What Is It?

The essence of the OMC’s mission is:

The Consortium will work to drive open standards for systems management within the industry, assisting IT managers and system administrators to custom-create solutions to best serve their business needs. One of the first projects will involve developing protocols for managing common IT infrastructure components, including information about servers, storage devices, configurations, networks models, middleware, applications and other relevant data, to create a unified approach to systems management for open source vendors and projects. The Consortium’s agenda also includes designing several integration paths for exchanging data with proprietary systems.

And the founding members are:

Nagios (sponsored by Ayamon), NetDirector (sponsored by Emu Software), openQRM (sponsored by Qlusters), openSIMS (sponsored by Symbiot), the Webmin project and the Zenoss project (sponsored by Zenoss, Inc.).

You can check out the rest of the site at www.open-management.com. Raven Zachary of 451 also has some commentary on the OMC.

How Real Is It?

I’ve spoken with several of the vendors involved, and they’re companies and software are very real. They have paying customers, roadmaps, and good systems management pedigree. I’ve also spoken extensively with some of the people involved, particularly, whurley, and I know he’s for real not only with his vision, but the execution of it.

As with any group, simply slapping up a web page, blog, and mailing list, snazzy as they may look, are simply the costs of doing business. The type and amount of activity on the mailing list over the next few months will be the best indicator — from afar — of how “real” the group is. The next mile-stone is developing some sort of interop mechanism — perhaps a standard — that each of the members support and ship. Once that’s accomplished, them the OMC will indeed, be very real.

And, by “real” I mean an active threat to The Big 4: BMC, IBM, CA, and HP…and, as we’ll see below, Microsoft.

The Zero Sum Game

The OMC’s goal to go up against The Big 4 is no big secret. Indeed, whurley said as much in an interview with Dan Farber last month:

Hurley described the coalition as a potential “800-pound gorilla alternative to IBM Tivoli” and other proprietary heavyweights, who he dissed as “old and stodgy” compared to the more fleet “user-driven innovations” that come from an open source ecosystem.

Along those lines, the first thing that’ll be fun to watch is the mailing list and the blog reaction. Getting open source systems management people talking on one mailing list is sure to be enjoyable. The OSS systems management people have a window open to cause some serious disruption in the systems management world, and ganging up together gives them a good shot at not only surviving, but thriving.

There’ll be a lot of excitement all around if Big 4 vs. OSS systems management goes zero-sum. Remember how much fun it was to think, talk, and write about Windows vs. Linux, and the watch Linux take out all the commercial Unixes?

Growing Instead of Killing

I’m not much for vendor sports, even when vendors are open source. In my ideal world, I’d prefer to see The Big 4 and the OMC partner up and work together. I’m pretty sure the “small” guys wouldn’t mind that at all, if it was genuine, but I’m somewhat pessimistic about the larger folks even smelling out the other camp: indeed, what’s the motivation. Of all The Big 4, CA has done something to make me think otherwise.

I’ve suggested that Microsoft team up with the likes of the OMC, and the same applies to The Big 4 as well. The great thing about “open thinking” is that everyone is welcome to the party as long as they’re not an ass. So if you’re one of BMC, IBM, CA, or HP, I’d suggest figuring out how to become part of the OMC, ideally by open sourcing something yourself, getting involved with standardization, or something as base as sponsoring them. There’s plenty of standardization work to be done that will be beneficial no matter who does it, and a body like the OMC could be a catalyst for actually getting a usable and ubiquitous systems management standard. Old King SNMP has sit on the throne for a long, long, long time, and the fracture between WS-Management and WSDM will just be a distraction from whatever the OMC or others might come up with.

The benefits for the OMC of Big 4 involvement would be, essentially, an instant victory in their mission: shaking up systems management both technologically and price-wise. As always, Sun is the wild-card with their yet to be open sourced systems management suite. Involvement from Sun would be fantastically exciting to see, perhaps we can arrange something if both parties are interested in smelling each other out.

