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Gary Edwards

Cloud file-sharing for enterprise users - 1 views

www.computerweekly.com/...e-sharing-for-enterprise-users

SurDoc Sync-Share-Store sync-share-store-collaboration DropBox

shared by Gary Edwards on 30 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 30 Aug 13
     
    Quick review of different sync-share-store services, starting with DropBox and ending with three Open Source services. Very interesting. Things have progressed since I last worked on the SurDocs project for Sursen. No mention in this review of file formats, conversion or viewing issues. I do know that CrocoDoc is used by near every sync-share-store service to convert documents to either pdf or html formats for viewing. No servie however has been able to hit the "native document" sweet spot. Not even SurDocs - which was the whole purpose behind the project!!! "Native Documents" means that the document is in it's native / original application format. That format is needed for the round tripping and reloading of the document. Although most sync-share-store services work with MSOffice OXML formatted documents, only Microsoft provides a true "native" format viewer (Office 365). Office 365 enables direct edit, view and collaboration on native documents. Which is an enormous advantage given that conversion of any sort is guaranteed to "break" a native document and disrupt any related business processes or round tripping need. It was here that SurDoc was to provide a break-through technology. Sadly, we're still waiting :( excerpt: The availability of cheap, easy-to-use and accessible cloud file-sharing services means users have more freedom and choice than ever before. Dropbox pioneered simplicity and ease of use, and so quickly picked up users inside the enterprise. Similar services have followed Dropbox's lead and now there are dozens, including well-known ones such as Google Drive, SkyDrive and Ubuntu One. cloud.jpg Valdis Filks , research director at analyst firm Gartner explained the appeal of cloud file-sharing services. Filks said: "Enterprise employees use Dropbox and Google because they are consumer products that are simple to use, can be purchased without officially requesting new infrastructure or budget expenditure, and can be installed qu
  • Paul Merrell on 11 Sep 13
     
    Odd that the reporter mentions the importance of security near the top of the article but gives that topic such short shrift in his evaluation of the services. For example, "secured by 256-bit AES encryption" is meaningless without discussing other factors such as: [i] who creates the encryption keys and on which side of the server/client divide; and [ii] the service's ability to decrypt the customer's content. Encrypt/decryt must be done on the client side using unique keys that are unknown to the service, else security is broken and if the service does business in the U.S. or any of its territories or possessions, it is subject to gagged orders to turn over the decrypted customer information. My wisdom so far is to avoid file sync services to the extent you can, boycott U.S. services until the spy agencies are encaged, and reward services that provide good security from nations with more respect for digital privacy, to give U.S.-based services an incentive to lobby *effectively* on behalf of their customer's privacy in Congress. The proof that they are not doing so is the complete absence of bills in Congress that would deal effectively with the abuse by U.S. spy agencies. From that standpoint, the Switzerland-based http://wuala.com/ file sync service is looking pretty good so far. I'm using it.
Gary Edwards

