Thinkervine

Thinkervine is glad to offer to those who wish Google Wave invites.

By now, these have been rolled out to pretty much most of you, but if some still don’t have one, feel free to leave a comment to request one (make sure to input your Gmail account in the e-mail field).

26 invites are available.

If you don’t know what Google Wave is, check out the videos below:

SAP Research developed an application, named Gravity, leveraging the Google Wave collaboration capabilities for Business Process Management, check the demo here:

With the advent of Web 2.0, web applications, thin applications and Software as a Service have lead to a fast development of Rich Internet Applications, in particular the user interface (UI) and usability. Whether they are based on AJAX, Flex or Silverlight, they all have a common purpose: provide an improved user experience through a thin client, at least comparable to fat client’s if no better.

Along the years, many software providers looked forward porting their current business applications to web based platforms, mainly for easing the maintenance, avoiding client deployment. These platforms, mainly based on J2EE technologies, were mostly made of static display, although the content was generated dynamically. On the usability level, users have gone from bad to worse. We all know business software has never been sexy. In addition to that, people now had to deal with constant refresh of pages for every action, increased wait-time while data was submitted to the server, as HTTP is not an optimized protocol for transactional applications.

On the other side, developers had to deal with issues like supporting several platforms (combination of browser/OS), new security aspects on uncontrolled layers, harder user acceptance.

The transition from fat client to thin client has merely been a mess for most software vendors. Reason ? This transition has been mainly technical and product managers have forgotten the main brick: the users.

Any change must under-go a global user acceptance. Especially when it comes to business software, that’s something people will use constantly on a daily basis for their work, you need to make sure to have a wide adoption and make it mainstream. For this purpose, the change must be user-centric.

RIA have the advantage of being naturally user focused. They tend to improve the user experience, allowing a more interactive approach with the web application, unlike HTML.

To the users, RIA comes with its own set of benefits:

• Increase productivity
• Enable an engaging, interactive user experience without page reloads or refreshes
• Provide real-time data management
• Allow users to interactively visualize and manipulate complex data more effectively and easily (drill-down, drag and drop…)
• Assisted inputs (interactive search, predictive typing…)
• Optimized screen layout (reduction of complexity)
• Keep pace with the users expectations. The UI for their business software are now aligned with those of their daily personal apps (E-Mail, Social Networks, Document sharing…)

On the other side, by creating a custom rich front-end, developers can  have a better enablement of the process centric aspect of the application. This becomes even more important when the process goes above a simple application boundaries to be executed onto several platforms.  Screen flows can be designed and organized according to the business process requirements while providing a uniform UI for all the process steps. Screens can be drastically reduced by automating the values of some fields and make them transparent to the users.

With RIA, companies are now able to address most of the users current issues with business software which are mainly:

• It is very complex
• It looks like crap

Through rewrapping their main processes into RIA, companies might increase their user productivity through this mix of process centric (screen flow) and user centric (usability) interface. Some software vendors now tend to understand that and are extending their frameworks to support new technologies that would allow them to enable this into their portals and mashups  (SAP has introduced the support of AJAX and Flash islands).

But just above the technical aspects of the technology, the complete product/project management chain must be educated on the value of these new user interfaces.

Thinkervine has migrated from its old host OVH to Media Temple.

The migration has been successful but if you notice any issue, please do not hesitate to report it through the contact form. This migration is completely transparent to you and nothing needs to be done on your side.

This new service should behold its promises and provide a sound infrastructure for this blog. Wishing you all to continue to enjoy our content. We are currently working on enhancing your experience by bringing fresh new concepts.

We thank you for your faith to Thinkervine.

With the recent events around the Twitter information leaked by a hacker, the cloud computing security topic has become a most discussed trend on the web.

You may have heard. Microsoft is not shipping IE8 with its new operating system Windows 7, which should be released in October, in Europe. Several solutions are being proposed as how users will install a browser on their machine but all have a common proposal: Users will have the choice on which browser to install.

This is a major threat for Microsoft and might lead to a big marketshare loss. Today, many people use Internet Explorer as it is the “default” installed browser and do not bother to look at something else. In the future, they will have no default and will have to make a choice.

