Category Archives: Web software

What becomes collaboration most

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What makes the PC successful as a personal productivity tool has also been its biggest obstacle towards better collaboration, that it is personal. And the more powerful PCs become, they more difficult it is to collaborate with them.

The primary collaboration tool today is still what it was ten years ago: sending an email attachment with a Powerpoint deck or Word document back and forth between two or more parties. It is a serial form of collaboration: I put together my work product, send it to you, and you send back your thoughts or changes. It is fraught with problems: I have to wait on your revisions before adding my own, and if I don’t agree with them, we pretty much have to start the process from scratch. I have seen documents that had more changes and comments than the original text.

Weren’t local area networks supposed to help us share our documents, at least around the office? Now the hard disks on the average computer can contain hundreds of gigabytes, so we can carry around our entire work output for the last decade and still have room to digitize our movies, music, and pictures. And just in case we don’t carry our PCs around, we all have iPods and can shut out the rest of the world by booting them up. Our electronic cocoon has become more potent.

Wasn’t a constant Internet connection supposed to make it easier to connect distributed work teams? Well, it has made email even more powerful, and now most of us feel bereft when we are off line for a few hours. Organizations like CA that turned off their corporate email system for several hours a day (which they did in the early 90s to get people to actually move around and talk to each other) seem so quaint now.

What about blogs and wikis, putting the power of communication in the hands of the common folk? Still, email is the main notification system of when this content changes. And while Google Docs and all those nifty Web 2.0 mashups have made it easier to build collaborative applications, someone still needs to collect the data sources together and do the heavy lifting. And social networks, which are great at grabbing and spamming your contact list, aren’t really all about collaboration, but more about who can collect the most names fastest. I didn’t do well at popularity contests in junior high, and I still feel somewhat deficient today.

There have been some notable attempts at collaboration, but all have been abject failures. Look at Lotus Notes, which is nearly 20 years old. It is still 95% used as an email system. Yes, it has some wonderful collaborative features, particularly with its SameTime messaging and telecommunications add-ons, but most people don’t know how to build their own Notes apps or don’t have these add-ons installed. The inventor of Notes is now at Microsoft with his Groove product, which is also a great idea that has hasn’t gotten much traction. To get any real collaborative benefit from Groove, you have to change the way you think about your data. Sharepoint isn’t much better, but to leverage that you need a lot of Microsoft infrastructure, and many organizations are just getting started with understanding how to use it for something besides running a simple Web bulletin board.

I’ve seen some promising signs of change, particularly with two-person teams that make use of screen-sharing technologies like LogMeIn or GoToMyPC, where both parties are connected and can control the same desktop, to make changes to a presentation or to interactively edit a document. Call this the Jurassic period of collaboration: we still have a ways to go up to evolutionary chain. Salesforce.com is another good case in point, where multiple people can share contacts and client information, provided they are religious about doing the updates. And a third area that is also promising are shared calendars, which at least make scheduling meetings easier.

So, as PC processors get faster, disks get bigger, and our social networks get larger, we still don’t have the perfect collaboration solution. We still think of the data on our hard disks as our own, not our employer’s. Sharing is still for sissies. Until that attitude changes, the headphones will stay firmly stuck in our ears, blocking out the rest of the world around us.

4 GB: The next RAM barrier

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Back in the early days of DOS, we had a memory barrier of 640 kB of memory. I know, it seems quaint now, something that you can find on the chipsets of audio greeting cards rather than real computers, but we spent a lot of time juggling applications to fit in that space. We had special hardware cards that could address more memory, and swapping programs (remember Quarterdeck?) that could allow us to run bigger apps. (And for those of us that are really old, we even remember the 64 kB barrier of the earliest Apple // computers!)

Now we are approaching another memory barrier, only this time it is 4 GB. That is the biggest amount of memory that 32-bit processors can access. It is a problem particularly for servers and has this eerie sense of déjà vu all over again for me.

