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HP recently followed up its December plan to release its WebOS mobile platform and development tools with a proposed timeline.  The company also recently released Enyo 2.0, the webOS developer’s tool that enables users to distribute their Enyo-based webOS applications across other platforms. When it’s all said and done, WebOS will be given to the open source community under an Apache license 2.0.

Developers were hoping to have the open source version of WebOS at all at once; however HP announced that the platform and its supporting tools will be released in installments running through September. The first version, Open WebOS 1.0, will be converted to a standard Linux kernel which will make it easier to port to different hardware.

It has been a winding road for WebOS since it was first introduced by Palm in January 2009 as the successor to Palm OS. After Palm was acquired by HP in April 2010, webOS was released to new HP devices. It was practically left for dead, after product line changes and complicated corporate shuffling at the top of HP.

Its troubled path since Palm’s acquisition by HP has caused experts to doubt webOS’s outlook. Al Hilwa, program director for IDC, said it will face an uphill battle.

“The battle for mobile platforms appears to have narrowed considerably,” Hilwa said, “And it is difficult and unrealistic at this point to expect WebOS to see a recovery back into that market.” In a smartphone poll performed by Nielsen in Q2 2011, webOS only had a 2 percent market share in the U.S. compared to 39 percent for Android and 28 percent that for Apple iOS.

However, Hilwa believes that the flexibility of webOS may help the platform become relevant in the future.

“It is quite possible that hardware vendors in the embedded space can take WebOS up for appropriate projects,” Hilwa said, in an email message. “Also, there are parts of WebOS, such as the development framework, that may be used independently.”

This month, HP expects to release and intended project governance model, QT WebKit extensions, JavaScript core, and UI Enyo widgets. In March, HP is set to release graphics extensions, LevelDB, USB extensions. An update for Enyo (2.1), the release of Ares 2.0, and Node services are expected for April. July sets up the ground for September with the release of a system manager dubbed, Luna, a system manager bus, core applications, and another update of Enyo (2.2). The Open webOS beta will be released in August, the company said. – Ryan Punzalan

Writing these stories so far on community members has been a great experience and I received a lot of positive feedback. The stories continue with the fourth story in the BizTalk Community Series that brings active BizTalk community members to the foreground. The story today is on Abhijit Mahato. He is a Microsoft Community Contributor since 2011, a blogger and an active BizTalk forum member.

Abhijit is married to his lovely wife Laxmi, and they are expecting their first child in March 2012. His family lives in Kolkata, also known as “The City of Joy, City of Palaces, the Cultural capital of India”, located in the eastern part of India.

Abhijit currently works as a Senior BizTalk Consultant at Capgemini, one of the world’s largest IT Services, Consulting and Outsourcing companies with over 115,000 people operating in 40 countries. His job involves working with customers on integration projects especially using BizTalk Server, WCF (.Net) and SQL Server (SSIS). He loves to design, architect, and develop BizTalk Solution. Also he likes to install and configure BizTalk Server.

He had his first integration project using BizTalk Server 2004 in the year 2005. His senior project manager and customer highly appreciated his work and effort. This motivated him to do more integration projects. Since then Abhijit has worked on many large and complex integration projects with BizTalk.

Abhijit feels that the best thing about working in any integration project is learning BizTalk (Integration product) and also the opportunity to learn other technologies like SAP, EDI, MS CRM and so on. What he likes the most about BizTalk Server product and I quote is:

“It is currently one of the most mature, reliable and stable integration server in the industry.”

Furthermore he describes the product in the following manner:

“It has got a huge number of “out of the box” adapters; and there is a long list of other features like message persistence, recovery in case of failure in communication, correlation, long running transactions, monitoring of business processes, complex mapping, and the ESB. Furthermore BizTalk contains a number of tools like BRE, BAM, SSO, BizTalk Admin console and so on enhancing productivity.”

