Here's a call to the community for ideas and input.
The situation is as follows:
I have 2 "sandbox" servers that I can use for anything I want. At the moment, they're running Domino 8 beta 2 and Sametime 7.5.1 respectively.
Come thursday, I intend to scratch them and build a demo environment, so that I can SHOW my management Notes/Domino 8 and the extended portfolio.
My hope is to cram Domino Mail and apps, Sametime, Quickr and Traveler onto those 2 servers, but I'm not quite sure in which configuration.
My initial thoughs are to put Sametime on one box, and let the other one handle Mail, apps, Quickr and Traveler. At the moment, there is real interest in Traveler and Sametime Meetings, so it is important that those perform as good as possible. The servers are old and underpowered, but then again, it's just for a few test-users, no real load at all.
Would that be the way to go, or are other configurations better? Are there any special issues to be careful of? Hints, tips, comments are more than welcome. I'm hoping to get some Quickr/Sametime integration and to show off DWA/DWA Lite, the native blog template and hopefully Ext.ND as well.
Ideas for demo scenarios are also welcome.
Any takers? Feel free to answer in the comments or send email. :-)
Notes Domino 
1 Comments
May 4th, 2008
So, the first beta - or "Readiness Toolkit" - of
MS Internet Explorer 8 has hit the internet.
Most "interesting" new features are their answer to the "Widget" paradigm - called "Webslices". IE8 can discover self contained "webslices" inside webpages and add them to the browser as widgets.
The other interesting new feature is a product called "Activities", which appear to be an integrated "mash-up" tool, used to do integrate with lookup- or sharing-type services. Idea being that third-parties like Facebook, Google or whomever, could supply these services on their websites, and the IE8 user can choose to plug in this "Activity" and then be able to use it as an integrated part of the IE8 browser.
Oh my ... it's a revolution of the entire internet! :-/
"Nothing to see here - move along"! Only issue is the bad choice of name for the "Activities" product, which have very little to do with an activity in my book. But thanks for fogging up the term, guys! ;-)
Breaking News 0 Comments
March 6th, 2008
One of those odd things moving around in the blogosphere ...
The instructions are:
1 - Go to
Wikipedia's random article page. The
first article you get is the name of your band.
2 - Go to the
Random Quotations page. The
last four words of the last quote is the album title.
3 - Go to
Flickr's Interesting photo page.
Third picture, no matter what it is, is your album cover.
4 - Put it all together to make your album. Either crop it to CD cover size, or just use the raw image itself ... the only rule is you're only allowed to add the album title and artist title.
My album cover looks like this ...
0 Comments
February 6th, 2008
It wasn't that long ago - 2 years to be exact - that we all were steaming with positive energy.
Lotusphere 2006 had just finished, and there was no longer any doubt:
Notes was cool! This was
"our time". The Notes 8 client - back then known just as
"Hannover" - was about to revolutionize the collaboration universe with it's
Eclipse based Managed Client Framework. IBM Lotus was back on the up (although they were never REALLY down), and a catchy slogan spread like a stampede through the blogosphere ...
Yeah - Notes was cool, and IBM Lotus was really aiming for the top. After a couple of years of wavering strategies and dubious products (yes, that would be the
Lotus IBM Workplace brand I'm talking about there), IBM Lotus was back on track with the powerful collaboration platform at the front of their strategic roadmap, supported strongly by the SameTime 7.5 enterprise IM platform and a few remnants of Lotus Workplace, the Websphere Portal based collaboration initiative. Notes 7 was running on a stick, connecting travelling
Nomads from just about any place in the world, and the future would bring back the Macintosh client and also support Linux as the desktop OS. Last but not least, the future was going to dispose of traditional folder-structure-based work habits and turn us into super-productive
activity-centric collaborators.
Notes was indeed NOT dead!
Lotusphere 2007 came and went with more positive news.
"Hannover" turned officially into Notes & Domino 8, and the client platform now included a suite of Open Source based
productivity tools, clearly targeting the average users of Microsofts rather proprietary Office Suite. SameTime was joined as a supporting act by the
Web 2.0 evolution of teamspace suite Quickplace - now apparently even
Quickr.
The fun didn't stop there. In 2007, IBM announced an agressive first strike on what was to become the
Enterprise 2.0 market by launching their brand new Social Software Suite, "Lotus Connections", allowing the business world to take advantage of the combined wisdom of the fabled "
One Million Monkees". Connections had also incorporated the stray "activities server" promised in 2006.
