I managed to spend time at REMIX this year in both Sydney and Melbourne. I was speaking on user experiences and media monetization at a breakfast we held for some of our web agency and ISV partners.
Overall highlight of the event was the great local atmosphere - almost all Australian speakers (even some of the Microsoft corporate ones). Michael and Shane did a great job of the keynote and pulling together all local demos of great work being done with our technology.
For me the most interesting breakout session was Vaughan Knight and Laith Alasad from Hyro talking through the solution they built for ABC Commercial.
I'd spent some time talking to the ABC about their back-end architecture and media delivery for this project but what I really like is the Silverlight user experience the ABC team and Hyro created. It provides a rich additional online and offline front-end to the existing shop website services, authentication and media assets (via Media RSS). This is now live in public beta as the new ABC Shop download service.
You can find a video of Matt Moran's (Technical Director from ABC Commercial) demo in the keynote here and Vaughan and Laith talking about the ABC preview player and its architecture here. A good example of taking a Software + Services approach to a media solution - delivering multiple client experiences (online and offline) back-ended by a series of shared web-based services.
In May Ron Jacobs was our speaker at the Sydney Architect Council:
TOPIC: The Perfect Pattern Storm, where TDD meets UX and MVP
As host of ARCast.TV, Ron Jacobs has a front row seat to observe the constantly shifting architectural landscape. In this session we will consider what happens when the force of test driven development (TDD) collides with the demand for better User Experience (UX).
The slides are available here:
A big thank-you to my colleague, Nigel Watson who hosted the council for me. His write up on the sessions is here.
Just before the Easter long weekend, Dr Bohdan Szymanik (Enterprise Architecture Manager, Kiwibank) delivered a great session entitled: Kiwibank in Transformation: Startup to Enterprise at the Sydney Architect Council.
The session was very well-received and had some interesting perspectives on how an IT group in a fast-growing business can position itself to create business value, innovate and make practical use of SOA to help manage complexity.
You can download a copy of the slides from here:
One of the most enjoyable aspects of our role as Architect Advisors in DPE is helping support the local customer and partner architecture community.
As part of this our team host quarterly Architect Council events in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne. For the councils we line up some great speakers from the local and international Architecture community to present a topic and spark a roundtable discussion amongst the council members.
The previous two Architect councils have featured Glenn Smyth (Enterprise Architect, Adelaide Bank) and Gianpaolo Carraro (Director, Architecture Strategy, Microsoft Corporation). Copies of their presentations can be found here:
This week we are joined by Dr Bohdan Szymanik (Chief Architect, Kiwibank) who is delivering a talk entitled: Kiwibank in Transformation: Startup to Enterprise
As Kiwibank has progressively moved from startup mode to an established corporate entity the structure, focus and strategies of the company are also having to change. This presentation examines the contribution of technology to achieving Kiwibank’s current success, the challenges the bank now faces and why technology and especially architecture will be critical to future success.
It should be another great architecture discussion so if you're an enterprise or senior solution architect working here in Sydney and not already receiving invites to these events drop me a note and I'll add you to the list.
Silverlight will be an Optional install for XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 for users of Microsoft Update. For enterprise deployments the WSUS feature pack is now available as well.
The Microsoft Update team blog has all the details.
With Silverlight adoption growing in media companies and for rich content on websites like our own microsoft.com and tafiti, end-users will increasingly need Silverlight installed.
Recently a number of local enterprise customers have asked me about our guidance to get Silverlight deployed using tools like SMS and Group Policy. The good news is that the Silverlight Enterprise Deployment Guide is now available for download - not surprisingly it's a guide to deployment for Silverlight 1.0 across an organization and reading through it answered all the questions I had about silent installs and on-going update options.
While I was on John's blog the other day I stumbled upon this Hype Cycle. LOL:
Not sure of its original source but I'd like to meet the analyst that put this one together.
I was gathering some material for a Gartner summit next week in Sydney (we're a sponsor) and was pleased to see that John's excellent book on 'SOA in the Real World' is now published and available online. Recommended if you want a pragmatic perspective on Service Orientation.
BTW, if you're at the summit I'll be attending and around our stand during the breaks, Nils is also speaking on Microsoft's Software + Services strategy.
I was just reflecting on the now famous Frankipedia incident and what really constitutes notability with the wisdom of crowds. Frank has certainly made a major impact on thousands of people in the development community in Australia and I suspect is at least as noteworthy as my second-rate superhero persona, Gravity who did indeed make the cut for Wikipedia inclusion.
I guess it pays to be a fictional character.
Recently when talking to an enterprise customer about SaaS and multi-tenancy considerations and it became clear that our guidance around architecting for SaaS is being read and applied. I think this is partly because reference implementations like Litware help to show the practical application of the guidance to the solution architects and developers.
The interesting aspect of the conversation was that, after the architects have applied the pattern for single-instance multi-tenancy to their individual SaaS applications, the cross-cutting concerns start to emerge around multi-application, multi-tenancy. ie when you have a portfolio of services and applications to deliver what are the consideratons to be able to deliver them so that management of the platform also scales in a cost-effective way? Much of this is addressed by the concept of a Service Delivery Platform (SDP). In telcos, SDP is a key consideration in managing next-generation services but the actual functionality varies widely by vendor.
The Microsoft SaaS Architecture Strategy Team is now working on the architecture of a service delivery platform for hosters and ISV's managing multiple SaaS applications. This would aim to address common services infrastructure and processes like identity, monitoring, provisioning etc and illustrates the opportunity for deep partnerships between hosters and SaaS ISV's. There is an initial article on this topic in The Architecture Journal and the team is planning to develop a reference implementation based on this and feedback from hosters, ISV's and enterprise SaaS providers.
In a world of Software + Services these hosted service delivery platforms are quickly emerging as a new category of application server. I'm watching with interest what the Windows Live team roll-out within 'Cloud Infrastructure Services' and how we'll architect and expose our own cloud platform for cost-effective service and application delivery on a mass-scale.
Technorati Profile So, send in those web spiders...
Hi, my name is Greg Willis. I have spent the last 3 years working for Microsoft's Communications Sector team and I've recently moved over to the Developer and Platform team here in Australia as an Architect Evangelist.
With this move I have joined another great team, led by Frank Arrigo and I'm looking forward to using this blog to share some of the discussions and experiences I have within the architecture community here in Sydney.
My current interests likely to get some blog airtime include Software + Services, SaaS, Web 2.0 (and its relationship to Enterprise SOA) as well as our next generation of user experience and media technologies like Silverlight.
