These Things Matter to Me
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Let's bring social bookmarking into the enterprise, with Magnolia (and *without* IBM)
Last week Magnolia announced plans to open source their social bookmarking software. I haven't been a big Magnolia user (I use the similiarly-purposed delicious), but not for lack of interest or quality. In fact, two of their biggest cheerleaders, Tara Hunt and Chris Messina have always tempted me to port my delicious data in there, by their association alone, but I never got around to it.
But with the recent announcement that Magnolia will go open source, I'm interested not just as a consumer, but as an administrator/ service developer.
I don't really feel like I've had the ability to bring social bookmarking inside the enterprise as a service. For many organizations to feel comfortable going into "the cloud," the service needs to have hooks into SAML -> Active Directory/LDAP, a la Salesforce.com/Google Apps.
OR
I need to have the ability to run things locally on my own server. Until now, neither delicious nor Magnolia had this ability, and now Magnolia will have the ability to do the latter. Let's hope they have a plugin architecture, so somebody can LDAP it.
I'm currently using Drupal and Deki-Wiki in my web/collaboration stack. I could easily see adding Magnolia into that mix. Ideally they could all share user and session information.
The first code for Magnolia (codenamed "M2") is scheduled to drop in September 2008. I'll be watching.
OR
I need to have the ability to run things locally on my own server. Until now, neither delicious nor Magnolia had this ability, and now Magnolia will have the ability to do the latter. Let's hope they have a plugin architecture, so somebody can LDAP it.
I'm currently using Drupal and Deki-Wiki in my web/collaboration stack. I could easily see adding Magnolia into that mix. Ideally they could all share user and session information.
The first code for Magnolia (codenamed "M2") is scheduled to drop in September 2008. I'll be watching.
Labels: enterprise, Magnolia, open source, social bookmarking
Monday, November 12, 2007
By popular demand! Oracle announces deprecated virtualization product.
How much you want to bet that web-based Oracle VM management tool requires Java? I really want to be wrong about this, but I gotta play the odds. Less certain, but also likely: "works better in IE."
Not that I want Oracle VM, their new confusingly Xen-based, partially open source, only-virtualization-environment they'll officially support Oracle on, to be really be good anyway. I actually laughed when I listened to this keynote at Oracle OpenWorld today:
Like all Xen-based stuff, Oracle VM will only support Windows guests if you have hardware virtualization. Unlike most Xen-based stuff, they're only supporting RHEL3, RHEL4 and RHEL5 Linux, and the wildly popular Oracle Enterprise Linux (if there's any left!).
Not that I want Oracle VM, their new confusingly Xen-based, partially open source, only-virtualization-environment they'll officially support Oracle on, to be really be good anyway. I actually laughed when I listened to this keynote at Oracle OpenWorld today:
Virtualization is hot... people have been asking us... Oracle, what are you going to do with virtualization?Yeah, kinda like how people keep asking, "Hey Coolio, when's your next album coming out?" Like how they do on opposite day!
Like all Xen-based stuff, Oracle VM will only support Windows guests if you have hardware virtualization. Unlike most Xen-based stuff, they're only supporting RHEL3, RHEL4 and RHEL5 Linux, and the wildly popular Oracle Enterprise Linux (if there's any left!).
Labels: enterprise, enterprisey, javalasses, Oracle, virtualization, xen
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
These Links Matter to You. Tuesday October 2, 2007
- 43 Folders switched over to Drupal
- New DrupalCamp alert: BADCamp '07, taking place in the Bay Area (northern California) early November 2007
- new episodes of LUG radio are noteworthy enough on their own, but this one has an interview with Miguel de Icaza
- most of this summer 2007's WordCamp (WordPress un-conference) talks have videos up
- (video) If Morgan Stanley can get social networking inside their business and present on Enterprise 2.0, there's hope for you. "Who knows who, and who knows what."