It was a bold move. I'm certain that I heard jaws drop anywhere from
Redwood to
Redmond, and maybe even in some places around the Googleverse as well.
IBM was taking a lead in the market. It had jumped ahead of the companies that were lazily looking at the anarchistic antics of the crowds on the web, not suspecting that these viral tendencies was so close to the enterprise strategies on the tabletops of Fortune 500 CEOs.
It was a massive push!
So - here we are. It's the end of january once again. Lotusphere 2008 is over. We should be on our toes, reaching for the highest levels of knowledge sharing, skill tapping and collaborative innovation. IBM Lotus have launched the products announced last year as they promised, and new products have been announced:
Lotus Foundations - an all-in-one, entry level, 5 to 500 user, Domino Collaboration server, including firewall and backup technologies, as well as productivity tools.
Lotus Symphony - the above mentioned productivity tools implemented as a seperate suite outside the managed client framework.
Lotus Protector - a "black box" anti-virus / anti-spam solution for Domino.
Notes 8.5 public beta for Mac.
Notes client coming for Ubuntu Linux.
Lotus Mashups.
And Lotus Connections 2.0.
Once again - an awesome series of products, and a very agressive strategy.
So why aren't I thrilled?
Well ... it might just be me, and it might be nagging over small, pathetic details, but ...
The things that really
MOVE the collaboration platform forward, aren't
really part of the Lotus portfolio, are they?
Activities, Connections, Mashups ... They're not running on the Lotus Domino application platform. They're running on the Enterprise Java based Websphere platform. Even Quickr - formerly Domino-based Quickplace - is now available as a Websphere based implementation, and the "Advanced" part of SameTime, now ONLY runs on Websphere!
So what? You say!
Well ... to some, perhaps not a lot. To many others, it's a disaster. All over the world, companies spend fortunes reducing the complexity of their infrastructures, trying to centralize of fewer, broader platforms. In the Enterprise Java space, several players are on the market; Sun, BEA (now to be Oracle) and of course IBM.
That, of course is not a problem, since the Enterprise Java platforms standardize using
Java Specification Requests (JSRs) - two such important ones being the portlet specification standards,
JSR168 and
JSR 286.
Brilliant, right?!
Wrong!
In situations like these, the vendors design their platform products to be compliant, so that any portlet written to JSR168 or JSR286 will run on the platform.
Sadly, the
applications the vendors themselves design for these platforms, do not comply, and as such
can't run on platforms from other vendors.
So all those companies out there, who have large, well-established Domino infrastructures, but have chosen alternatives to Websphere in the Enterprise Java market, are in trouble. They can't deploy all these new and awesome Web 2.0 collaboration products, without compromizing their consolidation strategies and adding
more platforms to their infrastructure.
Talk about increased TCO, right there!
Like I said, I'm probably just being a bitter old man, here. But my reality is, that I'll have a hell of a hard time trying to convince my management, that this implementation is actually worth the investment. I will likely be facing argumentation like "you want us to sacrifice our strategy for a corporate Facebook?", or - even worse - "If we have to migrate, we might as well migrate to [
insert your favourite evil conglomerate here]".
And should I succeed, I will have bought into a new and effective vendor-lock-in. If the ideas take off, more and more Websphere servers will spawn.
The last - and only - justification of this strategy would be, if the Domino server, within a few years, like the Notes client has become a plug-in to the Enterprise Java framework, would migrate to the Websphere platform, as "Lotus Collaboration Server for Websphere".
Wait ... wasn't that what Lotus Workplace was going to be?
Websphere, indeed ...
Does that mean, that Notes is dead?
.
Breaking News Notes Domino 3 Comments
January 30th, 2008
Having now stated that SOA is an
architecture, it is time to consider what makes SOA unique and interesting, compared to the way we do things already.
It is time to consider the concept of "
the service".
This is the point where many are led astray when talking about SOA. This is the point where people claim to have been using "services" for ages and that SOA is nothing new. This is the point, where a lot of people think that "services" means "web services", and that SOA is an enterprise integration project and all about component based development.
Vendors are pushing Service Oriented Architecture on the promise of extended
reuse of services,.resulting in reduced development time (and cost). Wait - that sounds remarkably familiar to the Object Oriented paradigm of the early 90's. We tried that and are doing that on a regular basis with technologies like J2EE and .NET ... Nothing new in that??!! And by the way - we didn't get too much of the promised reuse back then, so why should we believe it
now??