Four gigs seemed like a lot of memory just a few years ago. We didn’t really need to worry, and our desktop operating systems seemed comfortable inside it. Then Microsoft got greedy with Vista, RAM got much cheaper and apps got bigger. Before you knew it, we are once again running out of headroom.

What is driving these bigger applications is the popularity of both virtualization and database servers. Virtualization is especially memory-intensive. If you want to take advantage of this technology, you have to bulk up your machine with lots of memory and disk. And the more RAM you throw at database servers, the happier they are.

Another big consumer of RAM is the video card and how it interacts with system memory. Some of them share their memory space with the PC, which means when you are running graphics-intense operations, you take away some of that RAM from all your applications. Again, we’ve heard this tune before. And most of us haven’t really paid much attention to the video card in our servers, because we didn’t think they needed much horsepower there. After all, we weren’t planning on running GTA4 on our servers, right?

There are solutions: run the 64-bit versions of Windows, or Linux, or even the Mac OS, which can address memory beyond 4 gigs quite nicely. This is nothing new on the Mac or Linux side, which has had 64-bit OSs for many years. Indeed, if you go back into the early 1990s, we had DEC Alphas and Silicon Graphics’ Irix and all sorts of workstations that were 64-bit processors and 64-bit OSs. Some apps are now only available in 64-bit versions, such as Microsoft Exchange 2007. Others, like Oracle 11g, are still available for both 32- and 64-bit versions.

The problem is with Windows, and particularly finding the right 64-bit drivers for these machines. Rewriting drivers isn’t sexy stuff, and generally the province of some very talented coders that are dedicated enough to stick to the project. One engineering manager I spoke to told me it took his team six months to rewrite his driver set, and it wasn’t a fun six months at that. “Microsoft’s driver signing requirements are intense, he told me. “And at the time we were engaged with them, they were adding and changing tests during the process without informing us, which increased the dev cycles and cost.”

This driver issue is tricky, because you don’t usually think about all of them that you need to upgrade when you are looking at your server portfolio, and generally you don’t know what you need until you install a test machine and see what isn’t supported. Then the fun begins.

So take some time to plan out your strategy if you are running out of RAM. Take a closer look at the new Windows Server 2008 64-bit version, and whether it will run on your existing hardware. And while you are at it, look at Apple’s X Serve too: it might be a lower-cost alternative to running all those virtual machines on a true 64-bit platform.

(this appeared in Baseline Magazine this week)

Understanding contributions to the Linux kernel

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Since 2005, more than 3700 individual developers have contributed their time towards modifications of the Linux kernel operating system. A recent report here shows exactly how far and how fast that project has come, and the extent that Linux has become the province of corporations such as IBM, Novell, Red Hat and others. Since 2005, the community of developers has actually doubled, but new releases continue to appear every 100 days or so,. This is quite the opposite of major OS projects that are under the control of a single (or smaller number of) company such as Windows, OS/2, and DOS. Here is the chart from the study that shows the breakdown by company affiliation. None means the collection of individual developers who have volunteered their time, while unknown could be a corporate sponsor or an individual.linux

How to create Web Mashups

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By now you know what a Web mashup is. These combinations of open-source and other publicly available software that can pull together disparate info with little or no programming skills have been all the rage for a couple of years. So isn’t it about time you brought mashups into your enterprise?

In my column for Baseline magazine this month, I walk you through what you need to get started:

Joel Spolsky on the coming browser standards meltdown

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One of my favorite bloggers is Joel Spolsky, who runs Fog Creek Software in New York City. His most recent post is about the coming browser standards meltdown. You see, Microsoft has a problem with IE 8, the next version of its browser. (Wait a minute! I barely got used to IE 7, and now they want me to upgrade again?) I loved his post for many reasons: first, because he is a funny guy and uses some great examples of what Martians would do if they had standards. Second, because he quotes one of the most wonderful people on the planet (and my co-author of my first book) Marshall Rose. And finally, because of stuff like the following:

And the web designers are discovering what the Jews of Mea Shearim have known for decades: just because you all agree to follow one book doesn’t ensure compatibility, because the laws are so complex and complicated and convoluted that it’s almost impossible to understand them all well enough to avoid traps and landmines, and you’re safer just asking for the fruit plate.