XML Production Workflows? Start with the Web and XHTML - 1 views

quod.lib.umich.edu/...n-workflows-start-with-the-web

OpenWeb XML XHTML-CSS HTML5-CSS3-JavaScript IDML

shared by Gary Edwards on 01 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Challenges: Some Ugly Truths The challenges of building—and living with—an XML workflow are clear enough. The return on investment is a long-term proposition. Regardless of the benefits XML may provide, the starting reality is that it represents a very different way of doing things than the one we are familiar with. The Word Processing and Desktop Publishing paradigm, based on the promise of onscreen, WYSIWYG layout, is so dominant as to be practically inescapable. It has proven really hard to get from here to there, no matter how attractive XML might be on paper. A considerable amount of organizational effort and labour must be expended up front in order to realize the benefits. This is why XML is often referred to as an “investment”: you sink a bunch of time and money up front, and realize the benefits—greater flexibility, multiple output options, searching and indexing, and general futureproofing—later, over the long haul. It is not a short-term return proposition. And, of course, the returns you are able to realize from your XML investment are commensurate with what you put in up front: fine-grained, semantically rich tagging is going to give you more potential for searchability and recombination than a looser, more general-purpose approach, but it sure costs more. For instance, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is the grand example of pouring enormous amounts of energy into the up-front tagging, with a very open-ended set of possibilities down the line. TEI helpfully defines a level to which most of us do not have to aspire.[5] But understanding this on a theoretical level is only part of the challenge. There are many practical issues that must be addressed. Software and labour are two of the most critical. How do you get the content into XML in the first place? Unfortunately, despite two decades of people doing SGML and XML, this remains an ugly question.
  • Practical Challenges In 2009, there is still no truly likeable—let alone standard—editing and authoring software for XML. For many (myself included), the high-water mark here was Adobe’s FrameMaker, substantially developed by the late 1990s. With no substantial market for it, it is relegated today mostly to the tech writing industry, unavailable for the Mac, and just far enough afield from the kinds of tools we use today that its adoption represents a significant hurdle. And FrameMaker was the best of the breed; most of the other software in decent circulation are programmers’ tools—the sort of things that, as Michael Tamblyn pointed out, encourage editors to drink at their desks. The labour question represents a stumbling block as well. The skill-sets and mind-sets that effective XML editors need have limited overlap with those needed by literary and more traditional production editors. The need to think of documents as machine-readable databases is not something that comes naturally to folks steeped in literary culture. In combination with the sheer time and effort that rich tagging requires, many publishers simply outsource the tagging to India, drawing a division of labour that spans oceans, to put it mildly. Once you have XML content, then what do you do with it? How do you produce books from it? Presumably, you need to be able to produce print output as well as digital formats. But while the latter are new enough to be generally XML-friendly (e-book formats being largely XML based, for instance), there aren’t any straightforward, standard ways of moving XML content into the kind of print production environments we are used to seeing. This isn’t to say that there aren’t ways of getting print—even very high-quality print—output from XML, just that most of them involve replacing your prepress staff with Java programmers.
  • Why does this have to be so hard? It’s not that XML is new, or immature, or untested. Remember that the basics have been around, and in production, since the early 1980s at least. But we have to take account of a substantial and long-running cultural disconnect between traditional editorial and production processes (the ones most of us know intimately) and the ways computing people have approached things. Interestingly, this cultural divide looked rather different in the 1970s, when publishers were looking at how to move to digital typesetting. Back then, printers and software developers could speak the same language. But that was before the ascendancy of the Desktop Publishing paradigm, which computerized the publishing industry while at the same time isolating it culturally. Those of us who learned how to do things the Quark way or the Adobe way had little in common with people who programmed databases or document-management systems. Desktop publishing technology isolated us in a smooth, self-contained universe of toolbars, grid lines, and laser proofs. So, now that the reasons to get with this program, XML, loom large, how can we bridge this long-standing divide?
  • ...44 more annotations...
  • Using the Web as a Production Platform The answer, I think, is right in front of you. The bridge is the Web, a technology and platform that is fundamentally based on XML, and which many publishers are by now comfortably familiar with. Perhaps not entirely comfortably, but at least most publishers are already working with the Web; they already either know or have on staff people who understand it and can work with it. The foundation of our argument is this: rather than looking at jumping to XML in its full, industrial complexity, which seems to be what the O'Reilly-backed StartWithXML initiative[6] is suggesting, publishers instead leverage existing tools and technologies—starting with the Web—as a means of getting XML workflows in place. This means making small investments and working with known tools rather than spending tens of thousands of dollars on XML software and rarefied consultants. It means re-thinking how the existing pieces of the production toolchain fit together; re-thinking the existing roles of software components already in use. It means, fundamentally, taking the Web seriously as a content platform, rather than thinking of it as something you need to get content out to, somehow. If nothing else, the Web represents an opportunity to think about editorial and production from outside the shrink-wrapped Desktop Publishing paradigm.
  • Is the Web made of Real XML? At this point some predictable objections can be heard: wait a moment, the Web isn’t really made out of XML; the HTML that makes up most of the Web is at best the bastard child of SGML, and it is far too flaky/unstructured/underpowered to be taken seriously. We counter by arguing that although HTML on the Web exists in a staggering array of different incarnations, and that the majority of it is indeed an unstructured mess, this does not undermine the general principle that basic, ubiquitous Web technologies can make a solid platform for content management, editorial process, and production workflow.
  • With the advent of a published XML standard in the late 1990s came the W3C’s adoption of XHTML: the realization of the Web’s native content markup as a proper XML document type. Today, its acceptance is almost ubiquitous, even while the majority of actual content out there may not be strictly conforming. The more important point is that most contemporary Web software, from browsers to authoring tools to content management systems (from blogs to enterprise systems), are capable of working with clean, valid XHTML. Or, to put the argument the other way around, clean, valid XHTML content plays absolutely seamlessly with everything else on the Web.[7]
  • The objection which follows, then, will be that even if we grant that XHTML is a real XML document type, that it is underpowered for “serious” content because it is almost entirely presentation (formatting) oriented; it lacks any semantic depth. In XHTML, a paragraph is a paragraph is a paragraph, as opposed to a section or an epigraph or a summary.
  • n contrast, more “serious” XML document types like DocBook[8] or DITA-derived schemas[9] are capable of making semantic distinctions about content chunks at a fine level of granularity and with a high degree of specificity.
  • So there is an argument for recalling the 80:20 rule here. If XHTML can provide 80% of the value with just 20% of the investment, then what exactly is the business case for spending the other 80% to achieve that last 20% of value? We suspect the ratio is actually quite a bit steeper than 80:20 for most publishers.
  • Furthermore, just to get technical for a moment, XHTML is extensible in a fairly straightforward way, through the common “class” attribute on each element. Web developers have long leveraged this kind of extensibility in the elaboration of “microformats” for semantic-web applications.[10] There is no reason why publishers shouldn’t think to use XHTML’s simple extensibility in a similar way for their own ends.
  • XHTML, on the other hand, is supported by a vast array of quotidian software, starting with the ubiquitous Web browser. For this very reason, XHTML is in fact employed as a component part of several more specialized document types (ONIX and ePub among them).
  • Why re-invent a general-purpose prose representation when XHTML already does the job?
  • It is worth pausing for a moment to consider the role of XHTML in the ePub standard for ebook content. An ePub file is, anatomically, a simply disguised zip archive. Inside the zip archive are a few standard component parts: there are specialized files that declare metadata about the book, and about the format of the book. And then there is the book’s content, represented in XHTML. An ePub book is a Web page in a wrapper.
  • To sum up the general argument: the Web as it already exists presents incredible value to publishers, as a platform for doing XML content management with existing (and often free) tools, and without having to go blindly into the unknown. At this point, we can offer a few design guidelines: prefer existing and/or ubiquitous tools over specialized ones wherever possible; prefer free software over proprietary systems where possible; prefer simple tools controlled and coordinated by human beings over fully automated (and therefore complex) systems; play to our strengths: use Web software for storing and managing content, use layout software for layout, and keep editors and production people in charge of their own domains.
  • Putting the Pieces Together: A Prototype
  • At the SFU Master of Publishing Program, we have been chipping away at this general line of thinking for a few years. Over that time, Web content management systems have been getting more and more sophisticated, all the while getting more streamlined and easier to use. (NB: if you have a blog, you have a Web content management system.) The Web is beginning to be recognized as a writing and editing environment used by millions of people. And the ways in which content is represented, stored, and exchanged online have become increasingly robust and standardized.
  • The missing piece of the puzzle has been print production: how can we move content from its malleable, fluid form on line into the kind of high-quality print production environments we’ve come to expect after two decades of Desktop Publishing?
  • Anyone who has tried to print Web content knows that the existing methods leave much to be desired (hyphenation and justification, for starters). In the absence of decent tools for this, most publishers quite naturally think of producing the print content first, and then think about how to get material onto the Web for various purposes. So we tend to export from Word, or from Adobe, as something of an afterthought.
  • While this sort of works, it isn’t elegant, and it completely ignores the considerable advantages of Web-based content management.
  • Content managed online is stored in one central location, accessible simultaneously to everyone in your firm, available anywhere you have an Internet connection, and usually exists in a much more fluid format than Word files. If only we could manage the editorial flow online, and then go to print formats at the end, instead of the other way around. At SFU, we made several attempts to make this work by way of the supposed “XML import” capabilities of various Desktop Publishing tools, without much success.[12]
  • In the winter of 2009, Adobe solved this part of the problem for us with the introduction of its Creative Suite 4. What CS4 offers is the option of a complete XML representation of an InDesign document: what Adobe calls IDML (InDesign Markup Language).
  • The IDML file format is—like ePub—a simply disguised zip archive that, when unpacked, reveals a cluster of XML files that represent all the different facets of an InDesign document: layout spreads, master pages, defined styles, colours, and of course, the content.
  • IDML is a well thought-out XML standard that achieves two very different goals simultaneously: it preserves all of the information that InDesign needs to do what it does; and it is broken up in a way that makes it possible for mere mortals (or at least our Master of Publishing students) to work with it.
  • What this represented to us in concrete terms was the ability to take Web-based content and move it into InDesign in a straightforward way, thus bridging Web and print production environments using existing tools and skillsets, with a little added help from free software.
  • We would take clean XHTML content, transform it to IDML-marked content, and merge that with nicely designed templates in InDesign.
  • The result is an almost push-button publication workflow, which results in a nice, familiar InDesign document that fits straight into the way publishers actually do production.
  • Tracing the steps To begin with, we worked backwards, moving the book content back to clean XHTML.
  • The simplest method for this conversion—and if you want to create Web content, this is an excellent route—was to use Adobe’s “Export to Digital Editions” option, which creates an ePub file.
  • Recall that ePub is just XHTML in a wrapper, so within the ePub file was a relatively clean XHTML document. It was somewhat cleaner (that is, the XHTML tagging was simpler and less cluttered) than InDesign’s other Web-oriented exports, possibly because Digital Editions is a well understood target, compared with somebody’s website.
  • In order to achieve our target of clean XHTML, we needed to do some editing; the XHTML produced by InDesign’s “Digital Editions” export was presentation-oriented. For instance, bulleted list items were tagged as paragraphs, with a class attribute identifying them as list items. Using the search-and-replace function, we converted such structures to proper XHTML list and list-item elements. Our guiding principle was to make the XHTML as straightforward as possible, not dependent on any particular software to interpret it.
  • We broke the book’s content into individual chapter files; each chapter could then carry its own basic metadata, and the pages conveniently fit our Web content management system (which is actually just a wiki). We assembled a dynamically generated table of contents for the 12 chapters, and created a cover page. Essentially, the book was entirely Web-based at this point.
  • When the book chapters are viewed online, they are formatted via a CSS2 stylesheet that defines a main column for content as well as dedicating screen real estate for navigational elements. We then created a second template to render the content for exporting; this was essentially a bare-bones version of the book with no navigation and minimal styling. Pages (or even the entire book) can be exported (via the “Save As...” function in a Web browser) for use in either print production or ebook conversion. At this point, we required no skills beyond those of any decent Web designer.
  • Integrating with CS4 for Print Adobe’s IDML language defines elements specific to InDesign; there is nothing in the language that looks remotely like XHTML. So a mechanical transformation step is needed to convert the XHTML content into something InDesign can use. This is not as hard as it might seem.
  • Both XHTML and IDML are composed of straightforward, well-documented structures, and so transformation from one to the other is, as they say, “trivial.” We chose to use XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transforms) to do the work. XSLT is part of the overall XML specification, and thus is very well supported in a wide variety of tools. Our prototype used a scripting engine called xsltproc, a nearly ubiquitous piece of software that we found already installed as part of Mac OS X (contemporary Linux distributions also have this as a standard tool), though any XSLT processor would work.
  • In other words, we don’t need to buy InCopy, because we just replaced it with the Web. Our wiki is now plugged directly into our InDesign layout. It even automatically updates the InDesign document when the content changes. Credit is due at this point to Adobe: this integration is possible because of the open file format in the Creative Suite 4.
  • We wrote an XSLT transformation script[18] that converted the XHTML content from the Web into an InCopy ICML file. The script itself is less than 500 lines long, and was written and debugged over a period of about a week by amateurs (again, the people named at the start of this article). The script runs in a couple of seconds, and the resulting .icml file can then be “placed” directly into an InDesign template. The ICML file references an InDesign stylesheet, so the template file can be set up with a house-styled layout, master pages, and stylesheet definitions for paragraphs and character ranges.
  • Rather than a public-facing website, our system relies on the Web as a content management platform—of course a public face could easily be added.
  • It should be noted that the Book Publishing 1 proof-of-concept was artificially complex; we began with a book laid out in InDesign and ended up with a look-alike book laid out in InDesign. But next time—for instance, when we publish Book Publishing 2—we can begin the process with the content on the Web, and keep it there throughout the editorial process. The book’s content could potentially be written and edited entirely online, as Web content, and then automatically poured into an InDesign template at proof time. “Just in time,” as they say. This represents an entirely new way of thinking of book production. With a Web-first orientation, it makes little sense to think of the book as “in print” or “out of print”—the book is simply available, in the first place online; in the second place in derivative digital formats; and third, but really not much more difficult, in print-ready format, via the usual InDesign CS print production system publishers are already familiar with.
  • Creating Ebook Files Creating electronic versions from XHTML source is vastly simpler than trying to generate these out of the existing print process. The ePub version is extremely easy to generate; so is online marketing copy or excerpts for the Web, since the content begins life Web-native.
  • Since an ePub file is essentially XHTML content in a special wrapper, all that is required is that we properly “wrap” our XHTML content. Ideally, the content in an ePub file is broken into chapters (as ours was) and a table of contents file is generated in order to allow easy navigation within an ebook reader. We used Julian Smart’s free tool eCub[19] to simply and automatically generate the ePub wrapper and the table of contents. The only custom development we did was to create a CSS stylesheet for the ebook so that headings and paragraph indents looked the way we wanted. Starting with XHTML content, creating ePub is almost too easy.
  • today, we are able to put the process together using nothing but standard, relatively ubiquitous Web tools: the Web itself as an editing and content management environment, standard Web scripting tools for the conversion process, and the well-documented IDML file format to integrate the layout tool.
  • Our project demonstrates that Web technologies are indeed good enough to use in an XML-oriented workflow; more specialized and expensive options are not necessarily required. For massive-scale enterprise publishing, this approach may not offer enough flexibility, and the challenge of adding and extracting extra semantic richness may prove more trouble than it's worth.
  • But for smaller firms who are looking at the straightforward benefits of XML-based processes—single source publishing, online content and workflow management, open and accessible archive formats, greater online discoverability—here is a way forward.
  • The result is very simple and easy to use. Our demonstration requires that a production editor run the XSLT transformation script manually, but there is no reason why this couldn’t be built directly into the Web content management system so that exporting the content to print ran the transformation automatically. The resulting file would then be “placed” in InDesign and proofed.
  • The final piece of our puzzle, the ability to integrate print production, was made possible by Adobe's release of InDesign with an open XML file format. Since the Web's XHTML is also XML, is can be easily and confidently transformed to the InDesign format.
  • Such a workflow—beginning with the Web and exporting to print—is surely more in line with the way we will do business in the 21st century, where the Web is the default platform for reaching audiences, developing content, and putting the pieces together. It is time, we suggest, for publishers to re-orient their operations and start with the Web.
  • Using the Web as a Production Platform
  • Gary Edwards on 01 Nov 13
     
