Back again in the blog space, and looking forward to blogging again after so many months of being off line. Actually, because of day job work I wanted to put the blog aside to concentrate on a few other things. Anyway, back here again.

So, catching up on very recent events ... last week I was speaking at a few places, one of them was the Enterprise Architects Summit in Miami set up by the Fawcett Technical Publishing people who always put on a great show.

http://www.ftponline.com/channels/arch/reports/eas/2005/panel/

It was a pretty cool conference, the weather and location were great - so they tell me - I spoke most of Tuesday then had to fly out to Chicago that evening but I was stuck in my hotel room all the Monday before getting a Microsoft Technology Roadmap presentation material ready for a Wednesday speach. I never knew there was so much going on with all of our products. Lots of exciting news on all fronts for the rest of 2005 and into 2006 and beyond. 

Anyway what was cool about the Miami Conference was how many people attending recognized that 'SOA' was not a product but more of a marketectural buzz word for what I guess I would call 'Service Think'. A lot of people in Miami mentioned that 'business' was probably more comfortable with the service notion, maybe a slightly different definition of 'service' that SOAP/WSDL, and that one of the big challenges was/still is for IT to understand the language of business; i.e. diffrent "units of work" in business like a 'business transaction' than the comparible IT concept of a 'transaction' where there may be a few of technical transactions to make 1 business transaction. So this all let me introduce a nice little story op explain the complimentary and different viewpoints in the enterprise architectural space 'Business is from Mars, IT is from Venus' :-)

All of this week I'm in Redmond, taking care of business and next week I'll be at TechED in Orlando - actually all week, speaking next Friday (June 10) in the morning on something called 'Managing Connected Systems' but this won't be your normal IT Service Level Management talk but a very new approach to modeling legally binding business processes in the language of business and using that as the driving architectural force to dynamically configuring and managing enterprise managing Web services. This is a vastly simpler approach than past efforts like ebXML, which I helped author years ago, and some business standards like UN/CEFACT UMM, in a way that more than aligns but but really connects a business viewpoint with the IT viewpoint in the enterprise architectural space. In this approach we take a fresh, organic view to enterprise architecture and we've managed to greatly simplify and even cut entire layers of some standards thinking out of the real world implementation process. More of that in a few seperate blogs, plus we've got some DVD with demo code and InfoPath business modeling forms in production which anyone can freely use for their own enterprise problems.

Let's see, on the standards front there's not a lot of paparazzi news to report on over the last few months. More and more standards groups are addressing their IP and governance operating rules, finally, to offer a better working environment - but to be honest I think the traditional standards groups move too slow; even Oasis and W3C. I'd like to see more people try out things like Wiki software as a more efficient way to do real time virtual standards developments, but new collaboration software is only part of the challenge. There is a real need for fresh ideas and new blood in some of the standards community work and also a more realistic set of governance operating procedures which really do promote a transparent standards development process. Unfortunately a lot of standards groups are just re-inventing EDI in pointy brackets, which really doesn't really "move the ball" for the end user! 

On the company standards front, Microsoft is really taking the effort to listen and studying what is happening around the world with open standards. I think we as putting serious effort into thinking a lot on how we do better commuity engagements in some new ways and I think everyone will see us opening up a lot of our internal standards to the general community in ways, when you look at it, have all of the exact same essential conditions of open use as other open standards organizations, but more to come shortly I imagine!

On the Web services front I see more industry communities starting to do some real adoption of the new Web services specs, and I see more of the WS specs getting out to the development workshop process and into the more traditional standards accreditation processes; some day later I'll try and do a dump and see how much time it took to do the WS standards and try to measure what market adoption effect standards groups contributed; or not.

Finally, my group has been working to change their image. Check out the new architectecture web sites we're hosting, starting with the new http://www.microsoft.com/architecture and http://msdn.microsoft.com/architecture/ and expect to see a lot of non-Microsoft architects contributing a lot of great new content there in the future; hey, they're on RSS feeds so you can always add them to your blog favorites.   

Good to be back blogging again.

/Dave