Labels: drupal, enterprise, event, miguel de icaza, wordpress
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
These Links Matter to You. Wednesday July 11, 2007
That's How I Roll!
That's How I Roll!- New word alert! Clogging: code blogging.
- Hot goss alert! HP might be shipping Ubuntu pc's soon. You didn't hear it from me.
- Matt Asay on Ubuntu's underreported popularity in the enterprise
- A good piece on the Xen train that maybe never came.
- a good roundup of open mobile phone, OpenMoko, links (What, is there some other phone people have been talking about?)
Labels: clogging, enterprise, hp, matt asay, openmoko, ubuntu, virtualization, xen
Monday, June 25, 2007
blah blah blah iPhone. The empty ring of the word "enterprise," and why business IT needs to understand consumer products.
LOLz to Anil Dash, who tweeted:
What's the FUD? That IT departments should not embrace the iPhone. According to who? Well, according to a Gartner Report in ComputerWorld Malaysia (I'm just saying),
In the consumer space, every overheated battery, every slow javascript behavior gets catalogued and squawked about upon arrival. In the consumer space, a single customer can cancel and account or return a product in a day, without fear of violating a 3 million dollar contract, leaving vendors highly incentivized to minimize horror stories. Of course, there are consumer horror stories, but consumers can speak about them freely, while enterprise organizations are paralyzed in a variety of ways from sharing their experiences.
So why again, are we afraid of products that aren't "ready for the enterprise?" I'm afraid of the enterprise ones!
Related:
"To people in line for iPhone: people lined up for Windows 95, too, which was equally popular and revolutionary. In 2019 you'll understand."Now, don't you dare run off and think the point of this post is to mock the iPhone. I'm here to defend it. As a consumer, I'm uninterested the iPhone at this moment (that was Anil's point), but as usual, I'm writing in defense of logic and reason. And the iPhone FUD going around now is ten times more ridiculous than the iPhone hype (though seriously campers, y'all crazy). And so here I am, attempting to temper the FUD, and ignoring the hype.
What's the FUD? That IT departments should not embrace the iPhone. According to who? Well, according to a Gartner Report in ComputerWorld Malaysia (I'm just saying),
“We’re telling IT executives to not support it because Apple has no intentions of supporting (iPhone use in) the enterprise,” Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney says."Uh oh! It sounds like the iPhone is not... (wait for it). Ready for the enterprise. Well, then, can we give it an award? Can businesses buy them by the barrel? Because in my experience supporting the enterprise, products and tools that are "made for the enterprise" can be as ill-defined and ill-suited for business purposes as anything else out there. And in the past few years, the most useful tools and services appeared first in the consumer space before being integrated into enterprise products. The enterprise can not be assumed to be the place where quality and reliability appear first. It's the place where entitlement and shoddiness get away with murder for years, in the shadows of years-long commitments, contracts and decision-making cycles. The enterprise is where concerns about sharing too much about internal business processes keep problems about information technology tools hidden from view.
In the consumer space, every overheated battery, every slow javascript behavior gets catalogued and squawked about upon arrival. In the consumer space, a single customer can cancel and account or return a product in a day, without fear of violating a 3 million dollar contract, leaving vendors highly incentivized to minimize horror stories. Of course, there are consumer horror stories, but consumers can speak about them freely, while enterprise organizations are paralyzed in a variety of ways from sharing their experiences.
So why again, are we afraid of products that aren't "ready for the enterprise?" I'm afraid of the enterprise ones!
Related:
- John Gruber + Daring Fireball's Exchange Exchange (shuts down the whole iPhone security concern. don't even try to go there)
- The rise and fall of the 'enterprise' class distinction
Labels: anil dash, apple, consumer, enterprise, enterprisey, iphone, mobile
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Enterprise Linux's exaggerated value #2: the support you're forced to buy
Yesterday I began what will probably end up becoming a series of posts about how y'all need to rethink the meaning of the word "enterprise," and related, the value of support. In specific, I called out how "Enterprise Linux," (usually meaning Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell's Suse/SLES/SLED) is overvalued because the packages you pay for often need to be replaced with packages you don't pay for.