    I was looking for an answer to a problem Marbux had presented, and found this interesting article.  The issue was that of the upcoming conversion of the Note Case Pro (NCP) layout engine to the WebKit layout engine, and what to do about the NCP document format. My initial reaction was to encode the legacy NCP document format in XML, and run an XSLT to a universal pivot format like TEI-XML.  From there, the TEI-XML community would provide all the XSLT transformation routines for conversion to ODF, OOXML, XHTML, ePUB and HTML/CSS. Researching the problems one might encounter with this approach, I found this article.  Fascinating stuff. My take away is that TEI-XML would not be as effective a "universal pivot point" as XHTML.  Or perhaps, if NCP really wants to get aggressive; IDML - InDesign Markup Language. As an after thought, i was thinking that an alternative title to this article might have been, "Working with Web as the Center of Everything".
Gary Edwards

Ricoh Spends US$ 300m to Shift Focus to Managed Document Services - 0 views

www.cmswire.com/...d-document-services-009905.php

cloud-computing sursen Document-Management-System Ricoh

shared by Gary Edwards on 26 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Ricoh said the US$ 300 million would be invested in its managed document services infrastructure with a revenue target of US$ 3.3 billion by 2013.
  • Ricoh believes the shift is so profound that it is investing this amount of money in re-aligning its business.
  • Ricoh has identified shifts in the document management market that are focused on better enterprise returns based on more efficient document management.
  • Gary Edwards on 26 Jan 11
     
    Last September, Xerox launched a very expensive campaign to rebrand itself as a document management heavyweight. This week, Xerox's MFP rival, Ricoh (news, site), has just announced that it will be investing US$ 300 million over three years to "aggressively" accelerate its shift into the managed document services or outsourced document management space. Using its core hardware and software technologies, the shift will see Ricoh focusing not just on the provision of hardware and software, but offering entire document management services from capture to printing. At a press briefing held in New York, London and Tokyo earlier this week that underlined the global nature of the business shift, Ricoh said the US$ 300 million would be invested in its managed document services infrastructure with a revenue target of US$ 3.3 billion by 2013. Document Management Market Shift So, what is all this about? It seems simple enough - Ricoh has identified shifts in the document management market that are focused on better enterprise returns based on more efficient document management. No surprise there. However, what is surprising, is that Ricoh believes the shift is so profound that it is investing this amount of money in re-aligning its business.
Gary Edwards

The Real Meaning Of Google Wave - Forbes.com - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...nology-cio-network-google.html

wave wave-maker google-wave

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Sep 09 - No Cached
  • Wave is a new way to build distributed applications, and it will open the door to an explosion of innovation.
  • So, if Wave is not just the demo application, what is it? Google Wave is a platform for creating distributed applications. Each Wave server can be involved in a number of conversations involving Wavelets, what most people would think of as a document. Wavelets are actually a much more powerful and general because they are based on XML, which means you can have lots of depth of content, like headings and subheadings of a book, but on steroids. Adding a document repository to XMPP is just revolutionary.
  • The XMPP protocol manages the communication between the Wave servers so that all the Wavelets can synchronize as they are changed. Then Google finished the job by making Wavelets tag-able, searchable and versioned, so you can play back changes. But Google Wave goes beyond just managing the content--it also manages the programs that act on the content. At any level, a program can be assigned to a Wavelet to render it, that is, show it to a user and help manage the conversation. Google Wave also manages the distribution and management of these programs. The idea of a platform that combines management of the data and the code is really powerful.
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Sep 09
     
