Kit Kai's Tech Blog

I've been looking at social networking during my free time this month, to see if organisation can truely benefit from it somehow. Mainly looking at LinkedIn, and FaceBook (was on Multiply before social networking buzz is here, but it is too slow to be productive, and didn't innovate much since it started) as I'm in both network. Both have distinct characteristics. LinkedIn is more serious, linking people you have worked with or have a relationship with, and gaining your credibility through recommendation. FaceBook is also linking people you have worked with or have a relationship with, but very interactive, and content you are creating, via status updates, or through the fun little apps you add, propagate through your network. Those fun apps is double edged. On one hand, you get to interact with people further away from your network, which would take lots of time to maintain through your typical communication tools, those fun apps could also take time away from being productivity.

But looking at the organisation without KM initiatives, social networks might give organisation some form or knowledge retention, if it can be implemented properly. (Note: I'm not very familiar with knowledge management technologies).

Imagine (and I really mean imagine) your organisation organised into vertical markets, with each business units having their own accounts manager, pre-sales consultant, and delivery team. These supposedly have strong domain knowledge, but probably weak in technology knowledge. So there is a central team that looks purely on technology. When there is a sales engagement, BU account manager and pre-sales consultant will probably get one of the relevant consultant in the central team to be involved. But the domain information they can share is probably only whatever sales engagement they previously was involved in (more towards the technical side). Sure, some of these information is probably captured in CRM systems. But what about information generated during delivery process (Difficult customers, infrastructure issues faced, etc)?

I'm just imagining, say some sort of facebook is in place in the enterprise, with tagging in place. Will social networking help capture these information into an organisation's KM structure to be consumed in future sales engagement? Imaging a project managers doing some blogging about issues faced in managing the project, like some generic clause that potentially opens up the scope of the project, or an application guy facing identity management between two system. All these information, I'm quite sure will be useful to the pre-sales team / architect that may be involved in future engagement when designing a solution to best serve customer needs!

If an enterprise get it, I believe one of the key factor for social networking to be successful is it need to be pervasive as well, easily accessible through office productivity tool, and even better, support offline mode (even in 3g, staying connected all the time in Singapore is still a challenge). One of the main reason why my blogging slows down is I can't blog without coming to this web page. I don't even have time to see if I can link Word or OneNote to this community server... 

Oh, how I wish I'm in an organisation who would readily dogfood some of these technologies...

Was trying to catch up with my reading, I stumbled upon this from Channel 9. Its a sample application that demostrate SOA, and (according to the video) it so happens (My own opinion: Yah right. What are the chances that all the necessary contracts for all the webservices is the same!) that IBM has a similiar application which the app can also connect to, hence you can actually replace the business service layer without change the presentation layer.

Quoted from the document, the following technologies are illustrated in the .NET StockTrader benchmark application:

• Interoperability between .NET and J2EE services based on WCF and industry-standard Web Services.
• Implementing high-performance ASP.NET Web applications with a logical n-tier, service-oriented enterprise design pattern.
• Implementing high performance WCF services.
• Implementing multiple service bindings to support different network transports and message encoding formats using WCF.
• Hosting WCF-based Web Services using IIS and self-hosting WCF Web Services within custom service hosts.
• Building loosely-coupled message-driven services utilizing WCF and MSMQ.
• Integrating with .NET 2.0 distributed transaction services by utilizing System.Transactions, the WCF transaction model and the Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator
• Using WCF to implement systems with replicated messaging engines and transacted, durable messaging.
• Core performance tuning parameters for WCF and .NET to achieve high-throughput.
• Alternative physical deployment topologies inclusive of deploying to load-balanced server clusters for scalability and failover purposes.

There is also a document that compare performance between .Net and WebSphere. 

If you prefer to watch a video of the application instead of reading the documents, check out this link 

Man, when Chewy showed us this on his laptop, I thought it was a cool photo stitching tool, which allows you to construct a navigatable environment with the photographs you take about a place. I never knew it can be powered by social networking, stitching photos all over the world and create the environment!!!

Check out this video!

[Via Source=Joel Oleson]

Everyone is always looking for the huge case studies.  You don't have to go to Microsoft.com for this one.  See the Miami Herald's coverage of the Miami Dade SharePoint Deployment

http://www.miamiherald.com/295/story/208130.html

<snip/>

"This past weekend, Miami Dade County Public Schools successfully launched their full-fledged portal and applications suite, based on MOSS 2007, to over 360,000 students, 1.2 million parents, 40,000 employees, 400 school locations supporting 124,000 classes.  This weekend we released the following:

·         Role-Based Portals – Student, Parent, Principals, Employee

·         Collaboration Portals – 1200 Departmental Sites, 124,000 Class Sites, Project-Based Sites, 400 School Sites, etc.

·         Employee MySites – 40,000 Sites, Student MySites to follow this year

[Via]

To me, this is really cool! Schools in Singapore is just using SharePoint as a WCM portal, DM. Nothing much as visionary as this. Check out the audio as well!

I was trying to convert some case studies documents in SharePoint, to demostrate that you are able to author content in Word, and publish them in HTML using document conversion process. But the document conversion process keep crashing because of certain elements in the Word document. But when I tried to edit, the document is protected against edit.

Knowing Word 2007 files are just xml files in a zip file, I did the following.

1. Rename the document to zip format
2. Open it up in my favorite zip program
3. Edit settings.xml in Notepad
4. Look for "protection" in the xml file, and you will locate <w:documentProtection> element.
5. Remove all the attributes in it.
6. Update the zip file
7. Rename the document back to docx
8. Open it up in Word 2007, and you are able to edit the document...