Archive for February, 2006
Business User Perspective on UML, BPMN, and BPMS
Practitioners within the IT industry have been misusing terms and concepts consistently to promote their eccentricities. These are either data-centric or process-centric. For instance, objected-oriented programming uses the concept of a class to represent an executable unit of code (through abstraction, encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism), which an application can create, use, and destroy for a computational purpose. Is class data or process in UML? It is both. A class encapsulates data and methods (a form of information hiding) through proper abstraction of real world entities and events. Since computers became available commercially in the 50’s, graphical modelling languages proliferated and underwent several re-incarnations through various symbolic mechanisms. This article addresses UML, BPMN, and BPMS from a business user perspective, at a cursory level.
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The World is Flat
I just finished reading The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times columnist and author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree. In his last book, Friedman identifies ten events and trends that are flattening the world we live in today. I agreed with most of the thesis, and tried to relate to it my own experience working at Intalio.
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Office 2.0 Outliner
There are two ways to manage lists: flat with tags, or hierarchical with columns. Both topologies have their pros and cons, but the former is slightly easier to implement in a web browser from a user interface standpoint, hence has been used by most social bookmarking tools such as del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, or Simpy. Nevertheless, for lists that are aimed at supporting task management or brainstorming activities, hierarchies have proven convenient, and I was glad to see the release of what might be the first Office 2.0 outliner: iOutliner.
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Staying Online
The first documented bug for Office 2.0 is that it does not work if you’re offline. Then the challenge quickly becomes: how can one stay online most of the time? Last week’s experiements with mobile blogging lead to mixed results: I could make a post, but it was one of the shortest I ever made, […]
Office 2.0 Separation of Duty
It seems that every week that passes by brings the release of a new Office 2.0 alternative to Microsoft Excel. The latest in date is called Numbler, and is similar to Zoho Sheet or iRows. What I found interesting with it is the disclaimer that appears on the home page:
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A Taste of Things to Come
One of the things that I like the most with Salesforce.com is the ability to create custom forms for populating database tables. Problem is, at $125 per user and per month, I cannot use this tool with very many other people. I have been waiting for a more affordable solution for a long time, and this week saw the release of two candidates, jotForms and Wufoo. Even though they both remain quite primitive at this point, they will give you a taste of things to come.
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Transparency builds Trust
Because most of my personal and professional data is stored into Salesforce.com, I am connected to it more than twelve hours a day, five to six days a week. As a result, I can monitor in near real time most service disruptions that have been plaguing this great application over the last couple of months. If Bruce Daley is right, such disruptions might be related to scalability issues with the Oracle database, mainly because the entire Salesforce.com application is running off a single Oracle cluster. I have no idea whether this is true or not, but two recent moves from Salesforce.com make me think that they are getting serious about addressing such issues.
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Zoho Sheet goes Live
The much anticipated Zoho Sheet finally went live, right when iRows is getting released, for which Brian Benzinger provided a very thorough review. This tells me that some healthy competition is building up. If we add Num Sum to the mix, that makes for three working Office 2.0 alternative to Microsoft Excel. To me, it’s […]
Basecamp for PRM
Salesforce.com is one of the greatest tools for CRM, but as such it works best with existing customers. For wannabe customers, also known as prospects, something slightly different is required. I call it PRM (Prospect Relationship Management), and I’m currently experimenting the use of Basecamp for it. In essence, Basecamp can be used as a […]
Document Sharing and Spam Filters
The ability to easily share documents with others is one of the great features you get with Office 2.0, as described in this past article. Problem is, it works by sending an email to the person you want to share the document with, and that email can get canned by a spam filter, or ignored by people who are not familiar with the mechanism. This happened to me recently when sharing a document with Zoho Writer.
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Mobile Blogging
This is my first post published with the BlackBerry 8700. All the functionality offered by WordPress seems to be working. Next step? I’ll make today’s post on my personal blog from my friend’s Nokia 770.
Process Meet Data
Now that BPMN is being developed by the OMG, the idea of merging process modeling with object modeling is getting some traction. Traditionally, UML modeling has been very data centric, and the most widely used UML diagram is the class diagram, which is just an other way to model advanced data structures. UML activity diagrams […]
Pilgrimage to Sebastopol
Today, I drove all the way up to Sebastopol, CA to meet with Tim O’Reilly, one of our early investors. Tim had supported our initial work with Open Source, and I wanted to give him an update on the early results of our move back to an open source model. The short story goes like that: we generated more qualified leads in the past six weeks that we did in the last six years, we tripled the number of software vendors building their products on top of ours, and we quadrupled the number of system integrators using our product for engagements with their customers. Half of the committers to the code of our process server are open source contributors who are not on our payroll, and this ratio should increase significantly following yesterday’s donation to Apache, while extending the user base an order of magnitude faster than we could on our own.
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Donation to Apache
Today, Intalio offered to donate the PXE BPEL 2.0 engine to the Apache Software Foundation, for it to become part of the Ode project. Intalio will dedicate significant resources to the project and use the engine as a core component for upcoming versions of Intalio|Server. This proposed donation is the latest contribution from Intalio to […]
BPEL4People Revisited
The world of BPMS is divided into BPEL-lovers and BPEL-haters, and the thing that BPEL-haters seem to hate most is that the OASIS standard “excludes” human tasks. How can you have a “business process” execution language that cannot accommodate human-performed activities? “Out of scope”! Are you kidding?
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Demand Driven Development
Until now, if the customer of an enterprise software product needed a new feature to be developed, three main options would have been available: wait for the vendor to add the feature into a future release of the product, pay for the development of a custom feature and hope that it would make its way back into the product, or hire a third-party to develop a propriatery extension that would have to be maintained separately. The first option might lead to nothing, the second is expensive initially, and the third is expensive both upfront and down the line. Open Source development solved part of the issue by allowing customers to develop the feature themselves and contribute it back to the open source project, hoping that the community would pick it up at some point. It’s better than the first three options, but could still be improved upon. Here comes Intalio’s Demand Driven Development, which will be unveiled next month and to which I am glad to give you a preview today.
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Publishing versus Sharing
When discussing about a specific Office 2.0 service, I often make the distinction between ‘publishing’ a document and ’sharing’ a document. Some readers have recently asked questions about how they differ from each other, and I thought that some clarification would be welcome. The main difference between publishing and sharing is that publishing makes a document public to anyone who is connected to the Internet, while sharing makes this document available to a selected audience only.
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Office 2.0 Mashup Infrastructure
The idea of mashups blending BPM 2.0 and Office 2.0 is gaining some traction, as illustrated by this ZDNet article from Dion Hinchcliffe. In order to implement some mashups on my own, I have joined the ever-growing list of Ruby on Rails converts and have opened an account with NetFirms. This ISP offers some of […]
Office 2.0 Interoperability
My Office 2.0 setup currently includes 15 different services, 10 require a login and password, and 8 separate logins and passwords are used. This is one of the bugs that plague the concept for Office 2.0 today. It could be solved with single sign-on, which is one of the interoperability services that are needed to make Office 2.0 a truly effective computing platform. This article provides a first list of such interoperability services.
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The Quest for the Perfect Bookmarking Tool
Beside online calendaring, which was recently featured by Michael Arrington on Techcrunch, no other application gets more attention than social bookmarking these days. Most of us started with del.icio.us, then played with BlinkList, Diigo, or Simpy. The last to date is ma.gnolia, for which I received a preview account today. As usual, Brian Benzinger from Solution Watch offered a great early review. Here are my own first impressions.