Microsoft will be starting an evangelisation campaign, trying to rally most of the users to its new version of Internet Explorer, IE8. It started with a (laughable) comparison with Firefox and Chrome.

The below table shows their points of comparison. You may notice how the left column is populated, and you really got to check the comments.

According to this chart, IE8 should be the prefered browsing choice. But when it comes to real facts, this depicts how Microsoft tries to jeopardize real facts using marketing speech. This chart would have been of more interest if actually it had presented something more representative of reality. Showing a “no coverage” case for Firefox and Chrome when it comes to Security or Privacy is just meaningless. We all know how Chrome first introduced the “anonymous mode” that has been adopted in IE8 at a later stage. Both browsers support all common security and anti-phishing mechanisms.

Search has always been an enhanced feature within Firefox which had the small search box on the upper left, Chrome uses the address bar as a search engine, providing predictive typing. Where does this compare to anything provided by Microsoft.

Funny enough, Microsoft skipped Opera and Safari. Aren’t they considered as real threats to Microsoft ? Opera has just launched its Opera Unite platform, which introduces an embedded Web Server and several features. They were also the firsts to introduce the speed dial feature that was adopted in Chrome (supported in IE using Google Toolbar).

There’s one particular section I love: Performance. We all know this is a major issue in IE8. Slow for starters (cold and warm starts), slow for rendering pages and aweful Javascript execution speed. Both Firefox 3.5 and Chrome 3.0 have been introducing great enhancements. So what do they have to say for their defense ? “Top speed of a car doesn’t tell you how fast you can drive during rush hours”. Does that mean that the Internet is in a permanent congestion ? They might have missed fact that people have been consuming lot of media on the internet, that many now are living through DSL and Fiber. We’ll let them know. And I’d really know what kind of car they’re riding, old bikes perhaps. On the basis of this statement, you might just need to align on the basement ? Yeah, right. Why bother upgrading to IE8, let’s just get back to IE5

Now talking real, does browsing restricts to Windows users only ? What about Linux and Mac users ? Hence, what does Microsoft say about portability ? Or perhaps they might develop Linux and Mac versions for IE8 ? Which we righteously can claim ?

This is about time to go out and claim it. Microsoft, we would be glad to adopt IE8 provided you hand us copies under Linux and Mac. And I’m sure many others would do as well, so it’s up to you. Care to listen ?

Apple announced the release of the new iPhone, called 3Gs, during the World Wide Developer Conference 09, held on June 8th. Rumors and speculations have been going on, long before, as it usually does before any WWDC. Many of which were quite promising.

While the announcement was going on, a foule of people was there, following each of them, waiting for the breath-taking one. But it never came. Several interesting features have been announced, but most of them were rather tied to the Firmware 3.0 (which will be available as of June 17) rather than the 3Gs.

The innovative stake at Apple during the last year has been pretty low, or at least, not focused on the iPhone. There has been no improvements on the design, one of Apple’s major focus. No improvement on the screen quality. No improvement on useability. Not even a frontal camera for 3G conversations.

Among the improvements, you can find:

• 3MP Camera and video recording
• OpenGL support
• Compass
• Voice control
• 32GB storage

Complete list is here.

Mainly, the focus was purely technical: better speed, better battery life, better camera, more storage, Nike+ support. But again, this is far from creativity, far from revolution. I am not saying the 3Gs won’t be a great phone. And I will be part of the guys upgrading, since I’m still keeping a vintage 2G as I was not particularly seduced by the 3G and was expecting more from the next-gen.

The innovation slowdown is not just iPhone related. You can see it slowing in every major Apple line of products. Macbooks just got greener, Snow Leopard had the same focus: technical improvements, less features introductions than what Leopard did.

Is it a sign that Apple’s creativity is slowly reaching its limits ? Or is it because the main driving force (aka Steve Jobs) is leaving the business inch by inch (mainly due to health reasons) ?

Apple will, for sure, have to react if they don’t want to lose the market they’ve been winning. Palm Pre and Android are there as big threats and if you have to SWOT the smartphone market, you’d notice that Apple would face a great list of Ts (Threats) despite the Ss (Strenghts) and the Os (Opportunities) which they share with their competitors.

The Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) has been released today.

As the name says, the RC version of a software is the candidate to be the final version that goes to market, almost apple to apple, but for some minor bug fixes.

If you have been trying out Windows 7 during beta, you may just upgrade, this version is likely to be more stable and should implement late implementation features. If you’re a Windows XP/Vista user and plan to upgrade, you may start with this RC and move to the final version, which should be released on March 2010.

Windows Vista users will be able to upgrade to Windows 7 using the installation process, while XP and Windows 7 beta users should do a fresh install then restore/reinstall their previous applications and files.

The Windows 7 RC will expire on June 2010. As of March 2010, it will shut down the computer every couple of hours. But by the time, the final version should have been released to public and widely distributed. You will then have reinstall the final release and restore your files. Windows will notify you two-weeks before the shut down process starts.

Windows Seven has been released in two versions, 32bits and 64bits. Depending on your architecture, you should download and install the appropriate version. If you’re 64, I recommend you’d use the 64bits version rather than the 32 in order to leverage the full capabilities. 32bits applications will still be able to run in compatibility mode.

You may download Windows 7 on the Microsoft download site. You may then follow installation instructions described here.

The product keys are common to all users and a list is provided by Microsoft. You will be provided with a product key during the download process.

The Sun acquisition by Oracle has been a long debate on the press and Twitter.

Yesterday, as I was strolling through our internal corporate portal, I saw a headline post about this topic which continued in our internal forum, asking about our thoughts on this move. I thought I’d just share them with everyone.

First, we have yet to spot the real motivation that lead Oracle to overtake on Sun. Might be end-to-end data center solution or can be software based (Java mainly).

If you look at Oracle’s portfolio, it is mainly Java based, wether it is Oracle Database design tools, Middleware or most other applications. So, leveraging Java technology will certainly be a big asset for them.

Sun and Oracle have both a whole different corporate culture and outlook on open-source. So far Oracle has only done limited Open Source incursions. Mainly their Linux support service was a way to draw in more database customers. Oracle has a different approach to open-ness than Sun has. Plus the open source business model relies on services which is not something Oracle is really experienced with as they mostly rely on partners. And since Sun has drastically reduced the open source service over the year, they might not prove better monetizing these solutions.

The Java community is among the most importants in the IT world, Oracle cannot take back some of asserted concepts, like open source, availability/portability and roadmap for Java and its SDK. But they could fork their development into a community version and an enterprise version, providing a business oriented framework which is the main motivation for enterprises. On the other side, you’ll still have community produced content and software (Struts, Spring, Hibernate…).

Looking through MySQL, there are two differentiating parts:

• MySQL as a community and open source database, which might be kept as en entry database software, that fits well with the web world
• MySQL Enterprise (including MySQL Cluster) which will certainly be cut dead as it is a direct competitor to Oracle.

Although, for cost reasons, Oracle will probably reduce the team sizes for these community products to the minimal requirement. Hence you can expect more delayed releases and less improvement over time. The maintenance will probably an issue to discuss.

Oracle will probably kill all the non profitable side apps like Glassfish, Netbeans as they will try to impose their own existing tools that have been acquired through the years (especially through BEA). Not to forget that Oracle is a member of Eclipse, which is the main Netbeans competitor.

Now on the hardware level, the fact that Oracle provides hardware will probably change its relationship with hardware partners. For example, I can see the HP-Oracle Exadata partnership killed as Oracle will manufacture its own high profile database platforms.

Will the software still be agnostic ? Not sure. You might see in the future a delayed support for other platforms (Windows, AIX, HP-UX, Linux).

One of the main opportunities Oracle gets by acquiring Sun is entering the Cloud Computing world, they would be able provide an end to end platform. Sun has already made great achievements and acquisitions in this way. Completing their infrastructure with Cloud oriented applications (web application servers, database) will certainly reinforce Oracle’s position on this market as a global provider.

Now what are the threats to SAP ? It all depends on how strong the SAP-Oracle relationship in the coopetition environment.

