Can't believe the last time I blogged was TechED Orlando, in June. It's September and the summer flashed by ... Well, we finally published some very new Archietctural Guidance material on the topic of managing services, in the general sense of 'services' including business services but also there is a very real Web service angle to the content.

It's part of a new Microsoft Architectural Series and this series is about 'Managing Connected Systems'. The link to the public library where the content is, is here http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnbda/html/MSArcSeriesMCSIntro.asp and it will be automatically projected on to http://www.microsoft.com/architecture and http://msdn.micosoft.com/architecture in the next days.

What's nice about this Architectural Series is we're using some of the open business architecture Standards which I and a few others worked on at the United Nations for a few years; in my case before joining Microsoft. The Business Architecture standard is called the UMM and it's from the same organization who created UN/CEFACT, the global EDI standard. The UMM is actually the business modeling meta model behind the original ebXML project, years ago but since then ebXML has distanced itself from the UMM. The UMM is technology neutral, so what we did here in Redmond was an exercise to map our own Business Architecture model, a corrected derivitive from the UMM with corrections and a few things missing in the UMM we didn't have time for in the Standards meetings, and map that open business model specicially / prescriptively to the Microsoft products for the purpose of architecturally talking about aligning business with IT for total management.

To my knowledge, I don't think any major technology vendor has ever done a UMM - commerical product mapping like this before. Certainly I haven't seen SAP, IBM or Sun do anything with an Open Business Standard like the UMM like this; and I wouldn't put the ebXML BPSS or WS-BPEL in the same class as the UMM.

Got lots to blog about, and I'll be doing some long business travel soon so I should have some nice dead air time / off line to blog more about all sorts of things people have been asking me about.

/Dave