Enterprises try blogs, but fear remains (InfoWorld)

Companies are realizing that blogs work well for collaboration but fear losing control of sensitive data

Predicts 2006: The HPW Will Influence Users' IT Choices

High-performance workplaces make workers more effective in supporting business goals and adding value. Web-based technologies are becoming part of the HPW environment, as users influence the configuration of their tools. In 2006, it will be important to define guidance and governance best practices.

Imperial vision may reshape the net (FT)

You have found two old, faded photos in your attic and you want them revived digitally. You do not want to buy an entire photo-editing package for such a small task, nor do you want to take the photos to a digital photo laboratory and pay heavily for such a small job. Surely there is another solution?

John Darlington and his team at the London e-Science Centre, based at Imperial College’s Department of Computing, believe that there is – or at least soon will be. They have developed a prototype business model in which the developer of an application such as photo retouching or picture compression would offer it as a chargeable service over the internet.

Consumers would chose which service they want, upload their image to the service and pay – typically via Paypal – when the modified image is returned. In this way consumers get a direct and simple means to access precisely the application they require, without having to buy it.

The concept has been developed and funded over the past two years as part of the UK’s multidisciplinary e-science programme – Prof Darlington is director of the London end. His team has developed working pay-per-use mechanisms and demonstrated them using examples from three-dimensional rendering – creating an image from 3D design data – for 2D and 3D design optimisation and even for access to large research telescopes.

The telescope image service, demonstrated at a UK e-science event in September, was based on a telescope in Hawaii. A live camera showed the telescope slewing round to the correct position before taking the specified image. “Our demonstrations have been very successful – at least when it wasn’t raining in Hawaii,” says Jeremy Cohen, a member of Prof Darlington’s team. Last week there was a demonstration of the system at SuperComputing 2005 in Seattle.

The team’s business model is a novel twist on a concept with a long history in computing and many different names and interpretations – service computing. This seeks to separate the users of a computer application from its originators and providers.

The Imperial team’s approach to the concept is fundamentally different. Underlying the provision of chargeable services would be a new approach to the internet, in which its existing structure is reformulated as a series of open markets.

This would comprise service providers, execution providers that would provide the computing power necessary to carry out the work, and brokers who would scour the net to find the best service for users and negotiate terms on their behalf (see panel). In the full model everything required to complete a task – software, execution environment or data – would be available as a use-on-demand, pay-per-use service.

This revives, in a different form, the Network Computer vision of the late 1990s, in which consumers were to use stripped-down terminals to access their documents and software over the internet, tapping into remote processing power. That concept foundered on lack of bandwidth and worries over security if data were to be held remotely.

Prof Darlington believes the time could now be right for service computing. “There are issues with the internet as it is now,” he says. “A lot of rubbish is being traded over it – this is a clear example of Gresham’s Law in action. Where buyers cannot reliably assess the value of goods being offered, prices and the quality of goods traded are forced down. The low-value stuff crowds out the higher-value goods.”

The fact that this does not happen, however, when large and trusted organisations such as eBay or Amazon are conducting trading, convinced Prof Darlington that similar organisations, with a high level of public confidence, could provide the foundations and necessary inter-relationships for a service computing market to flourish.

The Imperial team’s service computing concept, if widely adopted, could have big implications for the entire IT chain. Separating execution from application development would free software developers to exploit their work commercially, without worrying about losing control of their intellectual capital or investing in the infrastructure that would link them to potential customers and get the work done.

It would also provide a fillip to companies offering utility computing facilities to provide processing power on demand as a service. Sun Microsystems, for example, let the Imperial College team use its Sun Grid service for execution on the demos. Conversely, the new approach might be bad news for Microsoft as individual users’ computers could run with much simpler operating systems.

The challenge now is to get the service computing market started in earnest. “How much demand will there be?” asks Prof Darlington. “That’s the $64,000 question. But my bet is that it could be massive. We have our eyes on the mass market of the global internet to provide a market for both consumers and producers of services.”

He is tempted to start a commercial service before the end of the year with something “amusing and harmless”, and is encouraged by the success of trivial services, such as ringtones and football scores, in the mobile phone market. “Once you get something on to the internet, the dynamics of the web can take over and the throughput could be enormous,” he says.

How service computing works

The core technology that would enable the Imperial team’s vision of service computing to become reality is available and in use now.

It is web services, the set of standards based on XML (extensible mark-up language) that can be used for sharing applications over the internet without having to link incompatible IT systems.

In a nutshell, the chargeable services such as photo compression would be “wrapped” in a web service which would be used to move the work between the various brokers, service and execution providers. The main issue for the Imperial team has been to find mechanisms to provide this mobility and to ensure that everyone involved gets paid.

The user would be unaware of the series of interactions and verifications that are initiated by his or her starting the process by sending a request to a broker which might include the maximum he or she is prepared to pay, or the time to wait, for the service to be carried out.

The broker would go to a registry of services available, or straight out on to the web to find what was available, then contact service providers and execution providers.

