Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

Last week I received a new laptop from my employer Inter Access . It’s Lenovo T61 with a dual core processor, 4Gb and 160 Gb Disk. It has Vista Enterprise installed on it, so I can finally work with Vista with a performing laptop. Focus today at Inter Access is SOA and High Performance Workplace. I am more involved in the SOA part than the other and have done a lot inside this area if you look at blog posts the last 15 months or so. One of the first things I have done on my new laptop is setting up VPC 2007 and created an image on it with MOSS 2007. Why, well MOSS is a part of Microsoft SOA software stack as I mention in post SOA with BizTalk . What I did was I installed Windows 2003 Server R2 with SP2 first, then I installed the virtual machine additions. After these initial installations I fully patched the server and added a few server roles like Application Server, Mail Server, Domain Controller and DNS. This all went smoothly and next thing I did was installing SQL Server 2005 Ent...

Coming Wednesday I have another discussion with a couple of architects of Inter Access (my company) about SOA. We will discuss the principles of SOA. Some of the principles to be discussed are published by Stefan Tilkov in InfoQ and SOAWorld magazine April 2007. It is a good written piece and very useful in our discussion. In a previous post What is SOA? I also mentioned a discussion with the same architects. Together with my colleague architects we are currently working on a SOA framework, where definition, principles and so on are building blocks. In the end this framework can be used to guide our potential customers to set up a SOA. Some principles of SOA can be found here at eBiz or here . Have a look if you are interested by going through the links provided. If not you could try have a look at our new website build entirely with MOSS 2007. Technorati: SOA Inter Access MOSS 2007

T oday attended a SharePoint training. The speaker was Bart Gunneman and he spoke about SharePoint, explaining the free part SharePoint Services 3.0 in the morning and the licensed MOSS 2007 in the afternoon. SharePoint Services provide in document collaboration, information sharing and enhancing productivity in for instance software developer teams (at least I used SharePoint Services a lot in software development projects in the past). SharePoint Services 3.0 delivers new functionality like: · Document collaboration (check-in/out, versioning, metadata); · Wikis, · Blogs, · RSS, · Discussions; · Project task tracking; · Contacts, calendars and tasks; · E-mail integration; · Directory integration; · Integration with rich clients through protocols and API’s; · Integration with smart clients like Outlook 2007. These functionalities were a demoed by Bart. Next MOSS 2007, the benefits buying a license are the features like: · Search; · Audiences; · Content targeting; · My Site; · Enhanced...