Please note: This blog is no longer updated and has moved to a new location: Scott Mark.

Friday, January 12, 2007

Alan Pelz-Sharpe Nails Enterprise Architecture in 10 Notes

I have been tracking CMS Watch for some untold number of years now (I don't even want to count them up and date myself), and love it even though CM / ECM is no longer the center of my universe as it once was.

Along comes Alan and he nails just about every problem in Enterprise Architecture in 10 short points!!! He presents it as an ECM list, but accurately notes at the end that you can substitute just about any E* problem domain in place of ECM and the list holds. A couple of my favorites:

"You have allowed your users to dump content into your repository without concern for process, rules or structure, and now its a humongous mess"

"You are running a centralized system but really should have a distributed one"

"Your developers had to fiddle extensively with your ECM platform, and two software versions later it doesn't play nicely anymore with anything"

I'm loving it - this is one for the wall...

CMS Watch has done a fantastic job over the years demystifying the technology of ECM, and repeatedly pointing readers back to the people and process concerns that are the key to ECM success and the most frequent afterthoughts.

It's also very cool to see what Tony has been turning this firm into in the last couple of years - it's clearly gaining traction. I always thought the insight was high quality to begin with, but they are conducting more and more surgical strikes on a wider area - search and portals among them. Keep it up, gang. Readers - start tracking this feed if you aren't already.

Thursday, January 04, 2007

Ajax Widget Interop, Micropayment Economics, and Our Collective Grim Future

Anne Zelenka caught my attention with her recent posts about Ajax start pages - be sure to check these out.

Tim Peter's right that ad-supported widgets are micropayments on a couple of levels - content providers are paying distributors micropayments for impressions and clickthroughs, and then I'm paying as a consumer with a drain on my attention. I guess what I am fearing is a world where each widget provider offers free and paid versions, so as a consumer I'm not signed up for a paid version of a single start page (a la NetVibes) that's ad free, but rather I'm stuck making micropayments to multiple widgeteers if I want ad-free versions of their widgets on whatever start page. Yikes!

Until there are standards or semi-standards for how to produce Ajax widgets that will work on a variety of start pages, this could be the grim future.

Rich Campoamor is right on about the JSR 168 portlet spec. In the original spec (I don't know where it ended up), all of the meaty UI specs (such as standard CSS style names that would let you add a measure of coherence to an aggregated portlet start page) were an appendix and an afterthought to the spec. I'm not optimistic about Ajax widget interop... but like I said I'm too cynical.

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