Hope is not an Architecture : Interoperability

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!

Interop Milestone: Infocards and User Centric Identity

nilsv — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 05:25:59 GMT

Great to see the recent news of the public interop session that was held at the Catalyst conference. This is testament to the continuing maturation of the Identity Metasystem.

The interop session was sponsored by the Burton Group with some great participation across the industry. The session included

7 Identity Selectors (Cardspace included of course!)
12 Identity Providers
25 Relying Parties

Bob Blakley has a more detailed write up at the Burton Group Identity Blog

Some of the participants

A quote from Bobs write up

"The interop clearly showed that Microsoft's decision to open the information card specifications, combined with the identity community's enthusiasm for user-centric identity technologies, has resulted in a truly open environment with lots of innovation and a variety of commercial and open-source providers."

MOSS interop

nilsv — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 12:38:46 GMT

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) had some great ways to consume services, aggregate information and compose applications from a variety of sources. The article Resources for interoperability with SharePoint Server 2007 sets it out nicely.

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.

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.

Computerworld article on interop

nilsv — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 15:18:00 GMT

Following my presentation at Tech Ed, I was contacted by Liz Tay of Computerworld

We discussed Microsoft’s investments and ongoing strategy for working across different platforms and systems. Liz wrote an article called .NET 3.0 designed for interoperability that appeared last Friday

Heterogeneity Happens!

nilsv — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 14:37:00 GMT

The week before last I had the opportunity to travel to Auckland to present at Tech Ed NZ on the Microsoft interoperability story. I know it seems like ages ago, but some folks have asked for a copy of the presentation. You can find the slides “Heterogeneity Happens! Microsoft and Interoperability” here. The following day I did the same presentation in Sydney at Tech Ed Australia