Microsoft & the Mid-market

For the OMC, of course, I still believe that Microsoft is their biggest competition: the small to mid-market is going to be both Microsoft’s and the OMC member’s bread and butter for the next few years.

Indeed, assimilating or “winning” against Microsoft is probably the gate-keeper for even getting on the battle field with The Big 4. At the very least (and here I go sinking into military analogies again, apologies all around), the OMC will have a two front war to fight against Microsoft and The Big 4.

I have no doubt that the open source systems management crew has and will have the technology to do it: the real question is if they can change the culture of enterprise systems management to buy from them. Again, when it comes to smaller folks, working together is always the best shot at that kind of marketering.

Innovation

At the very least, I’m hoping that the energy and the passion of the OMC members will give the systems management a big shot in the arm: there’s plenty of innovation to be had outside of the mindset that’s existed for years. I’ve seen The Big 4 talking a good talk along those lines, but they haven’t had motivation to go into hyper-mode and deliver at a rapid pace. Those thick maintenance revenues are keeping the halls awfully quite. Hopefully, the OMC will live up to my expectations and light a big enough fire under the whole systems management market, themselves includes, to spice things up. These next few months will be telling

Disclaimer: Microsoft, BMC, IBM, and Sun are clients.

Technorati Tags: bmc, ca, enterprisesoftware, hp, ibm, opensource, microsoft, puppy, socialsoftware, systemsmanagement

• A Power Supply in Every Pot & First Impressions
• Systems Management Protocols, WS-Management and Vista
• Microsoft Acquires AssetMetrix, could it be foundation for CMDB/ITIL asset management?
• Backporting WS-Management
• The Midmarket, Open Source, and Microsoft Systems Management
• More on WS-Management, MONAD/PowerShell, and Workflows

Technorati Tags: conferences, microsoft, microsoftmanagementsummit, mms2006, systemsmangement

Any further thoughts about WS Management?

I really need to look at it from a technical angle. As we were talking about awhile ago, I’m highly skeptical of most WS-* specs. On the other hand, if WS-Management is ubiquitous enough, my personal tastes for WS-* won’t matter ;)

That said, there’s still a huge window open until Vista ships, it’s widely deployed, and Microsoft back-ports WS-Management to older Windows versions. That is, it’ll be quite sometime before WS-Management is everywhere. In the meantime, a quick and simple REST approach could take hold. The advantage of simple is that it tends to spread fast, multiplying first-mover advantage.

…more than likely, though, SNMP, WMI, perfmon, screen scraping with SSH, and all the 1-off methods of gathering data will continue to hold their dominance as the preferred systems management protocols. They certainly won’t go away anytime soon.

What do you think of MONAD?

From what I saw of PowerShell, I was impressed. The ability to do batch operations from the command line and pipe the output of each to other processes in great. My gut tells me that sysadmins are going to find PowerShell indispensible.

I pinged someone about it who expressed concern that it didn’t work remotely. I haven’t check on this, but if that’s the case, PowerShell won’t be quite as handy for systems management platforms as I’d hoped. My thinking was that PowerShell would provide another way to remotely gather low level monitoring data and, more importantly, execute management tasks in Windows land. But, if you’re limited to doing it all in locally, it won’t be quite as nice.

I downloaded PowerShell RC1 documentation pack, so hopefully I can find sometime to read up more on the topic. It would, of course, be great to get a followup briefing to sort all this out ;>

What do you think of WorkFlows?

This is an area I haven’t looked in at all. Several System Center offerings (like Service Desk) are relying on Workflow heavily to implement a lot of the process and ITIL/MOF features.

This is all wild speculation, but if the artifacts of those Workflows can be imported into other systems, then other systems management vendors might want to keep on eye on the how the format’s used. As always, a systems management platform is strongest when it can accept input from as many “3rd party” applications and silos as possible, and Microsoft looks to be providing a whole new passel of inputs over the next few years.

Disclaimer: Microsoft is a client, as is BMC.

