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.

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/

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.

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.

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....

As the infrastructure maintenance and PC support operations mature, an IT department must continue to innovate. Its value proposition is the packaging and distribution of meaningful services aligned with the business needs. It includes partnering and consulting with customer groups in innovative spaces like collabortion, web publishing, and self-service. A higher level information creation and distribution channel needs to be created to support rapid assembly of reusable components. If given tools, advanced user groups should be able to build communities which can meet their own lightweight application needs, filling gaps that a centralized transaction system is not meant to.

Will IT Departments Still Exist in 2010? ...

Implementing a Pattern Library in the Real World: A Yahoo! Case Study

The Problem

Yahoo’s multiple business units, each containing decentralized user experience teams, have a natural tendency to design different solutions to similar problems. Left unchecked, these differences would weaken the Yahoo! brand and produce a less usable network of products. Designers and managers have discussed “standards” as a way to solve this problem but this standards content (often contained only in the memories of designers) has never existed in a commonly accessible format.

I originally found this story because of the Drupal folks being excited about Yahoo choosing Drupal as the best CMS to meet their specific needs for this project. But there is much to learn from this collaborative standards formation, and knowledge management effort in the "interface design" space.

I had suspected for a while that Blizzard's hugely successful MMORPG, World of Warcraft used JA-SIG/Yale CAS. As a WoW gamer myself, I had noticed the familiar service ticket string in the url when logging into the forums etc.

Well I finally found more confirmation, a Tomcat stack trace is included on this CAS in the wild!, yale blog post.

Talk about scalability.

update: oops, had a bad link to the blog

In The Continuing Disappearance of Document Management, James Till, vice president of Marketing for Xythos Software Inc., describes how the advent of Open Standards such as HTTP, SSL and WebDAV have shaken up the traditional Document Management Industry, as well as call to question complicated Enterprise Content Management (ECM) suite approaches to handling content within your organization.

I too have been stepping back from previous declarations of ECM as the solution, only because the implication is that an ECM strategy equals and ECM product. This is not always the case. In the emerging agile architecture environment, simple solutions that act as a bridges between personal productivity software running on desktops and distributed storage and workflow might fit the bill....

Identity and Access Management: Technological Implementation of Policy (PDF), provides another great overview of the identity management opportunity. One of the things I appreciated the most about this paper is the clarity of the business case based on "other than IT" perspectives. Besides the amazingly effective Ann West, nsf middleware and nmi-edit outreach coordinator, the article was written by Jeff von Munkwits-Smith, the University Registrar at the University of Connecticut.

A functional definition - Identity and Access Management:

• Integrates all the pertinent information about people from multiple authoritative source systems, reconciles the accounts, and joins identities together under one campus unique identity.
• Processes and transforms information about people including their affiliations with the institution, resource access etc. and pushes out and stores the information where it can be of use to applications.
• Acts as a focus for implementation of policy concerning visibility and privacy of identity information and entitlement policies across the systems.

Some more take-away notes and highlights below...