Martin Notes

I’ve been working with a lot of enterprise software during my whole career and it keep surprising me that almost no enterprise tool has any consideration for performance. I understand that the pricing is usually per CPU, which makes performance a less interesting feature for sales. But it goes too far.

How is it possible that you are advised to run 1 Oracle  WebLogic Portal instance on 1 CPU? I know portal is not comparable to PHP, but a factor 1:1000 is a bit to much for my liking. And Oracle is not alone in this: IBM, SAP, all of these are slow and slower. And it’s weird since we (the IT boys and girls) have fixed this a long time ago.

There is a beautiful concept called HTML caching. Yes, I know: that’s not nice, architectural incorrect, not flexible enough. Indeed, heavily personalised pages might not be the primary candidates for full page caching, but most of the websites out there still use a fairly static homepage. Cache that page!

At Componence we’ve (finally) delivered a standard caching solution to put in front of Oracle WebLogic Portal (or BEA Weblogic Portal and the result is shocking. The performance improvement is upwards of 1:20. Give it a try: http://www.wk-vet.fr. Yes, that’s portal, and it’s dynamic.

Dear enterprise architects, please stop being such principle asses and apply the most common fixes to your performance problems.

Enterprise 2.0, Opinion, Web Enterprise, performance

The man is making sense. There is no alternative for exchange in the opensource. Not for the server, and not for the client. It’s a sad thing because it makes acceptance of linux in the business world tough, if not impossible.

If Ubuntu is serious about the #1 bug, start thinking about this first: what software stack do you need to be a competitor to M$? That will include business software, quite a lot I think.

Enterprise 2.0, Opinion, Ubuntu open source enterprise

Why are we still working with menus in our desktops? It’s just about the most stupid way to give access to features in an application. Menus don’t give the user the possibility to ‘ask’ an application if a feature is available. If a feature is hidden somewhere deep the user might even never find it.

I’m pretty sure interaction designers thought a lot on how to replace menus. But I still see the concept coming back in every application an every website.

Looking forward to the web 3.0 ideas: why don’t we at least have a way to search in the features that an application provides? Why can’t I search in a menu? Better then that: why can’t I search for a feature? I’d like to enter in a word processor: “paper size” and then I want to see the dialog where I can set the paper size. I don’t want to enter the help, search, and get an explanation where I can do what I just found! That’s how we had to solve it in the 80’s, but applications should be able to do a bit more now.

Enterprise 2.0, GUI desktop, menus

This thing has been in my mind for a long time now. There is a connection between the open source community and Enterprise 2.0. They both describe distibuted responsibility and the use of web 2.0 tooling.

Look at the pages under: http://www.ubuntu.com/community/processes. This describes the organisation of the Ubuntu community. I’ve been reading this for about an hour now and I’ve seen 10ths of things we can use in Componence.

I’m going to do more research on this to find out how the settled enterprise can learn from the anarchistic open source community.

Enterprise 2.0, Linux, Opinion Enterprise 2.0, open source community

There has been a lot of talk lately about enterprise 2.0 in our company. It’s supposed to be the enterprise version of web 2.0, so: online collaboration, distributed content generation, distributed responsibilities, … This comes down to: wiki, blogging, but also a change in the company organisation.

I think that real enterprise 2.0 doesn’t have anything to do with technology, since all the technology was already there and it was already used. Enterprise 2.0 is about a change in mindset. Knowledge sharing has always been one of the major issues in enterprises. Componence (the company I work for) is not an enterprise, but we do work on 7 locations over the whole world. This means that our problem with knowledge sharing is in a way representative for larger companies.

Contact between employees is mostly through Skype. I’ve never been in a company where they are so happy when you have 15 skype chats open; this means you’re working hard. Chats, conference calls, video conferencing, mail, it all works, but the knowledge that is exchanged doesn’t stick. It’s lost after the conversation is over. Two or three people have learned something and then we go into the regular creating of presentations, text documents, mindmaps, etc.

But real knowledge should be shared with other people, discussed, enriched and USED! Wiki and blog give the company a way to do that. But then the employees still have to understand what they are doing. Don’t blog because your boss tells you to, don’t post something on wiki because it’s good for your bonus. It’s change in working: the knowledge in your head is worth nothing until you do something with it! Share the knowledge, actively join the discussion with other people in your company (our outside).

Me personally, I don’t have enough time to do all that shit… Ehm… Ah….

It’s going to be a long way before this Enterprise 2.0 thing will really work.

Enterprise 2.0, Opinion Enterprise 2.0, hype