    Good article.  One of the first to go beyond the demo, recognizing that Wave is application platform - a wrapper for the convergence of communications and content. Excerpt: Wave is a new way to build distributed applications, and it will open the door to an explosion of innovation. What the Wave demo showed is support for a continuum from the shortest messages to longer and longer forms of content. All of it can be shared with precise control, tagged, searched. The version history is kept. No more mailing around a document. This takes the beauty of e-mail and wikis and extends it in a more flexible way to a much larger audience. Google Wave is a platform for creating distributed applications. Each Wave server can be involved in a number of conversations involving Wavelets, what most people would think of as a document. Wavelets are actually a much more powerful and general because they are based on XML, which means you can have lots of depth of content, like headings and subheadings of a book, but on steroids. Adding a document repository to XMPP is just revolutionary. The XMPP protocol manages the communication between the Wave servers so that all the Wavelets can synchronize as they are changed. Then Google finished the job by making Wavelets tag-able, searchable and versioned, so you can play back changes. But Google Wave goes beyond just managing the content--it also manages the programs that act on the content. At any level, a program can be assigned to a Wavelet to render it, that is, show it to a user and help manage the conversation. Google Wave also manages the distribution and management of these programs. The idea of a platform that combines management of the data and the code is really powerful.
Gary Edwards

WE'RE BLOWN AWAY: This Startup Could Literally Change The Entire Software Industry - Bu... - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/ntire-software-industry-2012-3

Numecent Cloud-Paging Native-Apps-As-A

shared by Gary Edwards on 10 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 10 Sep 13
     
    "Startup Numecent has come out of stealth mode today with some of the most impressive enterprise technology we've seen in a decade. Plus the company is interesting for other reasons, like its business model and its founder. Numecent offers something it calls "cloud paging" and, if successful, it could be a game-changer for enterprise software, video gaming, and smartphone apps. Red Hat thinks so. It has already partnered with the company to help it offer Windows software to Linux users. "Cloud paging" instantly "cloudifies" any software, even an operating system like Windows itself, says founder and CEO Osman Kent. It lets any software, with no modification, be delivered from the cloud and run as fast or faster than if the app was on your desktop. Lots of so-called "desktop virtualization" services work fast. But cloud-paging can even operate the cloud software if the PC gets disconnected from the network or Internet. It can also turn a smartphone into a server. That means a bunch of devices like tablets can run the software -- like a game -- off of the smartphone. Imagine showing up to a party and letting all your friends play the latest version of Halo from your phone. That's crazy cool. Cloudpaging can do all this because it doesn't use "pixel-streaming" technology like other virtualization tech. Instead it temporarily downloads bits of the application itself (instructions) and runs them on the device. It can almost magically predict which parts of the app the user will need, and downloads only those parts. For business owners, that's not even the best part. It also helps enterprises sidestep extra licensing fees associated with the cloud. For instance, Microsoft licenses its software by the device, not by the user, and, in many cases, charges a "Virtual Desktop Access" fee for each device using a virtual version of Windows. (For a bit of light reading, check out the Microsoft virtual desktop licensing white paper: PDF) Cloudpaging has what Kent calls "f
Gary Edwards

That's All Folks: Why the Writing Is on the Wall at Microsoft - Forbes - 1 views

www.forbes.com/...ng-is-on-the-wall-at-microsoft

Microsoft

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Jul 12
     
    Control vs. Creativity.  As the ulitmate control freak, Ballmer was guanteed to crush the life out of Microsoft's most creative individuals and teams.  Gates was focused on Windows and MSOffice, and Ballmer on control.  That one-two punch made certain that Microsoft would not be a player in the next great wave of computing; The Cloud.   excerpt: This is yet another example of what I like to call the Wile E. Coyote syndrome. Like the unfortunate character in the old Warner Bros. cartoons, Microsoft now seems to be a company that has long since run off the cliff but, with legs spinning for all they are worth, doesn't know yet that it is ready to drop. Yet drop it most certainly will. Microsoft Win8 Tablet Is NOT a Game Changer Adam Hartung Contributor Snapshot: Steve Ballmer Follow (93) #44 Billionaires IDC Analyst: Microsoft's Surface Sizzle Needs Win8 Steak Daniel Nye Griffiths Contributor To understand how this happens, take a look at the work of Arnold J. Toynbee, a historian who studied the rise and fall of civilizations. He argued that a civilization flourishes when it motivates insiders and attracts outsiders with its creative dynamism and culture. The civilization breaks down when its leadership loses this creative capacity and gives way to, or transforms itself into, a dominant minority. When this happens, the driver of the civilization becomes control, not attraction. And it's precisely this switch from attraction to control that is the source of the breakdown. Interestingly, Toynbee says that the consequences may not be immediately apparent. A civilization can keep up momentum because the controls it puts in place generate some short-term efficiency. But eventually it will run its course and collapse, because no amount of control can replace the loss of collective creativity. Observe this in the corporate world by looking at the example of General Motors. G.M.'s 2009 bankruptcy came at the end of a long decline dating back to the early 197
Gary Edwards

No Jitter | Post | Cisco Or Microsoft? Who Wins the Line-of-Business War? - 0 views

www.nojitter.com/...ho-wins-the-lineofbusiness-war

Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 23 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • The multitude of services gives Microsoft an early edge when it comes to cloud, but the channel-enablement model for Cisco can create much greater scale than a direct to line-of-business model. The key is ensuring its resellers are fully trained in selling to line-of-business, which isn't a simple undertaking. Bottom line: With regard to cloud, Microsoft has a faster route to market, but Cisco's should give it an advantage over time.
  • Putting cloud aside, Cisco and Microsoft have markedly different approaches in selling to lines of business. For Microsoft, the key lies in its developer community. Developers build applications that business people use and buy. Many of these applications use Microsoft as an underlying technology without the purchaser really even being aware of that fact. Microsoft gets pulled through with really no involvement from Microsoft, providing a low- to no-cost sales model for the company. The only down side is that the application brand often overshadows the underlying brand.
  • With regards to UC, as this market transitions away from products to platforms, services will play a significant role. Cisco's services plays a role similar to IBM services. IBM's consulting group works with its top tier customers to understand how to solve business problems through compute-centric solutions. Cisco services works with its customers to create solutions through networking- and communications-related products. As more and more organizations look to leverage UC strategically, I would expect Cisco services to target its top-tier customers. The key for Cisco then is to take these solutions and push them down through its channel for scale and market share gains.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Cisco has been trying to build its own "Cisco Developer Network" (CDN) for the better part of a decade. The company kicked off this initiative way back in the early 2000s when it bought a company called Metreos that had some interesting VoIP applications and a slick developer interface. Back then, the program was known as CTDP, Cisco Technology Developer Program, and was run by VoIP people, not individuals that understand software and how to build a developer environment. Since then the program has undergone a number of facelifts and Cisco appears to have some real software people running the group, so there is some potential.
  • Microsoft has made a living off selling products, many of them sub-par, into business because of its developer relationships. Does anyone really think Microsoft gained monopoly-like share with desktop operating systems because of quality of product and ease of use? Hardly. Windows became the de facto standard for developers because of the quality of the developer program. Microsoft does a good job of meeting the needs of its large software vendors, but does an even better job of making sure those millions of small ISVs have access to Microsoft platforms and developer support.
  • So developer-led or services-led?
  • Microsoft should get an early advantage, as many in-house developers will look to Lync; but the services strategy by Cisco should create longer, more sustainable value, as it has for IBM.
  • The key for Microsoft is being able to adapt its developer environment faster as market trends change. Obviously, compute is moving away from the traditional desktop to mobile clients and the cloud, and there are far more single-use, purpose-built applications being built in the consumer world. I think Microsoft's Developer Network is oriented towards more old-school developers.
  • The key for Cisco is having the patience to work with its lead customers and find those unique, game-changing applications and use cases that it can then push down into the channel. It's the right strategy for Cisco, but it might take a bit more time to bear some fruit.
  • Gary Edwards on 23 Jul 13
     
    excerpt: "Developer-led or services-led? Microsoft should get an early advantage, but the services strategy by Cisco should create longer, more sustainable value, Last month I wrote a blog outlining how the line-of-business manager holds the key to winning the Cisco versus Microsoft war. A number of you commented that this was obvious and both companies are already doing it. I'll agree that this is something both companies are trying to do, but neither is doing a great job. Microsoft is a company with high appeal to IT pros and Cisco to network managers, with high brand familiarity to line of business managers but low appeal beyond this."
Gary Edwards