Another problem with Enterprise Linux is the way it's sold. You buy the bits and support together. People might think it's hard for an open source software vendor to just sell the bits, when technically, so much of it is "free," and its easier to just imagine all those software dollars are actually paying for "support" (representing commercial man-hours, not free) but the simple fact is many organizations would love to pay for the bits they could technically get for free, and just do without the facade of expensive support, when the support they get from other resources is more responsive.
Photohosting site smugmug was in that boat, and blogged about their issues with Novell and Redhat.
WHAT WE CAN DO
Many of us who use Linux in commercial situations are more than happy to pay for it. Let's feel comfortable paying for it in different ways. We need to get over the traditional model of a single, central body of developers and supporters being embodied by a single company. There are different currencies and parties involved. Give back to your providers creatively with money, bug fixes, documentation, and sharing your best practicies. Take the time to identify the upstream developers and projects and consider funding them directly. Publicly share your challenges and success stories on the internet, the attention will help future users and the developers by making their project less of an unknown quantity for future users.
But most importantly, be willing to break free of this totally broken tradition of thinking paying a bunch of money to a central body in some way solves your technical problems and protects you. It may make certain people in your organization feel safe, but take the time to run some numbers. What value have you really gotten out of support in the past? Put the burden of determining value on those who sell it.
Another problem with Enterprise Linux is the way it's sold. You buy the bits and support together. People might think it's hard for an open source software vendor to just sell the bits, when technically, so much of it is "free," and its easier to just imagine all those software dollars are actually paying for "support" (representing commercial man-hours, not free) but the simple fact is many organizations would love to pay for the bits they could technically get for free, and just do without the facade of expensive support, when the support they get from other resources is more responsive.
Photohosting site smugmug was in that boat, and blogged about their issues with Novell and Redhat.
...we loved Red Hat Linux, we loved how good they were at building & testing their software, we loved their mechanism for delivering software updates. We just didn’t need support.The company ended up going with CentOS, a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux I'll write about another time. Again, you'll notice the author isn't trying to avoid paying for the software, he just doesn't want to pay for a service ("support") he doesn't need.
We got on our knees, begging and pleading with Red Hat to let us pay for a “software updates only” license. They wouldn’t have it. “Support comes bundled with updates”, I was told, “no ifs, ands, or buts”. I *want* to pay Red Hat for the valuable service they do for us and the community. I just don’t want to pay for the part we don’t need - human support.
I would really like to pay Red Hat for all their hard work building and testing the software. .. It’d be the right thing to do. But Red Hat won’t let me.
WHAT WE CAN DO
Many of us who use Linux in commercial situations are more than happy to pay for it. Let's feel comfortable paying for it in different ways. We need to get over the traditional model of a single, central body of developers and supporters being embodied by a single company. There are different currencies and parties involved. Give back to your providers creatively with money, bug fixes, documentation, and sharing your best practicies. Take the time to identify the upstream developers and projects and consider funding them directly. Publicly share your challenges and success stories on the internet, the attention will help future users and the developers by making their project less of an unknown quantity for future users.
But most importantly, be willing to break free of this totally broken tradition of thinking paying a bunch of money to a central body in some way solves your technical problems and protects you. It may make certain people in your organization feel safe, but take the time to run some numbers. What value have you really gotten out of support in the past? Put the burden of determining value on those who sell it.
Labels: business, cent os, centos, enterprise, linux, novell, open source, red hatredhat, sled, sles, supports, suse
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Enterprise Linux's exaggerated value #1: its "tested" packages are too old to use
One of the supposed benefits of enterprise (what that word really means reserved for another post, but a good place to start is here) Linux is that the included packages are "tested" and "hardened" (what does that even mean??!?) for the enterprise. The problem is, in the time it takes to test, these packages have grown quite old, increasing the chances that a sysadmin will need to replace them with software from elsewhere. For security reasons, and technical compatibility reasons, you're often forced to upgrade packages.