Technorati Tags: bmc, conferences, enterprisesoftware, microsoft, microsoftmanagementsummit, mms2006, monad, powershell, systemsmangement, workflow, ws-management

(I should probably clarify for those of you don’t know me personally that I separate out being able to say something funny about a word from making fun of what that word represents. I am a multi-layered smart-ass.)

Long-tail Systems Management

Of late, the enterprise systems management crew has been questing for the suite spot (pun intended ;>) to sell to the mid-market. The target sales are people who don’t want to sign an “enterprise license” and/or gorge on the stream of software and configuration that comes with enterprise systems management. The arguments that we hear from the OSS systems management vendors, closed source people like RTO or CITTIO, and now Microsoft tend to start with the line: “now, we all know that [enterprise] systems management platforms are way too complex and have too much in them. Not everyone needs that…”

I should side-note that I don’t fully buy into that complexity pitch. The reality is much more complex (rich irony!). Most the systems management offerings out there can be complex, and some of it should be. But as someone who used to be on the front-lines of the fight, I can tell you that there’s a constant internal battle to make things as simple as possible. Furthermore, despite my love for Conway’s Law, the size of a company doesn’t always drive the complexity or simplicity of the software it produces. Take Nagios configuration: it’s way too much for simpletons like me.

Dubious complexity discussions aside, the field of mid-market/long-tail/SMB systems management is wide open. From what I saw at MMS 2006, Microsoft is a powerful contender. And though the the low-level technical sessions were the only place where the word “open source” came up (as we’ll find out, we should move that discussion up the stack all the way to the keynotes), the fact of the matter is that Open Source systems management and Microsoft systems management are going to be going at it head-to-head over the next few years. Both of them are targeting the same market.

OSS Systems Management

From the discusions I’ve had with OSS systems management vendors, they seem to be as oblivious to the Microsoft threat as Microsoft is of them. This might be because I haven’t thought, until now, to ask the question, “what are you going to do about Microsoft?” But, for all the railing each of them (and the closed-source mid-markets) does against the big 4 — BMC, CA, IBM, and HP — they’ve clearly spent time thinking about who they’re up against.

Worrying about the big four at this point is a distraction. The OSS systems management vendors need to start thinking about Microsoft’s management and CCM offerings: the newly named System Center suite. Sure, the roadmap is long, but MOM and SMS are here today, and they’re quickly combining their powers, as it were, into System Center. The possibility of more Vista biffs aside, 2007 will come quicker than we realize.

Strange Bed-fellows

Microsoft can and does do well in the mid-market. More importantly, they have something to offer now and cheaply (MOM and SMS) that has the potential for a bright future. In that sense, mid-market systems management is the classic battle of Windows vs. *nix one. The more Windows in the mid-market, the easier it’ll be for Microsoft, the more *nix, the easier it’ll be for the OSS crew.

To me, this means that right now is a great time for Microsoft and the OSS systems management crews to start working, or at least “partnering” closely together. Never mind what the public messaging is on such a relationship. The real reason is pure samurai mind-games: “keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.”

For Microsoft the advantage is keeping an eye on the innovation that’s occurring in open source systems management. For the open source systems management folks, the advantage is cracking into the Windows silo. Microsoft’s interest may not seem as great, but the fact of the matter is that the majority of the innovation occurring in systems management is coming from the open source companies and projects.

Larry Ellison’s views on OSS IP aside — Good luck with that! — OSS systems management people are the ones who’ll be, and are, delivering innovation in the area: hosted systems management, collaborative systems management, RSS, simplicity, new approaches, and perhaps even new service models around systems management.

Let’s digress down that rabbit hole a bit…

Open Source Systems Management Driving Innovation

I’ll save a lengthier discussion of innovations in OSS systems management for later, but here’s a little taste:

• FiveRuns is just now unwrapping their hosted systems management offering, whose UI is built on Rails of all things. I’ve spoken with Dave Wilby at length about all sorts of exciting (but sadly, for this post, embargoed) features, that I keep waiting to see in action and talk about.
• Qlusters is lucky to have CTO William “whurley” Hurley driving their quest to, frankly, take over and revolutionize systems management. Lofty goals, sure, but not impossible, esp. with the foundation they have available today.
• GroundWork is wrapping up OSS systems management tools into digestible packs and wrapping service sales around that stack. From the conversation I had with them this week, they also seem to have a very exacting understanding of how they’ll make money and the chops to deliver.
• Along with closed-source members LogLogic and LogRhythm, the Log Management and Analysis crew includes OSS-based Splunk, who’s taken a great crack at a new approach to systems management. More importantly, Splunk Base is one of the first attempts at true collaborative systems management.

