Coté's People Over Process

(The link round up probably won’t be back until after the US Thanksgiving break: enjoy the feasting! –Coté)

• NOSQL Patterns
• Red Hat debuts virtualization management
  Gordon gives you the quick low-down on RedHat's virtualization strategy with KVM.
• Plethora of New Regulations Requires Data-Driven Enterprise
  Kind of a pass-thru piece for Informatica, but, hey, still good data for Wall Street is probably looking for. "The first one is making sure the data is relevant, explained Parthasarathi in an interview with Wall Street & Technology. "If a compliance officer is able to answer a particular question, but says I can't answer that question, that won't do," he says. The second challenge is to make sure the data is trustworthy and the third challenge is timely data, he said, adding, "The fines from missing the deadlines is increasing." Complicating the process further, data is spread across so many different systems, so that delivering timely data is a challenge, he adds. In order to respond to multiple regulators in the U.S. and abroad, asking for different types of data and quality levels, Parthasarthi said that firms need a data-driven enterprise."
• Con-way Freight’s Modernization Journey Using SOA at Mainframe Executive
  "Con-way Freight recently reached a milestone marking its arrival near the finish line of a decade-long journey to modernize its mainframe applications…. In the final stage, the EJBs and their methods were wrapped as standard Web services. With this, the team had arrived at SOA as we know it today." In the words of that ever quotable movie: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." Snarkyness aside, it's a pretty good and detailed write-up of mainframe modernization.
• So where's Microsoft's Live Mesh?
  Seems like Ray Ozzie is operating more in the consumer, end-user side of Microsoft rather than the IT, infrastructure side. Fair enough.
• Financial Firm CIOs Strongly Favor IBM, Aite Survey Finds
• What's next for Microsoft's Azure cloud platform?
  Addressing legacy IT in cloud transitions: "To enable existing apps to run on Azure, Microsoft is planning to make virtual machines (VMs) available to developers, which they will be able to customize and run their legacy apps inside them." Also: "Microsoft officials made a vague reference in this morning’s keynote to System Center in the cloud. I asked Srivastava if this meant Microsoft was looking to offer System Center as a Microsoft-hosted service, the way that it is offering Exchange and Office Communications Server as Microsoft-hosted offerings. That isn’t the case, he said; instead, Microsoft has opened up the Windows Azure management programming interfaces so that System Center — as well as third-party management products like HP OpenView — can manage Azure-hosted applications."
• Three new codenames and how they fit into Microsoft's cloud vision
  Crack-coverage from Mary-Jo: Azure consolidated down (compare to the complex IBM cloud burger) and three new project/layer names for VPN'ed cloud connections ("Sydney"), data marketplaces like Infochimps ("Dallas"), and AppFabric (app server, caching).
• A critical PDC for Microsoft
  "It sounds unlikely [that Microsoft will be the open web champions]; but where do you go if your mood is “anything but Google”? We could see some surprising new alliances; though I honestly do not see the Windows-Office empire within Microsoft accepting that kind of role under the current leadership."
• News Corp. Joined by Rivals Weighing Google Block
  Man, I love the story here: media fights back! I hope we see a lot more of this cause it's sure more exciting than watching news(papers) sulk in their booze over "free."
• Augmented Reality: Getting Beyond the Hype
  Check it out, whurley's now an augmented reality guy.
• Can (and will) Microsoft keep Silverlight compatible across platforms?
• Attentio raises €525,000 for social media monitoring and analysis software suite
• UK jails schizophrenic for refusal to decrypt files
• HP floats Q4 profit on services biz
• Microsoft begins paving path for IT and cloud integration
  Quick round-up of Microsoft cloud efforts and projects.
• WSO2 extending SOA into cloud computing
  WSO2 launches a cloud portfolio. To choose one of the items: "The WSO2 Cloud Connector products enable developers to offer fast and secure cloud services, WSO2 said. These include Cloud Services Gateway, offering a secure tunnel into an enterprise from a cloud, and Service Accelerator, decoupling quality of service processing from back-end services and enabling message-processing. The products are composed of a cloud virtual machine and a component running locally within an enterprise, enabling communication between enterprise and cloud systems."
• When Designing for Moblin, Think Like a Mobile User, Part 2
  Part two of a brief, but nice series on UX for mobile/hand-held devices (just generalize it from Moblin), e.g.: "The Moblin experience should be more like a media player than like a desktop application."
• Open Source Designers – A community of practice for design & user experience people in Open Source
  "If you’re doing design & user experience work in an open source community, then chances are we have a lot in common – no matter what community we’re working in. We have some big challenges every day, but we also know that if we can overcome those challenges we can make a really big contribution to the sustainability and increased popularity of open source software. The purpose of this site is to create a space where we can come together to share our experiences, to ask each other questions, to compare notes and to promote the projects we’re working on and help get some extra eyes on our work – and to act as a support network."
• When Designing for Moblin, Think Like a Mobile User: Part 1
  More than being targeted at Moblin, this is about designing for hand-held, mobile devices, e.g.: "snacking," how the battery running out effects UX/design, etc.
• Why Tim O'Reilly Sees Microsoft as a Proponent of the Open Web
• Linux owns 32 percent of netbook market, says study
• Pictures in Our Heads
  I thought he'd go into what it was like using an iPhone to write a column, but instead he goes all cyberpunk.
• Microsoft still working on an Adobe Lightroom competitor, but with a social twist
  Flickr/Yahoo! should be working on one of these. No one seems to be figuring out (gulp) "Photography 2.0."
• H-E-B to expand Allandale store