Hope is not an Architecture : Architecture

Architect Journal WPF Reader - Beta available!

nilsv — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 04:01:13 GMT

I've always been a fan of the high quality articles available in the Architect Journal.

Of course you've always been able to subscribe or view articles online but now there is a better way to read, search and share articles. Simon Guest and co. have just released a beta version of the Architect Journal reader.

It's based on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and automatcally syncs up new content from the web site. Great for offline viewing too. I likey!

Adelaide Bank - Enterprise Architecture and Motion

nilsv — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 00:48:00 GMT

We were fortunate enough to have Glenn Smyth, Chief Architect of Adelaide Bank present at the Canberra Architect Council last week.

Many folks that have been around the traps in Canberra for a number of years will know Glenn from his days at ATO and also DEWR. He is a great presenter and a colourful character.

I think Glenn did a great job of describing the Enterprise Architecture Framework that he is champoining at the bank. He decribed the approach to capability modelling that is being used to ensure that the services being built are the "right services", something which is often challenging in SOA.

The capability modelling work is drawn from much of the work that has come out of Microsoft for the last number of years. Formerly known as Motion and now officially named MSBA, Microsoft Business Architecture (I gotta admit I like the name "Motion" better).

You can find a copy of Glenns slides here which includes some notes and references (approx 3 Mb in size).

ARCast in OZ - TFS for mainframe COBOL ... oh and .NET too

nilsv — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 18:05:54 GMT

Ron Jacobs of ARCast fame just sent me an email to let me know that the ARCast he recorded at TechEd 2007 Australia is now available.

Checkout his ARCast from downunder (2.5 mins into the video) which has an interesting interview with an organisation I've done some work with.

The interesting thing is that this is a large organisation and like many large orgs have several different application platforms - a real mixed environment. These guys are using TFS to support their software development lifecycle across .NET but also their other development environments, including use of TFS for their Cobol devs on the mainframe, for IBM WebSphere artifacts (using an Eclipse plugin) as well as their Seibel environment!

If that wasn't enough, they also have developers working in different cities and using TFS across their WAN which is performing very well. Niiiiiice!

Don't ask me who the organisation is, I've been sworn to secrecy ;-)

Good job Justin, Michael!

Public Sector and Forms

nilsv — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 08:37:09 GMT

The two go hand in hand don't they?

How many different forms do people need to fill out for the requirements of different government departments? It seems that every department has a process and a bunch of forms that require automation. It'd be fair to say that Forms in the Public Sector are a recurring IT pattern in projects.

Now with the release of the dubiously named OBA RAP for E-Forms processing in the Public Sector at least forms sound somewhat sexy ...?..... right?

The OBA RAP for E-forms is a reference architectures that leverages Microsoft Office as an "application platform" or what is now termed an OBA - an Office Business Application.

The reference solution framework is generic and can be adapted to enable end-to-end processing of a number of electronic forms in the Public Sector.

The solution was built using a number of technologies from the 2007 Office System and .NET 3.0 platforms. Among those technologies include:

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Microsoft Office InfoPath Forms Services
Windows Workflow Foundation
Windows Communication Foundation
Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007
Microsoft Office Outlook 2007

Also included as a part of the RAP are a number of supplementary materials including a click through demo, videos, technical and business presentations, and architecture whitepapers.

SOA Workshop for Architects - Webcast series

nilsv — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 02:42:32 GMT

Webcast series that discusses SOA and the Microsoft platform pieces that can make SOA real. Great to see that User Experience is seen as a important enabler of a successful SOA strategy.

SOA Workshop for Architects: Messaging & Communications

SOA Workshop for Architects: Business Process & Workflow

SOA Workshop for Architects: Tools & Modeling

SOA Workshop for Architects: User Experience

SOA Workshop for Architects: SOA Overview

SOA Workshop for Architects: Federated Data

SOA Workshop for Architects: Identity and Access

SOA Workshop for Architects: Governance and Management

"SOA seems to have come and gone quicker than a $50 hooker"

nilsv — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 10:30:42 GMT

Murls wrote an interesting comment on my last post about Dr. Don Fergusons presentation at the last architect council.

Murls writes " .... To me it seems like I have seen so much come and go over the years and SOA seems to have come and gone faster than a $50 hooker. And my belief is confirmed through a set of slides that are just as relevant as the hooker. Here is an interesting thought...

(Q) what is the difference between the human body and the IT Industry?
(A) We know whats going on inside the human body. And we didnt create it!