While I have to disclaim that I haven’t talked with customers for any of the above yet (meaning you could justifiably dismiss it all as slide-ware and cooked demo’s until I do talk with actual end-users), what I’ve seen is impressive. What’s even more impressive is the passion, in true open source form, each of the companies have for their work.

More importantly, those are just 4 companies that to talked with (please email me if you think I’ve missed you ;>). There are many other companies, projects, and people out there innovating in the seemingly “innovation dead” field of systems management. For example, some day soon a mad midnight coder (or one of the above) is going to figure out how RSS can clean up the data avalanche…or do something totally unexpected with mashing Web 2.0 concepts into systems management. Perhaps it’s already happened.

What the OSS systems management people don’t have enough of is a the lust for ITIL-based thinking that the big 4, and even Microsoft, are focused on now; GroundWork may be an exception to this. I like the structure and common language that ITIL brings, so I of course want to see the OSS crew pick it up more. That’s something else they could learn from a closer relationship with Microsoft, or the big 4.

Working Together at Arm’s Length: WS-Management and SDM

One mutually beneficial area to work on are systems management standards. I can’t speak to the technical merits of WS-Management (I’d love input on that), but it’s something that’s there to consider. Microsoft is bullish on it, and they’re back-porting it to “older” Windows (someday, at least ;>)

I’m eager to see a successful common data format emerge as well. Many have tried and died. But, having programmed at the lowest levels of systems management, I can tell you that there’s nothing special or differentiating about the data model you use. It’s all just different words for the same thing. Pure Carr.

While Microsoft has the System Definition Model (SDM), they’re keeping it close to their chest and tied up in licensing. I have a feeling that, SDM might be too heavy weight because of that. When I asked them about standardizing SDM, Microsoft folks focused on the bad parts of committee driven formats to justify keeping SDM closed. But they’re missing the good parts of community driven formats; one of them being that those formats tend to be light weight.

The OSS systems management camp could help with that right out of the gate. More importantly, if the OSS folks added support for those standards, the relevance of System Center would grow because it could pull even more data from outside the Windows silo and push management outwards as well.

I’ll Take the Ecosystem I can Get

Ideally, Microsoft and the OSS systems management folks would genuinly work together and create a healthy ecosystem that could move it’s attention fully to solving everyone’s systems management problems, instead of focusing on the zero-sum, market-grab, logic they’ll really operate under. But, come one: software companies and groups never get along. They always come in at least pairs: WS-Management and WSDM; Java and .Net; Rails and Enterprise Software; Redmond and Armonk.

Despite that, Microsoft and the OSS systems management folks could still benefit from a continuous pairing: if only to smell each other out for the cold war, as it were. Continuing with the WWII metaphors, the two might be interesting allies against the big 4: it’d be the embattled elders calling the plucky youngsters from across the pond.

Sun, of course, is in an interesting position in this scenario. They’re the yet to be played wild-card in systems management at the moment: ever on the verge of open sourcing N1. Indeed, they could replace Microsoft in the above, though in a different way, no doubt. Perhaps they should jump on the chance before Microsoft has the time to turn the fleet around ;>

Disclaimer: Microsoft, Sun, BMC, IBM, and LogLogic are client.

