George Cerbone's blog

How long is a piece of string?

gcerbone — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 15:33:00 GMT

A raging email thread on one of our internal aliases led me to an old blog entry about self-locking kangaroos.

We have the same kind of thing in architecture. I am often asked "What is the best way to..." or its logical corollary "Take a look at this architecture and make sure there is nothing wrong with it." These kinds of questions are what I used to call "How long is a piece of string" questions. Without extra context, it is really tough to answer them. It's like asking "Which is a better car for me... a mini-van, or a roadster?"

In architecture, we call this additional context functional and non-functional requirements. Tools like PBA can make it easier to identify thse requirements. As architects, we look at the context and try to make smart trade offs. But there is rarely a "best" answer to most of these problems.

Web 2.0 thoughts from the boss

gcerbone — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 21:13:04 GMT

Dan has written a great post on Web 2.0 and why young(er) folks seem to "get" it more easily.

I've learned two things:

1) I am old. Thanks, Dan. :)

2) I've often said that technology is much more a reflection of sociology then anything else. That's why so many problems in the enterprise are so hard, and so many "tech" projects fail. To paraphrase Jim Collins..."First figure out what you want people to do, then figure out how to make them do it."

Enterprise Authorization

gcerbone — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 18:31:17 GMT

My colleague Curt Devlin has written a great article on enterprise authorization. This is a really thorny problem that is going to get worse as enterprises become more and more virtual.

Sun to sell Windows

gcerbone — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 17:39:00 GMT

I never thought that I would see the day that Microsoft and Sun would have become so close, but Sun is going to sell servers pre-installed with Windows.

It's good to see...I've always thought Sun was a great company.

Will Microsoft Become Facebook for the Enterprise?

gcerbone — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 16:40:00 GMT

Great article from CIO on some really innovative social networking work that Wachovia is doing.

Death of the Datacenter

gcerbone — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 00:08:00 GMT

I've believed for a long time that the "Datacenter" as it exists today is a doomed entity, which needs to become a logical construct rather than a physical construct. Apparently, Forrester agrees. I agree with the first part of the conclusion, that pervasive networking will be a key driver going forward. I'm not so convinced that it immediately leads to desktop virtualization.

First MCA board

gcerbone — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 19:21:00 GMT

I recently got the opportunity to serve on my first MCA board in Atlanta, GA. Congratulations to all of the candidates that achieved the certification.

One thing that stood out for me....we need to find a way to better prepare candidates. We had several folks who were very close to the bar, and I think that with a little more prep, they would have been able to achieve the cert.

To that end, I am working with some other MCAs to put together a set of resources for prospective candidates. Look for some more info here soon. And if anyone who is pursuing the certification has ideas on what they would like to see, let me know that, too.

Edit: Corrected spelling. Thanks, Mom!

Green Datacenter Initiative

gcerbone — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 19:18:00 GMT

One thing that has been on my mind lately...how can folks reduce the amount of power that they are consuming in the datacenter. Very few architects look at power efficiency as a first-class system quality.

In my mind, this is something that is going to take a while to solve. It is roughly analogous to security as a system quality. Infrastructure architects can build firewalls, set up traffic monitors, but at the application layer architects have to consider security important and architect their solutions with that quality in mind. It's the precise same problem with power. We will see initial stabs from the infrastructure side of the house, but it will be a while before apps are power aware.

I think that green is the next big thing in the datacenter, and not just because of environmental concerns. Power is expensive and getting more so. Power cost quickly dwarfs acquisition cost. Architects need to consider these things when they design systems.

MSDN Financial Services Industry Center

gcerbone — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 21:47:00 GMT

Check out the MSDN Financial Services Industry Center, run by Mike Walker. Excellent content!

http://msdn.microsoft.com/FinServArch

Windows PowerShell...

gcerbone — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 20:41:37 GMT

...has relased to the web!

Download is available here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/management/powershell/download.mspx

Financial Services Webcast series

gcerbone — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 18:30:00 GMT

The 3rd Unwrapped for Financial Services Webcast Series for Developers is coming up in September.

This series is presented live, and includes both technical and strategic session on Microsoft solutions for Capital Markets, Retail Banking and Insurance firms.

Check out http://www.financialdevelopers.com/ for more information, or register here.

Perspective Based Architecture

gcerbone — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 23:27:08 GMT

My colleagues, Lewis Curtis, Ryan Plantm and I have been working on an architecture methodology called "Perspective Based Architecture" or the PBA method. The idea is to move to a question based framework that can be employed within any other methodology that may already employed.

Check out the website here.

First post from Live Writer!

gcerbone — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 17:38:21 GMT

Now that we have released the Live Witer beta, I'm planning on being much better about keeping my blog up to date.

George awarded MCA

gcerbone — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 09:42:00 GMT

I have just been notified that I have sucessfuly passed the architecture board, and I am officially a Microsoft Certified Architect. I have to give many, many thanks to my mentors Lewis Curtis, and Allen Stewart, without whom I would not have made it.

I will blog on my MCA experience soon....

Rights management tension

gcerbone — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 03:10:00 GMT

A comment to a recent post to my blog regarding rights management:

"Sounds like an innovation your customers don't really want/need. Stronger integrated rights management mainly benefits content owners, and allows the imposition of unreasonable limitations on content use. I am in particular talking about, for example, buying a song, and having it only be listenable from my one PC, and not be portable to my laptop, or my iPod, or some other device. So, this is why, I for one, am not enthused about these "innovations."

First, thanks for reading, and thanks for your comment! Although I was using the RM example as, well, an example, I think you bring up some interesting points.

I understand the tension between the desire of content owners to protect their content, and the desire of consumers of content not to be restricted. There have been RM schemes that have been very restricitve, and the kind of symptoms that you describe have been painful for folks. And I think that is precisely why we need to have a common, flexible, transparant rights management platform that makes it easy to migrate content from one device to another. Stronger rights management benefits content owners. More transparent rights management benfits both owners and consumers. And enterprises, too, are very interested in being able to apply rights management to business documents. We use this internally at Microsoft. Powerpoint presentations that are for internal use only get rights managed. Even if someone copies them off of a file share onto the internet, the content stays protected.

I also think content consumers benefit from rights management as a technology. Content owners are more comfortable making content available electronically, if they enforce their licensing policies. Content comsumers get broader range of available content.