In-the-Clouds-with-SOA-XML-and-the-Open-Web

2006 MSDN white paper that is the best overview I've found thus far of the bridges Microsoft is building between Office 2007 and the Microsoft cloud. 12 pp. Somewhat dated in the intervening two years. Describes the Microsoft "line of business" vision for vertical markets in some detail. "This white paper introduces Office Business Applications (OBAs), a new breed of easily customizable solutions that address real-world business problems through the 2007 Microsoft Office system. OBAs deliver people-centric, collaborative solutions to the enterprise through familiar Microsoft Office servers, clients, and tools. This document discusses today's business environment, identifies a "results gap" that contributes to reduced productivity, and shows that OBAs are an effective new approach that enables enterprises to achieve the "last mile of productivity." You will see that several key components of the 2007 Microsoft Office system can be used to develop Office Business Applications and that, when Line of Business Integration (LOBi) for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is released, it will further simplify the development of OBAs. Finally, if you would like to develop a collaboration-planning scenario using the 2007 Office system, just follow the steps outlined in this paper."

"Washington, D.C., May 14, 2008 - The Securities and Exchange Commission today voted unanimously to formally propose using new technology to get important information to investors faster, more reliably, and at a lower cost. At the center of the SEC proposal is "interactive data" - computer "tags" similar in function to bar codes used to identify groceries and shipped packages. The interactive data tags uniquely identify individual items in a company's financial statement so they can be easily searched on the Internet, downloaded into spreadsheets, reorganized in databases, and put to any number of other comparative and analytical uses by investors, analysts, and journalists. The proposed rule would require all U.S. companies to provide financial information using interactive data beginning next year for the largest companies, and within three years for all public companies." Note that reports must currently be submitted in the Edgar format, with WordPerfect the only major word processor writing directly to Edgar. See also http://www.xbrl.org/faq.aspx (.) The proposal is potentially susceptible to legal challenge at the WTO per terms of the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade and the Agrement on Government Procurement. If approved, XBRL would constitute a "technical regulation" within the meaning of the ATBT and a "technical specification" within the meaning of the AGP. That raises the issue of whether XBRL constitutes an unnecessary obstacle to international trade within the meaning of those treaties. This is the kind of stuff that is supposed to get sorted out by joint creation of an international standard by ATBT member nations. But both treaties are very poorly implemented in the U.S.

""The response has been amazing -- since we launched in January, the velocity of sales for Office 2008 is nearly three times what we saw after the launch of Office 2004," said Craig Eisler, general manager of the Mac BU at Microsoft. ... As part of its announcements Tuesday, the Mac BU also said it intends to bring VBA-language support back to the next version of Office for Mac, but offered no timeframe for the update." According to the article, sales for MS Office 2008 for the Mac have tripled what MS Office 2004 accomplished. There's a bit of a wookie hidden in the claim because new Mac sales have far more than tripled since the comparable period following the release of Office 2004. So even though Microsoft Office gross sales on the Mac have increased from the period compared, there is a strong appearance that Microsoft is losing market share on the Mac, something I would be concerned about were I Steve Ballmer, not something to celebrate. Also note that the lack of VBA support in Office 2008 plus a few other Microsoft moves dealt Office for the Mac out of the Micrsooft cloud. Why Redmond might suddenly have a change of heart and deal Apple into the MS Cloud afer all is something not explained. But it is somewhat plausible that Microsoft feels the need to change its mind on VBA because it is losing market share on the Mac. My assessment? The VBA announcement is vaporware until proved otherwise, designed to slow the adoption of competing office software on the Mac, which makes the rapidly expanding OS X stack, e.g., now able to run Linux apps, a bigger threat to Windows. Microsoft is obviously losing Office market share on the Mac platform and OS X is eating Windows market share. Time for vaporware.

"Sun Microsystems demos two new JavaFX-powered applications, Photo Flocker and Movie Cloud, at its annual JavaOne Conference in San Francisco Tuesday." Part of the JavaFX package is new codecs. The video on this page demos the high-definition video codecs and 3-D effects., plus some sound. The HD video impressed me. It's noticeably better than normal video fare on the web.

"JavaFX will, like all of Sun's software platforms, be made freely available as open source, and it'll be released via the GPL (v2) license." But note that Schwartz stretches the truth mightily here. E.g., Solaris is under the CDDL license, OpenOffice.org was just changed to LGPLv3 from LGPLv2, on and on.

Service Component Architecture (SCA), an SOA specification for transforming IT assets into reusable services, was hailed Tuesday as a way to build services with lower barriers to adoption and link SOA to Web 2.0. ... SCA provides an executable model for assembling services and supports multiple languages such as BPEL (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services), Java and PHP scripts, said Edwards. "It's simplified because it has this principle of removing middleware APIs," said Edwards. ... There are multiple implementations of SCO and SDO, said Edwards. Official 1.0 versions of SDO and SCA from OASIS are expected by the end of the year.

A browser plug-in for JavaFX will be featured in the Java SE (Standard Edition) 6 Update 10 release due this fall. Both Adobe, with its Flash platform, and Microsoft, with Silverlight, are offering plug-in platforms for rich Internet applications. But Sun plans to provide the industry-leading rich client with JavaFX, said Param Singh, Sun senior director of Java marketing. The Java runtime helps make this possible, he stressed during an interview at the JavaOne conference on Thursday afternoon. "The Java runtime is on over 900 million desktops today," Singh said. Every month, there are 40 million downloads of updates to the Java runtime, he said. Additionally, there are more than 2.2 mobile phones with Java on them, not to mention Java's presence in 100 percent of Blu-ray devices, said Singh. "The notion is, we will take JavaFX where the Java runtime is available," Singh said. Sun's JavaFX plug-in will enable deployment of applications that can work either in or outside of the browser, Singh said. This ability to run applications inside or outside of a browser is similar to what Adobe is offering with its AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) software.

Very large collection of links to Groklaw articles dealing with Sun and Solaris, with article titles and dates, arranged chronologically. With the Microsoft cloud running atop Solaris, this is likely to be a useful research tool to access relevant historical information.

(Use page search) Obama will appoint the nation's first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century. The CTO will ensure the safety of our networks and will lead an interagency effort, working with chief technology and chief information officers of each of the federal agencies, to ensure that they use best-in-class technologies and share best practices. ... The CTO will also ensure technological interoperability of key government functions. For example, the Chief Technology Officer will oversee the development of a national, interoperable wireless network for local, state and federal first responders as the 9/11 commission recommended. This will ensure that fire officials, police officers and EMTs from different jurisdictions have the ability to communicate with each other during a crisis and we do not have a repeat of the failure to deliver critical public services that occurred in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. ...