Finally Abhijit is very excited about Microsoft’s recent announcement of the forthcoming release of BizTalk Server 2010 R2, and is looking forward to exploring and working with this new release.

In his spare time, Abhijit loves to spend time with his family and friends, take participation in various quiz competitions and enjoy solving mathematical and logical puzzles. Besides that he loves reading technical blogs on new Microsoft technologies like Windows AppFabric,Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows Azure. Finally he also spends time in contributing to MSDN BizTalk forums and write blogs posts about BizTalk issues and related topics.

Abhijit would like to thank people for reading his posts and appreciates if they can also provide feedback. This will keep him motivated to continue to contribute. He feels this will also improve the online BizTalk community experience for others.  

A final quote from Abhijit:

“I believe that one doesn’t ever get tired until he makes the last attempt and doesn’t ever make the last attempt until he is successful.”

I would like to thank Abhijit for his contributions to the community and the time he took to have a chat with me.

U.S. Commerce Association Honors the Achievement
NEW YORK, NY,  January 30, 2012—SOA Software has been selected for the 2011 Los Angeles Award in the Merchandising & Marketing category by the U.S. Commerce Association (USCA).

The USCA Award Program recognizes outstanding enterprises throughout the country. Each year, the USCA identifies companies that they believe have achieved exceptional marketing success in their enterprise category. These companies enhance the positive image of business through service to their customers and region.

“Receiving the 2011 Marketing Award is an honor and very special,” said Roberto Medrano, executive vice president of marketing. “It builds on our recognition from top analysts for our innovative products and from tier one industry organizations for our forward thinking marketing management.”

Various sources of information were gathered and analyzed to choose the winners in each category. The 2011 USCA Award Program focuses on quality, not quantity. Winners are determined based on the information gathered both internally by the USCA and data provided by third parties.

About U.S. Commerce Association (USCA)

U.S. Commerce Association (USCA) is a New York City based organization funded by local businesses operating in towns, large and small, across America. The purpose of USCA is to promote local business through public relations, marketing and advertising.

The USCA was established to recognize the best of local businesses in their community. Our organization works exclusively with local business owners, trade groups, professional associations, chambers of commerce and other business advertising and marketing groups. Our mission is to be an advocate for small and medium size businesses and business entrepreneurs across America.
URL: http://www.uscaaward.com

About SOA Software

SOA Software is a leading provider of unified SOA governance, cloud and enterprise API Management products that enable organizations to plan, build, and run enterprise services and open APIs.  The world’s largest companies including Bank of America, Pfizer, and Verizon use SOA Software solutions to transform their business. http://www.soa.com

Strategic Move Driven by Global SOA Governance Paradigm
Los Angeles, CA. – January 17, 2012 – SOA Software, a leading provider of SOA governance, cloud and enterprise API Management products, is extending its presence to the Middle East region, the company announced today.  The strategic move serves a growing demand for SOA governance automation solutions that span global trade networks.  Tony Rolston, Managing Director, MEA, will manage the Middle East operations.

“We’re experiencing a remarkable evolution in cloud-based computing,” said Paul Gigg, President and CEO, SOA Software.  “As companies stretch service-oriented architectures across the globe, we are increasingly called upon to provide governance automation with trading partners and international business units.  The Middle East, including such countries as Egypt, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, is a natural extension of this trend for us.”

“The Middle East is an area of tremendous potential for SOA Software,” said Rolston.  “Economies are growing as businesses become more and more connected globally. We’re seeing many opportunities to help corporations effect automated SOA governance. Our newly expanded management team includes seasoned professionals with over 10 years experience working in this field in the Middle East so we are fully conversant with the business challenges and customers are already requesting SOA Software as their Governance platform of choice.” 

About SOA Software

SOA Software is a leading provider of unified SOA governance, cloud and enterprise API Management products that enable organizations to plan, build, and run enterprise services and open APIs.  The world’s largest companies including Bank of America, Pfizer, and Verizon use SOA Software solutions to transform their business.  For more information, please visit http://www.soa.com.

