derek abdinor

I recently had the need to get information on Vignette (story server) in a hurry, and followed a certain methodology which is no doubt common to many.

In order:

1. Google
2. Vignette’s site
3. Wikipedia
4. Phone dev friends
5. Twitter
6. Post a question on LinkedIn

You could seperate the first 3 into old-style information harvesting (even wikipedia), #4 into common sense, and #5 and #6 into “leveraging social media”. Well, the winner by a country mile for answers was LinkedIn! Let me share with you those that were public answers:

Vignette server: difficult to develop a website on top of it or not?

Answers

Krishna Kumar: Sr. Vice President & Group Editor – DARE at CyberMedia India Ltd
If you are talking fo getting it done by a consultant, that can be costly.

And the cost may have nothing to do with the complexity.

Vignette is supposed to be one of the most scalael and highend content servers out there, having hosted sites for Olympics, etc.

The server (plus various additional modules) itself is very costly. And consultants with experience on vignette do not come cheap

kkkg

Eric Small: Director, Consumer Product, with extensive technology background, focus on web communities and UGC
If you’re at the point you’re even asking this question, you’ve got a difficult task ahead of you. Vignette, or any enterprise-level CMS, is meant to solve the problem of large-scale content management. By and large, when you get to this point, your web site is going to be complex (and thus difficult). Otherwise you wouldn’t be considering spending that much $$$.

Use the CMS Watch report at www.cmswatch.com/cms/report/ to make sure you’re getting the right vendor. And get someone in your organization to read the CMS Bible by Boiko (ISBN 978-0764573712) to get a good sense of the process of building out a CMS-driven system. If you have the leverage (and you should with this kind of investment) insist on a prototype before signing on the dotted line.

By the way, if all of this seems out-of-scale for what you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t be looking at Vignette. For smaller implementations there are good open-source solutions like Drupal and OpenCMS.

Luis Mendez: Solutions Architect
Vignette can be very complex. But this will be the case with any combination of portal server, web server, application server, content management server, and dynamic business objects delivering along with search, security, and high performance environment.

It really depends on how you want to foray into the Vignette products themselves.

On one hand, you can use the Vignette out of the box content managers and have everything sent out via RSS, XML and so forth. That’s easy assuming all content management is done through the apps that come preconfigured out of the box.

On the other hand, doing things like delivering secured data with integrated directories and other ACLs on both the content management and the content delivery is another bowl of wax.

There are of course other issues to deal with such as client side request through frameworks like AJAX, how portlets communicate with one another in multiple states and how all of that translates into where you content is going to come from.

Getting a Vignette consultant on board would be an expensive proposition because they can help you traverse all of these topics. They are typically well versed in all areas of the web and then some!

===/===
What did we learn? That LinkedIn is powerful as it filters a lot of the noise and is targeted at professionals,  that you will get an answer from strangers and friends alike and that anyone wanting hard skills in this economy should hit the Vignette books. Thanks all!

This first appeared in TechLeader, June 2008

I have this credibility problem with cartoons where, when they regularly reach behind their heads/into their coats, they tend to whip out gadgets/weaponry that outweigh them and flaunt Newton One to Three.

For storylines, its weak. But for concepts like storing terabytes of data and other objects off your local grid, its incredible. And that’s cloud computing, or SAN (Storage Area Networks).

Sign up with a provider of massive amounts of data and processing power, and simply call their services to do the processing, storage, business logic where applicable. It works on a pay-as-you-go model, and is free in some cases.

The best known cloud providers are Amazon Web Services and Google Appengine. It stands to reason, these guys have massive networks of servers that never run at 100%; they may as well tick over while standing “idle”.

If you tweet, use Facebook or Yahoo! apps, you may see the flicker of aws.amazon.com in your status bar, as resources get pulled in. Salesforce is termed a cloud application, as the data, logins and modules are all on various servers far from your office or project.

Nice application

An idea I like is having a cloud at home. No synching between digital camera, PVR, notebook and other consumerist gadgets. If you have wifi at home, simply navigate to the folder from any device. Brilliant. No cables.

Take-up

Powerful. Looking at how nervous MS Office is about online documents (Google, Zoho, Salesforce) is an indication. There are operational risks, and no, Twitter’s essential services don’t run off AWS. At the end of the day, one is party to a contract with a massive going concern.

This closing paragraph links back to the first, to round things off in a homely, Readers’ Digest, kind of way. Can you use cloud services in your enterprise? Is there space for a South African entity to offer this here, and in the continent?

Me, I like my Belgian or British cartoons. Those with credibility gaps I can bestride.

