Steve's Seaside Life

Category: All Posts

All Posts

InfoPath gives insights into the future

I have always looked upon InfoPath as a example of a product that needs to be part of the infrastructure of the Longhorn platform.  At its simplest it’s a product to render forms defined in XML, allow them to be completed offline, validated, and then submitted them to web services. 

 

If you think of WinFS as effectively an XML store, which manages sometimes connected interactions with server side data sources (especially web services) then InfoPath type capabilities are a natural part of the WinFS shell.  So I was interested to see this MSDN paper on Submitting forms in InfoPath 2003 because of the potential implications on how Microsoft is thinking about WinFS and Synchronisation and sometimes connected operation.  These new adaptors allow:

 

  1. Submitting to a Web Service

  2. Submitting to a SharePoint Site

  3. Submitting through E-Mail

  4. Submitting to a Database

 

These new capabilities are interesting but the ability to complete the form off-line and then, when connected, send it to the server is still way to clunky (but likely to be a key area the Longhorn team will need to make slick).  

 

I was also disappointed that they did not include submitting via email …

All Posts

Help me understand how Microsoft might respond to Linux!

I have been asking myself the following question:

 

If Linux begins to capture significant desktop market share what options are open to Microsoft? 

 

In this article I have listed my initial ideas, and it would be great to get some feedback on the technical feasibility (some of them maybe plain crazy) and political acceptability of the options within Microsoft.  It might also be interesting to get feedback on how the Open Source and business communities might respond.

 

Here is my headline list, with each option described in more detail later:

 

  • “bet the company” on strategies to retain the consumer market

  • Make Windows a better host for Linux applications

  • Make Windows a better server for Linux Desktops

  • Make Linux a better host for Windows Applications

  • Make .NET the most attractive Linux Development Platform

  • Make Windows a better client to Linux Servers

  • Make Windows appeal to Open Source developers

  • Win the TCO and Security debate

  • Reduce the cost of Windows and Office

 

Retain the consumer market

 

  1. I have already blogged on this here

Make Windows a better host for Linux applications

 

  1. Purchase an existing X Server product to integrate into Windows Services For Unix…

All Posts / Insights / Personal Posts / Research Interests / Strategy / The Future of Work

My research interests

A colleague of mine recently asked me what my IT research interests are.  It got me thinking; I am interested in lots of things, but only a few that I am prepared to put serious time and effort into.  Here they are: Personal Knowledge Management Team communication, collaboration and co-ordination,...

All Posts

Collaborative editing

Michael; who writes the Shared Spaces blog has recently written about the challenges of collaborative editing of documents/presentations.  The problems not too difficult to solve within an business (Net Meeting etc) but solving the problem between businesses (through two sets of firewalls) in a secure fashion is another problem altogether.  Its even more difficult if like me you want to do it on an ad-hoc basis, during a telephone or IM conversation, rather than using a multi-user conferencing system like Lotus Same-time, Oracle Collaboration Server or MS Live Meeting.

These are the options that Michael came up with, as these all cost loads of money, require a client installation and lots of coordination between collaborators they don’t fulfil my ad-hoc need, any other areas would be welcome:

  • Groove Virtual Office Professional 3.0. Staff put the document to be shared into a Groove Document Review shared space. Internal and external participants are invited. Using the “Co-Edit” function of Groove, one person in turn can have edit rights of the document, and once they save their changes, everyone in the co-edit session gets to see the changes immediately. It’s not true real-time co-editing, but it’s extremely close … and it definitely …

All Posts

How do you blog?

This is a great series of articles on different blogging styles, it includes hints and tips on when to use each one and how to use it to best effect.  Well worth a read even if you don’t blog, as some of the insights are useful for any type of...

All Posts

BlackBerry Enterprise Software v4.0

A new version of the BES has just been announced.  Loads of great features, my favorite being finally getting rid of desktop sync, which never worked reliably for me.  Worst feature no improvements in task management, and wireless task and address book management.  More details follow: BlackBerry Enterprise Software v4.0...

All Posts

The future of OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.Org have published their marketting plan.  ZDNet UK has a good article on the topic.  The full plan can be found online here.  I particularly liked the following quote:

“Microsoft, our major competitor, has a marketing budget of five to 10 billion US dollars, while we have 25 cents in a PayPal account,” said McCreesh.

OpenOffice.org have identified the following target markets:

According to the OpenOffice marketing plan, the main markets for the office suite are government offices; education establishments; public libraries; small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs); not-for-profit organisations (NFPs); own equipment manufacturers (OEMs) building PCs with pre-installed software; and Linux distributions looking for an office suite to bundle.

Although StarOffice has more ambitious target markets.  Overall the plan targets OOo having a market share of apprximately 50% by 2010.

All Posts

Solaris vs Linux technical and philosophical differences emerge

Everyone knows that Linux is flavour of the decade, so I found this blog post very interesting as it explained why its not easy to replace Solaris with Linux or to merge Solaris capabililities into some future version of Linux.  It also illustrates one of the challenges faced by theOpen Source community in general, how to you coordinate major changes that affect hundreds of files, distributed architecture and design seems more difficult than distributed development.  The main guts of the post follows:

The main reason we can’t just jump into Linux is because Linux doesn’t align with our engineering principles, and no amount of patches will ever change that. In the Solaris kernel group, we have strong beliefs in reliability, observability, serviceability, resource management, and binary compatibility. Linus has shown time and time again that these just aren’t part of his core principles, and in the end he is in sole control of Linux’s future. Projects such as crash dumps, kernel debuggers, and tracing frameworks have been repeatedly rejected by Linus, often because they are perceived as vendor added features. Not to mention the complete lack of commitment to binary compatibility (outside of the system call interface). …

All Posts

Seven rules for email

One of the researchers who works for my company produced a great guide on the uses and abuses of cummuication and collaboration technologies a few years ago.  When I first read it I was impressed but at the same time depressed at the neglect that most companies have of their basic (common) business processes.  I have continued to be interested in how companies can extract maximum advantage from simple IT infrastructure technologies by focussing on how to use their tools to best effect. 

The following post therefore caught my eye – seven rules for e-mail – it would be great to see a best practice debate on how the phone, SMS, email, syndication, IM and conferencing technologies should be used.  The seven rules above provides a good but limited start. 

As an illustration of such a debate in action, albeit on a slightly different subject, there is no better example than the getting things done forums.

All Posts

Enterprise IT decision making

I am an enterprise architect, and its sometimes a challenge to balance making the right technical choice with the right choice.  David Chappell talks about this in the context of Open Source J2EE.

I’ve gotten some interesting comments from readers of my latest column in Application Development Trends. The major complaint is that I didn’t give enough weight to the role that open source J2EE technologies like Tomcat and JBoss play in this market, describing it instead as controlled by IBM and BEA

He puts this down to the fact that:

My perspective is very focused on enterprises, the people who control the large majority of IT spending. In this world, there’s some use of open source J2EE technologies, but it’s a definite minority. There are vastly more applications running on WebSphere and WebLogic, and so viewing this market as dominated by these two is accurate

Of most interest though is how he characterises the Open Source community:

In most of my interactions with open source advocates, including this one, the arguments I hear tend to be rooted in a purely technical view of the world. This probably reflects the strong technical orientation (they’re developers) and relative lack of …