feeds from every project – useful for a daily activity scan.
• Click on Project 1 – changes and I am ready to focus on my Project change board meeting

The beauty of RSS is that once the structure is defined feeds look after themselves.  In addition in tools like Outlook it’s also possible to use flags and search folders to create lists of actions, items, folders with items aggregated by author, by date etc.

IBM are also moving in the direction of context zones with the context being an Activity (for me see here and here), and their activity explorer being the tool I interact with.  The activity concept is very powerful allowing me to associate RSS feeds, emails, IM messages, documents etc with an activity.

In addition there seems to be a general consensus amongst search gurus that search tools will soon be watching what we are doing, how busy we are, who we are talking too etc etc and will be presenting us – non intrusively but proactively - with the information we need from a wide variety of sources, transparently and without forcing us to interrupt we want to.

Ron Oglesby has written an interesting article on the Brian Madden blog about the future of Virtualization, I highly recommend that you read all the comments as well.  One of the points raised in the comments concerns the over use of the Virtualization word, which I fully agree with,  it seems that any technique that is used to achieve isolation or abstraction now needs to be replaced by virtualization – very annoying!

I am a real fan of Windows PowerShell, not least because of the quality of the team who have worked on it and I have blogged about it a few times before.  I was disappointed that it’s not pervasive in Vista although I know all about the need to make cuts to ship.  However it’s been really encouraging to see the great implementation for Exchange 2007 and now – encouragingly - the fact that it will be fully integrated with System Center Virtual Machine Manager this blog post provides the details.