Archive for January, 2007
EveryTrail
From time to time, you stumble upon an new application that radically changes the way you look at things around you. Mosaic changed the way I look at computers, Google Earth the way I look at the world, and EveryTrail the way I look at my trips. Today, I had lunch with Joost Schreve, EveryTrail’s CEO, and got to use his application for one of my favorite activities: flying with friends in the San Francisco Bay Area. [Continue…]
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Unstoppable
They were first to release an integrated Office 2.0 suite. Then, they were first to release a single sign-on interface for it. Today, they are first to put all the pieces together into a single user interface. Welcome Zoho Notebook. [Continue…]
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Contact Managers Roundup
Here is the third edition of our Weekly Office 2.0 Roundup. Today, we will review 4 contact management applications, from Big Contacts to Xing. We will identify some unique features that might help your own selection process, and you will get a chance to cast your vote for the best online contact management application. [Continue…]
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BPM, ECM, ESB, and Security
What makes enterprise architecture both difficult and fascinating is that it’s all about dealing with a multi-dimensional problem. Focus on one or two dimensions, and the others quickly become orthogonal considerations, usually relegated to a later time, actually never really implemented. More often than not, security is one of these dimensions that does not get the attention it deserves. Dealing with security is a little bit like cleaning your house: when its clean, nobody can really tell how much work had to be done for getting there, and only when things get dirty do people start noticing. This post from security architect James McGovern is a good summary of the problem at hand, and gives me an opportunity to answer a question that was asked following the publishing of this post on the intersection of BPM and ECM: what about security? [Continue…]
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Man vs Machine
In the little world of Business Process Management (BPM), most vendors like to create confusion in customers’ minds as a way to slow down the relentless commoditization process they are facing. For this purpose, many tricks can be used, ranging from the development of incompatible standards, to the segmentation of the market into meaningless categories. Recently, this later form of FUD has gained some momentum, with the sparkling of a debate around human-centric BPM vs integration-centric BPM. This distinction makes absolutely no sense, and is yet another contributing factor to the delay in the mainstream adoption of BPM technologies in the enterprise. Here is an attempt at providing some much-needed clarification. [Continue…]
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Office 2.0 at Software 2007
As indicated in this earlier post, IT|Redux is partnering with the Sand Hill Group to promote Office 2.0 at the Software 2007 conference, which will take place on May 8-9 in Santa Clara, CA. We have slots for speakers, and space available for exhibitors on the Office 2.0 Pavillion. [Continue…]
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Taking Digital Notes
Back in April 2001, I read a fascinating article written by Steve Silberman for Wired Magazine. It described a new technology developed by a Swedish company called Anoto. The technology allowed hand writing to be digitized by a micro-camera embedded into the tip of a pen when using paper layered with barely visible patterns. I played with an early version developed by Nokia, but the pen was too bulky to be used on a daily basis, so I decided to wait for the technology to mature a little bit more. It did, I tried it, and I’m glad to report that it actually works. [Continue…]
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Calendars Roundup
Here is the second edition of our Weekly Office 2.0 Roundup. Today, we will review 12 calendaring applications, from 30 Boxes to vivapop. We will identify some unique features that might help your own selection process, and you will get a chance to cast your vote for the best online calendaring application. [Continue…]
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Who Are You?