There is a new BizTalk blog. Another one, yes targeted for BizTalk administrators. Why? There are many blogs out there. Yet most of them are focused on the developer. There is not much on BizTalk administrative topics nor one blog where BizTalk administrators share their knowledge, and experience between each other and with the community. Jeroen Hendriks from Axon Olympus started an initiative to create a blog for BizTalk professionals with a heart for managing BizTalk. He talked this through with me sharing some thoughts and a game plan. We took from there and blog is live now!

You can join as contributor by contacting Jeroen (administrator and owner) through Contact Us. Currently besides me and Jeroen, two more professionals from the field joined: Tord Glad Nordahl and Howard S. Edidin. Probably more BizTalk professionals will join over time. I hope many will contribute and even more will read this blog.

Enjoy.

The third story of the BizTalk Community Series that brings active BizTalk community members to the foreground is on Rene Brauwers. He is mainly an active blogger on BizTalk Server. His blog contains highly valuable posts on setting up a BizTalk infrastructure, how to integrate with CRM 2011 and on many other topics. Last year he also acted as technical reviewer for BizTalk Server 2010 Patterns book and for my forthcoming BizTalk Server 2010 Cookbook.

Rene is 34 years old, born in Venlo, the Netherlands, and he moved to The Hague in 1996 to study. Ever since he has stayed in or close to that city. He currently lives together with his girlfriend Miranda in Rijswijk.

Rene is a BizTalk Specialist at Motion10 and is he considers himself as one of those people who is lucky enough to say that he can make a living out of his hobby. His BizTalk expertise ranges from the early stage involvement like pre-sales, proof-of-concepts, requirements gathering, architecting, developing to administration. Besides BizTalk he still finds the opportunity to do some programming as well like C#, SQL, WCF, Entity, WF, Azure and so on.

Rene’s integration background started years ago with WebMethods. The main reason for his involvement with this product back then was that BizTalk according to his employer was not mature enough. His employer choose WebMethods. However Rene has never been a Java kind of guy. He liked Microsoft more, so in the end he was thrilled to get his hands-on experience with BizTalk.

Rene loves the versatility of the BizTalk Server product. Iin fact nowadays it (almost) fits into the complete .Net software stack. He feels that almost every integration challenge can be solved with it.To his opinion there is not another product that offers so much out of the box functionality as BizTalk Server (BRE,BAM, B2B, B2C, ESB, SOA etcetera). All this functionality for such a relative small investment. With this level of versatility Rene believes a developer should be pretty broadly skilled (infra-structure knowledge, security, LOB applications, SQL, .NET, WCF, Cloud, PAAS, SAAS, being able to think in processes, think publish/subscribe, creative, Communicator, Team-player, Documenter etcetera). Besides that as a developer you have to stay on top of the latest developments, which makes it so interesting. He thinks all of this makes us BizTalkers so scarce!!!

In his spare time Rene likes to:

• Spends a lot of time together with his girlfriend Miranda on decorating their house and planning/discussing on how to decorate it. Well actually she comes up with the good ideas and he usually agrees.
• Loves to spend time together with friends, have a few drinks and some laughs.
• Likes to dig into new (Microsoft) Technologies and play around with them.
• Big a fan of (summer) music festivals like Pinkpop, Valtifest, LoveLand, Extrema, Parkpop and so on.
• Study, well that’s one of the perks when you’re in IT, you always have to keep learning and luckily he doesn’t mind.
• Mostly he just chills and relaxes, enjoying live to it’s fullest extent.

Currently Rene doesn’t practice any sports, except for the occasional swim in the morning. Yet he has the intention to start picking up table-tennis again, something he enjoyed when was young. Besides that he loves to watch soccer. He mainly likes to watch ‘Oranje‘ (our National Soccer Team) play. Yet he is still disappointed by the fact that the Dutch lost the World Cup 2010 final from Spain. Rene simply can’t wait for the sweet revenge this year with Euro 2012

A final quote from Rene:

“Simply treat people as you would like to be treated. Respect each other and be honest. It all sounds so easy, but only if it would be that easy…. “

Rene also has a request for my readers:

If you have a 457 visa for Australia to give away Feel free to contact him through LinkedIn.

