Lukas Svoboda: Strategy, Architecture, Governance & Technology

Interesting article in Computerworld which states that Microsoft wants the Open Source community to pay royalties for 235 alleged patent violations – many inside Linux and Open Office. Very interesting ploy from Microsoft, I can't say I agree with the tactic as I think it's just going to create more negative publicity for Microsoft and alienate the Open Source community even more…

RIM has finally shown off a plug-in for Visual Studio that allows blackberry device development in the Visual Studio environment. Very nice considering the RIM IDE is complete poos. I definitely commend RIM for targeting VS into the future.

I've posted a new ARCast (Architecture Pod Cast) with John Bernhard, Enterprise Architect of AirNZ on the topic "The role of the Architect to Challenge". Find it at www.arcast.co.nz . I also worked out how to setup a RSS stream for podcasting only, it's added to the navigation links or you can find it here J

Interesting to see the expansion of Datacom with the purchase of Sydney company Relate. Also very interesting to see the "STAR" initiative that will see Datacom's business processes all come online. I can hardly wait for the low cost labour online ordering process :)

Hat tip to Adam G, but this resource is a fantastic mind map of Silverlight resources

Some thought provoking IT Horror stories from CIO magazine.

TIP: For you architects out there looking for independent industry support and certification keep an eye on IASA – an international body who is getting involved in some interesting Architect certifications.

Microsoft has just in the last few days released expression studio. Good news for MSDN subscribers, you also have a copy J. Very pleased to see Microsoft doing that and seeding it amongst the development community.

Okay, you can probably tell that I'm reading Computerworld at the moment, but I find this article from Computerworld funny in a weird way. Is it talking about Software as a Service as the dominant model into the future for software products or is it talking about selling software at low cost with services attached? It almost sounds to me as if the article has got the two confused. Puritanically I see SaaS being a distribution and maintenance mechanism for software, i.e. it's one way to provide a software service but not the only way. Definitely a weird story - this type of press can only service to confuse the whole SaaS issue. Agree? Disagree?

Probably predictable in some sense, but according to this Computerworld article it looks like Microsoft will officially call Longhorn "Windows Server 2007". Hopefully MS ships before the end of the year otherwise it might have to be Windows Server 2008! J

In the last few days Google has renamed its personalized web page offering "iGoogle". An interesting name considering Apple use "i" in all their branding. Out of shear reading between the lines this gets me thinking that Google and Apple might be up to something. I guess someone else is thinking along the same lines…

This very interesting article in Computerworld serves to highlight a critical problem that SaaS faces – in that a small bug can become massive just because of the amount of people that depend on that service.

So last night I ran the Great Fronde ECM event. We had a reasonable turn out of people and the event was a resounding success. One of the proposals I floated with the audience was to setup a vendor-independent, integrator-independent NZ ECM online community and the response was overwhelmingly positive. Another principal here at Fronde will probably end up front and running it with help from me to get it up and running. If you are keen to be part of this community, drop me a line on LUKAS AT FRONDE DOT COM.

The 5 guiding principals of Enterprise Architecture - This is right on the money from my experiences of doing Enterprise Architecture:

No Strategic Vison, No EA: If you know where you are, but you don't know where to go. Don't plan a journey.

Good is Good Enough: An Enterprise Architect knows he has achieved the perfect solution not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

The Only Constant is Dynamics: Dynamics is the only constant while adaptiveness is the natural variable, so plan for this constant.

Pure Logic is the ruin of the Spirit: Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit and creativity delivers unexpected opportunities, so use your creativity.

Be Enterprising: If you want to create an Enterprise Architecture, don't drum up the architects to collect information and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless value creating possibilities of the enterprise.

On Wednesday the 2^nd of May I'll be hosting an event on Enterprise Content Management with Helen Rayner from Telecom and Clark Thomborson from Auckland University. It should be a really interesting event with Helen and Clark presenting as they are ECM experts in industry and academia respectively.

Full details including speaker bios are at the Fronde News Website but a taste is below:

The Great Fronde Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Event

Date: Wednesday May the 2nd 2007 Times: 4:30pm to 6:00pm Venue: Fronde, Level 7, 131 Queen Street, Auckland

Overwhelmed by mountains of information and yet not able to locate anything useful? Feeling alone trying to outline information management strategies and drive the implementation of content management solutions? Confused about how to organise and manage content in your organisation? Come and hear from a panel of information management experts and users on how they have addressed the situation and what results they have achieved. Learn from the collective experiences and best practices, and understand the capabilities of the technology to better manage your information assets.

