jjanssen's blog

Lotus Sametime Supports XMPP (Jabber)

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 08:52:14 -0800

Lotus had adopted the SIMPLE protocol early in its branching off from SIP, and it still a work in progress. Now, like many others, Lotus has adopted XMPP, the protocol behind Jabber as well. This means that there is yet another mainstream product that is interoperable with other XMPP-based services, including APU IM and Google Talk.

Source: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2068781,00.asp

The Data Must Flow

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 19:37:19 -0700

I ran across a phrase that reminded me of "the spice must flow" line that rings in the head of any fan of Dune.

enabling the flow of data in such a way as to make its location immaterial

What a great way to describe our recently proposed architecture principle relating to data:

Leveraged Data - Data is an enterprise asset that should be leveraged across the organization over time.

Current IT Issues Report: IdM and Portfolio Management float to the surface

Wed, 07 Jun 2006 14:04:36 -0700

The seventh annual Educause Current IT Issues Survey Report highlights two areas which I have been following. First, Security & Identity Management (IdM) rose to the top, displacing IT Funding as the most strategic issue needing to be resolved for future success. Second, Portfolio Development & Management was a new category this year and immediately received attention, appearing among the top-ten issues expected to become more significant in the coming year. Other issues I have been tracking of late were also covered, including ERP, Academic Alignment, and Web Services (SOA).

Here are some of the highlights from the report, with additional resources referenced at the end. Overall, this report is a treasure trove of Higher Education IT strategic thinking:

No such thing, as the next big thing

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 13:24:44 -0800

Nicholas Donofrio, IBM's executive vice president of innovation and technology, declared:

"If you're looking for the next big thing, stop looking. There's no such thing as the next big thing," he added.
..these days, people are looking for value that arises from a creation and not just looking at technology for its sake.

So what is it that people are looking for? Not entirely new technology, but better packaged, better managed, and more congruent services in line with the way humans interact. Sounds familiar.

innovation today is more about services, process, business models or cultural innovation than just product innovation.

Source: cnet news article

OpenOffice 2.0 Released

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 09:30:56 -0700

Its been five years since Sun Open Sourced the StarOffice suite they purchased from German company Star Division. Today OpenOffice has released version 2.0 which represents a very significant re-engineering of the 1.0 codebase.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 is the productivity suite that individuals, governments, and corporations around the world have been expecting for the last two years. Easy to use and fluidly interoperable with every major office suite, OpenOffice.org 2.0 realises the potential of open source.

With new features, advanced XML capabilities and native support for the OASIS Standard OpenDocument format, OpenOffice.org 2.0 gives users around the globe the tools to be engaged and productive members of their society.

ZDNet Coverage:

Version 2.0 brings some significant new features, and Google has pledged to help distribute OpenOffice through a high-profile pact with Sun. But perhaps more significant, OpenOffice.org uses the standardized OpenDocument format that stands in stark contrast to Microsoft's proprietary formats.

Massachusetts has required support of OpenDocument, and Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president of standards and open source, has urged computer users to pressure software companies, governments and corporations to support OpenDocument.

How soon do you adopt emerging standards?

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 09:05:46 -0700

Interesting IBM developer works article:

Standards and specs: Early adopters

Follow the pitfalls and perks that come from adopting a standard before it becomes one

This is a rather hardware focused standards article, but there are some valid lessons to be gained.

Remember that standardization is about interoperability first and foremost. If competitiveness between prospective partners in a standardization effort sinks the standard, everybody loses.

Which is why open standards are so important. There is a great difference between industry standards and open standards. Industry standards are lead by companies who form loose partnerships with eachother when developing new product lines with the desire for interoperability. Open standards are those lead by independent standards bodies, usually with open participation and vendor independence. This doesn't mean that open standards sometimes don't suffer the results of vendor competition, if they are implemented inconsistently (thus breaking the standard for advantage).

Anyway, good article. I attempted once, to explain the difference between Open Standards and Open Source, which may provide some relevant background to this topic.

Confirm the Work of Our Hands

Fri, 05 Aug 2005 15:07:03 -0700

For my evaluation this year, I was asked to perform a self evaluation, a reflection of the lessons learned from the last year. Sometimes I think that an exercise such as this would have been easier if I had kept a journal or had been more open and honest on my work blog. With that in mind, I am posting it for what it is.... maybe by writing down my lessons, I won't forget them, or perhaps they may be of some use to others.

Lessons Learned at APU during 2004/2005

I think most of the lessons that I have learned in the last year have had to do with things that were necessary to learn about myself. It is apparent that this better understanding of the way in which I am motivated, the times in which I am successful and those which I am not, is necessary in order to be effective in my unique position at APU.

Aflresco - A fresh look at ECM

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 08:36:40 -0700

"Alfresco is an open source, open-standards content repository built by the most experienced content management team that includes the co-founder of Documentum. The Alfresco product has a lean, modular component architecture that allows new functionality to be added without any system disruption and is significantly faster than proprietary commercial systems."

http://www.alfresco.org/

I haven't yet investigate it much. Its strongest features at this point appear to be file based repository and light workflow, and not extensive on the web content management front. Therefore, I am not sure I would yet put it in the ECM space.

Grokker goes web-based

Fri, 17 Jun 2005 09:48:02 -0700

A while back, I reviewed several desktop content search engines, as faculty on campus had desired something better to search all the research they had collected on their PC's. We recommended X1 for most users, and ISYS for advanced users. Since then, google of course released google desktop search as well.

