Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Facebook Etiquette: Five Dos and Don'ts

Facebook and other social networking sites can create an uncomfortable overlap between your personal and professional life. We show how to manage your Facebook profile so it can work for both business and pleasure. The article in CIO.com explains how to behave in these social networking sites and as social media has become a prevalent communication/collaboration medium for business organizations as well, it is important to understand the rules of the game. This article highlights them very well.

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Tuesday, November 18, 2008

How Cloud Computing Is Changing the World

A major shift in the way companies obtain software and computing capacity is under way as more companies tap into Web-based applications. The article includes a discussion of how some companies are moving aggessively to cloud computing using software from vendors such as Microsoft, IBM, Salesforce.com and Google. Also, based on research, the market for cloud computing is going to surge to 95 billion in the next five years. It is very interesting to see how all this turns out in the long run, but things are moving fast in the corporate world.

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SAP and Microsoft, Watch Your Back according to BusinessWeek.com article today

Google Apps, Linux, and other free or inexpensive systems are winning more fans in the corporate world. I am very worried about the misconception of free software (does not exist) and true enterprise solutions. When comparing Microsoft and SAP to Google in enterprise computing, is is really an unfair comparison because Google lacks completely true enterprise solutions that has a critical role. Sure, Google has an online spreadsheet program that lacks everything that one would expect from a real application. Also, Google does not provide a platform for an independent software vendor to build true enterprise solutions. I have spoken with many very seasoned CIO's of large companies and they have yet to see open source or Google apps to have an impact on enterprise scale solutions. I am not taking into consideration Linux which is a differnet story.

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Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Microsoft's Ray Ozzie Talks Open Source, Azure and More: New information coming to surface every day

Microsoft's Ray Ozzie Talks Open Source, Azure and More Microsoft's chief software architect, Ray Ozzie, in an interview with eWEEK at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, delved into a series of subjects, most prominently open source and interoperability, software modeling, and the Windows Azure cloud operating system. What is very interesting in the interview with eWeek.com is the topics that are linked together: open source, interoperability, software modeling and domain-specific languages . I truly think Ray Ozzie is the right person to drive things, his innovation to the software world such as Lotus Notes, Groove and a bunch of other things has demonstrated that he is "a man walking his own path" and I believe that when he says interoperability is important it is also going to mean that going forward.
Ray Ozzie concludes about Microsoft modeling strategy and what it means to Windows Azure in following way:
In the abstract I'll just say the quest, the ultimate goal, is that we push the limits as much as we can to see how much we can abstract into modeling from the entire life cycle from the analyst to the developer to the person who understands ... from the person who understands the business problem to be solved to the developer who will probably in some cases have to wrap it with code, with some procedural code, to how it gets deployed, and to how it gets managed in an operational environment.
What is very interesting to me in the whole scenario about cloud computing combined with modeling is that domain-specific languages or domain-specific modeling (DSM) requires a platform with services so to me this is a non-brainer when thinking about the discussion whether DSL or DSM is needed. We need higher abstraction levels in our development, we need to get to a point where we can address the business issues and requirements in a way that we do not have to reinvent the wheel all over again. I like the article from eWeek.com. I highly recommend you to read it to learn more about Ray Ozzie's thoughts.
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