It is good to see that MS is plugging away at this and now providing a way to really take a look at it. I am not qualified to comment on its technical merits, but the idea is important (to content management but more to computing in general) and something we have been watching for a long time. Dan Farber’s entry on this release has some useful links, and Wikipedia has an accessible intro to WinFS
Category: Enterprise software & integration (Page 24 of 30)
Although not officially announced, a number of trade publications have reported on Oracle’s acquisition of Content Media, and Tony Byrne succinctly captures what is of immediate interest to followers of the content management market.
What we started calling EII (Enterprise Information Integration) a few years ago, and what many vendors called ECI (Enterprise Content Integration) remains one of the biggest challenges organizations face – too big to be served by a small niche market, as evidenced by Oracle’s move, as well as by the earlier IBM and EMC acquisitions. For a more in-depth look at the problem, players and the market see our article on What is Enterprise Information Integration (EII)?
Oracle has bought the assets of Context Media. The content integration technology will complement Oracle’s Content Services 10G and collaboration products. There is no official announcement on the details of the acquisition. http://www.oracle.com
Writing for Power Builder Developer’s Journal, Coach Wei has an excellent article on how XML can play a key role in beefing up client applications in J2EE environments.
This question of client functionality continues to be key. Content applications, especially, often demand rich feature sets for client interfaces. The question is how to bring enough functionality out to the client without significant investment in cost and resources. As organizations bring more business process out to the browser–for larger and larger audiences–this question continues to pose practical challenges.
I have commented before on research done by vendors. Such research is not independent of course, but sometimes you look at the results, and some of it makes perfect sense. Take this chart from a presentation by Jonathan Bruce, XQuery Evangelist for DataDirect Technologies. Jonathan was the featured speaker at a recent meeting of The Washington Area SGML / XML Users Group.
If you are interested in XQuery, I would recommend downloading the whole presentation.
Ipedo announced the latest version of its EII platform, incorporating several product enhancements to facilitate delivery of on-demand intelligence. Ipedo XIP 4.0 introduces a dual SQL/XQuery engine, giving it a broad span of information integration. The new release also features several new capabilities designed to reduce the cost and complexity of information integration, including a visual rules processing interface, Web Services publishing, and integration with BusinessObjects and Crystal Reports. In all, Ipedo XIP 4.0 has over 50 new additions and improvements, including enhanced query optimization techniques, new data source discovery and mapping capabilities, and new visual wizards for data import. Ipedo XIP leverages SQL and XML Query to integrate and manage information from disparate, complex data sources to enable real-time business decisions. Ipedo’s approach treats existing corporate databases and external data flows as a single, virtual data source. Ipedo XIP 4.0 is available now for Windows 2000, Windows NT, Sun Solaris and Red Hat Linux. Pricing is on a per-CPU basis. http://www.ipedo.com
I am liveblogging the Keynote Debate between Microsoft and Sun on what is the right strategy for information interchange. The panelists are Tim Bray, Director, Web Technologies, Sun Microsystems, and Jean Paoli, Senior Director, XML Architecture, Microsoft. Jon Udell is moderating.
- Actually Frank Gilbane is moderating, and not Jon, so we will hear some of Jon’s thoughts as well
- Frank: the session is really about strategies for sharing, preserving, and integrating document content, especially document content with XML.
- Frank gave some background about the European Union attempts to standardize on Microsoft Office or OpenOffice
- Tim elucidated some requirements of your data format. (1) Technically unencumbered and legally unencumbered (2) High quality (and a notable aspect of quality is allowing a low barrier to entry). Tim: “As Larry Wall (the inventer of Perl) noted, easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible).”
- Jean predicted that by 2010, 75% of new documents will be XML.
- Tim agreed with Jean that 75% of new documents will be XML by 2010, but asked how many of them will be XHTML (as opposed toa more specialized schema, I assume).
- Some agreement by all that electronic forms are an important aspect of XML authoring, but Tim thinks the area is “a mess.” I’m paraphrasing, but Tim commented on the official XForms release, “Well, it’s official.”
- Jean commented that XML-based electronic forms are made more difficult because forms themselves require consideration of graphical user interface, interactivity, and even personalization to a degree. This suggests forms are more complex than documents. (And this reminds me of a comment Mark Birbeck made about there being a fine line between an electronic form and an application.)
- Good question from the audience. So much time has elapsed since SGML got started, and we are still only have XSL-FO (which this person was not happy with). What does this suggest about how long it will take to get better, high-quality typographically sophisticated output?
- Tim would suggest we are seeing some improvement, beginning with better resolution on the screen.
- Another commenter weighed in, suggesting that format is important and format does convey meaning. Would like to hear that the tools are going to get better.
- Frank: when do you need a customized schema?
- Jean: best way to safeguard your data and systems is to have an XML strategy. You can gain efficiencies you never had before. Also suggested that the Microsoft schemas will not somehow trap your content into Microsoft’s intellectual property.
- Jon’s takeaways: (1) software as service (2) XML-aware repositories and (3) pervasive intermediation (the content flows in such a way that you can intermediate it)
When business people want to condemn a new technology to a geeky grave, they often say that the new thing is “a technology in search of a problem.” This suggests–quite correctly–that the best technology solves a pressing business problem.
Web services, specifically, and service-oriented architectures in general, solve a number of pressing business problems. In particular, web services allow organizations to continue operating legacy systems that work well and that, for various reasons, defy replacement or upgrade. If you can at least reach a point where the legacy system can be integrated with other applications via web services, you likely have a moderate-cost, stable, and workable means to integrate the legacy system with web-facing applications going forward.
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