David has an excellent writeup - please go take a read.

Phile Wainewright has an interesting post on Multi-tenancy and SaaS. Multi-tenancy is the key principle, architecturally speaking - but the foundation, metaphorically speaking, is Metadata. The next big battle from a platform perspective is going to...

Check out the SaaS Architecture Center on ARC .

David Chappell has an excellent writeup on the real threat to JEE. I couldnt agree more - SCA has and will continue to have more impact on (the demise of) JEE than on the larger industry per se.

We just published an architectural perspective on Software + Services in our ARC center on MSDN. Michael Platt , who leads Web Architecture in my team, is the author.

I am not a fan of the enterprise-wide approach. Top-down, mega mandates rarely works in the real-world. I will give you an example - if you were in the industry in the 90s you probably witnessed the hype cycle on data warehouses. Conceptually elegant...

Phil Wainewright has an excellent write-up on Google Maps as the fools gold of mashups . I couldnt agree with him more.

This is a must-read post by Mike - here is a snip below: The most interesting and potentially most profitable use of Web 2.0 techniques in the Enterprise is however in the customer facing areas of organizations and in a few specialist internal business...

Dion Hinchcliffe has written a thought-provoking article on Pragmatic SOA - specifically what he calls the WOA/Client - definitely worth reading. Btw, if you look carefully you will see a picture of our latest Architecture Journal in his write-up.

We recently made available the download of our first book in the Architecture Journal book series. You can find the contents online here . Here is the foreword - Foreword to Dynamic Modeling: Aligning Business and IT Businesses are always looking...

Gianpaolo Carraro , Fred Chong and Roger Wolter recently published this work in our ARC center on MSDN. I highly recommend this for their views on the continuum between shared and isolated data.

Many organizations have invested and continue to invest in attempting to create 'Enterprise Architectures' , only to get limited, or even negative, value from the effort. Multi-million dollar failures are common across both the public and the private...

Approximately six months back we made a strategic decision to invest on creating architecture guidance for the SaaS space. This work is being led by Gianpaolo Carraro and Fred Chong in my team. In a very short span of time both GP and Fred have done...

Erik Johnson suggested that I make the distinction between big SOA and little SOA. I think this is a very good way to distinguish the big-bang, 'mega' approaches - afflicted by what I call the build-it-and-they-will-come syndrome - which suffer from...

A topic I had been meaning to post for a while now - but here is how I see it: The 'Old' integration problem is about connecting systems - we had monolithic applications, that were siloed, trapped in their fiefdoms - and we in IT used duct-tape and...

Continuing on the theme of data - I want to point you at what I believe is the bible wrt dealing with data in loosely-coupled, service-oriented systems - Pat Hellands's paper on Data on the outside vs. Data on the inside in the MSDN ARC center.

Patrick Meader, Editor in Chief of Visual Studio Magazine and I sat down to talk about where architecture is going - you can find the interview contents here Your mileage may vary - but at least you have my perspective fwiw.

We recently published a book on SO - the links to the MSDN ARC center are: http://msdn.microsoft.com/architecture/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnbda/html/RdSrvOrt.asp http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4469946F-2723...