Having negotiated a price, the broker would send the work to the execution provider, which would access the service provider’s software online, carry out the work and send it back to the broker. The latter would send it on to the user.

For payment the broker would verify that the user’s account was sufficiently in credit and then request a payment token that would be used to pay the execution and service providers through their Paypal accounts.

In the final step the broker would take payment from the user’s account. read

Workplace Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes, 2005

Gartner's most recent Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes show that companies are putting workplace technologies to new uses. Thus, vendors have more chances to differentiate themselves, even as markets consolidate.

FileNet P8 Enterprise Content Management Solutions (Gartner)

P8 is FileNet's strategic platform for enterprise content management. It will appeal to enterprises that have settled on Java as their standard. read

Microsoft making RSS a two-way street (InfoWorld)

RSS 2.0 to become a multidimensional publishing system, for use across different applications

Google in plan to put world culture on internet (FT)

Google has thrown its weight behind an ambitious and potentially controversial US-led project to put the world’s cultural memory online.

Open content opens doors to opportunity (InfoWorld)

Group launches portal that provides access to free educational courses offered by MIT, Johns Hopkins, others

Google supports Library of Congress online effort (InfoWorld)

Google is giving a financial boost to a U.S. Library of Congress project to digitize "rare and unique" items and build an online library.

Microsoft to give Office access to rivals (FT)

Microsoft will on Tuesday announce it is opening up access to its Office file formats to competitors, as part of a move to ensure the software giant does not lose lucrative government markets for its Office software.

Hummingbird Positioned in the Leaders Quadrant in 2005 Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Magic Quadrant (Hummingbird)

Leading analyst firm reports on the evolving content management market as vendors further enhance their ECM suite technology

Integrated E-Learning

Vendor OutStart's new release gives us occasion to think of e-learning as a horizontal process

Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management, 2005 (Gartner)

The 2005 Magic Quadrant for enterprise content management assesses the ECM vendors and their products' completeness, maturity and interoperability. As companies build out their content infrastructures, these considerations, as well as the vendors' future market viability, will be critical.

Google's Stumble

Uncharacteristically, Google has stumbled. The search giant's initial rushed efforts to digitize the world's books and offer that information to its legion of searchers has opened opportunities to its competition and tarnished Google's (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) image of spotless execution.

SAP CEO Kagermann looks to expand in banking software sector (Forbes)

FRANKFURT (AFX) - SAP AG chief executive Henning Kagermann told Switzerland's Finanz und Wirtschaft newspaper that the business software giant wants to increase its banking software sales by expanding its presence in North America and major Asian markets.

Managing Next-Generation IT Infrastructure (Forbes/McKinsey Quarterly)

In recent years, companies have worked hard to reduce the cost of the information technolgy infrastructure--the data centers, networks, databases and software tools that support businesses. These efforts to consolidate, standardize and streamline assets, technologies and processes have delivered major savings. Yet even the most effective cost-cutting program eventually hits a wall: the complexity of the infrastructure itself.

SOA Web Services and Enterprise Content Management (it.sys-con.com)

New business requirements are leading companies to change the way they deploy enterprise content management (ECM) data and applications. Faced with the limited interoperability and/or scalability of conventional ECM platforms, developers are turning to Web services as a way to realize ECM functionality and real-time content wherever they are needed within an organization. While this approach is still relatively new and more work remains to be done to improve the effectiveness, it already shows promise as a better way to think about ECM technology.

Factiva Partners With System Integrators to Develop Customized Integrated Information Solutions

NEW YORK, Nov. 1 /PRNewswire/ -- Factiva®, a Dow Jones & Reuters Company, today announced the expansion of its Partner Network with the introduction of its Systems Integrator Partner Program. Broadening the Partner Network to include systems integrators generates opportunities to target key vertical industries and roles within the enterprise while creating new collaborative solutions and a new sales channel for Factiva. Factiva's Partner Network includes leading enterprise software companies that simplify the integration of Factiva's high-quality news and business information into Enterprise Information Portals (EIP) workflow productivity solutions and vertical applications.

Vitrium Systems Introduces protectedpdf(TM) and protectedpdf.crm(TM), the First in a Suite of Breakthrough Software as Service Digital Rights Manageme

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Nov. 1 /PRNewswire/ -- Vitrium Systems, a
provider of Software as Service (SaS) digital rights management (DRM)
protection technology, today announced the launch of two breakthrough SaS DRM
PDF protection products, protectedpdf and protectedpdf.crm.  Vitrium's
technology blends security, value, and ease of use in a way not yet seen in
this marketplace.

Seamless Technology Inc., a Holding Company for e-Learning and Internet Commerce Operations Completes Entry into Public Marketplace (Business Wire)

Seamless Technology Inc. (Pink Sheets:SLSX) (www.seamlesstech.com), today announced the completion of its merger with Fingerware Corporation, a publicly traded technology company, As part of the merger, the controlling shareholders of Seamless Technology have taken control of Fingerware Corp, and the name of the company has been changed to Seamless Technology Inc. As part of the merger, Seamless has received a $700,000 net equity infusion from the existing cash reserves of Fingerware.