And you can't just grab updates from the vendor, because even the updates are really old, only marginally newer than the package that you're trying to replace. So you uninstall the vendor package, and either grab a package from elsewhere, or compile the source. And try to remind yourself what exactly you're paying for again...
An example? The just-release Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 comes with an RPM for Firefox 1.5.x. What?
A common dismissal of Ubuntu (not typically described as "enterprise linux") is that "it's fine for the casual user, but not for the enterprise."
Frankly, its packages are more appropriate for the enterprise than any enterprise linux i've seen. For this reason alone I'm very excited about its increasing acceptance in the business community. Even if it starts at the periphery...
And you can't just grab updates from the vendor, because even the updates are really old, only marginally newer than the package that you're trying to replace. So you uninstall the vendor package, and either grab a package from elsewhere, or compile the source. And try to remind yourself what exactly you're paying for again...
An example? The just-release Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 comes with an RPM for Firefox 1.5.x. What?
A common dismissal of Ubuntu (not typically described as "enterprise linux") is that "it's fine for the casual user, but not for the enterprise."
Frankly, its packages are more appropriate for the enterprise than any enterprise linux i've seen. For this reason alone I'm very excited about its increasing acceptance in the business community. Even if it starts at the periphery...
Labels: business, enterprise, linux, novell, red hat, redhat, ubuntu
Monday, January 22, 2007
And which do you choose, a hard or soft option? Drupal 5.0 is out, does Internet, Intranet, content, collaboration!
(original screenshot snagged from Drupal.org's 5.0 screenshot page)
What's Drupal? Drupal is open source software. Drupal can be used to manage blogs, communities, newspapers, magazines, forums, wikis, on-line video channels, and other kinds of content. You've probably visited a site powered by Drupal, and not even realized it! ('Da Drupes is humble like that.)
A new version of Drupal, Drupal 5.0 was released last week. What's new since Drupal 4.7, its last major revision?
(This is a compressed Flash movie of the "What's new in Drupal 5.0" video. Consider downloading the larger, but much higher quality mp4 here.)
While it's easy to find out that software like Drupal is being used when it's running a famous public website, it's a little harder to know when it's being used internally, in corporate, community, and organizational intranets. As it turns out, Yahoo! uses Drupal internally, and outlined the process. Based on this awesome Drupal case study from IBM, one can only assume they use it for collaboration stuff as well.
Related links:
(original screenshot snagged from Drupal.org's 5.0 screenshot page)A new version of Drupal, Drupal 5.0 was released last week. What's new since Drupal 4.7, its last major revision?
- There's a web-based installer! (It's not as nice as the Wordpress installer, but it's easier than Drupal 4.7's.)
- The administration panel/ tools is totally reworked since Drupal 4.7. In a good way.
- The new core theme lets you change color stuff dynamically with CSS
- more!
(This is a compressed Flash movie of the "What's new in Drupal 5.0" video. Consider downloading the larger, but much higher quality mp4 here.)
While it's easy to find out that software like Drupal is being used when it's running a famous public website, it's a little harder to know when it's being used internally, in corporate, community, and organizational intranets. As it turns out, Yahoo! uses Drupal internally, and outlined the process. Based on this awesome Drupal case study from IBM, one can only assume they use it for collaboration stuff as well.
Related links:
- Drupal project lead Dries Buytaert's personal blog (powered by Drupal, duh)
- Drupal superstars Lullabot
- The Digg.com Drupal 5.0 announcement thread. (for the patient and thick-skinned)
Labels: cms, collaboration, collaborative, content management system, drupal, enterprise, enterprisey, internet, intranet, open source, oss, software, sysadmin, video