Treeno Software: The Treeno Document Vault 2.0 Document Management Network Appliance - 0 views

www.sfgate.com/...article.cgi

Treeno DMS wiki-WORD

shared by Gary Edwards on 14 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 14 Jun 11
     
    A Complete Document Management System packaged as a server appliance.  Still needs wiki-WORD sync-share-collaborate.  Still needs portable "native client" docx viewer/editor with fixed/flow/flock options. Good solution for SMB:  instead of trusting business documents to a Cloud provider, they can purchase the Treeno DMS-Cloud appliance and do it themselves. Treeno Document Vault 2.0 - document management appliance. The new Treeno Document Vault is designed specifically for the small to medium sized business. It is a completely self-contained plug-and-play document management server appliance. Treeno's EDM solutions include document, imaging, email and document workflow management. Treeno Software's mission is to provide their customers with operational workflow efficiencies and measureable return on investment (ROI) through the fast installation and implementation of their fully secure, highly reliable, and easy-to-use, web-based Enterprise Document Management (EDM) Solution. For more information on Treeno Software, please visit www.treenosoftware.com
Gary Edwards

Google Launches Cloud SQL API To Allow Developers To Manage Their Databases Programmati... - 0 views

techcrunch.com/...eir-databases-programmatically

ODBC Google-API Data-API

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Jun 13
     
    "Google's Cloud Platform has long featured Cloud SQL, a zero-maintenance MySQL database that's hosted on Google's cloud platform. What it didn't offer was an API to easily manage these databases without having to use Google's admin interface. Today, however, Google is launching the Cloud SQL API. This new REST API will allow developers to programmatically manage their database instances and open a number of new use cases for Cloud SQL. The API, which Google still deems to be experimental, will allow developers to create their own workflows to easily create and delete instances, restart them and restore them from backup. They will also be able to use it to important and export their databases to and from Google Cloud Storage. For developers, this means using Google's cloud database is now quite a bit easier, especially if they need to regularly manage multiple databases for their customers. Google's launch partner for this API is OrangeScape, which uses it to power parts of KiSSFLOW, its Google Apps workflow SaaS service. "
Gary Edwards

The End of the Battery - Getting All Charged Up over Supercapacitors - Casey Research - 0 views

www.caseyresearch.com/cdd

Casey-Research Technology Alex-Daley SuperCapacitors

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Apr 13
     
    Very interesting article describing the near market ready potential of "supercapacitor" batteries.   This is truly game changer stuff, and very interesting to me since i've been following the research and development of "graphene technologies" for some time.  The graphene superconductor targets the future of both energy and computing.  But graphene is also at the cutting edge of "faster, better, cheaper" water desalinization!  Nor does it take a rocket scientist to see that a graphene nano latice will have an enormous impact on methods of separating water (H2O) atoms to create an electical current - a cost free flow of electons.   Very well written research! excerpt: "an article in the recent issue of Nature Communications on a novel way to mass-produce so-called superconductors on the super-cheap - using no more equipment than the average home CD/DVD burner. Hacked together by a group of research scientists at UCLA, the ingenious technique is a way of producing layers of microscopically nuanced lattices called graphene, an essential component of many superconductor designs. It holds the promise of rapidly dropping prices for what was until now a very expensive process. You see, we've known about the concept of supercapacitors for decades. In fact, their antecedent, the capacitor, is one of the fundamental building blocks of electronics. Long before the Energizer Bunny starting banging its away around our television screens, engineers had been using capacitors to store electrical charge - originally as filters to help tune signals clearly on wireless radios of all sorts. The devices did so by storing and releasing excess energy, but only teeny amounts of it... we're talking millions of them to hold what a simple AA battery can. Over the years, however, scientists worked on increasing their storage capacity. Way back in 1957, engineers at General Electric came up with the first supercapacitor... but back then there were no uses for it. So, the technology
Paul Merrell

"Windows Management Framework" is here for Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003, 2008 - Remot... - 0 views

coolthingoftheday.blogspot.com/...agement-framework-is-here.html

Microsoft WMF WinRM 2 BITS 4

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Windows Management Framework, which includes Windows PowerShell 2.0, WinRM 2.0, and BITS 4.0, was officially released to the world this morning.
  • “Windows Management Framework, which includes Windows PowerShell 2.0, WinRM 2.0, and BITS 4.0, was officially released to the world this morning. By providing a consistent management interface across the various flavors of Windows, we are making our platform that much more attractive to deploy. IT Professionals can now easily manage their Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008 R2 machines through PowerShell remoting
  • WinRM is the Microsoft implementation of WS-Management Protocol, a standard Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)–based, firewall-friendly protocol that allows for hardware and operating systems from different vendors to interoperate. The WS-Management Protocol specification provides a common way for systems to access and exchange management information across an IT infrastructure.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • BITS is a service that transfers files between a client and a server. BITS provides a simple way to reliably and politely transfer files over HTTP or HTTPS. File downloads and file uploads are supported. By default, BITS transfers files in the background, unlike other protocols that transfer files in the foreground. Background transfers use only idle network bandwidth in order to preserve the user’s interactive experience with other network applications, such as Internet Explorer. Foreground or typical transfers are also supported.
Paul Merrell