One of the things that a faculty member suggested at the time of our investigation was perhaps a better way to search the internet from their desktops as well. So I included Grokker, which was sort of a new face on search. A fancy way to view results by visual categories. Categories are built in, or you can define your own. The only bummer was the technology was limited to Windows.

Now they have released a web based grokker which appears to be a Java applet with most of the same functionality as the desktop version (except of course indexing your desktop content). It uses the Yahoo! search engine.

Anyway if your looking for an interesting way to view search results, check it out.

Redhat Directory Server - Return from LDAP History

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 15:26:03 -0700

When APU was to deploy our first LDAP directory service, we were looking at running both OpenLDAP and Netscape/iPlanet Directory Server. The sole reason we were going to purchase the iPlanet directory server was because it had a password synchronization mechanism with NT 4. It was a major goal to have a single username and password for all major services running on windows and unix. However, when implementation time came around, we had moved to Windows 2000, which the iPlanet directory did not yet support sychronization with.

Much time has passed...

The Collaboration ASP Race

Thu, 16 Jun 2005 09:28:11 -0700

There has been more press lately about backpackit.com, the latest service from http://www.37signals.com/

Nate first showed me tadalist a long time ago. . Basically just a simple todo list but I have enjoyed using it for those todo items I only need to see when I am online. Its fast and very intuitive.

One of the reasons why Nate was so interested in 37signals is because of their open source web development framework called "ruby on rails". Basically a really easy to use inline scripting language (similar to php but more advanced). Nate and Mark both proved that you could produce a database driven application in short order.

More recently, 37signals have been implementing Ajax, the xml via javascript that gmail has made famous, in their ruby applications.

Backpackit is a interesting application. Its very easy to use, and has a good feel. However, I feel that it is a little more restrictive than most wiki applications. And their pricing model is a little off the mark, basically paying per page.

Really 37signals primary bread and butter is basecamp, their easy to use web based project management app. I have not yet played with it, but it appears to get that the project management problem is one about gathering all communication around a project space, more than just gant management. I think I may be suggesting it for my brother, an architect and general contractor who is faced with managing projects with dispersed office and field employees.

As far as ASP hosted wiki's, I think the one with the most potential is jotspot.com. They take wiki to the level of small "lotus notes" like application development, and there are some big names behind it.

Some similar functionality to backpackit, in that when you sign up you get a subdomain, and then each page has a randomly generated email address that you can use as an alternate method to update the page.

The list of available applications is impressive. I would suggest checking out the advanced tour.

I think the overriding principle driving success with these applications is that people really are drawn to the simple. Mobile users, and those who are fed up with reinstalling operating systems after viruses or other system failures, are growing soft to the concept of completely web based applications. Now that developers are pushing beyond the standards with things like ajax (standards being discussed at w3c even now), there is proof that web application feel can be improved without significant overhead.

Its a race for the best collaboration tool which can marry the "ease of publishing and sharing" found in blogs, wiki's, and social networking sites. Thus the emergence of new big name offerings like MSN MySpace, Yahoo! 360, etc. Should be interesting.

Portlet Gems

Thu, 09 Jun 2005 11:02:57 -0700

JSR-168 is a portlet standard that allows any compliant portal to make use of these mini-applications. The potential for providing a mix of applications produced external to an organization, yet consumed internally is great.

There are many companies providing such services in a-la-carte ASP fashion, I thought it would be good to start collecting resources for free portlets. As uPortal is JSR-168 compliant it is likely that we will be consuming such portlets in the future for our University Portal.

Gems - A Collection small JSR-168 compliant Portlets
http://community.java.net/portlet/
http://www.jsr168.org/
http://portlets.blogspot.com/

uPortal 2.5.0 Released

Thu, 02 Jun 2005 16:34:29 -0700

Announcement Excerpt from List:

uPortal 2.5.0 general audience release is now available.
http://www.uportal.org/

http://jasigch.princeton.edu:9000/display/UPC/2.5.0

There are many bugfixes and feature enhancements included in this release, perhaps the most notable of which are the availability of DLM as an alternative layout management system and improved JSR-168 portlet support (caching and redirects).

2.5.0 should now be considered the "stable" 2.x version. APU currently has version 2.1.5 deployed. A significant feature changelog can be found here. You can see from this Deployed uPortals list, that many schools are running 2.4.2, or had made plans toward that end.

About a month ago, the uPortal community also released uPortal 3 Milestone 1, representing the next generation of uPortal.

Summer of Code

Thu, 02 Jun 2005 11:24:17 -0700

Well I just had a really nice write-up regarding Google's Summer of Code Program, but I lost it do to buggy htmlarea javascript crashing my browser.

My main point was that it was a very smart move by google. On the surface its a benevolent outlay of 1 million dollars in stipends for students to help out Open Source projects. Underneath is an very smart campaign building up google's relationship with the Open Source community and future employees. A chance to find talent at high schools and Universities... a sort of real-time interview (note all code needs to be publicly available). A chance for Open Source projects to get new talent and some nagging tasks/feature requests done. A chance for students to have something meaningful to work on, and even be mentored by open source project representatives. Real work, real deadlines, real rewards in a non-threatening way.

But its a win-win for all parties really, the open source community, the students, and google. Smart. Marketing and PR can be used innovatively with some real value.

A university can learn from such a campaign.... IT departments should establish such a relationship with their Computer Science departments, for many of the same reasons.

Apache Harmony (Open Source JVM)

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 15:28:12 -0700

This news is a few weeks old, but I didn't run across it till today.

The Apache Foundation is sponsoring the development of a compatible implementation of J2SE 5. The project is called Harmony, and is sitting in the incubator. The FAQ posted to the mailing list, answered the first few questions that popped into my head....