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:

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

  ¶ 11:05 PM Links to this post

  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:

"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

  ¶ 6:06 PM Links to this post

  These Links Matter to You. Tuesday, January 23, 2007

• wowza. Five kinda serious usability issues with Microsoft Vista. ( really well written)
• very funny podcast with mostly-Mac blog Daring Fireball's John Gruber, and Panic's Cabel Sasser (this was done at Macworld, soon after The Keynote. Lotsa Steve Jobs mocking that comes from a place of love.)
  
• For real. IBM announced gigantor social software suite, Lotus Connections. This kinda competes with Microsoft's gigantor Sharepoint. Many companies will pay for the privilege of buying these packages, and then learn how to use them and in some cases, if to use them. (see also, Enterprisey) Drupal's Dries Buytaert suggests an IBM/ Drupal collaboration.
• wait. that deserves its own bullet-point. Enterprisey. ("...a derogatory term describing sophisticated software architecture which is claimed to be good enough (robust, flexible, etc.) for use in enterprise applications, but in fact is merely excessively complex...")

Labels: drupal, enterprisey, interface, microsoft, usability, user experience, vista

  ¶ 10:10 PM Links to this post

  And which do you choose, a hard or soft option? Drupal 5.0 is out, does Internet, Intranet, content, collaboration! 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?

• 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!
  

If you want to check out some sites that use Drupal, the video below shows some famous ones, like MTV UK, This Week in Technology, and SpreadFirefox.com.

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

  ¶ 10:01 PM 1 Comments Links to this post