Archive for April, 2006
High Connectivity
High Availability is defined as 99.999% uptime, or a downtime of less than 5 minutes and 14 seconds a year. Fault Tolerant is 99.99%, or 52 minutes and 24 seconds of downtime per year. Well Managed is 99.9%, or 8 hours, 44 minutes, and 9 seconds of downtime per year. Managed is 99%, or 3 days, 15 hours, 21 minutes, and 36 seconds of downtime per year. If we were to use similar metrics for measuring the connectivity of a mobile worker, Connected (99%) is what we could reasonably shoot for today, and Well Connected (99.9%) might become feasible once all airlines provide Internet access aboard aircraft. [Continue…]
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In Search of Stickiness
Some web services have stickiness, others don’t. The first will draw users to make use of the service on a regular and voluntary (pull) basis. The second will get infrequent use, most of the time in response to external requests (push). If two services compete for the same audience, the one with the higher level of stickiness eventually wins against the other. This is especially true for services that rely on Metcalfe’s law in order to deliver value to their users, chiefs among them social networking services. [Continue…]
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Data Synchronization Pain
Data synchronization is a difficult problem to solve, especially when multiple platforms are being used. As long as one is using Microsoft Outlook in conjunction with Microsoft Exchange Server, things go pretty smoothly. The same is true when using Apple Address Book, Apple iCal and Apple Mail in conjunction with Apple iSync. But what happens when your contacts are stored into Salesforce.com and your events are spread across Salesforce.com and Google Calendar? As it turns out, a lot of very unnecessary pain. [Continue…]
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Can Microsoft Catch Up?
Microsoft Corporation reported third-quarter results today. Earnings slip below target, as indicated in this CNET article. But what is more interesting is the guidance that was given to investors, indicating that future earnings would be significantly impacted by a dramatic increase in investments dedicated to the development of the Windows Live platform. [Continue…]
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The Beauty of Convergence
Convergence is what happens when two or more devices are merged into one. For example, a phone and a camera become a camera phone. In and by itself, this means that you have to carry only one device instead of two. But what’s even more interesting is when new applications get invented for it. Then 1 + 1 is greater than 2, and nothing is more exciting than beating maths. [Continue…]
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My New Office 2.0 Setup
Now that Dabble DB supports full JSON data exports, I have decided to update my Office 2.0 setup. This gave me the opportunity to learn a little bit more about JavaScript programming, and I must say that I am quite impressed by the progress made by web browsers in recent years. [Continue…]
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What is a BPMN Designer
This is the seventh edition of our weekly BPM 2.0 post. Today, I will try to explain why a BPMN designer should be prefered to a BPEL editor. Most BPM vendors that have developed native BPEL runtime components offer a BPEL editor as a development tool. This is better than having to write BPEL code manually, but don’t expect business analysts — or even process analysts — to be productive with such a tool. BPEL is a very sophisticated process execution language, and as such was designed for computers, not human beings. [Continue…]
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I Love Computers
I’ve had a love affair with computers since I first saw one when I was six or seven years old. I believe it was a VAX, and it was used for doing some number crunching at the university where my father used to work. I liked them because, as my dad used to say, they could compute very fast and would always give the right answer. Little did I know that getting the right answer doesn’t mean much if you don’t ask the right question, but we’ll keep this for later. [Continue…]
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Dabble DB gets JSON
A couple of weeks ago, I indicated that Office 2.0 databases lacked the ability to syndicate complete records in a fully structured manner. Since then, Andrew and Avi at Smallthought Systems (the company developing Dabble DB) have worked on the issue and fixed the entry I made into the Office 2.0 bug tracker by adding a JSON feed to their already comprehensive list of data export formats (CSV, HTML, OPML, PDF, RSS, Text). [Continue…]
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3TERA
One of the many challenges faced by anyone implementing Office 2.0 applications or adopting the Software as a Service model is the scalability of the underlying infrastructure. Salesforce.com’s growing pain are closely monitored, but Web 2.0 services such as del.icio.us and Flickr suffered from the same ailments at times. Developing some online application with a clean user interface that will work consistently across multiple web browsers is difficult enough. Add the requirement to make the application scale to millions of users in a matter of months and the task becomes impossible to most. Here comes 3TERA. [Continue…]
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SAPPHIRE
I have been invited by SAP — or more precisely my friend Jeff Nolan — to join the bloggers corner at SAPPHIRE in Orlando on May 16-18. All expenses, including flight, hotel and registration are paid by SAP AG. [Continue…]
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The First Office 2.0 Suites
Thanks to the recent coverage we got on LifeHacker and the help of more than two dozen contributors listed as a comment to this post, the Office 2.0 Database now has 90 entries organized in 28 categories. I recently updated the Dabble DB view I am using for the database and organized entries into families, which makes it much easier to find what you’re looking for. But an other view simply sorted by application names shows something quite interesting: the emergence of the very first Office 2.0 suites. [Continue…]
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The World is Flat Breakfast
The first IT|Redux breakfast took place today and was a great success. The goal of the meeting was to identify the 11th flattener, following Thomas Friedman’s list of 10 flatteners in The World is Flat. [Continue…]
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Why BPMN Matters
This is the sixth edition of our weekly BPM 2.0 post. Today, I will try to explain why BPMN matters. Until now, there has been no standard notation for designing business processes. ARIS — the Brainchild of Dr. August-Wilhelm Scheer — is a great notation, but it’s a very propriatery one that is not supported by any other tool than IDS Scheer ARIS. UML Activity Diagrams are cute, but business analysts somehow cannot use them. Flowcharts is what they’d rather go for, but these tend to be limited to the modeling of single processes, which does not accomodate the requirements of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Something better was needed, and this is why BPMI.org developed BPMN a couple of years ago. [Continued…]
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Cingular 8125
I have been using a BlackBerry device for a couple of years now, and even though nothing can beat the user interface for reading emails, I was getting ready for a change. I have been looking for something that would have a better web browser and a Wi-Fi connection, and here is what I found. [Continue…]
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Help Needed for Office 2.0 Database
The Office 2.0 Database is nearing completion. Thanks to Lee Provoost’s oustanding work, 47 out of 79 entries have been fully populated. For the 32 more to go, I would love to get your help. If you’re familiar with any of the applications that still need some data to be added, please use this entry […]
Networking is an Art
As much as I like networking today, it is not something that came naturally to me. Instead, it took me quite some time to become comfortable with its basic principles. My education process included reading books, such as Keith Farrazzi’s Never Eat Alone and Malcom Gladwell’s Tipping Point, following Guy Kawasaki’s advice on The Art […]
Office 2.0 on Overdrive
The pace at which new Office 2.0 applications are being released seems to be accelerating. For some applications, like Google Calendar, it’s good news. For others, such as ajaxXLS, not really so. [Continued…]
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Simple is Beautiful
One of the overarching themes for IT|Redux is the reduction of complexity in IT. As far as I can tell, there are too main ways one can achieve such a goal. The first is to provide radically simpler approaches that can address 80% of our needs. The second is to provide sophisticated tools that offer the right level of abstraction in helping us deal with the remaining 20%. In the past 36 hours, I got to experience both, with demonstrations from Thingamy and Contivo. [Continued…]
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Acquisitions Create Opportunities
Yesterday, Red Hat acquired JBoss for $420 Million. A week before, TA Associates announced a $200 Million buyout of Global 360. Both acquisitions are interesting in the sense that they create wonderful opportunities for others to develop their businesses in creative ways. [Continue…]
