The first annual “JiveWorld” was held at the W Hotel in San Francisco October 28&29.  Three of us signed up: Scotty Logan, Jacob Pierce and myself.   The event was well attended, in fact a bit too well attended for the venue.  There were various good and bad news that came out of the announcements and sessions.

General Summary

There are a significant number of very large organizations that are jumping into Jive enthusiastically.  There is a shared sense of benefit of social software in order to bridge cultures and workflows in large communities; even business communities.  Many of these large accounts for Jive have been willing to spend lots of money on (essentially throw away) professional services customizations in order to make up for some of the tactical shortcomings of Jive in order to benefit from all that is right about the product.  The buzzword for customizations at the conference was “overlays”, by the way.

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Well, this is different…

I’ve been attending the Common Solutions Group meetings (thrice yearly) since 2002 but this is the first attempt to do a meeting totally online.

Topic 1 Shared Services

First discussion was regarding info sharing around possible shared services.

• expertise in virtualization (especially VMware)
• joint partnerships and related issues: operations, shared vendor licensing
• discussion about global server loadbalancing; especially between institutions that have F5 loadbalancing infrastructures.

James Hilton presented on shared services.  Read more »

One of the tracks at Catalyst this year focussed on Cloud Computing, and included sessions from Burton Group analysts, customers and cloud service providers. Burton Group made a point of distinguishing the different types of cloud services that are currently available:

Hardware / Infrastructure as a Service

Services that allow you to run your OS and software on top of virtualized servers, storage and networking: Amazon (EC2, S3, etc.), Rackspace Cloud, various Virtual Private Server vendors, etc.

Platform as a Service

Services that provide a development platform, where you have no view into the OS or infrastructure and are bound to a particular application development environment: Salesforce’s force.com, Google AppEngine, EngineYard, etc.

Application / Software as a Service

Services that provide applications directly to users, sometimes with opportunities to integrate with in-house apps and services (e.g. authentication) – Google Apps, Zoho, Microsoft Office Live, Salesforce, Basecamp

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As in previous years, the Catalyst conference in San Diego this year had specific themes/tracks.  Often these themes overlap and sometimes they throw in a niche subject just because it’s hot.  This year particular focus was given to:

- Cloud and virtual computing

- Social Networking

- Identity and Access Management

- Information Security

- Unified Communications

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Indiana University hosted the Common Solutions Group this Spring.  The principle theme this time was, ostensibly, Cloud Computing.  While there are some notible exceptions, there was a general skeptisim among peer institutions in CSG that the Cloud is more than hype.  To the extent that there was traction on the topic, it was mostly around one or another peer institution providing service to other EDUs for a given service. Read more »

I took a quick look at using SSL with MySQL, and it turns out to be reasonably simple to enable SSL for transport level encryption, while still using username and password for authentication. Read on for some links to useful articles for MySQL, Java, Perl, Ruby on Rails and some sad news about PHP.
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On Friday afternoon (3-6-2009) I had an hour long discussion by phone with Identity Finder CEO Todd Feinman.  For those not familiar with what Identity Finder is, this is software that (nominally) you run on a client and it give a report of data that appears to it as being sensitive in nature.  The smarts of the product comes in pattern matching SSN, credit card numbers, health record numbers based on an array of criteria this company keeps track of.  They also claim to do a good job keeping any false positives to a minimum e.g. there are strings of numbers that form legitimate SSNs and others that don’t.

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I scheduled an hour Burton Analyst chat with their workflow guru and spoke with him on Monday.

I’m in Tempe, AZ (next to Univ. of AZ) at a special I2 CAMP session on federations in the context of Registrars and their world.

In the beginning was The Mainframe. It came from IBM, as did all the peripherals… at an outrageous price. Along came an upstart called EMC who could sell us disk to work with The Mainframe. Not only did the EMC disk cost less than IBM’s, it could also be connected to our Unix systems. And thusly, did the EMC arrays come forth and multiply, until they numbered 13.
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