Our Panelists are Professor Clark Thomborson, ECM expert from the University of Auckland, Helen Rayner, Information Manager Policy & Strategy for Telecom and Lukas Svoboda, Principal Consultant at Fronde. The panel will go through theoretical and practical aspects of Enterprise Content Management as well as demonstrate some of the features in Microsoft's latest ECM offering – Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

To book: To book yourself on this event please phone Wendy Watson on 09 377 2400 or email her at Wendy dot Watson at Fronde dot com

Further Information: If you would like to know further details on this event please phone Lukas Svoboda on 09 377 2400 or email him at Lukas dot Svoboda at Fronde dot com

Tonight (Thursday the 26^th of April) I will be speaking at the Auckland ICT Cluster. I'm speaking on Technology Strategy and how important it is to select the right technology for your product or IT development. The details from the cluster are as follows:

"Selecting the right technology for your product – the right technology strategy"

Lukas Svoboda of Fronde will talk about some of the key strategies to employ when looking at selecting technology for a product or IT development. Lukas will also look at some of the latest application trends and how they can help with Technology Strategy. Lukas is a highly acclaimed architect in the New Zealand IT community and during his 13 years in the IT industry has developed significant experience in consulting and designing systems for corporates, software vendors and government departments.

5.30 to 7.00 p.m. - Networking with refreshments
5.30 to 6.00 p.m. - Drinks & pizza
6.00 to 6.05 p.m. - Welcome
6.05 to 6.10 p.m. - Five one-minute presentations by cluster members.
We will draw business cards on the night.
6.10 to 6.30 p.m. - Lukas Svoboda, Fronde Systems Group.
6.30 to 7.00 p.m. - Further networking

Cost: $15 for members, $25 for non-members; payable by Direct
Credit or cheque in advance.
Location: Location will be AUT Technology Park, James Fletcher House.
Level 4, 581-583 Great South Road, Penrose.

Jim Donovan is the CEO of Fronde and has now started a new blog. Wow, I must say I've very impressed to see a CEO of a big System Integrator writing a blog in NZ. Even better it happens to be the System Integrator  I'm working for :) Welcome to the blogosphere Jim!

If you have been following my personal blog (www.kiwibohemian.com) you might know that I've changed jobs having moved from Optimation to Fronde. At Optimation I had the title of Managing Principal and I was supposed to be doing strategic consulting (not much eventuated) but I ended up mainly focused on building the Microsoft Practice. Having moved over to Fronde I'm now no longer doing any active practice building (Fronde has a fantastic Microsoft capability already well in place) and instead focusing on Strategic Technology Consulting. Anyway, to cut a long story short – My focus has changed. I'm now focusing on Enterprise Architecture again and linking EA to Solutions Architecture as my day to day job. Part of my new focus is to pick a few key IT areas and I've tentatively decided to focus on Service Orientation, User Experience and to a lesser extent Microsoft Enterprise Technologies. To this extent I'm thinking I might refocus and even rebrand this blog around these areas. Any thoughts from blog land out there? Would it make this blog any more or any less useful? And yes it is 4am good Friday. Too many exciting things keeping me from sleeping J

Fantastic, Microsoft has finally realised that releasing Expression Studio with MSDN is a good idea. These tools while primarily targeted at Designers require developer integration and buy-in. So software folk like me who have an interest can now properly play with and demonstrate the value of Expression Studio within a development life cycle. Nice one Microsoft!

Over the last few weeks Vodafone have released the "Vodafone 1210" - A Vodafone branded Windows Mobile Smartphone originally manufactured by ASUS. The beauty of this thing is the price - $599 retail for a full MS phone in NZ. The only real lacking feature is no camera. But it is fully 3G. It is also only Win Mobile 5 but not 6. No mater I think this great value for money and going on my shopping list! There is quite a bit of info on this in NZ already mainly on geekzone. So here are a few links to find out further:

Vodafone NZ Product Page | Geek Zone Review | Geek Zone rant on locking (and unlocking) the phone | Forum Discussion on the 1210

It would have been sometime early 2006 but I went and did a guest lecture at Auckland Universities' Computer Science 734 grad paper. I did a shorter version of my normal Model Driven Architecture/Development talk, if you want a copy of it download the PDF from this link.

Tomorrow and Friday I'm chairing the 2nd Annual brightstar IT Archtiecture conference. This conference attracts the cream of Architecture speakers in NZ and is limited to a small audience. More information can be found here at Brightstar.

Check out big screen headlines so far one of the best plugins for Vista media centre. It's incredible. Beautiful interface and extremely usuable application for MCE. I've been running it for a while at home on my MCE setup.

Boo - a language for the .NET CLI targeting some of the frustrations of C#. Python like in some syntax, it's simple and strongly typed allow development supposedly quicker than normal C# .NET apps. Be interested to know if anyone is actually using it commercial, certain has some interesting aspects to it!

In what appears to be a very obvious response to the Microsoft/Nortel alliance, Cisco and IBM have joined forces.