Not sure if I'm intimate enough with the subject matter to comment on the $50 hooker analogy ;->

Certainly I agree, as would anyone who has been in the (IT) industry for some time, that we have seen our fair share of fads … waves of supposed innovation that have washed away without fulfilling the early promises. I too, am starting to tire of everything being “SOA” but there is still some interesting stuff going on, some of which Don outlined in his talk (along with the visual cues from his slides). i.e. I thought his talk was more engaging than just his slides :-)

One of the interesting topics he talked to folks about was some early work going on at BizTalk Labs. This includes some discussion on the Internet Service Bus (okay I can do without that name too).

The aim of the project is to offer some of the services of a services bus (connection between end points, publish-subscribe) on the internet as a software service. The channel 9 video on the topic describes a scenario of an IRC chat program where clients can subscribe to an IRC channel (the IRC chat scenario starts at about 10 minutes into the video). A second scenario based on a Wall Street trading app (at about 16 minutes into the video) aims to highlight de-coupling the end points and connect via the service bus.

Early days, but the potential for this is interesting to contemplate and something that would have seemed some way off 5 or more years ago. We have come along way with web services et al (and some service orientation techniques).

Back to the question that Murls asked us to consider ..... I think the question and answer could be:

(Q) what is the difference between the human body and the IT industry?
(A) We don't know what's going on inside the IT firewall of most complex organisations and we did create it! Is SOA an attempt to help us simplify and understand some of this complexity?

Canberra Architect Council - Dr. Don Ferguson

nilsv — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 13:40:21 GMT

Last week we were fortunate to have Dr. Don Ferguson in Australia.

Don is a Microsoft Technical fellow and fairly new to Microsoft after many years at big blue.

During this time he visited Canberra and presented at the Canberra Architect Council and shared some interesting thoughts on SOA, ESBs, Web Services and Web 2.0.

Don was also the keynote speaker at the Australian Architect Forum that was held in Sydney and Melbourne.

You can find a copy of Don's Slides here (approx 5.5 Mb in size).

Architect Journal 10 - Composite Applications

nilsv — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 04:23:00 GMT

The latest issue of the Architect Journal has some great articles including some interesting ones on composite applications.

Building Composite Applications using ..... what?

nilsv — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 06:33:38 GMT

Wikipedia defines composite applications as "... a perspective of software engineering that defines an application built by combining multiple services. A composite application consists of functionality drawn from several different sources ..."

What the composite "container" might be could, vary from a portal approach, to a richer smart client perhaps built in WinForms or perhaps Java client technology.

What many folks don't know is that Office 2007 makes a great platform (yes I said PLATFORM!) that provides rich services for composition of presentation, logic and data.

There is now a book available about composite applications and how they can be developed using the 2007 Microsoft Office System. This is a good reference that provides an overview of the technologies available in the 2007 Microsoft Office System, and gives several examples from various industries of how to build Office Business Applications.

Check it out at http://msdn2.Microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb220803.aspx

Comm Bank Case Study published

nilsv — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 07:21:26 GMT

Just returned from annual leave and in catching up, I see that the CommSee case study has been published on MSDN!

This is a meaty, 63 page technical case study that examines the solution architecture, technical project details, and best practices employed to get CommSee successfully rolled out to 30,000 users.

Great to see a case study that goes to some depth!

A couple of months back I posted links to other CommSee interviews and resources that may be of interest.

Canberra Architect Council - Software as a Service

nilsv — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 12:32:00 GMT

Yesterday my colleague, Nigel came to Canberra to present at the Canberra Architect Council.

The topic was "Software as a Service – Catching the Long Tail".

I have seen the presentation before but the interesting thing about this delivery was that it was to a public sector audience. Is SaaS even relevant to public sector?

You bet it is! I was aware that several federal agencies are using external services such web content management services, CRM such as Salesforce.com and even customer matching data services and this was discussed a little more yesterday.

The other interesting scenario that was discussed was using the SaaS model for offering or sharing services between government agencies, perhaps in a limited group of government departments. Sharing and exchanging data between agencies is not a new problem, but applying some of the principles and learning's from commercial SaaS offerings does present some different perspectives, such as the models for cost recovery, delivery methods to the SaaS consumer as well as the underlying SaaS architecture to support the economies of scale as more SaaS consumers (in this case government agencies) use a particular service.

The slides that Nigel presented can be found here . (Note: approx 7Mb in size).