Do take a moment and head over to his site and read through his post.

Creating successful mashups and rich Internet apps

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Today’s businesses are all about quickly adapting to changing conditions. Employees want prompt access to their data. They also want the ability to analyze and act upon changing situations and evolving markets, so they can seize strategic advantages and exploit opportunities. To make business more agile, IT itself must become agile—quick, resourceful, and adaptable. Today that means being able to create applications for the moment, what are often called agile applications.

In a white paper I wrote for SnapLogic, I talk about some of the challenges and opportunities for creating Web mashups and rich Internet applications, and how the company’s data tools can be helpful for corporate developers.

You can download the paper here.

A cool example of Second Life for applications modeling

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I have known Jeff Barr for many years and am envious of his job: he basically gets to work on cool stuff at Amazon.com and tell people about it. He developed a Second Life application that models what he is trying to do with various Amazonian Web services and produced this short video that gives you a small taste of what he is doing. Way cool!

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=jUtshoCw0WE]

Yes, there is plenty of non-business related things going on in Second Life, especially people that are hooking up to each other. But this demonstrates the power of showing you how various pieces of code can hook up to each other in a way that would be difficult to do in the real world.

Sending large files without email attachments

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Sending large files as email attachments is a big pain in the neck. Most email services — and most corporate filters — place a limit on the size of attachments, or your total storage, and if you have a bunch of photos or a video or a large PowerPoint presentation, you will quickly find out what this limit is and get a message saying the file can’t be sent that way. So what are your choices?

If you own your own domain, you can transfer the file to your Web site using file transfer protocols such as FTP or SCP and then have your correspondent transfer it down to their computer. If you both have Instant Messenger accounts on the same system, you can send the file that way too. Both of these are better methods than email attachments, but your correspondent may not want to use either of them, and they are a bit cumbersome to get going. If you are using IM at work, your corporate IT department may block attachments too. And some IM “collector” programs like Trillian or Adium don’t handle the file transfers well.

Luckily, there is another method that makes use of a file transfer service. You upload the file via a Web site and a simple fill-in form. Once the file has been uploaded, the service sends an email message to your recipient, with a link on how to get the file.

There are a number of free services that you can use for this purpose that go by names such as SendThisFile.com and DropSend.com. They vary in how much storage you have, the maximum file size, how many files you can send per month, whether they encrypt the file or password protect the link so no one else can read it, and how much they charge beyond the basic free service.

My current favorite is Box.net. They offer free storage of up to one gigabyte, and have some nifty features too. Unlike some of their competitors, your storage is permanent – the others place a limit on how long they will store your files. It takes just a minute to setup an account and upload a file.

One of the more interesting things about Box.net is that they have begun working with other online vendors to complement their file storage services, what they call Open Box Services. Basically, they publish their interfaces and help develop links to other Web services applications. You can fax a file directly from their repository using their eFax link. You can send your file directly to your blog. You can edit your photos. This is all pretty cool, and is a great way to showcase Web services and do some lightweight collaboration. I like the fact that I can put a bunch of my files there for other applications to access.

Box.net isn’t the only one doing this applications sharing, of course. Notable is Google Docs, where you can edit, save and share spreadsheets, documents, and presentations, and directly post them to your blog as well. They are also free for up to 5 GB (with some caveats) and if you need more you can purchase up to 50 GB for $50 a year, which is probably the best bargain per gig around.

The downside for Box.net is that their maximum file size is 10 MB for the free service.  If you need more it costs $10 a month. Depending on your circumstances, you might want to try out one of the other free services that can handle larger files. Still, whatever you do, you now have lots of choices and don’t have to send any more email attachments.

