For most EA organizations there is a huge struggle to justify their existence. There is quite a bit of criticism on the practice from folks asking, Does Enterprise Architecture Matter? The common quote I hear from our EA customers about opposition is...

A colleague of mine Gianpaolo asked me about what is the role of EA in a heavily SaaS oriented enterprise. The hypothetical case would be of and IT shop being extremely (80%) of the enterprise IT “operations” being run by 3 rd parties (SaaS, vendors,...

I was just talking about this today on a thread internally here at MS where we were talking about EA challenges. One person commented saying; "all EA's do is create documents". I don't agree with this completely, there are a lot of artifacts built but...

Yesterday I had a conference call with Roger Sessions at ObjectWatch, Inc . to fill us in on the new methodology he created called Simple Iterative Partitions (SIP) . It's defiantly thought provoking and if you were a mathematics major then you'll love...

I will be presenting at this years Microsoft SOA and Business Process Management conference. The conference is held on the Microsoft campus, Oct 29-Nov 2, 2007. I will speaking about composite applications on the Microsoft platform. I will post details...

This release adds support for ribbons, form-skinning, various CommandAdapters and UIElements are also added, some of which extend CAB as well as offer basic support for DevExpress controls. The BankTeller QuickStart application has also been updated to...

ISO has published ISO/IEC 42010:2007, Systems and software engineering — Recommended practice for architectural description of software-intensive systems. The text of this ISO standard is identical to IEEE 1471:2000, and will serve as basis for the joint...

Erika has a post on OpenXML integration.Check it out. Tags: OBA OpenXML

I recently saw a post from Brandon Satrom as he was asking for feedback on his interpretation of composite applications and the value proposition to his organization. He is definitely on the right track, and not because he is using the guidance that I...

Microsoft announced the availability of Tafiti , a Silverlight-based search tool on top of Microsoft's Live Search engine. Tafiti, which means "do research" in Swahili, enhances searching on the web by allowing users to store and share search results...

I am happy to say we have finally released the Business Data Catalog Editor. Currently, writing an application definition to connect the BDC to a LOB system is a manual process. This requires an understanding of both how the LOB system is configured and...

My visit to Australia had many surprises. One was a new OBA that was developed by one of our partners Dataract . This is truly a "Diamond in the Rough". I have to give them a "plug" because they are offering a great new OBA that leverages both our MOSS...

Microsoft is now a member of the Australian Lending standards body called LIXI . http://www.idm.net.au/story.asp?id=8709

When I talk about OBA I focus a bit on open standards. From a interoperability, publishing and consumption perspective. I advocate the usage of Open XML within architectures wherever possible. By using these standards we can enable our information to...

Erika Ehrli updates us on the new poster for Office development. If you want yours it's just a DL away... PDF: http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/9/c/09cda3f2-6d3d-4082-aec5-9a62b7679ecf/2007OfficeDeveloperMap.pdf XPS: http://download.microsoft...

Independent software vendor Approva provides a monitoring and auditing solution. Its BizRights Platform and Enterprise Controls Suite addresses all of the major financial and operational business processes including financial close, procurement, sales...

I have been asked about BizTalk performance and scalability for the last few weeks while I have been here in AZ and NZ. I found the BizTalk Server 2006 Comparative Adapter Study that was preformed to compare the performance between BizTalk 2004 and 2006...

In last weeks session I was asked about governance and OBAs (at least from a server side perspective). I am happy to report that the community is concerned with governance as well. Microsoft IT Team Site Life Cycle Management Beta 1 was created on Codeplex...

As you can see from my previous post I was asked if you could build an OBA to address CM concerns. This is actually a great idea. If you build an OBA to address configuration management it would definitely work. Now I am not going to give CM enough justice...

First thanks to everyone whom came to my sessions at TechEd. Other thanks goes out to folks in the blogosphere talking about the session. The first session was standing room only! I have two more on the same topics in New Zealand. In the presentations...

Well I had a great time in Sydney. The people and the food were great! I got the opportunity to eat a "Bug". It's kinda a cross between a lobster and a prawn but looks like a sea spider. The final day in Sydney was a dozy. As you can see from the previous...

So if you remember from my previous post I mentioned that I met Matt Damon... Well I didn't want to say anything until I actually had the tickets but I was lucky enough to get tickets to the Sydney Premier! Above are the tickets for the premier. I have...

Today we started bright and early, 7am Australian time. I had the opportunity to meet some the players here in the Aussie market. We went through Microsoft's position on industry standards, namely ACORD. Then I went into the international insurance trends...

Well I've made it to Australia. I was a little worried when my flight was delayed for four hours. From a non-technology perspective I got to meet Matt Damon who was on the same flight as I. He is here for the premier of the Bourne Ultimatum movie. We...