On any given day, this modest blog receives about 500 visits, and is read by a little bit more than 500 subscribers to its feed. I get to know a few of my readers through the comments that are posted, and from the trackbacks that I gather using Technorati. For the rest of you, and you represent the vast majority of my readers, I have no idea of who you are. So how about you tell me? [Continue…]
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Bring Your Own Computer
If we believe Gartner, Total Cost of Ownership for a business class desktop is about $5,000 per year. Over a four-year period, that’s a whopping $20,000. Within large corporations, a disproportionate amount of IT budgets is spent on support and maintenance — up to 90%, to which desktop maintenance is no small contributor. Some CIOs are starting to have issues with such a picture, and are becoming quite creative in coming up with solutions that might significalty accelerate the adoption of Office 2.0 alternatives within the corporate world, much faster than I originally envisioned. [Continue…]
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For an Amazon Web Services Clone
In my Inferences for ‘07, I suggested that open-source, plug-compatible alternatives to Amazon’s EC2, S3, SQS will be released sometime this year. Here are a set of reasons why this would make sense, and why everybody would benefit from such a thing, including Amazon itself. [Continue…]
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The Quest for the Perfect Online Charting Tool
The recent release of the online charting tool Swivel is exciting news to many who want to chart some piece of data without having to use any software. Nevertheless, it only works for static datasets that must be uploaded onto Swivel’s servers, as opposed to being served from the Web. Is there any better solution currently available? [Continue…]
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Bookmarks Roundup
Here is the first edition of our Weekly Office 2.0 Roundup. Today, we will review 27 bookmarking applications, from BlinkList to Zurpy. We will identify some unique features that might help your own selection process, and you will get a chance to cast your vote for the best online bookmarking application. [Continue…]
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Open Source Relationships
When it comes to enterprise software, most partnerships established between vendors tend to be asymmetrical: a large vendor would embed some piece of technology developed by a much smaller one, or a small System Integrator (SI) or Value Added Reseller (VAR) would distribute the products of a larger, well established vendor. Commercial Open Source business models are slowly but surely changing the parameters of the equation, and giving birth to more equalitarian and fruitful relationships. Here is why. [Continue…]
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The SOA Puzzle
As mentioned before, SOA is BPM’s enabling infrastructure, and BPM is SOA’s killer application. But what is SOA really? And how does it relate to ESB (Enterprise Service Bus)? Ask these questions to ten SOA pundits, and you’ll get ten different answers. Well, I’m no SOA pundit, so don’t take my answer for gospel, but here is how Intalio is going about building its own SOA stack out of freely available Open Source pieces. If anything, it might give you some ideas for building yours down the road. [Continue…]
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Upcoming Office 2.0 Events
We’re still in the first half of January, but the calendar for Office 2.0 events is filling up rapidly. Of course, we will have the second edition of the one and only Office 2.0 Conference sometime in October or November in San Francisco, CA. But in the meantime, here are a couple of events you might want to consider joining, either as an attendee or as a sponsor. [Continue…]
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iPhone and Office 2.0
Steve Jobs and his friends have finally showed their new baby to the rest of us, and yet another user experience won’t be the same anymore. This time around, Apple is about to change the way we use a phone, much like it changed the way we listen to music with the iPod, or the way we use a personal computer with the Mac. In and by itself, changing the way we use a phone is a pretty ambitious goal, but I must believe that Steve is after an even more ambitious one: changing the way we deal with information, and he has a better shot at it than anybody else. Here is why. [Continue…]
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Weekly Office 2.0 Roundup
Next Monday, I will start a new weekly series of articles on Office 2.0, each covering one family of applications among the 48 that are currently tracked by the Office 2.0 Database. This will serve as an opportunity for me to complete the database incrementally, and for you to either participate in this collective effort, or to identify the set of applications that will best suit your needs. Here is how this new series will come together. [Continue…]
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Where BPM and ECM Intersect
Following my recent post on the excellent Koral, several astute readers have asked what the integration points between Business Process Management (BPM) and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) could or should be, and whether some industry standards were available in this intersection area. Here is a first shot at answering the question. [Continue…]
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Workflow for New Year’s Resolutions
For most of us, New Year’s resolutions are forgotten almost as soon as they’ve been taken, not because we’re not genuine enough in their proclamation, but because the process we use to follow through is broken. As much has been taught to us by David Allen through his excellent Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology, but some simple truths are worth repeating on a regular basis if we want them to really sink in. Here is how to fix the process. [Continue…]