Technorati Tags: bmc, conferences, enterprisesoftware, ibm, itil, microsoft, microsoftmanagementsummit, mms2006, systemsmangement, ws-management

Cockburn the Anthropologists

In fact, my favorite Agile thinker, Alistair Cockburn kicked off his career with the work he did at IBM. As he writes up in Crystal Clear, in 1991 IGS, and more specifically, his boss at the time, Kathy Ulisse, wanted to come up a new, better process to use for OO projects. So she sent Cockburn around to as many groups as possible to find out what they did:

What they told me was very different from what I had been reading in the books. In particular, they stressed aspects not covered in the methodology texts: close communication, morale, access to end users, and so on. It was not long before these issues separated in start contract the successful projects I visited from the failing ones. I came to see these issues, and not the design techniques, as the key to reaching a successful project outcome.

As Gladwell’s success proves, people love counter-intutive thinking, and the above was, at the time, counter-intutive…at least from what books were saying. Ironically, Cockburn took a very academic approach to coming up with a very non-academic methodology: he did an ethnographic study of software development “tribes,” and then shaped it into his research, reports, books, and an entire career. In a very real way, he and other Agile thought-leaders are software anthropologists, which is simply fantastic: we’re lucky as a community to have people like that who we can draw on to improve ourselves.

Good People

To mash in a quote, slightly out of context but happily related to the above, from Mr. Brown:

The only thing I’d add is that, in order to classify a process as mindless and choose to throw it out, you don’t just need good people; you need experienced people.

Richard’s point is the second part of what makes me like Alaistar Cockburn so much: his pragmatism. At the begining of his Agile Software Development, he lays out a process for assessing the expierience (or “maturity” to use CMM terms ;>) of the people on your team. The write-up is much more thorough than the almost footnote-ish comments along those lines in other books, for example, “we assume you start with good people…right?”

After laying out a model for asses your team’s skills — complete with fancy spider diagrams — he then make this extreamly pragmatic statement along the lines of: if you don’t have enough well seasoned people, this Agile stuff isn’t going to be easy. In fact, you might want to slow it down a bit. He’s since suggest a few core “tools” to hedge against all manner of development challenges, including, I’d argue less than optimal skills.

I’d quote from the book the assessment process from the book, but it’s such a great book that it’s always loaned out to someome. It’s one of those books I should keep a box of to give out ;> Needless to say, Bill and Richard are spot on to point out that skills are key.

More War Stories

I’ve been off the enterprise agile horse for awhile — distracted by identity, systems management, and all manner of other shiney object ;>. It’s be great to hear from people like Bill, Richard, and others more stories about doing Agile development, marketing, selling, and the software in general.

Several of the vendors I’ve spoken with have alluded to adopting Agile practices — BEA is the last one that I recall — and I get the feeling that those stories aren’t being told as much as they should. On the “customer side,” I know that people like Scott Mark, James McGovern, and my buddies back at BMC would love to hear about how Agile is going in big shops.

I’ve been keeping my eye out for such stuff, but it’s worth putting out a general request to have more people write-up blog posts. To get the ball rolling, for those of you haven’t been long-term DrunkAndRetired.com podcast listeners (why not?!), here’s a couple Agile war-story episodes we recorded over the past year:

• The Life Agile, Part 1
• The Life Agile, Part 2
• Agile at BMC

I’d be happy to record a podcast on the topic with you if you’d prefer that over blog posts, emails, or wikis.

To succumb to my habit to go parenthetical every other sentence: along those lines I’ve been talking with several people in Austin, Kert Peterson and the AgileATX group in particular, about turning up the dial on the Agile community in Austin. If you’re in Austin and interested in doing that, send me an email, and I’ll drag you into the efforts ;>

The Will to Change

When I evangelize Agile, one of the points I try to make (when applicable) is that you’re not so much arguing to replace an existing process with an Agile one as to have a process. That is, too often development groups think they have a process, but they really just have a loose collection of folk-lore, anecdotes, and tools. The degree to which you have great people or few people makes a loose process easier. But, for the majority of the development teams out there, a process gives them the time to do the real work instead of floundering about process concerns.

One of the reasons that I like Agile processes are that they commonly include frequent retrospectives where you can ask, “should we keep doing this?” Scrum and XP in particular have iteration retrospectives (every 2 weeks or a month), where you have the chance the change what your doing…if your organization has the will to change. Too often, of course, the org. doesn’t have the will to change, and what was once an Agile process becomes yet another dogmatic process used simply for CYA.