SAP is a main driver to Oracle’s database world so has it been for Sun’s hardware and software (OS, Clustering). On the other hand, Sun was maintaining a specific SDK for SAP in order to run NetWeaver 7.0 Java based platforms. Will the version still be maintained by Oracle ?

As for future releases, SAP has taken a step ahead and is now basing the new solutions on its own JDK, named Solid Rock, this reduces the liability to Sun’s releases thus to Oracle. On the other hand, SAP uses its own framework for building Java applications (CAF and Java webdynpros), thus the impact of Oracle owning Java cannot be significant.

Still this rises the liability to its main competitor for future releases. In order to be kept aligned on future evolutions of the technology, SAP will still have to leverage the advancements made by Oracle on Java in order be standards compliant. Unless Oracle suddenly threats Java as a private and proprietary asset, SAP might not affected by this.

Oracle has now become a big threat to IBM then to HP (and possibly Microsoft) rather than SAP. The position against SAP will barely change by this acquisition, but this makes an important competitor to these 3 others.

Google is making new experiments on their search engine. This experiment allows a restricted set of users to try out new search options amongst which many have been there for some time (timeline, content oriented search, timed-research). But the new experiment also includes the Wonder wheel which allows you to derive from an initial search to possible (understand most queried related subjects) on the subject.

Let’s take an example. Suppose you want to make a search on “Social Networks”.

Submit your search request then click the options link on the page results.

Select then the Wonder wheel option from the Standard view section.

Magic… And there you have your wonder wheel guiding you through further searches

You may then click on any section and navigate through your parent searches

For example click on “Online social networking” and you get this result

This kind of guided search now can be useful if Google could add semantics which would bring a whole lot of new possibilities. This search can be even more enhanced if Google could leverage all the power of its parent services and Google Open Social APIs to suggest targeted results like facebook pages.

If you want to try out this feature, you can work around the restriction by navigating to http://www.google.com, execute the following javascript into your navigation bar:

javascript:void(document.cookie=”PREF=ID=4a609673baf685b5:TB=2:LD=en:CR=2:TM=1227543998:LM=1233568652:DV=AA:GM=1:IG=3:S=yFGqYec2D7L0wgxW;path=/; domain=.google.com”);

The previous javascript code will create a local cookie on your browser saying that you’re part of the experiment.

There, you will be ready for your search request and the wonder wheel.

Il y’a quelques mois l’ICANN a ouvert l’enregistrement de ses propres extensions à n’importe quelle institution dès lors qu’elle payait un droit d’enregistrement (relativement important ~ 185,000$) et qu’elle démontrait sa capacité à administrer cette nouvelle extention.

Depuis deux jours OVH s’est lancée dans l’aventure et propose l’enregistrement gratuit de son domaine en .ovh. Bien évidemment la seule contrainte étant d’héberger le domaine sur les DNS d’OVH, autrement, il ne serait pas fonctionnel.

Si vous êtes intéressés, rendez-vous dès maintenant sur leur page d’enregistrement et choisissez votre domaine.

… Tout cela serait fortement alléchant s’il n’y avait quelques petits détails qui nous chiffonnaient:

1- On sait qu’OVH sont dotés d’un sacré humour

2- L’annonce de ce service a été effectuée… le 1er avril

3- Aucune annonce officielle à aucun niveau n’a été faite

Cela pourrait donc nous faire penser à un poisson d’avril, et on n’en est pas loin.

Octave Kabla (directeur d’OVH) a donné la réponse. Aujourd’hui, OVH est en phase de pré-réservation des domaines. Ils ont déposé un dossier auprès de l’ICANN et attendent sa validation. Les personnes ayant déposé un domaine se le verront attribuer, si le dossier est accepté, dès qu’OVH recevra l’autorisation de commercialiser des domaines avec cette extention.

En attendant, les personnes impatientes, pourront toujours utiliser ce domaine à la condition de modifier les entrées de leur serveur DNS et de pouvoir ajouter une délégation, pour les domaines en .ovh, aux serveurs DNS d’OVH. Le domaine devrait apparaître dans leur manager sous 24h après l’enregistrement.