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Best of the Blogs by Jacqueline Emigh
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More and more these days, thought leaders are leveraging blogs as a way to share their knowledge and views with other Windows IT financial pros. As a general rule, the best of these blogs capture wisdom gained behind the scenes, by insiders who live and breathe this industry on a day-to-day basis. Here are snapshots of some particularly interesting and useful recent entries from the blogosphere.
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Articles from
April 2007
Why the blog is of interest:
The blogging wave isn’t limited to Microsoft staffers alone. Long-time Microsoft partners are getting into the act, too. Greg Brill, founder and CEO of Infusion, just so happens to be a particularly prolific blogger. In “Greg’s Weblog,” he delivers a partner’s perspective on issues ranging from management leadership to Windows technologies such as SharePoint and SQL Server Management Studio.
Greg also answers questions from readers, giving tips culled from his years of experience with different types of consulting gigs, including per project fixed price; POC (proof of concept) projects with Microsoft; on-site mentoring; and contracts with Microsoft for ADRS (Architectural Design Review Sessions) seminars.
In one especially memorable blog entry, Greg provides advice to a young consultant who's pondering the prospect of starting his own business.
“The thing you have to be honest about, when bringing on another employee into a services company, is whether or not you legitimately have something to offer them relative to other opportunities they can pursue,” he writes.
“And this goes to the heart of what kind of company you want to be. As a services company, you need to make a choice up front: you are going to go commodity or high-end. You cannot do both. Choose now."
Click through to blog:
Why the blog is of interest:ESB is grabbing lots of attention lately in financial IT circles as a potentially hot new method of integrating disparate systems. But ESB stands for Enterprise Service Bus, not Enterprise Silver Bullet, points out Mohammad Akif, a Microsoft senior architect who supports strategic accounts throughout Canada. Should Microsoft join the ranks of vendors now marketing “ESB-in-a-box”? Mohammed doesn’t think so. In a blog entitled “No Spin Architecture," Mohammad shares his keen insights into ESBs, Vista and Office 2007 upgrades, the various flavors of .NET, and much more. According to Mohammad, although Microsoft's BizTalk could definitely qualify as an ESB, “Microsoft does not believe in a one-size-fits-all approach and has so far resisted the pressure to name BizTalk or a variation of it as an ESB.” Click through to blog:
Why the blog is of interest:Identity theft is fast progressing as a huge threat to financial institutions everywhere, especially in the area of online banking. In his “Identity Weblog,” Kim Cameron, Microsoft’s architect for identity, addresses innumerable ramifications of this growing problem, ranging from illegal sale of stolen credit card information on the Web, to whether or not schoolchildren should be fingerprinted, to technical solutions such as encryption. In an April 2nd entry, Kim answers questions from his readers about CardSpace, an encryption technology that can be enabled for .NET 2.0 through the use of Visual Studio 2005 Toolbox for Windows CardSpace. Click below to read Kim’s advice on subjects such as how CardSpace prevents phishing - even when used in conjunction with passwords - and to find out how to ask him ID-related questions of your own. Click through to blog:
Why the blog is of interest:Have you heard of OBAs (office business applications) yet? Even if your answer is “yes,” how much do you really know about what they are, and how they relate to OR-LOS (OBA RAP for Loan Origination) and other SOAs (software-oriented architectures)? Mike Walker, finance industry architectural strategist at Microsoft, does a great job of unraveling these mysteries in the March 31st entry from his multifaceted blog, “Mike Walker’s Ramblings about Industry Architecture.” Mike tells us, for example, that OBAs are NOT a “place far far away in the StarWars galaxy or something.” Rather, they’re a new breed of composite applications that bring together both the front-office and back-office in real world businesses, and their use can be particularly valuable in financial services. To read more of Mike’s thoughts about OBAs, OR-LOS, and SOAs, click on the link below. Click through to blog:
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