Thursday, September 22, 2005

TERACOM_ ORLANDO

"eine flexible Runtime Development Plattform zur Individualentwicklung"

sounds interesting

Sunday, September 11, 2005

Radical promise of BPM

BPM systems provide the same infrastructure capability as an RDBMS, but applied to application processes rather than simply data.

"The reason people are thinking of and implementing BPM is that they face a host of process related issues. That's similar to what happened with data because it all became embedded in applications, and people said there had to be a better way of managing the data. But now applications have become the problem, with business process fragments locked away in stovepipe applications, and people want a better way to manage end-to-end processes. The IT litter across the organization has become so voluminous that people are looking for a way to renormalize it and put it into a standard form."

Saturday, September 10, 2005

IT Value

"A CIO has to look at a network of separate variables that affect IT effectiveness. At the top level they are business alignment, process maturity, technical architecture, and human performance.

The CEO has a different perspective: All he or she usually cares about is cost, value, project success, and system uptime (and maybe performance).

Cost is easy.

The project success rate is easy.

System uptime and performance are semi-easy.

Value is the kicker, since IT is an enabler of value rather than a driver.

One approach: Make sure all projects define their expected business value - this is the business sponsor's responsibility, not IT's responsibility. If the only accepted value measure is money, insist that Finance provide an accepted means for translating various forms of intangible business benefits into financial measures. If your company makes use of a Balanced Scorecard, the impact of each project on the Balanced Scorecard measures should do."

(From: Infoworld.com, Advice Line by Bob Lewis, (c) IDG Network)

Monday, September 05, 2005

Cool tools for SQL Server developers - includes SourceSafe Integration

Apex SQL Edit (http://www.apexsql.com/)
Imceda Speed SQL IDE (http://www.imceda.com/)
SQLScriptSafe (http://www.sqlscriptsafe.com/)

"Lockdown Enforcer" appliance to challenge Cisco NAC

The appliance is connected to switches and does not let any client access the network unless the client is compliant with patch-level-policy, or anti-virus-policy. Non-compliant clients are moved into a quarantine VLAN.

Alternative approaches are "Inline-Solutions" (Vernier Networks, InfoExpress, Sygate which is currently been swallowed by Symantec) and homogenous switch-based solutions like Cisco NAC.

Cisco NAC eventually requires switch upgrades and the Cisco Trust Agent on each client. Lockdown's solution however works agent-less as long as the client is a member of the administrative domain (whatever that exactly means); guest-systems are supported by an applet-agent (whatever that exactly means ...).

Interesting stuff, especially now that DELL switches are so dirt cheap.