Edward Snowden Explains How To Reclaim Your Privacy - 0 views

theintercept.com/...ns-how-to-reclaim-your-privacy

surveillance state Snowden operational-security advice must-read

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Micah Lee: What are some operational security practices you think everyone should adopt? Just useful stuff for average people. Edward Snowden: [Opsec] is important even if you’re not worried about the NSA. Because when you think about who the victims of surveillance are, on a day-to-day basis, you’re thinking about people who are in abusive spousal relationships, you’re thinking about people who are concerned about stalkers, you’re thinking about children who are concerned about their parents overhearing things. It’s to reclaim a level of privacy. The first step that anyone could take is to encrypt their phone calls and their text messages. You can do that through the smartphone app Signal, by Open Whisper Systems. It’s free, and you can just download it immediately. And anybody you’re talking to now, their communications, if it’s intercepted, can’t be read by adversaries. [Signal is available for iOS and Android, and, unlike a lot of security tools, is very easy to use.] You should encrypt your hard disk, so that if your computer is stolen the information isn’t obtainable to an adversary — pictures, where you live, where you work, where your kids are, where you go to school. [I’ve written a guide to encrypting your disk on Windows, Mac, and Linux.] Use a password manager. One of the main things that gets people’s private information exposed, not necessarily to the most powerful adversaries, but to the most common ones, are data dumps. Your credentials may be revealed because some service you stopped using in 2007 gets hacked, and your password that you were using for that one site also works for your Gmail account. A password manager allows you to create unique passwords for every site that are unbreakable, but you don’t have the burden of memorizing them. [The password manager KeePassX is free, open source, cross-platform, and never stores anything in the cloud.]
  • The other thing there is two-factor authentication. The value of this is if someone does steal your password, or it’s left or exposed somewhere … [two-factor authentication] allows the provider to send you a secondary means of authentication — a text message or something like that. [If you enable two-factor authentication, an attacker needs both your password as the first factor and a physical device, like your phone, as your second factor, to login to your account. Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, GitHub, Battle.net, and tons of other services all support two-factor authentication.]
  • We should armor ourselves using systems we can rely on every day. This doesn’t need to be an extraordinary lifestyle change. It doesn’t have to be something that is disruptive. It should be invisible, it should be atmospheric, it should be something that happens painlessly, effortlessly. This is why I like apps like Signal, because they’re low friction. It doesn’t require you to re-order your life. It doesn’t require you to change your method of communications. You can use it right now to talk to your friends.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Lee: What do you think about Tor? Do you think that everyone should be familiar with it, or do you think that it’s only a use-it-if-you-need-it thing? Snowden: I think Tor is the most important privacy-enhancing technology project being used today. I use Tor personally all the time. We know it works from at least one anecdotal case that’s fairly familiar to most people at this point. That’s not to say that Tor is bulletproof. What Tor does is it provides a measure of security and allows you to disassociate your physical location. … But the basic idea, the concept of Tor that is so valuable, is that it’s run by volunteers. Anyone can create a new node on the network, whether it’s an entry node, a middle router, or an exit point, on the basis of their willingness to accept some risk. The voluntary nature of this network means that it is survivable, it’s resistant, it’s flexible. [Tor Browser is a great way to selectively use Tor to look something up and not leave a trace that you did it. It can also help bypass censorship when you’re on a network where certain sites are blocked. If you want to get more involved, you can volunteer to run your own Tor node, as I do, and support the diversity of the Tor network.]
  • Lee: So that is all stuff that everybody should be doing. What about people who have exceptional threat models, like future intelligence-community whistleblowers, and other people who have nation-state adversaries? Maybe journalists, in some cases, or activists, or people like that? Snowden: So the first answer is that you can’t learn this from a single article. The needs of every individual in a high-risk environment are different. And the capabilities of the adversary are constantly improving. The tooling changes as well. What really matters is to be conscious of the principles of compromise. How can the adversary, in general, gain access to information that is sensitive to you? What kinds of things do you need to protect? Because of course you don’t need to hide everything from the adversary. You don’t need to live a paranoid life, off the grid, in hiding, in the woods in Montana. What we do need to protect are the facts of our activities, our beliefs, and our lives that could be used against us in manners that are contrary to our interests. So when we think about this for whistleblowers, for example, if you witnessed some kind of wrongdoing and you need to reveal this information, and you believe there are people that want to interfere with that, you need to think about how to compartmentalize that.
  • Tell no one who doesn’t need to know. [Lindsay Mills, Snowden’s girlfriend of several years, didn’t know that he had been collecting documents to leak to journalists until she heard about it on the news, like everyone else.] When we talk about whistleblowers and what to do, you want to think about tools for protecting your identity, protecting the existence of the relationship from any type of conventional communication system. You want to use something like SecureDrop, over the Tor network, so there is no connection between the computer that you are using at the time — preferably with a non-persistent operating system like Tails, so you’ve left no forensic trace on the machine you’re using, which hopefully is a disposable machine that you can get rid of afterward, that can’t be found in a raid, that can’t be analyzed or anything like that — so that the only outcome of your operational activities are the stories reported by the journalists. [SecureDrop is a whistleblower submission system. Here is a guide to using The Intercept’s SecureDrop server as safely as possible.]
  • And this is to be sure that whoever has been engaging in this wrongdoing cannot distract from the controversy by pointing to your physical identity. Instead they have to deal with the facts of the controversy rather than the actors that are involved in it. Lee: What about for people who are, like, in a repressive regime and are trying to … Snowden: Use Tor. Lee: Use Tor? Snowden: If you’re not using Tor you’re doing it wrong. Now, there is a counterpoint here where the use of privacy-enhancing technologies in certain areas can actually single you out for additional surveillance through the exercise of repressive measures. This is why it’s so critical for developers who are working on security-enhancing tools to not make their protocols stand out.
  • Paul Merrell on 16 Nov 15
     
    Lots more in the interview that I didn't highlight. This is a must-read.
Gary Edwards

Soonr Brings Cloud-Based MS Office Document Editing to the iPad: Online Colla... - 0 views

gigaom.com/...s-office-document-editing-ipad

wikiWORD jive-OfficeSync Soonr project-management Document-Management-System

shared by Gary Edwards on 23 May 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 23 May 11
     
    Soonr is an extremely well done document management service alternative to DropBox, Box.net, SyncDocs and a host of other services in this new Cloud sector of integrated document services.  What makes Soonr different is there focus on project management, with resource management for documents, collaborative notes and workgroups.  Nicely done.  Great iPAD interface.  Needs wikiWORD in the worst way.  Especially in the wake of Jive's purchase of OfficeSync. excerpt: Soonr is the first cloud file storage service to offer integrated editing for Microsoft Office documents on the iPad. Unlike cobbling together of file storage apps such as Dropbox and SugarSync with editing apps such as QuickOffice and Documents-To-Go, Soonr brings it all together so you can directly edit any files stored in the cloud using a single app. No configuration, no hassle, no cross-app interdependency. It also works offline when you don't have a Wi-Fi connection and will sync back up when you do. And you can store, share, access, search, edit and sync your files from any tablet securely through Soonr.
Gary Edwards

Two Microsofts: Mulling an alternate reality | ZDNet - 0 views

www.zdnet.com/n-alternate-reality-7000016916

Microsoft microsoft-monopoly Judge-Thomas-Penfield-Jackson

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Judge Jackson had it right. And the Court of Appeals? Not so much
  • Judge Jackson is an American hero and news of his passing thumped me hard. His ruling against Microsoft and the subsequent overturn of that ruling resulted, IMHO, in two extraordinary directions that changed the world. Sure the what-if game is interesting, but the reality itself is stunning enough. Of course, Judge Jackson sought to break the monopoly. The US Court of Appeals overturn resulted in the monopoly remaining intact, but the Internet remaining free and open. Judge Jackson's breakup plan had a good shot at achieving both a breakup of the monopoly and, a free and open Internet. I admit though that at the time I did not favor the Judge's plan. And i actually did submit a proposal based on Microsoft having to both support the WiNE project, and, provide a complete port to WiNE to any software provider requesting a port. I wanted to break the monopolist's hold on the Windows Productivity Environment and the hundreds of millions of investment dollars and time that had been spent on application development forever trapped on that platform. For me, it was the productivity platform that had to be broken.
  • I assume the good Judge thought that separating the Windows OS from Microsoft Office / Applications would force the OS to open up the secret API's even as the OS continued to evolve. Maybe. But a full disclosure of the API's coupled with the community service "port to WiNE" requirement might have sped up the process. Incredibly, the "Undocumented Windows Secrets" industry continues to thrive, and the legendary Andrew Schulman's number is still at the top of Silicon Valley legal profession speed dials. http://goo.gl/0UGe8 Oh well. The Court of Appeals stopped the breakup, leaving the Windows Productivity Platform intact. Microsoft continues to own the "client" in "Client/Server" computing. Although Microsoft was temporarily stopped from leveraging their desktop monopoly to an iron fisted control and dominance of the Internet, I think what were watching today with the Cloud is Judge Jackson's worst nightmare. And mine too. A great transition is now underway, as businesses and enterprises begin the move from legacy client/server business systems and processes to a newly emerging Cloud Productivity Platform. In this great transition, Microsoft holds an inside straight. They have all the aces because they own the legacy desktop productivity platform, and can control the transition to the Cloud. No doubt this transition is going to happen. And it will severely disrupt and change Microsoft's profit formula. But if the Redmond reprobate can provide a "value added" transition of legacy business systems and processes, and direct these new systems to the Microsoft Cloud, the profits will be immense.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Judge Jackson sought to break the ability of Microsoft to "leverage" their existing monopoly into the Internet and his plan was overturned and replaced by one based on judicial oversight. Microsoft got a slap on the wrist from the Court of Appeals, but were wailed on with lawsuits from the hundreds of parties injured by their rampant criminality. Some put the price of that criminality as high as $14 Billion in settlements. Plus, the shareholders forced Chairman Bill to resign. At the end of the day though, Chairman Bill was right. Keeping the monopoly intact was worth whatever penalty Microsoft was forced to pay. He knew that even the judicial over-site would end one day. Which it did. And now his company is ready to go for it all by leveraging and controlling the great productivity transition. No business wants to be hostage to a cold heart'd monopolist. But there is huge difference between a non-disruptive and cost effective, process-by-process value-added transition to a Cloud Productivity Platform, and, the very disruptive and costly "rip-out-and-replace" transition offered by Google, ZOHO, Box, SalesForce and other Cloud Productivity contenders. Microsoft, and only Microsoft, can offer the value-added transition path. If they get the Cloud even halfway right, they will own business productivity far into the future. Rest in Peace Judge Jackson. Your efforts were heroic and will be remembered as such. ~ge~
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Jun 13
     
