Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Solving the ECM Puzzle




How Portals Enhance Business Performance


Accenture
3/24/2006

A new point of view from Accenture Information Management Services highlights how portals are on the mind of business leaders because they can achieve excellence in employee communication and productivity as well as customer management and service.


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The Future of Integration in Content Management



Organizations have information—data in neat rows and columns, document images, documents, forms, photos, and everything else that contains important organizational information—spread throughout the enterprise. What do you need to know to ensure you're able to see the right information (and all of it)?

John Harney
January/February 2006

Almost all of you reading this understand that "enterprise content management" (ECM) is an umbrella term for many technologies including imaging, workflow, document and records management, search, email management, Web content management, etc. As organizations find themselves increasingly overloaded with information; many are turning to these technologies, singly or in suites, to deal with the overload. As mature and complementary products and technologies, facile APIs have evolved with which to pretty painlessly integrate them.

Of course, other integration methods like Web services, XML, and Java adaptors have developed in recent years that accelerate integration to an even greater extent. The latest to get a lot of attention is federated repository management (or enterprise content integration), the ability of products like Venetica to provide bi-directional access to unstructured data in content management and other systems from disparate vendors. Though FRM deals largely with unstructured data, it promises to unify data across the enterprise, even structured data when platform vendors like Oracle use FRM to pull all data into a structured database.

So system integrators and customers have a lot of options. But, hey, it gets better. According to David Newman, vice president, Research, Enterprise Information Management, Gartner, integration disciplines that were previously, at best, tangential to ECM are now morphing into one another and in the process becoming increasingly relevant to it. Indeed, he observes that structured and unstructured content are converging, and managing the data overload from applications like enterprise report management (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), custom legacy systems, mainframe-based systems, as well as all the technologies within CM requires a new approach. Gartner calls this "enterprise information management" (EIM).


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Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Panel: Java Will Endure

LAS VEGAS —A group of high-profile Java watchers discussed the future of the Java language and platform, including challenges Java faces on the Web tier, the impact of dynamic languages and the onslaught of open-source software, on March 25 at TheServerSide Java Symposium here.

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Monday, March 27, 2006

IDC Sees More Strong IT Spending in 2006

Fueled by purchases that accelerated in the second half of last year, worldwide IT spending in 2006 will cruise upward at a healthy rate of 6.3 percent, according to IT market research firm IDC.

A report released today by International Data Corp., of Framingham, Mass., cited two main reasons for the trend: economic stability in the United States, Europe and Japan, and "continued robust growth" in emerging markets.

Software buys will grow at a rate of 7 percent, while hardware and software purchases will increase by 6 percent, according to the report.


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Java Experts Predict AJAX Will Be Huge

Java gurus at TheServerSide Java Symposium agree that AJAX is the next big thing for building Web applications.

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Thursday, March 23, 2006

Think “Process”

"Technology is simply a vehicle for carrying out processes.
The power of your company is contained in the processes themselves.
The most valuable opportunities for  establishing competitive differentiation are in how a product or service is created, sold, delivered, and supported."
        – Jack Welch, former CEO of GE





Create smart environments based on Java Bluetooth APIs

Learn how to allow embedded devices to share information and events across a Bluetooth PAN

Level: Introductory

Chris Bygrave ( bygravec@uk.ibm.com), Software Engineer, IBM

21 Mar 2006

With the continuing boom of mobile devices in the communications and gaming industries, as well as the software trend toward ad hoc and peer-to-peer networks, the ability to target heterogeneous devices for networked applications (whether gaming, productivity, or information sharing) is a big advantage. In this article, learn how to use and integrate the Bluetooth API (which was introduced into Java™ 2 Platform, Micro Edition [J2ME] through JSR 82) into your own applications. Here, you'll find a complete Bluetooth device discovery, pairing, and messaging implementation.

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Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Getting started with the Eclipse Communication Framework

Use ECF to create communications-based applications quickly
Level: Introductory

Chris Aniszczyk (zx@us.ibm.com), Software Engineer, IBM
Borna Safabakhsh (borna@us.ibm.com), Software Engineer, IBM

14 Mar 2006

The Eclipse Communication Framework (ECF) is a new Eclipse project devoted to providing an open source framework supporting the creation of communications-based applications on the Eclipse platform. Find out about the ECF, its basic capabilities, and its future direction.


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Java Feature: Putting a Face on Web Services and SOA

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a hot topic among analysts, CIOs, and technology marketers, but the path from high-level architectural principles to programming a functioning, real-world service isn't always clear, especially since, in the end, you still need to create a clean user interface that's as flexible as the services it consumes.

Why SOA?
The concepts underlying SOA aren't a major divergence from standard design principles like abstraction, encapsulation, and reuse. To put it simply, SOA is a software architecture in which application functionality is encapsulated as independent services. These services are in many cases Web Services but can also be services derived from various technology types. Clients in different applications or business processes can then consume these services. More important, an SOA is designed to decouple the implementation of a software service from the interfaces that call that service. This lets clients of a service rely on a consistent interface regardless of the implementation technology of the service.

Instead of building big monolithic applications, developers can build more agile services that can be deployed and reused across an organization for different applications and processes. This allows for better reuse of software functionality, as well as for increased flexibility because developers can evolve the implementation of a service without necessarily affecting the clients of that service.

