JDJ ran an interesting article on BIRT — one of a now growing number of open source Biz Intelligence platforms that compete with the likes of Actuate and BusinessObjects. I haven’t used it yet, but if any of you have and would like to comment on your findings, let me know.
Read more about it at JDJ: Business Intelligence and Reporting with BIRT.
Ron Jacobs talks about Project “Noodle”, a new Microsoft project designed to help people become architects. There’s a PowerPoint presentation called Architects and the Architecture of Software that’s a pretty nice intro and I’ll try and keep an eye on the project to see how it progresses and is able to meet its goal.
I just ran across this interesting site, AgileDraw.org, that helps agile modelers and programmers produce diagrams. Here’s how they describe it:
Agile Draw is a set of principles and styles for producing diagrams that communicate effectively. These principles can be used with any drawing technique or tools, from whiteboard to pencil and paper to computerized tools. The essence of Agile Draw is to use simple conventional drawing elements such as circles, boxes, connecting lines and text, in conventional ways that give diagrams a sense of life and a consistent way of communicating.
The Agile Draw principles are not new! Agile Draw is a simple summary of things we all know about drawing useful pictures.
My friend Eric Spiegel has just published his most recent article Prejudging Talent Can Cost You at Datamation.
The job market is getting pretty tight these days and it’s hard to find good people in a now pretty good economy. Eric’s suggestions are right on target.
I’m a patent holder and I train patent examiners on technology topics so I often see and sometimes work with the folks at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). If all you know about the USPTO is what you read in the newspapers you should attend some events where you’ll meet the folks that work there. If have found most of the staff that I’ve encountered to be courteous, hard-working, caring, and really trying to do the right thing as often as possible. They have a pretty tough job, though, so it’s hard to know what’s right or wrong (I think they do pretty well).
If you think the patent process is broken or would like to learn more about it, I just got an email announcement this morning that you would find useful:
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is holding a two-day conference to address the intellectual property needs of small and medium sized businesses, entrepreneurs, and independent inventors interested in manufacturing or selling their products abroad.
March 27 – Presentations to help conference attendees identify intellectual property assets and discuss the steps needed to protect those assets in the United States and abroad. Major presentations will cover patents, trademarks, copyright, and trade secrets.
March 28 – Presentations focusing on enforcement issues that may arise in protecting intellectual property rights in the United States and abroad including: patent, trademark, and copyright infringement; unfair competition; counterfeiting; and piracy.
This conference will also include one-on-one consultations between the USPTO attorneys and conference attendees on Monday and Tuesday afternoons.
This program is part of the Federal Government’s Strategy Targeting Organized Piracy (STOP) and the USPTO’s continuing commitment to increase public awareness of intellectual property rights and the enforcement of those rights in the global marketplace.
There is no charge to attend this event, but seating is limited and registration is required.
My friend Andy over at The Disco Blog wrote recently about Code reviews vs. pair programming vs. static code analysis. He compares and contrasts some of the mechanisms used to improve code quality and why some may work better than others. Worth reading.
I’ve been doing lots of Enterprise Architecture work these days and I’m inevitably asked: “what’s the point? Aside from it being required by many business cases being prepared for new IT system, there really is utility in doing an EA.
I found this blog post that explains why: Business Value of Enterprise Architecture.
The EMR and HIPAA blog has posted additional information on “pod slurping”: Securing Your Desktops - Pod Slurping. He’s started a good discussion out there and we should join in to see if we can talk about policies health IT shops should put into place.
The Microsoft MVP Architect’s mailing list today had a pleasant surprise: Fred Chong’s WebBlog : SaaS is a journey, walk with us.
Check out the article if you’re at all involved in SaaS. Here’s how he started:
Looking through the lens of an architect, architecting software as a service is an area sorely in need of better guidance. Of the companies I have spoken to, some have redelivered classic client-server applications using technology similar to terminal server so that they can expedite the time-to-market, only to run into scalability issues when the market demand for their software service takes off; some have chosen to put all their customers’ data in one database, with no upfront consideration for data performance and regulatory compliance issues; a few have attempted to solve per tenant data model extensions issues with many battle scars to prove apparent intractability of the perfect solution…
This is great. The above are all reasons why I have a day job…
I’ve been spending a lot of time looking into how my team can help lower the bar for software vendors to deliver software as a service. I’m a fan of SaaS, because I believe this software delivery mechanism changes the economics of the software industry in a way that allows online information and computing to be accessible to many more people in emerging markets such as India and China. This is a topic that warrants a separate posting a different time. For now, I want to highlight what Microsoft is bringing to the table in terms of SaaS architecture guidance.
