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 »

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.

Bob Blakley from the Burton Group presented some of the content of his soon-to-be-released Relationship Layer paper at both IIW 2008a and Data Sharing Summit 2. Phil Windley has a longer writeup on his blog, but the gist of the paper is that “identity” only has meaning within a relationship.

The first day (long workshop) is covering “Cyberinfrastructure” There was first a presentation from Chad Kainz of the UofChicago and basically made the case for central IT’s role in supporting humanities using cyberinfrastructure. He presented on the bamboo project which is Mellon Foundation funded.
http://www.projectbamboo.org/

The second part of the morning was more directly part of our world in IT Services. The topic is virtual organizations as cyberinfrastructure. Ken “Ming” Klingenstein did his Comanage schtich which called out the LIGO work that Scotty is doing. The next presentation was from the Jim Leous of PSU who is a researcher on the LIGO project. It was cool to see the application of the collaborative tools. No one is fooling themselves that having tools will overcome investigators tendency to be very picky about the level they are willing to share with their “collaborators” though.
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After the presentation, lunch, then onto discussions of various permissions management issues.
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