To this end, the main requirement of an SOA is that the interface to the services is decoupled from the implementation. This separation provides the central benefit to SOA, both from a programmatic perspective and a financial one. Existing systems, both legacy and modern, internal to the company and external, can be exposed and consumed as services, simplifying the task of development.


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Monday, March 20, 2006

Egypt's goal: To be the land of offshoring

By Andy McCue, Silicon.com
Published on ZDNet News: February 10, 2006, 12:26 PM PT

Egypt is making a pitch to be the next offshore outsourcing hot-spot, claiming that its foreign language skills and low labor costs put the country in a strong position to compete with India and Eastern Europe.

AT Kearney recently ranked Egypt number 12 in a list of top offshore outsourcing destinations and while the country's share of the offshore call-center market is still very small, analyst Datamonitor predicts it will grow by 52 percent over the next 12 months.

Egypt's leading call center company Xceed has a 1,200 seat operation at a new government-subsidized high-tech Smart Village just outside Cairo where salaries for staff working on offshore accounts range from around $350 to $440 per month.


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4%

4%  :(

http://news.filbalad.com//News.asp?NewsID=11799


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Thursday, March 16, 2006

Spring Web Flow 1.0 EA Released

Keith Donald@nospam.com Mar 07, 2006  -  Show original item

Spring Web Flow (SWF) 1.0 EA has been released. Spring Web Flow is a product of the Spring community focused on the definition and execution of page flow within a web application. The product has entered a four week evaluation period before the final 1.0 release. Updates include a REST-style URL mapper, a POJO method binding mechanism, Portlet integration, JSF integration, and more.


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Article: Clustering JSR-168 Portlet Applications in Tomcat

Regina Lynch@nospam.com Mar 07, 2006  -  Show original item

JSR-168 Portlet applications represent a special challenge when it comes to clustering within Tomcat. In this article, Unicon Software Architect John A. Lewis discusses how to use Tomcat 5.5, mod_jk 1.2, Apache 2.0 and Pluto 1.0.1 to construct a functioning Tomcat cluster that will properly replicate portlet session information.

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JDO 2.0 Passes

Neelan Choksi@nospam.com Mar 15, 2006  -  Show original item

Java Data Objects 2.0 (JSR 243) passed the Final Approval Ballot. The final tally was 15 Yes votes, 0 No votes, and 1 member of the Executive Committee didn't vote.

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Monday, March 13, 2006

Father of Java Reminds New York Audience That Java Works With All Languages


by JDJ News Desk

(March 9, 2006) - "There have been a number of language coming up lately," noted James Gosling today at Sun's World Wide Education & Research Conference in New York City. "PHP and Ruby are perfectly fine systems but they are scripting languages and get their power through specialization: they just generate web pages. But none of them attempt any serious breadth in the application domain and they both have really serious scaling and performance problems." He then dismissed C# as having had potential, but no longer: "We were afraid [Microsoft] were going to do something really creative - but they're hopelessly focused on one platform."



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Thursday, March 02, 2006

SOA realization: Service design principles

Level: Advanced

David J.N. Artus ( artusd@uk.ibm.com), Consulting IT Specialist, IBM

17 Feb 2006

Apply these principles to Service-Oriented Architecture design to help realize the vision of business agility through IT flexibility.

Introduction

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) offers a vision of IT flexibility enabling business agility. In this article we will focus on two specific aspects of IT flexibility: decoupling and ease of process implementation. How well individual services are specified and realized has a significant impact on these aspects of IT flexibility, and hence on business agility. Our goal here is to provide guidelines for specifying and realizing services that enable the SOA vision. We use the following structure:

  • First, we describe the context within which services and service operations will be specified and realized. We consider the responsibilities of the SOA infrastructure and the responsibilities of the service.
  • Next, we consider the design principles that apply to the specification of services as a whole rather than to individual operations.
  • Finally, we state the design principles that apply to individual service operations.

The design principles we outline are intended to promote IT flexibility by increasing both decoupling and ease of process implementation, so we will complete our introduction by examining these ideas in more detail.



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ECM is dead - long live ECM!

by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
01-Mar-2006

There is a hunger in larger enterprises for solutions to help the average worker handle the masses of information that they currently encounter. Management is placing equally strong demands to meet compliance requirements. Together these two drivers are providing a huge boost to the world of Enterprise Content Management (ECM).

Nevertheless these 2 trends have created new problems that, on the surface, seem difficult to reconcile, including:

  • Endemic competition between 2 camps within the enterprise: those espousing traditional, heavy-duty ECM vs. those seeking "ECM for the masses."
  • A dawning realization that the vast majority of content never makes it into either type of system.
  • Essential Records Management activities going almost completely ignored, despite the recent compliance push.

All is not lost. I'll argue that on the one hand, the technology may not matter that much anyway, since ECM is really about processes and standards. And as enterprises sort out those processes, they may well find a need for new types of tools and systems in any case.


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Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Web 2.01 , A rich internet applicaiton example


Summary:

Learn about what I call "Web 2.01," a fusion of "Web 2.0" style application content with a "Rich Internet Application" client, which is not subject to many of the limitations of a web browser.

What does a Web 2.01 application look like? Well, here's a screenshot:

Web 2.01 application

Notice that it's a Rich Internet Application. It includes a favorite feeds list, Friend of a Friend functionality, and a way to select favorite authors.

Once you set up your favorites, you can get an XML feed of the favorites via web services.





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