I resigned from Microsoft today after six great years. I hope some of you will subscribe to my new blog (see URL below). I know this blog has been very quiet over the last couple of months and I intend to blog a lot more frequently from now on! cheers! Cameron Reilly Website: http://reilly.typepad.com Email: cameronreilly@gmail.com IM: cameronreilly@hotmail.com Phone +61 400455334 

I love essays like this that stretch my thinking and give me new conceptual models for understanding what I see happening each day. According to Pat Helland's “Metropolis“ article, “we are at approximately the early 1880's in urban development in our parallel IT shop's growth!“ I also like his explanation of why “shared services will not be achieved by trying to put all of your applications on one version of one platform”.  I'm going to use his material for my next series of discussions on “why SOA“. Source: Steve Kirk

InfoPath makes developing XML forms much easier than ever before. But how do you quickly make those forms available to people external to your organisation who may not be running InfoPath on their desktop yet? Enter InfoView. A partner of ours in Sydney, Unique World Software, has recently released an exciting new tool called “InfoView”. InfoView uses the files created by Microsoft InfoPath to convert the InfoPath form to an ASP.NET web form able to be delivered through the browser. The XML data generated by InfoView is identical to the XML created by InfoPath, so  BizTalk can easily be used for routing and workflow. The CEO of Unique World and I were talking last night about potential applications of InfoView for our customers. I particularly can see lots of opportunities for enterprises who have customers they want to complete browser-based forms (let's say a telco who wants an online customer self-service system) and then route the data in those forms to back-end transactional data systems such as their ERP and CRM using BizTalk 2004.

I might actually figure out how to make this scripting stuff work! AW have recently released a guide in PDF format. Source: Marc

This article on Skype for Pocket PC mentions that Skype was founded by the two guys who in vented Kazaa! That's news to me. Wow, talk about two guys changing paradigms...

Great to see ZDnet Australia giving Channel9 some early coverage!

I'm all excited reading miscoranda's drill-down into Gmail. This is big. As big as OutlookMT, Scoble? I dunno. But it's big. Oh, I know, web mail is old hat. Yeah but so was “search” when Google jumped into the pond. Also laughing at Kevin Fox's post assuring everyone Gmail wasn't an April Fools Day joke and about why he loves working at a company like Google. Hey Kevin - if you're looking for more testers... give me a yell! Source: http://weblogs.asp.net/pleloup/archive/2004/04/04/107442.aspx  

A few months ago I linked to an article in a local paper which mentioned that one of Australia's largest e-tailers was still running on Microsoft ASP and SQL 7. Nothing at all wrong with that, as far as I'm concerned - plenty of businesses out there are happily running on even 20 year-old technology. The challenge for vendors, though, is to make the new technology compelling enough to create a business justification for organisations to upgrade their infrastructure. Today one of the developers at this e-tailer, Paul, posted a comment making the point that “any form of radical technology shift is going to require a pretty compelling business case to justify the expense (and, in the case of the SQL 7 -> SQL 2000 migration, it's a fairly enormous expense)“ and letting me know that they are “doing pretty amazing things with the old technology“ and I'm sure he's right on this last point. The folks at Wishlist are a very smart bunch who have a great site and an even better business model. Let's face it - any “dot com“ who survived the crunch are smarter than your average bear. So anyway, I was wondering - what business justification have other organisations have used to migrate from ASP to ASP.NET or from SQL7 to SQL 2000? Is it compelling enough? Do we need to do more to either make the new technology compelling or to communicate the more compelling features of the new technologies? Is it really to do with price? Or with the cost and complexity of the migration?

McNealy (about why the deal came about): “What I think is happening, is that the customer is getting more in charge. I challenge you to find large enterprise customers who are unhappy with this deal”. What do customer's think of the Sun - Microsoft deal? Does it matter to anyone besides Sun and MS? Does anyone else care? I've just spent ages scrolling through the comments on /. and I can't see much analysis or opinion worth anything. I've read a few press comments and, again, no analysis which sparks my interest.

Revealing a brand synergy unprecedented in next generation gaming, Bungie today announced a list of vendors to be featured in-game in "Halo 2" the exciting sci-fi adventure heading to Xbox game systems this fall. Gee, I can’t seem to find “Mungo McIver, a Microsoft marketing expert” in the GAL. How about that….

Been reading Warren Buffett's Letter to Berkshire Hathaway's shareholders in their 2003 Annual Report. It contains a great anecdote about how a group of students from the University of Tennessee helped him decide to purchase Clayton Homes. Really worth a read.

I had a laugh to myself reading this article today about a study conducted by the Online Publishers Association which analyzes the Internet habits of 18-to-34-year-olds, and guess what it found?? Gen X and Y have embraced the Web in a big way. Wow. No kidding. Humour aside, there are some good numbers in the report: 25 percent of this group sends or shares video via the Web, compared to 6 percent of all Internet users 42 percent burn downloaded music to CDs, versus 24 percent of all Internet users 18 and older The 18-to-34-year-old demo turns to the Web for entertainment. In fact, 30 percent visit entertainment sites daily, compared to 32 percent who read newspaper entertainment sections and 19 percent who read entertainment magazines. I just make it into this demographic (turning 34 in October) and it isn't unusual for me to spend 18-20 hours a day in front of a PC (and therefore the web), so of course it's going to be an integral part of how I live, work and play but I guess this is still big news for some baby-boomers who didn't grow up with a PC in front of them (come to think of it, neither did I).

Thanks to Buzz  who introduced me tonight to Anagram. Anagram instantly and intelligently translates the meaningful text from any application into Outlook Contact, Calendar, Task and Note items. Great app! Just what I've needed for YEARS. The amount of time I spend cutting and pasting people's sig files into contacts... I hate to think! I notice Omar's been talking about Outlook as a platform with Anagram as one example. And of course Marc covered it a couple of weeks ago. Gee, I stop blogging for a couple of weeks and the world kept moving without me...

Here's a shout out to AAMI! This week we received the full payout from the recent burglary. Today we picked up the replacement video camera and I pushed in the only video cassette left behind, one I thought was blank. I pressed play and guess what? It's got Xmas. It's for all of my footage from Xmas eve up until the burglary. The funny thing is that the little "save" latch on the tape wasn't pressed over to "save" - it was still on "record". Now, the first thing I do when I remove a full tape from the camera is to press the "save" latch to prevent it getting recorded over. So I'm thinking the thief took the time to remove the cassette from my video camera and left it on the floor. Wow.  I also splurged a bit today from my mid-year bonus - picked up a Waveterminal U24 Audio Interface  and a pair of Sennheiser 212 pro headphones so I can finally improve the quality of the recording of the tracks I'm working on. Now all I need is the new PC - but that's next week's project.

Yesterday I had the distinct pleasure of meeting a living legend - Clive Finkelstein. Clive Finkelstein is acknowledged worldwide as the "Father" of Information Engineering (IE), having developed its concepts from 1976 - 1980 based on original work carried out by him to bridge from strategic business planning to information systems. Many of his papers and some projects are available online at http://www.ies.aust.com/~ieinfo/. I'd love to get Clive to speak at some Microsoft events.