We shouldn't. Simple as that! Don't believe the promises of reuse as a result of SOA. In theory, the concept is brilliant - as it was/is with object orientation. But in reality, the reuse of services will face the exact same challenges as the reuse of objects. It is very, VERY difficult to create services (or objects) that are
generic enough for massive reuse. More often than not, the
context in which the service is intended to be reused, is different from the context to which the service was built. What is needed is not the existing service, but a
slight variation of the existing service - hence a new service is made, or the existing service is wrapped in a service-extension that adds functionality to the existing service. Alongs comes the third iteration, and here, more new functionality is added, while some existing functionality is discarded.
Before we know it, our generic services has spawned numerous variations used in very different ways. And sure -
in theory - there might well be a tiny bit of code being reused somewhere deep in the core of the service, but the value of that reuse is eaten up by the added complexity and need for strict governance to avoid messing things up for each other.
Don't think of SOA in terms of reuse. Don't think of SOA as an expansion of OO. SOA is
not about doing CORBA or DCOM better. SOA is about the
business.
A common misconception of SOA is in the analogy of
LEGO™ bricks being put together to form some complex construction. What that analogy
is interesting from an interface point of view (we might get back to that), it is really poor from a
service point of view. A "service" implies "serving" - the performance of some sort of value bringing function. In itself, a
LEGO™ brick on its own performes no function. Only when connected to others can it fulfill a purpose. Not so with a
service.
A service is a self contained unit of functionality that on its own delivers value to its user. It fulfills a purpose in itself, but coupled with other services, it can fulfill an even greater purpose.
I like to imagine SOA like a walk-in closet. It holds a huge number of items, each fulfilling a purpose. There are pants, socks, shirts, sweaters, shoes, scarfs, gloves, hats, belts, ties etc.etc. - each with a purpose of their own. You can mix and match in a collosal number of unique ways, and put your "services" together to form
ensembles, serving the greater good of keeping you warm, comfortable and looking sharp.
Speaking of
ensembles - another interesting analogy would be that of musicians. Each are capable of playing music on their own, but put them together in a
band and they can complement each other and make music together that they could never have made on their own.
Both in music and in fashion, there are
rules, however. In fashion, colours match or clash, and you just
don't wear brown shoes with a grey suit!
Brown shoes don't make it!
In order for music to really work, the musicians have to play in the same key and tempo. You must follow these rules - these
standards!
You must also follow the agreed
principles of composition and adhere to certain rules - or
policies - to produce what is known as
harmony., and make the music sound good (or at least, bearable).
Another thing fashion and music have in common is
composition. Both in putting an outfit together and in writing a piece of music, you
compose.
In SOA, you compose as well. You compose your business processes. And if you do it right, the elements you use to compose your business processes is the services mentioned above. You put the pieces together in the right order to suit the purpose of your business.
That is where the real value proposition of SOA lies. That is where the famed
reuse is in play. Not in reusing single services for multiple business processes, but in reusing
the existing business processes elements when creating new processes or adapting existing processes to changes in the business objectives.
It is when your architecture allows you to reuse existing implementations, and only change the services that represents the changing parts of the process. That is where the value lies.
SO ... What is
S O A ?
SOA is the collection of standards, principles, policies and composition that enables companies to change and extend their business processes - and the strict control and management of said collection.
It is not the code, not the infrastructure, not the platform, not the technology.
It's the
architecture. The rules, standards, principles and the composition.
0 Comments
January 5th, 2008
Ah ... it had to happen, didn't it? Now that I finally kick this blog into gear, I had to start out by asking that annoying, fundamental question:
"What is Service Oriented Architecture, or S O A?" Well, where should I start?
First of all, and perhaps most important - or at least very fundamental - SOA is, as the name implies, an
architecture. It is not a product, a product set or a bundle of software. It is also not a specific technology or set of technologies. It is a set of
principles and
policies that sets a
frame of reference.
So, no ... when a vendor tells you that "to SOA" you need their SOA product suite, don't accept that as the truth, and under no circumstance expect to be handed a shortcut to SOA. It's
wrong, and in the worst case, you might end up on a deroute away from the entire purpose of SOA and compromising the value of your architecture.
No, you have to do all the tedious bits. You have to start at the very top, understanding the very philosophy of service orientation, and from there, you need to figure out what
your requirements are, drill down into the essence of your
business and
rethink it. Understanding your business is the first step in building your architecture.
That's right. SOA is about
business - not about technology. So why is it, that 99% of SOA projects are IT-driven and lack business unit interaction?
