Archive for December, 2005
Online Alternative to Utilities
Previous posts have identified online services as candidate alternatives to most useful functions offered by a personal operating system and an office productivity suite, including file management, word processing, spreadsheet editing, presentation building, project management, emailing and bookmarking.
Not directly covered, yet often mentioned, are the use of Salesforce.com as an alternative to Microsoft Access and the […]
Online Alternative to PowerPoint
When looking for an online alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint, one has to forget about the fancy animations that Microsoft’s tool can produce, and focus instead on the distribution channels for this presentation.
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Online Alternative to Excel
The spreadsheet editor might very well be the most difficult office productivity application to migrate online, and there are a couple of good reasons for this:
First, HTML was originally designed to publish textual information and tables were added as a way to format tabular data, not to develop complex spreadsheets, therefore online word processors today are […]
Online Alternative to Bookmarks
The web browser was originally designed as a thin, user-agnostic client, but it quickly became a full-fledged application in its own right, which goes against the idea of Office 2.0 for which all data is stored online.
Several things make a web browser user specific, among them browsing history, cookies and bookmarks. Security concerns make the first […]
Online Alternative to Explorer
Windows Explorer, or any other file manager for that matter, is all about storing, organizing and retrieving files—in a rather inefficient way in the case of Windows Explorer. In that respect, any online alternative should not only offer similar services, but also provide some much-needed improvements.
When looking for such an alternative, one should keep in mind […]
Online Alternative to Word
A word processor is the most frequently used office productivity application, and therefore deserves special attention when trying to find a working online alternative. Following the advices of my good friends Assaf and Jeff, I have experimented with a couple online word processors: Zoho Writer from AdventNet and Writely from Upstartle.
Zoho Writer is part of the […]
Happy Holidays
Happy holidays to all! It seems to me that a weblog is much more appropriate for mass greetings than email or LinkedIn messages. I have been deluged with those over the past two weeks and found it difficult to keep up, so here we go again: happy holidays to all! And as a holiday gift, […]
Salesforce.com Outage
On Tuesday December 20th, some salesforce.com users (including myself), mostly in North America, experienced intermittent access between approximately 9:30 am and 1:00 pm ET & 2:00 pm and 4:45 pm ET. The outage was explained by salesforce.com executives and commented in interested ways by Phil Wainewright on ZDNet.
This incident, and the unrelated problems recently experienced with […]
The BPMS: Hampered by a Common Language?
A particular curse of emerging technologies like BPM is that all the vendors feel forced to tell their story using the same set of features, benefits, and promises to the business—predictably taken from some Gartner report published early in the hype cycle. But as the technology becomes less emerging and the assortment of available offerings […]
The 451 Group Report on Open Source
The 451 Group recently published a fascinating report on open source: Cashing in on Open Source Software. This report written by Rachel Chalmers with support from John Abbott, Chris Noble and Martin Schneider, is more than 100 pages in length and provides one of the most insightful analysis of the open source business model I […]
A LinkedIn Success Story
As an avid LinkedIn user, I have had many occasions to appreciate what this great social networking tool can offer, but none come even close to this one experience.
I got married last Summer and had the honor of receiving guests from all over the world. Among them was a contingent of 20 French people made of […]
IBM acquires Bowstreet
IBM today announced the acquisition of Bowstreet. The portal-based tool company had been working with IBM for about three years and derived most of its revenue from this relationship, making the acquisition a very natural one.
Bowstreet’s product is interesting because it’s a perfect illustration of how challenging it can be to deal with complex systems. At […]
Why buy a BPMS when you can get it for nothing?
Today’s BPM Suites are delivering on customers’ capability wish lists, but vendors are having a hard time getting buyers to put their money where their mouth is. Caught in limbo between IT infrastructure and an enterprise application, BPMS doesn’t fit traditional payback models of either IT or line of business investment, so it faces a […]
Will SCA make things simpler?
One problem with SOA is that the first initial does not yet stand for ‘Simple’, as was the case for SOAP, the Simple Object Access Protocol—even though SOAP quickly became quite complex itself over time. Distributed systems are inherently complex and marketing hype can only go that far.
Part of the problem is that services do not […]
Online Alternative to Outlook
If you do not have a Gmail account yet, send me an email and I will gladly provide one. Gmail redefined web-based emailing and single-handedly proved that AJAX works. What makes it infinitely better than any other email client is the fact that it works in a non hierarchical fashion. Instead of organizing emails through […]
The Perfect Storm
BPM meets SOA meets Open Source. All the ingredients for a perfect storm are coming together. BPM needs a platform like SOA to be deployed in a cost effective way, while SOA needs BPM as a killer application. Says Eric Austvold from AMR Research in his Alert:
“Even though the biggest expected benefit of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) […]
Is iSeries cool?
Like most people who never wrote a single line of RPG, I used to think that the IBM eServer iSeries platform (formerly known as AS/400) was legacy, proprietary, irrelevant. After spending two days with the iSeries folks in snowy Rochester, MN, I realize that my perception was simply wrong, period.
Today, iSeries should not be considered as […]
Online Alternative to Project
In the quest to find online alternative solutions to the various components of an office productivity suite, one more building block has been recently added by DreamFactory. The DreamTeam extension to Salesforce.com is by no means a match to the functionality offered by Microsoft Project, but if all you are looking for is a way […]
What is BPEL good for?
A lot of people have complained that BPEL is not appropriate for the modeling of business processes and does not provide support for human workflow. They are right! But instead of complaining about it, they really should rejoice that BPEL, as an execution language for business processes, is a pretty darn good specification that does […]
View as HTML in Gmail
In its quest to remove the need for an office productivity suite on the client, Gmail added a significant feature recently: all Microsoft Office email attachments can now be viewed as HTML pages within the web browser, as opposed to being downloaded on the client and opened with the appropriate Microsoft Office application. The HTML […]