#entarch There is a common fallacy among enterprise architects that radical structural and behavioural change can and should be driven by a few simple and powerful ideas. Alas, the public sector is strewn with the disastrous consequences of this fallacy.

We can find countless examples from the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK. For Steve Harrison, Honorary Professor of Social Policy at the University of Manchester, the idea that NHS reorganisations can be triggered by a few general ideas is one of the Seven Fallacies of English Health Policy. He points out that high levels of abstraction (beloved by academics and architects alike) do not allow proper assessment of the plausibility of claims about benefits of reorganisation and how the system will work. (HT @mellojonny)

Where do health reorganization principles come from? I asked a popular search engine, and was led to a paper called Basic Principles of Information Technology Organization in Health Care Institutions (JAMIA 1997); (I suppose from the high search ranking of this paper that it is a widely used source for such principles.) The paper concludes that all organizations MUST have certain characteristics, based on a single case study where these characteristics seemed to be beneficial; in other words, arguing from the particular to the general. (I’m sure there must be some more rigorous studies, but they don’t seem to get as good search rankings for some reason.)

But many of the principles that govern sweeping architectural reforms of the public sector aren’t even derived by thinly based generalization from such observed vignettes, but are derived from purely abstract concepts such as “choice” and “competition” and “justice”, to which each may attach his or her own politically motivated interpretation.

This leads to several levels of failure – not only failure of execution and planning (because the generalized principles are not sufficiently refined to provide realistic and coherent solutions to complex practical problems) but also failure of intention (because a vague but upbeat set of principles helps to conceal the fact that the underlying vision remains woolly).

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog post for the Official blog of TechNet Wiki with the topic “Wiki-Ninjas on Technology: BizTalk Server”. In that blog post I wrote a story on contributions of the community and Microsoft employees for the TechNet Wiki. Mid December there were little of 40 BizTalk Wiki Articles and over a month’s time it has grown to little over 70. That is a tremendous growth of articles (around 30). It show increasing popularity of the TechNet Wiki as a channel of information on Microsoft technology and products.

The newly added articles on BizTalk Server have been written by myself, Tord Glad Nordahl, Sandro Pereira, Howard S. Edidin, and Mick Badran. All these articles (existing and new) are being improved every day by people mentioned here and others (Microsoft employees and the community). I expect the number will grow over time to over 100+ articles as more community members will probably join.

With the wealth of information on TechNet Wiki, MSDN and other Microsoft channels combined you can fully leverage the BizTalk Server platform. You can reach all the BizTalk related wiki articles through BizTalk Server Resources on the TechNet Wiki article.

Enjoy reading any of the articles and hopefully you will find them useful.

By Ryan Punzalan

Today, Accenture released an updated version of a self-service portal to provide people electronic access to their caseworkers and the benefit application process in state resource systems.

Accenture Citizen Self-Service Portal Version 2.0 has enhanced self-service features, a training module and a ”natural language” rules engine to increase public agencies’ flexibility to adapt benefit eligibility programs and processes in response to legislative and policy changes.

Human service agencies using the portal will be provided ”24/7” access to citizens who want to determine their potential eligibility for public assistance programs, apply for benefits and manage benefits.

The new portal is designed mainly to help meet the needs of social service agencies and the people served by those agencies. It builds on the Accenture Public Service Platform to help public agencies manage human services delivery cost effectively with improved technological flexibility and enhanced citizen services and program outcomes.

This is part of an on-going Accenture effort to provide SOA expertise to government agencies. Read here to find how the company is now working with the state of Kansas to help create a new benefits eligibility system that implements service-oriented architecture.