    Comments on the latest SVN article mulling the effects of Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's anti trust ruling and proposed break up of Microsoft. comment: "Chinese Wall" Ummm, there was a Chinese Wall between Microsoft Os and the MS Applciations layer. At least that's what Chairman Bill promised developers at a 1990 OS/2-Windows Conference I attended. It was a developers luncheon, hosted by Microsoft, with Chairman Bill speaking to about 40 developers with applications designed to run on the then soon to be released Windows 3.0. In his remarks, the Chairman described his vision of commoditizing the personal computer market through an open hardware-reference platform on the one side of the Windows OS, and provisioning an open application developers layer on the other using open and totally transparent API's. Of course the question came up concerning the obvious advantage Microsoft applications would have. Chairman Bill answered the question by describing the Chinese Wall that existed between Microsoft's OS and Apps develop departments. He promised that OS API's would be developed privately and separate from the Apps department, and publicly disclosed to ALL developers at the same time. Oh yeah. There was lots of anti IBM - evil empire stuff too :) Of course we now know this was a line of crap. Microsoft Apps was discovered to have been using undocumented and secret Window API's. http://goo.gl/0UGe8. Microsoft Apps had a distinct advantage over the competition, and eventually the entire Windows Productivity Platform became dependent on the MSOffice core. The company I worked for back then, Pyramid Data, had the first Contact Management application for Windows; PowerLeads. Every Friday night we would release bug fixes and improvements using Wildcat BBS. By Monday morning we would be slammed with calls from users complaining that they had downloaded the Friday night patch, and now some other application would not load or function properly. Eventually we tracked th
Gary Edwards

Is Microsoft On The Verge Of A Sudden Collapse Predicted By Catastrophe Theory? - Forbes - 1 views

www.forbes.com/...redicted-by-catastrophe-theory

Microsoft Microsoft-Death-Spiral

shared by Gary Edwards on 27 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 27 Nov 12
     
    Forbes magazine has a doom and gloom Microsoft article that "ends on a note of doom".  They lampoon Windows 8 using the reviews of other bloggers like Charlie Demerjian, "Microsoft has failed". http://goo.gl/H4mZc The end of Microsoft though comes from the inability of Microsoft to change course.  In short, Microsoft has fallen into a death spiral consistent with Catastrophe theory (http://goo.gl/6CWwY). No comment or mention of Microsoft Cloud efforts:  Azure, Live.com, or SkyDrive. excerpt: In the end, the death spiral for Microsoft is in full effect, and management is expending a lot of effort to speed it up. Anyone who dares point out that the entire system is collapsing, or worse yet suggests an alternative, gets Sinofsky'd. Or was it Guggenheimer'd? In any case, Microsoft is unwilling to change, and that is very clear. Even if they wanted to, they are culturally far beyond the point of being able to. What was a slow bleed of marketshare is now gushing, and management is clueless, intransigent, and myopic. Game over, the thrashing will continue for a bit, but it won't change the outcome. Microsoft has failed. I hope this isn't true. Microsoft has been a stabilizing force in the market and many users are very attached to its products. For the first time, however, businesses can look to Google and to Apple and see plausible, battle-tested alternatives to the products they have used from Microsoft-for much less money. And in a bizarre way, Microsofts spasm of innovation has made the company now a destabilizing factor for IT departments and Google Docs is looking an awful lot like the old guard. The big question is how fast Microsoft might collapse if businesses began to defect en masse. Like other phenomena of global instability, extreme change seems to come quicker now. For Microsoft, the window is closing fast."
Gary Edwards

How To Win The Cloud Wars - Forbes - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...how-to-win-the-cloud-wars

Cloud-Computing

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Sep 12
     
    Byron Deeter is right, but perhaps he's holding back on his reasoning.  Silicon Valley is all about platform, and platform plays only come about once every ten to twenty years.  They come like great waves of change, not replacing the previous waves as much as taking away and running with the future.   Cloud Computing is the fourth great wave.  It will replace the PC and Network Computing waves as the future.  It is the target of all developers and entrepreneurs.   The four great waves are mainframe, workstation, pc and networked pc, and the Internet.  Cloud Computing takes the Internet to such a high level of functionality that it will now replace the pc-netwroking wave.  It's going to be enormous.  Especially as enterprises move their business productivity and data / content apps from the desktop/workgroup to the Cloud.  Enormous. The key was the perfect storm of 2008, where mobility (iPhone) converged with the standardization of tagged PDF, which converged with the Cloud Computing application and data model, which all happened at the time of the great financial collapse.   The financial collapase of 2008 caused a tectonic shift in productivity.  Survival meant doing more with less.  Particularly less labor since cost of labor was and continues to be a great uncertainty.  But that's also the definition of productivity and automation.  To survive, companies were compelled to reduce labor and invest in software/hardware systems based productivity.  The great leap to a new platform had it's fuel; survival. Social applications and services are just the simplest manifestation of productivity through managed connectivity in the Cloud.  Wait until this new breed of productivity reaches business apps!  The platform wars have begun, and it's for all the marbles. One last thought.  The Internet was always going to win as the next computing platform wave.  It's the first time communications have been combined and integrated into content, and vast dat
Paul Merrell

Cover Pages: Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) - 0 views

xml.coverpages.org/cmis.html

interop CMIS ECM emerging standards web app glue

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Apr 10 - Cached
  • On October 06, 2008, OASIS issued a public call for participation in a new technical committee chartered to define specifications for use of Web services and Web 2.0 interfaces to enable information sharing across content management repositories from different vendors. The OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) TC will build upon existing specifications to "define a domain model and bindings that are designed to be layered on top of existing Content Management systems and their existing programmatic interfaces. The TC will not prescribe how specific features should be implemented within those Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems. Rather it will seek to define a generic/universal set of capabilities provided by an ECM system and a set of services for working with those capabilities." As of February 17, 2010, the CMIS technical work had received broad support through TC participation, industry analyst opinion, and declarations of interest from major companies. Some of these include Adobe, Adullact, AIIM, Alfresco, Amdocs, Anakeen, ASG Software Solutions, Booz Allen Hamilton, Capgemini, Citytech, Content Technologies, Day Software, dotCMS, Ektron, EMC, EntropySoft, ESoCE-NET, Exalead, FatWire, Fidelity, Flatirons, fme AG, Genus Technologies, Greenbytes GmbH, Harris, IBM, ISIS Papyrus, KnowledgeTree, Lexmark, Liferay, Magnolia, Mekon, Microsoft, Middle East Technical University, Nuxeo, Open Text, Oracle, Pearson, Quark, RSD, SAP, Saperion, Structured Software Systems (3SL), Sun Microsystems, Tanner AG, TIBCO Software, Vamosa, Vignette, and WeWebU Software. Early commentary from industry analysts and software engineers is positive about the value proposition in standardizing an enterprise content-centric management specification. The OASIS announcement of November 17, 2008 includes endorsements. Principal use cases motivating the CMIS technical work include collaborative content applications, portals leveraging content management repositories, mashups, and searching a content repository.
  • Paul Merrell on 28 Apr 10
     
