What is Enterprise Architecture?

A question that I am often asked by colleagues and friends alike is “What is an Enterprise Architect, anyway?” This article is the first in a series of articles that will explain the term “Enterprise Architecture,” why it is important, and how each of the disciplines that constitute Enterprise Architecture relate to each other. Most importantly, this article is going to talk about how Enterprise Architecture needs to govern the processes around software development.

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Exchange Web Services – Subscriptions and Notifications

It’s been a really busy week since I posted my first post on Exchange Web Services. I have learned a lot in that short period of time that I want to share with you. Whether you are an OpenEdge, Java or .NET developer, I think this post is going to have some information for all of you.

In my first post, I told you about the background story – I need to enable an OpenEdge CRM application to create, modify and delete calendar and task items in Microsoft Exchange. I also need Exchange to let me know any time a calendar or task item is changed so that I can update the OpenEdge database accordingly. Simple use cases.

When I left off last week, my next step was to get Exchange subscriptions working, and, boy, what a trip that has been.

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Exchange Web Services – Starting out

A couple of months back, a gentleman who has now become a friend and business partner, came to me and asked me if there was any way to get at all the calendar items in his sales organization’s calendars with the intention of integrating it with his Progress OpenEdge CRM system. Jim is using Exchange 2007 for his e-mail and calendaring solutions.

I was aware that Microsoft had released a new API for Exchange in Exchange 2007 called Exchange Web Services (EWS), and so I said that I needed to do a little research on the API, but I was pretty sure that it was possible. Sure enough, MSDN has some documentation of the API and Microsoft is touting it as the replacement for all APIs that communicate with Exchange. Web Services – how hard can it be?

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Windows 7 and Google Chrome Browser update

It’s been a couple of months since I first installed Windows 7 and Google Chrome and although I had planned to provide an earlier update, things got pretty busy through December and I am only now coming up for air. So here, at last, is the long-promised update.

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Google Chrome OS vs Microsoft Windows

I was looking through all my favorite web sites for news on Friday evening when I ran into two news reports that I thought were very interesting. Microsoft showed up at their Professional Developers Conference in LA with a half-baked presentation about Internet Explorer 9 that just happened to make press the day before Google announced the release of Google Chrome OS as open source code. Is this a coincidence or an emergency reaction to the realization that Chrome OS could be a very serious threat?

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Windows 7 upgrade experience

We have 4 Windows boxes at home. Three are HP 32-bit notebooks and the other one is an HP 64-bit machine – mine. We bought all 4 machines during the course of this year and all came with Windows Vista. We have had no end of trouble with Vista. The machines work fine, but a lot of applications generate exceptions and hang under Vista that work fine on my XP box. So I decided to believe Microsoft’s advertizing (probably a big mistake) that indicates that Windows 7 has been thoroughly tested.
For the most part, this upgrade went smoothly even if it took an inordinate amount of time. The machines are more stable than they were before and they seem to be faster. Internet Explorer performs much better and even Firefox is behaving pretty decently.
So far so good.

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OpenEdge Dynamic OpenClient Java Example

In a previous post, I said I would post an example that demonstrates the use of the OpenEdge Dynamic OpenClient. Well here is the Java version of it. This post is an extensive discussion of the example and how it is structured. Enjoy.

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No, Ms Manes, SOA is NOT dead

This morning my RSS feeds had an update from Ms Manes’ blog again. She points to an article by Dan Woods of Forbes.com and says of his article that she is “pleased to see that Dan read beyond the first paragraph, and he understands the core message of my post (i.e., ‘SOA has been disappointing and that services should be a key focus’)” …
I wonder if Ms Manes realizes that she advocated exactly the same thing that Mr Woods advocated and then went on to slam the idea? In her original post she argued that the focus should shift from SOA to building services, and yet here she is arguing that just building services will result in fragile, expensive systems. Ms Manes is just flat-out contradicting herself.

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Twitter and Facebook face the wrath…

Like many others, I woke up yesterday morning to find Twitter down. While I was trying to check Twitter, my wife was trying to get at her Facebook page and was surprised at how slow it was. “The internet is slow!” she exclaimed. A few minutes later I caught the report on the fact that Twitter had experienced a denial of service attack. Based on today’s reports, it appears that the denial of service attack was a Russian attack on a Georgian citizen who had made politically charged comments about the Russo-Georgian conflict last year. Organizations around the world see social media as the future of customer growth and they are spending large sums of money on very expensive people to advance their social web marketing agendas, and therein lies the risk…

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Marines ban Social Media

The United States Marines today announce a ban on Twitter, Facebook and several other Social Media sites. This ban is to be in force for 1 year and it is being done because “These internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries.”
No doubt that for the Marines themselves and their families this is a very disappointing thing.

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