Gavin Terrill's Blog

I'm a twit...

"Twitter-er" that is. I have no idea what this twitter thing is all about, but that's never stopped me from diving in at the deep end before: http://twitter.com/gterrill.

For a desktop client, I'm giving twhirl a whirl - an AIR based app that seems to work very nicely.

What are you up to?

Dion laments the lack of a good calendar solution:

We have great calendar clients such as GCal, iCal, 30boxes, etc etc, and we have simple standards such as ics, and hcal but I still have a nightmare with calendars.

I've heard a lot of enterprises feeling this pain as well. Most of 'em have standardized on outlook, which is pretty limited in terms of supporting multiple calendars. A couple of use cases I would like to see supported:

• Let me see a calendar showing milestones in the projects I'm interested in (and no, I don't want to create and manage a seperate calendar in Exchange - I want Exchange to be able to read and write using a standard format that is also supported by my enterprise project portfolio planning software).
• Let me pull certain types of events from individual calendars to create a read only unified view (e.g. vacations) across a group.

Security, via an ACL, would be key.

On RSS & WebDAV for ECM

There is an invitation to comment on two standards for ECM over at "Enterprise Architecture: Thought Leadership".

Leveraging RSS for ECM is fine, but you'd probably want to take a look at layering in some Atom if you wanted to provide any sort of half decent functionality beyond simple notifications of new  content. I'm a little surprised to hear that ECM vendors don't already support this. You'd think it would be trivial to implement something on top of their existing proprietary APIs (or not). Maybe there just isn't sufficient market pull in the enterprise space to justify building out the feature at this time?

The second idea is that ECM vendors should support WebDAV to upload files to an ECM repository via drag and drop. Judging by the CMS Matrix, most products already support WebDAV. Doing drag and drop against a WebDAV repository has been around for quite some time - best known examples would be Microsoft's Web Folders, and  WebDrive.

Depending on what you are trying to do, these "standards" can be just the ticket. Which reminds me of the old adage: "The good thing about standards is that there are so many of them."

Windows Workflow Foundation

Not the World Wildlife Fund, but the Windows Workflow Foundation. This is Microsoft's initial foray into workflow and at first glance it looks quite good. I have to admire the vision and execution Microsoft have shown here. WFF coupled with the more meaty document management capability of Office 12 with Sharepoint Services can now provide a serious alternative to the FileNet's, Documentum's and OpenText's of the world. For your average approval routing or correspondence management type of document centric workflow applications it would be hard to look past this technology.

I wonder where the Open Source offering with this level of integration and friendliness to integrators, administrators and developers is? Open Office? I don't think so. Maybe 2006 will be the year of Microsoft after all.