The NOSE

Presentations

Did two presentations this week.

• "Technical Introduction to Second Life" at the annual MnSCU IT Conference.

• "Educational Technology Futures: The Shape of Things to Come" at the Minnesota High Tech Association Spring Conference.

ELI Conference 2008

I am at the Educause Learning Initiative Conference this week in San Antonio.

Identity 2.0 Gaining Momentum

One of my prinicipal take aways from the Burton Catalyst Conference: Identity 2.0 ("user-centric identity") is shining considerably brighter these days in the identity management firmament. While not a supernova event like Apple's rollout of the iPhone, we can expect to see more exciting developments. 

The maturation of Microsoft's CardSpace, the user-centric interop demonstration at Catalyst, and new developments around OpenID all presage a bright future for the user-centric approach advocated by identity gurus Dick Hardt (CEO, Sxip) and Kim Cameron (Microsoft's Identity Architect).

• What is Identity 2.0? You can't do better than start with Dick Hardt's entertaining keynote ("Identity 2.0") at Oscon 2005. Want more Dick? Try, "Who's the Dick on my Site."
  
• What are Identity 2.0 principles? Wade into Kim Cameron's influential paper "The Laws of Identity". And then "The Identity Metasystem", which introduces an inter-operable architecture based on the laws of identity.

SOA Dreams vs Reality

Is anyone reaping the benefits of SOA? At a well attended Catalyst Conference session called "SOA: Dreams vs Reality", a show of hands showed no hands. Anne Thomas Manes, VP & Research Director, went on to provide some tips:

SOA is about design, not technology (as a corollary you don't need ESB or a vendor's latest product to do SOA) You cannot buy SOA, you must design it Cultural and political factors are significant impediments to SOA implementations SOA is a long-term journey. If your organization is not willing to make a significant investment (enterprise-level planning; infrastructure & governance; organizational and cultural shift), don't waste your time.

Sharepoint 2007: Microsoft's New Juggernaut

At this week's Catalyst 2007 Conference Burton Group Research Director Peter O'Kelly predicted that Microsoft's Sharepoint 2007 is poised for very rapid expansion and is likely to take the lead in the "super platform" space: "Make no mistake about it --- it is a juggernaut". O'Kelly concluded that "SharePoint 2007 is a watershed product with very strong synergy across Microsoft's product/services offerings" and will significantly "reorder the collaboration/content management competitive landscape." While "far from perfect" the new version of Sharepoint, according to O'Kelly, is "also far beyond 'good enough'".