Live Writer, a kinder, gentler blogging editor from Microsoft

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This week Microsoft announced its Windows Live Writer. Here to tell you about is Newt Barrett, who is CEO of Succeeding Today (Newt@SucceedingToday.com). Newt and I worked together at CMP during another era in tech publishing. Take it away, Newt.

Something is afoot at Microsoft.

t has to do with a product that was quietly released in beta in mid-July and announced this past week. It’s called. It’s slick. It’s solid. And it’s free.

Live Writer is an intuitive, WYSIWYG blogging editor that enables bloggers to manage multiple blogs on multiple platforms–either online or offline. In fact, I’m writing this article with Live Writer.
But this week’s release of Live Writer isn’t just about a product. It’s about Microsoft reasserting application dominance in a world of consumer-created content.

Free is a Strategy that Works for Microsoft

Although Bill Gates prefers to get paid for software, he knows how and when to give it away free. Just think back to 1995 when Microsoft first started to take the Web seriously. In May 1995, a few months before the launch of the much hyped Windows 95, Bill Gates wrote a legendary memo, entitled, “The Internet Tidal Wave.”
“It’s the most important single development” since the IBM PC.”I have gone through several stages of increasing my views of its importance. Now, I assign the Internet the highest level.”(as quoted in Business Week, July 15, 1996) What followed within 12 months was a seismic shift in strategy that put the Internet at center stage for the software company and for many of us too.

Microsoft was late to the party, but not too late to crush a once arrogant Netscape. While Netscape was charging $50/copy for its browser, Microsoft readied the launch of Internet Explorer in 1996 at a much lower price: FREE. As Bill Gates cheerfully noted in a press conference at the launch of IE, “It’s priced to sell.”

It looks as though Microsoft is making another strategic move that’s all about the Internet–and about blogging.

What Makes Live Writer So Important?

Microsoft, like the Japanese, tends to take the long view. They may be late to the party. They may appear to have missed an opportunity. But, once they decide they must dominate a market they will do whatever it takes.
“I think blogging is super-important and we’ve got to do a lot more software.” That’s what Bill Gates said in a January 7, 2005 interview on the blog, Gizmondo. Clearly, he was telegraphing what they’re now doing.
Microsoft’s approach with Live Writer is intriguing–not just because it’s a beta product that works with very few glitches, but because it plays nice with others.

Here’s how it works:

You download and install it. (http://get.live.com/betas/writer_betas) LW will work even when you are not connected to the Internet. Next, you tell LW about your blogs. It works with WordPress, Typepad, Blogger, and Microsoft’s own Live Spaces. You show it how you log on and then let it match your style by posting a test blog that it immediately removes. You can submit either a post or a page, and then it pulls down your categories and lets you set a publish date.

You can edit and resubmit your posts, and you can pull down posts that you had made before using LW in order to edit them. Its WYSIWYG tools enable you to format a page easily, insert tables, photos, website images, and videos, and create hyperlinks and tags. It works effectively even on a small laptop screen and works with voice dictation on the Vista platform .It has some nice plug ins both from Microsoft and from third party developers – one notable and symbolic example is “Blog this from Firefox” tool. Imagine developing something that works seamlessly with Firefox!

The Bottom-line

Live Writer is capable and easy to use. It matches the very attractive price of Internet Explorer–free. It works just as easily with WordPress as with Live Spaces. It’s just as useful offline as on. Within a day of using it, Live Writer has become my blog editor of choice.

Microsoft was heavy-handed in destroying Netscape. Live Writer demonstrates that Microsoft is just as determined to win in the blogosphere as it was to win on the Web browser. In 2007 it looks as though Microsoft will do it with a great product that actually plays nice with others. What a nice surprise. Of course, you still need XP SP2 or Vista, maybe someday it will run on a Mac!