    I should have posted before about CMIS, an emerging standard with a very lot of buy-in by vendors large and small. I've been watching the buzz grow via Robin Cover's Daily XML links service. IIt's now on my "need to watch" list. 
Paul Merrell

FBI Flouts Obama Directive to Limit Gag Orders on National Security Letters - The Inter... - 0 views

firstlook.org/...ders-national-security-letters

surveillance state FBI NSLs litigation 1st Amendment civil-liberties

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Despite the post-Snowden spotlight on mass surveillance, the intelligence community’s easiest end-run around the Fourth Amendment since 2001 has been something called a National Security Letter. FBI agents can demand that an Internet service provider, telephone company or financial institution turn over its records on any number of people — without any judicial review whatsoever — simply by writing a letter that says the information is needed for national security purposes. The FBI at one point was cranking out over 50,000 such letters a year; by the latest count, it still issues about 60 a day. The letters look like this:
  • Recipients are legally required to comply — but it doesn’t stop there. They also aren’t allowed to mention the order to anyone, least of all the person whose data is being searched. Ever. That’s because National Security Letters almost always come with eternal gag orders. Here’s that part:
  • Despite the use of the word “now” in that first sentence, however, the FBI has yet to do any such thing. It has not announced any such change, nor explained how it will implement it, or when. Media inquiries were greeted with stalling and, finally, a no comment — ostensibly on advice of legal counsel. “There is pending litigation that deals with a lot of the same questions you’re asking, out of the Ninth Circuit,” FBI spokesman Chris Allen told me. “So for now, we’ll just have to decline to comment.” FBI lawyers are working on a court filing for that case, and “it will address” the new policy, he said. He would not say when to expect it.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • That means the NSL process utterly disregards the First Amendment as well. More than a year ago, President Obama announced that he was ordering the Justice Department to terminate gag orders “within a fixed time unless the government demonstrates a real need for further secrecy.” And on Feb. 3, when the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced a handful of baby steps resulting from its “comprehensive effort to examine and enhance [its] privacy and civil liberty protections” one of the most concrete was — finally — to cap the gag orders: In response to the President’s new direction, the FBI will now presumptively terminate National Security Letter nondisclosure orders at the earlier of three years after the opening of a fully predicated investigation or the investigation’s close. Continued nondisclosures orders beyond this period are permitted only if a Special Agent in Charge or a Deputy Assistant Director determines that the statutory standards for nondisclosure continue to be satisfied and that the case agent has justified, in writing, why continued nondisclosure is appropriate.
  • There is indeed a significant case currently before the federal appeals court in San Francisco. Oral arguments were in October. A decision could come any time. But in that case, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which is representing two unnamed communications companies that received NSLs, is calling for the entire NSL statute to be thrown out as unconstitutional — not for a tweak to the gag. And it has a March 2013 district court ruling in its favor. “The gag is a prior restraint under the First Amendment, and prior restraints have to meet an extremely high burden,” said Andrew Crocker, a legal fellow at EFF. That means going to court and meeting the burden of proof — not just signing a letter. Or as the Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez put it, “To have such a low bar for denying persons or companies the right to speak about government orders they have been served with is anathema. And it is not very good for accountability.”
  • In a separate case, a wide range of media companies (including First Look Media, the non-profit digital media venture that produces The Intercept) are supporting a lawsuit filed by Twitter, demanding the right to say specifically how many NSLs it has received. But simply releasing companies from a gag doesn’t assure the kind of accountability that privacy advocates are saying is required by the Constitution. “What the public has to remember is a NSL is asking for your information, but it’s not asking it from you,” said Michael German, a former FBI agent who is now a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice. “The vast majority of these things go to the very large telecommunications and financial companies who have a large stake in maintaining a good relationship with the government because they’re heavily regulated entities.”
  • So, German said, “the number of NSLs that would be exposed as a result of the release of the gag order is probably very few. The person whose records are being obtained is the one who should receive some notification.” A time limit on gags going forward also raises the question of whether past gag orders will now be withdrawn. “Obviously there are at this point literally hundreds of thousands of National Security Letters that are more than three years old,” said Sanchez. Individual review is therefore unlikely, but there ought to be some recourse, he said. And the further back you go, “it becomes increasingly implausible that a significant percentage of those are going to entail some dire national security risk.” The NSL program has a troubled history. The absolute secrecy of the program and resulting lack of accountability led to systemic abuse as documented by repeated inspector-general investigations, including improperly authorized NSLs, factual misstatements in the NSLs, improper requests under NSL statutes, requests for information based on First Amendment protected activity, “after-the-fact” blanket NSLs to “cover” illegal requests, and hundreds of NSLs for “community of interest” or “calling circle” information without any determination that the telephone numbers were relevant to authorized national security investigations.
  • Obama’s own hand-selected “Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies” recommended in December 2013 that NSLs should only be issued after judicial review — just like warrants — and that any gag should end within 180 days barring judicial re-approval. But FBI director James Comey objected to the idea, calling NSLs “a very important tool that is essential to the work we do.” His argument evidently prevailed with Obama.
  • NSLs have managed to stay largely under the American public’s radar. But, Crocker says, “pretty much every time I bring it up and give the thumbnail, people are shocked. Then you go into how many are issued every year, and they go crazy.” Want to send me your old NSL and see if we can set a new precedent? Here’s how to reach me. And here’s how to leak to me.
Gary Edwards

Feng Office: Putting the "Flow" in Workflow - 0 views

webworkerdaily.com/...e-putting-the-flow-in-workflow

feng-office conrado-vina web-contact-manager office20

shared by Gary Edwards on 01 Jul 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 01 Jul 09
     
    Conrado gets a very good review! Excerpt: Feng Office packs most of the features you should require for most project management duties. In addition to basics like calendars, contacts and email, it also provides milestone and task management, and a built-in time-tracking function. All of the above are well-implemented, although some users may actually find the similar interface design of all the functions more confusing than helpful, since it's often not clear which function you're using at any given time without looking at what tab is highlighted. I like the uniformity, though, since it gives each feature a sense of connectedness to the others and adds to the feeling that Feng Office is a holistic solution. Notes, Links and Documents features also bring much to Feng Office's overall value proposition, and each is well-executed. You can even create new Word docs and PowerPoint HTML documents and presentations directly from within Feng Office using its own built-in editors, both of which retain UI elements from Microsoft's own suite. That means less time switching from browser to standalone apps, which adds up to better productivity.
malwaresecurity

What is Mobile Device Management (MDM) Explained | Comodo - 0 views

bit.ly/2MeP13r

Mobile Device Manager

shared by malwaresecurity on 17 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • malwaresecurity on 17 Jan 19
     
    Mobile Device Management(MDM) is a type of mobile security software that is implemented by IT departments to control and protect the mobile devices of employees. It is employed across multiple operating systems and various service providers.
  • malwaresecurity on 17 Jan 19
     
    Mobile Device Management(MDM) is a type of mobile security software that is implemented by IT departments to control and protect the mobile devices of employees. It is employed across multiple operating systems and various service providers.
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