Actually - If you have an answer to that question, I'll be very happy to hear it! My best guess is, that it is because IT-vendors treat SOA as a tangible product portfolio as opposed to the rather abstract concepts of "business philosophy" and "architecture". In short - it's easier to sell SOA based on technology than it is to sell it based on understanding.
But - and this might not be a perfect analogy - it is like selling a painting by Picasso based solely on information about canvas and paint, not motif, colours and composition. Hopefully we can all agree that doing so would be more than wrong, it would greatly reduce the value of the investment.
For all I know, this blog might well end up containing a lot of stuff about technology. It is not the intent, and if it does,
please try to remember that technology is a means, not a goal.
So much for the "A" in S O A. Tomorrow, I will try to blog a bit about the "S".
Happy new year to you all. Thank you for your patience.
0 Comments
December 3rd, 2007
"How Service Orientation will change your Business" is the subtitle of this book from
ZapThink analysts
Jason Bloomberg and
Ronald Schmelzer, and that subtitle sets the stage for the entire concept of SOA better than most definitions of this term, which was recently voted "Most Confusing Acronym" by the
Global Language Monitor.
" IBM had to write a book to explain it!? " was the reasoning behind this vote, and IBM
has indeed written
several books on the subject.
However, books from IBM naturally tend to focus on the technology in the IBM portfolio, and - essentially - Service Oriented Architecture - is not about technology.
"How Service Orientation will change your
Business".
Succeeding in SOA isn't about huge technology implementations. It's about making a conceptual change to the way you drive you
Business. A change that will facilitate change at a much more rapid pace than previously possible, powering business
agility, one of the biggest challenges facing corporations in the modern business world. It is often said, that "
inflexibility is the mother of all problems". Never has that been more true, and never has the consequences of rigidity in the markets been more grave.
This book "gets it" like few others. Bloomberg and Schmelzer manage to set the stage for Service Orientation without getting caught up in technology, vendor strategies and development methodologies.
Instead, the focus is on identifying and explaining the "generic" challenges in modern organisations, explaining the concept of Service Orientation and its benefits, and targeting some of the issues that
will pop up, when trying to shift an organisation away from traditional methods and towards Service Orientation: Organisational resistance, or
inertia, project funding and governance issues.
Service Orient or be Doomed is not trying to sell you a six pack of technology implementations, and the target audiences aren't the technical staff, but while management might be the obvious readers,
everybody will benefit from the understanding that this book will provide, and if the
entire organisation was to buy-in on the
same understanding of the concept, the
same reasons for the change, and the
same priorities, the first milestone would be reached.
Recommended Reading 2 Comments
November 6th, 2007
... I wouldn't have NO luck at all.
Allright, allright ... I'll readily admit to being the worlds SLOWEST web-developer, but I swear I have no luck.
So - I'm working like a madman on my new design, building from a really cool wordpress theme with quite a number of "enhancements" (well -
I like to think they are enhancements, anyway). It's a struggle, because I'm way off my usual path, but it's coming along slowly but surely.
Actually - I'm done. Ready to go live and really excited about it too - when I get a friendly email suggesting that I read
this article.
PANIC! I begin digging into my template, and sure enough, it is one of those templates that are full of malicious or - at the very least - dubious code.
Bugger! Bugger! Bugger!
I'm back to square one, discouraged and bitter, and have decided to stay with the current design until I recover from this depressive state and regain my creative inspiration.
Sorry,
Steve, for the blatant rip-off of your design. I hope it won't be too long until I get back in the creative state and start fiddling again. Perhaps I should start from scratch, this time - just in case!
The good news is, that I have no more excuses NOT to begin actually blogging on the intended main subject of SOA and the Notes/Domino platform, so expect more to come soon. Really. Honest. I promise!
Site information 0 Comments
November 1st, 2007
It's been very quiet round here. I apologize for that.
To be honest, I had a bit of problems with the Blog engine.
The current design is basically a ripoff of
Steve's design, and I felt I needed my own look, so I started fiddling about with it and ended up painting myself into a corner I didn't know how to get out of again.
That made me decide to do a COMPLETE re-design, which was quite a learning process. It's been a while since I have done any serious web-development, and to be honest, I had NO idea that it could be THIS easy, so I made it harder than it had to be. That's just so typical of me!
The new design is definately on track now, and it won't be too long until the show can begin.
So thank you for your patience. Please have a seat and grab a box of popcorn. The fun will begin
shortly ... eventually
Site information 2 Comments
July 15th, 2007
Welcome to Olufsphere.com, where I will try to focus on the role of the Notes/Domino platform in the SOA universe.
Site information 2 Comments
February 21st, 2007
