I am always very wary when I see anything from Microsoft about how easy or desirable it is to migrate any non trivial application from Lotus Notes to any Microsoft Technology. This stems from my painful experiences with Microsoft’s claimed Notes killing technology WebStore, now renamed the Exchange Storage System,...
My company currently uses Plumtree and I must confess that I have not been a great fan of its portal. However I did like this posting which described the most successful application types that have been built using their Portal, and probably any other as well. Expert location/knowledge management workspaces...
Greg has just written one of the few posts that starts to discuss RSS and its impact behind the firewall. That is in a corporate environment. greg hughes – dot – net – More on RSS and how it can change the way we work and live I wrote extensively...
Back in 2001, I was given the opportunity to create my own team. It was a great opportunity and I pulled a team of about 30 people together to work on Architecture and Systems Integration projects in the Infrastructure arena. We hit upon a slight problem though we could not find any space within the existing company buildings in the area. This presented us with another great opportunity, work from home, or find and design our own office. This is the story of how we designed our Office and what we learned.
Dan Gillmor has written a book about how the web and blogging in particular are changing the nature of journalism. Its available online here there is a companion blog here. This is the marketing spin:
Grassroots journalists are dismantling Big Media’s monopoly on the news, transforming it from a lecture to a conversation. In We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, nationally known business and technology columnist Dan Gillmor tells the story of this emerging phenomenon, and sheds light on this deep shift in how we make and consume the news.
The blogging workflow.
This is a very very nice summary of how blogs work by Roland Tanglao at Streamline, it complements my comments because it provides more details of some of the server side infrastructure:
1. Joe Blogger writes something and publishes it to his blog.
2. Joe’s Blog system updates his site’s HTML, updates his RSS file and sends a ‘ping’ message to the ‘Aggregation Ping Server’ indicating that his site has updated.
3. Search engines like Google and RSS specific services like Feedster, Technorati and PubSub periodically ask the Aggregation Ping Server, “Which sites have updated?”.
4. Since Joe’s site sends pings and has an RSS file and is easy to update frequently, Joe’s search engine rank is higher than a ‘normal site’.
5. Techie Teresa uses a program called an RSS reader to subscribe to Joe’s site. The RSS reader checks Joe’s RSS file for updates periodically (usually once/hour or once per day) and notifies her of Joe’s updates. Teresa no longer wastes time manually surfing Joe’s site. She just checks her RSS reader.
6. As a result, Teresa’s information flow is more efficient and she can monitor more sites in less time.
7. Joe Surfer (who …
The Radicati group recently published a report titled
“IBM Lotus & Microsoft–Corporate Messaging Market Analysis” (June 2004), available at www.radicati.com/reports/single.shtml.
Its a truly awful report, as many people have commented. It breaks all normal reporting rules:
I actually looked forward to reading it when I first heard it had come out because I had some concerns over Lotus Workplace and how Lotus Notes/Domino would transition to the new architecture. However the report was so biased I ended up feeling much more positive about Lotus than I had before. The basis for my change of view “IBM must be on to something with Workplace if such bad analysis is the only tool available to make Microsoft look good”. I was also left even more uncertain over what Microsoft is up to with Exchange, as I have already blogged on here and here.
The last straw for me in this report was the criticism of IBM/Lotus over migration to Workplace and the commendation of Microsoft on …
http://blogs.officezealot.com/legault/archive/2004/08/08/2238.aspx
Microsoft research have come up with some really cool tools for capturing and manipulating whiteboard contents captured using low quality web cams. My whiteboard is right behind me, (so my web cam points right at it, so it would work just great, but the downloads are MS only. The best trick is it removes the person writing on the board from the image. Here are some of the key points:
Other systems use expensive cameras or dedicated electronic whiteboards. The Live Whiteboard system, developed at Microsoft Research by Zhengyou Zhang and Li-wei He, uses whatever whiteboard you already have. It only needs an inexpensive Web cam and some clever software.
Live Whiteboard doesn’t just deliver a video stream of the whiteboard. The software takes out all the shadows and uneven surfaces that come through on a Web cam, and turns the whiteboard into an image that allows viewers to see the whiteboard notes. Through a series of image processing procedures, the originally captured image is first transformed into a rectangular bitmap to correct perspective distortion, and then color-enhanced to increase contrast, saturation, and to provide a clean uniform white background.
In addition, if the remote viewer wants to focus his …
Some background on NewsGator and Syndication.
This post by Brad Feld, a Venture Capitalist who has recently invested in NewsGator is useful if you too have invested in a copy and want to understand a bit about where the tool is going. But its also interesting if like me you want to understand a bit about syndication in general and the market opportunity as investors see it. I recently posted on how I see the market from a technical perspective for behind the firewall corporate environments, in discussion with NewsGator this market is certainly in their plans.
Greg adds a bit more detail in his blog