Good job Nigel!

Informa SOA conference

nilsv — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 02:19:08 GMT

Last week I attended the Informa Service Oriented Architecture. In addition to presenting, I also had the pleasure of chairing the second day of the conference which basically involved introducing the day, keeping the other speakers to the scheduled time and most interesting was moderating the panel discussion.

The thing I liked most about this conference was the broad representation and speakers that attended. In contrast to some other conferences run by analysts organisations (or vendors!), the speakers and content seemed more realistic about actual SOA progress and maturity within organisations.

Some of the speakers included architects from Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, IOOF, St. George, QBE, ANZ, Accenture and Suncorp.

Was also good to catch up with Jim Webber from Thoughtworks and Kevin Francis from Infosys who also presented.

I presented on the second day on "Working through the issues of SOA implementation". The slide deck can be found here (note 5.8 Mb file). This presentation was pretty much based on Ron Jacobs content of Patterns and Anti-patterns of SOA.

SOA for Real! Comm Bank video interviews and resources

nilsv — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 04:43:00 GMT

You might have seen some talk of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) CommSee project. Its a highly successful SOA implementation with many interesting aspects (incremental delivery approach, Service design, .NET Smart client, large scale project, mainframe integration, user centric etc etc).

It's been featured in quite a few articles such as CIO Insight and of course my colleagues Nigel and Anna blogged about the User experience side of CommSee.

Now there is an MSDN page dedicated to CommSee where you can find a series of video interviews with the CommSee team discussing the operational and architecture aspects of the CommSee project as well as some case studies.

Some great stuff here on SOA in the real world.

CardSpace / Identity Metasystem Resources

nilsv — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 14:44:00 GMT

Today I had the opportunity to present to a large group of folks from some of the government agencies based here in Canberra on one of my favourite topics -CardSpace and the Identity Metasystem!

Of course, CardSpace addresses the problem of storing those passwords in odd places

But this topic is also sooo very relevant for cross agency services and of course federation too!

The presentation today seemed to go pretty well (i didn't catch anyone falling asleep :-> ).

There were lots of interesting questions and a robust discussion after the presentation which I take to be a good sign.

I promised to send out some resources to attendees so thought I'd post them here too.

The David Chappell whitepaper on Introducing Windows CardSpace is a great primer

There are also two great channel 9 presentations that I'd recommend:

The first is the InfoCard - Deep Architecture which is an CardSpace overview but also includes a drill down on the CardSpace architecture and design of the identity selector itself.
The other great channel 9 video is the drilldown on WS-Trust. Vittorio does a fine job of taking us through the use of WS-Trust and how keys are used and exchanged between the particpants of the identity metasystem. I'm not the only one who thinks this video is a cracker!

You can find the slides from my presentation here.

WOW! Softricity - Software delivered like electricity!

nilsv — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 05:07:00 GMT

I remember the first time I saw a virtual machine running. It was many years ago on a early version of VMware. My reaction was WOW! I immediately recognised the problems it could solve and the opportunities virtualisation could provide.

Think about virtualisation at the next level ... what if we were able to virtualise an application?

That is, introduce an abstraction between applications and the OS so that an application and its associated files, registry setting, fonts, .ini files, COM objects, services were virtualised and we could provision this application on demand when the user wanted to run the application without actually installing it on the machine it runs on.

If we had a strategy to run an application on a computer without actually installing it? I'm not talking about Terminal Services! Not Click-Once! Not Citrix!

Softricity is a company that Microsoft acquired about 7 weeks ago and it purports to do some pretty nifty things.

SoftGrid is the engine that provides applications to the desktop on demand using a centralised policy. It takes the virtualised application that has been packaged as a "flat file" and "streams" what is required down to the client.

It takes virtualisation to the next logical level:

(Hey this is a blog, not a formal publication. Quick Tablet PC sketches just seemed like the right thing to do...)

I'd heard of Softricity and its was explained to me briefly but it wasn't until I went to a Softricity presentation and did a bit more digging into it that I realised how innovative a leap this is and how many real life scenarios and challenges this can address for organisations:

Reduce application management costs
Centralise Application availability
Better enable roaming users
Simplify and accelerate application and OS migration
Assist in Server consolidation
Reduce help desk calls

Any application on any computer on demand via the network ...

I'd better stop here, this is beginning to sound like a product pitch.

Ron Jacobs has done an Arcast on the subject or visit the Softricity site if you'd like to learn more.