And that’s where thinking about people over process comes in. As I said on Bill’s blog:

as long as you can ask what “process” means and change your work habbits according to the answer you come up with, you’re probably operating under a principal of people over process: the people and roles are defining and driving the process, not the other way around.

Disclaimer: IBM, BEA, and BMC are clients.

Technorati Tags: agile, prjmgmt, programming, software

As I said yesterday, the key to successful systems management protocol is ubiquity: the more silos, devices, platforms, and applications that a protocol can interact with, the better. I raised the concern that WS-Management would be available only in Vista, and suggested that the best bet for it’s over-all success would be backporting it to XP, 2000, and other Windows versions. The thinking being that people don’t upgrade as rapidly as you might want, so WS-Management would be waiting for Vista to become the primary Windows deployment.

Well, long story short, Ed said that there were plans to backport WS-Management to past Windows versions. Not Win95, he joked, but the other major versions. There wasn’t a definite timeline or release strategy, but the fact that they’re thinking and planning on it is encouraging for WS-Management.

Now, as I said previously, I just need to dig deeper into WS-Management and see how well it would technically be at providing a standardized systems management protocol. Comparing it to CIM and WSDM would, of course, be excellent as well.

Disclaimer: Microsoft and IBM (who’re the WSDM folks) are a client.

Technorati Tags: conferences, enterprisesoftware, microsoft, microsoftmanagementsummit, mms2006, systemsmangement

The Page

If you look at the sidebar of the main page for the blog, you’ll see:

Which is pretty much what it was before I started playing with it, sans the IM links and time zone. The point is: the visual rendering of the page and even the CSS didn’t need to change to use hCard. The microformat is unobtrusive, which is fancy-talk for “cheap to implement.”

The Code

Here’s what the “code” (to use the term loosely) looks like:

<address class="vcard">
	<div id="about">
		<h2>About</h2>

		<p class="pic" id="portrait">
			<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/cote/"
			   title="More photos">
			   <img src="http://static.flickr.com/31/101406173_5dad3bf43a_m.jpg"
			        width="160" height="240" alt="Coté" class="photo" /></a>
	  </p>

		<p>I'm <a class="url fn" href="http://www.peopleoverprocess.com">Coté</a>,
			a software <span class="title">Industry Analyst</span>
			with <a href="http://www.redmonk.com"><span class="org">RedMonk</span></a>.
			I cover a wide range of topics in the software and technology world.
			These opinions are my own, but whose else would they be?</p>
	</div>

	<div id="contact">
		<h2>Contact</h2>
		<span class="email">
			<span class="type">Email</span>:
			<a class="email" href="mailto:cote@redmonk.com">cote@redmonk.com</a>
		</span>
		<br/>
		Y!: <a class="url" href="ymsgr:sendIM?bushwald">bushwald</a>
		<br />
		AIM: <a class="url" href="aim:goim?screenname=bushwald">bushwald</a>
		<br/>
		<!-- didn't bother putting these in microformat -->
		GTalk: bushwald@gmail.com<br />
		MSN: msn@coteindustries.com<br />
		Skype: <a class="url" href="callto://bushwald">bushwald</a>
		<br/>
		<span class="tel">
			<span class="type">Work</span>:
			<span class="value">+1-512-206-2927</span>
		</span>
		<br />
		<span class="tel">
			<span class="type">Cell</span>:
			<span class="value">+1-512-663-7507</span>
		</span>
		<br />
		Time Zone: <abbr class="tz" title="-06:00">CST</abbr></span>
	</div>
</address>

That may seem like a lot of code, but the difference between what I had before adding in an hCard and after is slim.

The key point here is that the microformat of an hCard more layers on top of existing formats than rests on it’s own. A companion point is that the hCard microformat piggybacks on existing XHTML tags instead of making it’s own tags up.

The long existent address tag is used for the entire hCard, and it spans more than one “block” of data. You don’t have to use address, of course, the important things are the class attributes and the relationships implicit in the XHTML nesting.