Comment unnecessary: more of a story here

Comment unnecessary: more of a story here 

Good piece by Confluence about how they see financial data going in 2008. Some key take-aways from this slightly-edited release:

According to Kirk Botula, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, “There are many forces driving the automation of fund administration functions. These include the global expansion of fund companies, increased frequency of reporting across many different regulatory and accounting regimes, and heightened transparency demands.”

•  Back-office shortages will intensify.
  In 2008, staffing shortages in fund companies’ and service providers’ back offices will intensify, as pressure to support additional mutual fund and alternative investment instruments places even more demands on a limited talent pool. Fund administrators will seek technology solutions that enable them to automate routine processes to reduce staff dependency and eliminate the risk of error.
• Investor pressures will drive expense control.
  Market pressures have been driving down the operating costs that investors are willing to pay. Investors will continue to seek out low-cost products, and this price sensitivity will force fund companies to exert more cost control over their expenses. Leading service providers and fund companies will include the automation of expense payments and budgeting as key initiatives in 2008.
• FAS 157 requirements “in full swing.”
  The Financial Accounting Standards Board’s (FASB) new fair valuation reporting rule, FAS 157, went into effect in November 2007. Fund companies’ fair value committees and their auditing firms continue to be pressured to have the proper data to support the valuations that they set for securities. As they incorporate the newly mandated FAS 157 Level 1, 2 and 3 disclosures into their reports in 2008, fund companies and service providers will demand that their accounting and fund administration systems automate the reporting process. This automation will help reduce the burden on back-office staff and lower the risk of error.
• SEC continues focus on XBRL, short-form prospectus.
  The SEC continues to champion the XBRL language for electronic reporting, and that momentum will continue with its short-form prospectus initiative. This initiative is intended to improve mutual fund disclosure by providing investors with information in a clear and concise format. Confluence believes that, though a commendable endeavor to simplify investor disclosure, the short-form prospectus is another reporting requirement that will burden already-taxed administrative staff without technology to streamline the process.

Companies automating fund administration processes need to pay special attention to issues of data integrity, as well as scalability. Confluence advocates a centralized, “platform-agnostic” database as the backbone of this process.

Fitting I should have stumbled upon this article about Open Source Business Models while waiting to board for the Balkans.

Safari for Windows launched today/yesterday, and while I have worked hard as a mozangelist, I think this is a good thing. Safari comes with third party extensions (webkit) which I have not played with, but after becoming addicted to XUL in FireFox, which I believe is wasted as a UI layout and script engine, I would love to see what Webkit can do.

It’s very easy to write your own browser app, or extension, in XUL and a bit of javascript. XUL has cult-like following, and Quirk has built an amazing extension with it. Would love to see other social bookmarking (social spying) apps come out of Safari.

27 seems to be the number of ideas and answers to long-nurtured questions one hears/comes up with/is set right on/seeks clarification on. Thanks organisers.

Vinny Lingham wore his VC hat and threw down the gauntlet to Enterprise 2.0 aspirants: build it, we will come. He also introduced the new features of SynthaSite 2.0: basically Dreamweaver as a web app, for web 2.0 apps, for coders and code eschewers We’re picturing the day LAMP developers will refer to a SPUM- built site: SynthaSite, PHP, Ubuntu, MySQL.

Erik Hersman of Zungu spoke about Mobile opportunities in Africa. See earlier post on W3C and Mobile Web Initiative or see here, more relevant now with Southern Africa’s own W3C chapter. Really, if you’re an early adopter or pioneer-type, this is where you re staking pegs into rich, virgin soil.

Colin Daniels demystified Bullardgate. Pity, I was waiting for the Oliver Stone movie to come out. Bullard (Kevin Spacy); Bloggers (check your blogroll). Told us more about “The Times” launch, allows me to paraphrase Carlyle: “Close thy Nova, open thy Times”.

As for skyrove: wow. Future very bright, massive marketing opps but chips for scare tactics

Facebook has opened up its platform for extensible development by the community, so expect custom widgets on par with MySpace, but I believe, with far, far more reach.

We are seeing companies prefer open source solutions (Drupal, Joomla) over proprietary crap. Why? Rather have 300 000 developers behind your product than 5. Another thing is that prop software is so difficult to port or extend, you have to imagineer yourself into the original guys mind, and really: do you want to?

this is a brilliant move by facebook. Software guys may code widgets for FireFox and Yahoo!, Drupal and even PHP to up their geek credits, but what if you can code on facebook and impress ALL your friends? For the college crowd that make up the numbers at FB, these guys will be up all night and facebook is going to be the next public space (ww2?)