SunriseValley

Which role Web 2.0 will play in the ERP game?

chrisuti — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:51:45 +0000

What are your main investments in 2008/2009? This question is asked to a lot of CIOs these days. Many companies are planning a major ERP upgrade and doing first steps in a SOA based environment. These strategies are well aligned with business stakeholders and are based on a solid businesscase. It goes more flawsy if it comes to the topic of Web 2.0 usage like blogs, wikis, discussion threads or social networks.

Analysts are talking about the additional value of Web 2.0 in combination with a service-oriented approach, which extends the reach of the enterprise systems as known of today. “The simple fact that you get more information, more capability and more features on the Web to get work done than you do in your own company, is pretty much driving these Web 2.0 initiatives,” said R. “Ray” Wang, a principal analyst at Forrester. “Honestly, I can get better services outside of most enterprise companies today. We need to collaborate and we need a system in case our enterprise systems fail. Corporate IT departments are trying to figure out how to incorporate Web services, packaged app vendors are trying to figure out how to incorporate them, and users are just trying to figure out what they can do and still adhere to corporate IT policies.”

Another trend we are seeing at the corporations is, that there aren’t changes just be one’s that imposed by necessity, many of them are driven from the bottom up. These kinds of grassroot IT solutions are mainly pushed by the Web-savvy workers. It brings a kind of parallel model of helper applications, which are often deployed in a Web or cloud environment and based on Web 2.0 paradigm. This working in ‘two parallel worlds with different capabilities’ will result in a push for generic features within the business systems. Most of these are lacking these systems since years, but now it could be directly compared with the webbased applications. I am expecting a high demand in the following areas:

Real Enterprise Search:
Everybody is using google like search capabilities for any information on the web he is looking for. The users will complain more and more about silo-based search capabilities. Unfortunately there is no cheap quick fix.
Security will become a major concern
More and more business information will be moved in open wikis and social networking applications across the corporate firewalls. The edges of the corporation will be more and more porous from a security perspective. The demand for holistic concepts will increase dramatically to ensure confidentiality of business information and secure IP.
Blogs and Wikis are driving the demand for extracting business information
Blogs and Wikis are containing every kind of business information, from project status to research topics and organizational information. This information is efficiently linked and represent an own information network. The demand will rise to have a high-level overview about the available information.
Enterprise intranets will learn social network capabilities
Relationship management, collaboration capabilities and building ad-hoc interest groups will change the usage and the value of the current intranets. The process to get projects done will change with the availability of this kind of features within the company. This knowledge networks will be extended across the company borders and will establish dynamic structures of fast problem solving methodologies.
Mashups are coming, but slowly
We will see more and more enterprise mashups, however it requires a more or less code-free composition of information. This mashup capabilities are going hand in hand with situational applications, which are composed on the fly combined with analytical capabilities and business data available on-demand.
Rich Internet Applications are extending the UI capabilities
Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight applications will bring a richer user experience with new graphical capabilities to adress complex business situations in a new way. We see spreading such capabilities in the analytics area and in edge applications like talent management. These new high graphical interactions are going beyond eye candy.
Mobile devices are enabling web based collaboration
Blackberry and iPhone are a new push to the mobile business applications. Even in business environment these new gadgets are on the way to improve the business work beyond email exchange. Mobile internet and access to exchange servers will become a driver for a new mobile application generation. The availability of little helper applications for these devices will push the demand for embedding business applications with a look & feel built for ad-hoc usage

So all in all we will see more and more a democratic Web 2.0 revolution, which will touch the business systems like ERP on many areas. Do you agree? In which application areas do you see the hardest push for Web 2.0 capabilities?

Intel Mashmaker – Mashups easy, fast and fun!

chrisuti — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 19:12:27 +0000

Intel launched a new product for creation of mashups, called Intel Mashmaker. It is coming from Intel’s research center and it is really cool. It enables you to create personalized mashups on the fly, which is easier, faster and more fun. According to Intel, you can:

Build mashups on-the-fly – combine content from multiple sources such as web content, videos, maps, RSS feeds, photos, and display in one place
Manage your mashups – tools that let you manipulate, save as favorites, edit, sort, annotate, and share your mashups with friends, or with social network sites
Design and tailor your mashup your way – visualization features that let you customize, control the layout, and view your mashups any way you want
Adapt your mashup to your persona – inherent enabling technology delivers on-demand information, adapts to your areas of interest and preferences

It works as a toolbar extension for you browser (currently FireFox, IE7). Mashmaker will you suggest Mashups from the Mashmaker toolbar, which the community proposed as senseful extensions to this website. You can modify the website on the fly and adapt this to you needs. It uses the power of the internet – just with few clicks. You are just adding new visual parts, which connects the content on the site to other useful information – your own website design with the information you want to like to see. The best – this kind of modifications on the website is not limited to tech nerds, everybody is able to do this. The community approach and the non-tech modification are the real killer features of this. Intel, amazing work! Check it out:

BumpTop – a REAL desktop UI

chrisuti — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 21:45:30 +0000

We have seen myriads of good or bad approaches to build a desktop UI, which has some similarities with a real desk. There were multiple directions to copy the reality in software and enrich it with more efficiency. Thousands of researchers tried to find the killer approach based on their understanding of the human behaviour. If we are stalking around in our offices and having a look on the most of the desks and desktops of our colleagues – we can say in a lot of cases – this approach was not really successful so far.

BumpTop is not yet another approach, it is really taking a new idea. It structures files AND programs as 3 dimensional cards with own weights, which could indicate the importance of a document or task. You are able to shuffle these documents around and move about the desktop or build piles based on different criteria. So you could create a pile of today’s tasks, one for later and one just for information. This sounds cool, but has also a disadvantage. You can also create a mess like in the real world. However some intelligent search and organize function could help to reorganize this mess in seconds.

Anand Agrawala is the creator of BumpTop, the new way to build desktop UIs. It applies the 3d metaphor and the corresponding interactivity to the virtual desktop. See BumpTop in action to get an impression:

Seadragon or picture zooming in amazing speed

chrisuti — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 20:34:11 +0000

Yesterday I came across with a very amazing product, called seadragon. It is a company, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2006. This software is capable of assembling static photos into a synergy of zoomable, navigatable spaces. The video shows you some of the astonishing features, what is possible today:

Microsoft plans to bundle such capabilities in the next Silverlight version. These awesome features combined with a hard core GUI programming features will give Silverlight the awaited push in the current race with Flash/Flex. In the end it is a question, which product will win the hearts of the developer community.
Here you will find more about Seadragon. Seadragon will fulfill the following four “promises”:

Speed of navigation is independent of the size or number of objects.
Performance depends only on the ratio of bandwidth to pixels on the screen.
Transitions are smooth as butter.
Scaling is near perfect and rapid for screens of any resolution.

The Seadragon team is currently tuning its DirectX implementation, making the most of the new Windows Media Photo format, and cranking on the Photosynth Technology Preview.