Convention and Hierarchy

So, what we have here is formatting by convention (to steal a page from Rails) and hierarchy.

Format and convention are two words that don’t often go together, because convention implies messiness and parsing problems. But, convention, not validity, is what makes, and made, the web successful.

Hierarchy is a danger word for many coders as it’s a synonym for “bad performance” and “walking DOMs.” Both of those applied to the hilt until recently. But those problems have been steadily fixed in XML/XHTML land with a better understanding of XSLT, CSS paths, and the fact walking a DOM in a dynamic languages (e.g., JavaScript) can be much easier than in most static (e.g., Java) languages.

Rendering

Here’s what the data looks like in a third-party tool:

Not too hot because of two things: I have a funny character in my name (é) that no one nor no thing ever gets right. Bill probably has the same problem. Also, it seems to have conflated together two of my URLs. I’m not sure if that’s because I typed in something wrong, or a bug in the tester.

Why This Matters: Less Code & Config

Typical snafu’s aside, what’s amazing about this example is that with just 10-20 minutes of reading and typing, a static web page was used to provide structured data to a 3rd party tool. The time it took doesn’t matter so much, what does matter is that one view can be used by two different consumers. The URL PeopleOverProcess.com can be used by:

1. People who want to read the webpage.
2. Software that wants to get my contact info.

Normally, you would need two different URLs/files for that: one for each consumer. That is, microformats make screen-scrapping really easy. No more need to use regexes and script-hacks.

This simplistic example doesn’t mean much. But let’s expand it to something with even more data: free/busy calendars.

A constant problem for us at RedMonk is scheduling meetings. We each have different OS’s, but more importantly, 99% of our scheduling is with people outside of our organization. so you can imagine that the Exchange/Outlook approach doesn’t work too well.

Now, you can imagine that we could put a calendar on a web page that showed when we were free and busy: it might even say what we were doing at the time, contain links to relevant things (like follow-up blog posts)…you know, the Web 2.0 calendaring wet dream ;> Upcoming, eventful, and others are good initial cuts at a UI for a calendar (the next steps are integrating with more applications and services, like Exchange and iCal, or dodgeball.).

What gets tricky is if some application — say Outlook — wants to use that calendar web page to help someone schedule time with RedMonk. Good luck with that. At best you’d have to screen-scrape and someone hook up with Outlook.

Now, if that calendar web page was microformated — with hCalendar? — things would go much better for the program involved: parsing the well-formed XHTML of a microformat is do-able in a short amount of time (read: “cheap”).

You might be thinking, “but you could just have the programatic view of the calendar at another URL.” And, sure, you could, but why have more code?

Which highlights a key benefit of microformats in web pages is that you don’t need a protocol of discovery for the programatic content. For example, if I give you the URL http://www.peopleoverprocess.com, I might have to markup in that page that my programatic calander view is at http://www.peopleoverprocess.com/cal.xml. (Indeed, this is what’s done for RSS feeds with a link tag in the page’s head.) That’s where the whole “one view instead of two” idea comes in again. Once you’ve got the URL, you’ve “discovered” everything there is to know.

Using It

There are always going to be times when another view is better. On the other hand, when it comes to many types of data — contact, calendars, social net relationships, and other declarative statements in both consumer and enterprise software — coding a support another view for programatic access may be just time prohibitive enough to prevent you from providing programatic access. In those times, microformats are a good option. Meta-data is exciting stuff, and microformats are light-weight enough to actually be a viable approach to meta-data…as opposed to say, RDF, at least by programmer-lore.

The over-all simplicity of microformats makes them a good base-line for providing data access as well. Instead of starting out with a new view from the get go, It might be a good idea to start by using a microformat, and only expand out to a brand new view if needed.

Disclaimer: Microsoft is a client.

So, while there’s no analysis involved — just hard-core dorking out — I’d be pleased to say hello to you if you come by ;>

Disclaimer: Sun, who’s responsible for much of JAAS, is a client.