Vodafone launches consumer-targeted Palm Treo smartphone
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(InfoWorld) - As part of a strategy to generate greater revenue from mobile data services, Vodafone Group has collaborated with Palm to launch a smartphone modeled after the Treo 750v but at a fraction of the price and with a newly designed user interface.
Vodafone will exclusively sell the Palm Treo 500v, which debuts in Europe in October, for three months, after which the handset will be available to other operators and retail outlets, in Europe and Asia, Roy Bedlow, vice president and general manager of Palm Europe, said Wednesday. Vodafone had a similar agreement with Palm when the operator launched the Treo 750v last year.
Pricing of the 500v will vary according to market. The handset will be available free or for a small fee together with a 12- to 18-month contract in the U.K., according to Vodafone spokeswoman Helen Brockett. In Germany, pricing for the handset will begin at ?30 ($41) and increase slightly according to the conditions of the operator’s two-year contracts.
By comparison, the Treo 750v sold for more than ?500 with a two-year contract in Germany when it was launched.
However, unlike the Treo 750v, which is targeted primarily at business users, the 500v lacks touchscreen capabilities, largely to lower the handset’s cost, Bedlow said. The phone runs Microsoft Windows Mobile 6 Standard operating system, which doesn’t support touchscreen capability, unlike the Professional version used in the 750v model.
Although the Treo 500v runs on 3G (third-generation) networks, it doesn’t support the more recent version HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) protocol, again mostly for cost reasons, according to Bedlow.
But the new smartphone is packed with a few features missing in the 750v, including a new interface designed to give users faster and easier access to Vodafone Live mobile Internet applications.
The applications are shown in a carousel that users can manipulate for easy navigation, according to Bedlow. In addition to Live, the carousel includes a number of applications such as Google Maps, YouTube and eBay.
The Treo 500v is designed for one-hand use, according to Bedlow.
Like the Treo 750v, the 500v supports Microsoft Direct Push technology to deliver Outlook mail, as well as Vodafone’s own push e-mail service. Users can also configure the handset to send and receive e-mail from the Vodafone account or from other e-mail accounts.
“With the Treo 500v, Vodafone wants to broaden its user base for mobile data services such as the Internet and e-mail,” Bedlow said. “The handset makes more features of high-end mobile phones available to more users.”
The new smartphone has 150MB of internal memory and a slot for a microSD expansion card. It is also equipped with Bluetooth wireless technology.
As part of the European rollout, Vodafone will offer the Treo 500v next month in Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and the U.K., with other European countries as well as the Asia-Pacific region to follow, according to Bedlow.
The Treo 500v will not be available in the U.S., although Palm is planning new devices later this year for North American market, according to a company spokesman.
Keyloggers proposed to fight terrorism in cybercafes
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(InfoWorld) - An organization in Mumbai, India has proposed that police use key-logging software at cybercafés to keep track of communications between terrorists.
Public computers at cybercafes offer terrorists the anonymity they require, said Vijay Mukhi, president of the Foundation for Information Security and Technology (FIST) in Mumbai in a telephone interview late Tuesday. Terrorists are known to use instant messengers (IM) from companies like Microsoft and Yahoo, and these companies do not share information from IM chats with the police, he added.
Keyloggers are software on a computer that record a user’s key strokes — whatever the user types — on a computer keyboard. Data from keyloggers will be uploaded to centralized servers where it will be available to the police for scrutiny.
The move does not as yet have the approval of the Mumbai police.
The keyloggers would be activated centrally as and when a suspect walks into a cyber café or when suspicious activity is noted, Mukhi said.
A number of bloggers have criticized Mukhi’s proposal, saying it will put personal data of ordinary individuals at risk. But some other blogs said that it is too small a price to pay to protect against loss of life from terrorism. The police should put in place a mechanism for citizens to seek redress from any misuse of their private information, Mukhi said.
Bomb blasts by terrorists have killed a large number of people in the country. In July last year, seven bombs planted in Mumbai’s suburban trains killed over 200 people and injured another 700.
Terrorists are increasingly using the Internet to communicate with one another, as they are aware that telephone and mobile phones connections are under Indian government surveillance, according to Mukhi.
FIST, a non-profit organization in Mumbai, is focused on cybersecurity and has worked with the police on related issues. It aims to get keyloggers on computers in cybercafes throughout India, Mukhi said.
Verizon taps FBI criminal division chief as CSO
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(InfoWorld) - The executive in charge of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation’s criminal investigations division will take over as chief security officer (CSO) of Verizon Communications early next year.
Michael Mason, head of the FBI’s Criminal, Cyber, Response and Services Branch, will become Verizon’s CSO in January 2007, the company said Tuesday. He replaces Jim Trainor, who will retire from the telecommunications giant.
A 22-year FBI veteran, Mason oversees the largest branch of the FBI and is the executive responsible for the federal law enforcement organization’s criminal, corruption, civil-rights, and cyber-crime investigations.
Mason will be in charge of Verizon’s overall security efforts, including physical security and cyber security within the company. He will report to Bill Barr, Verizon’s executive vice president and general counsel.
With more than 62 million customers and nearly 240,000 employees, Verizon is one of the largest carriers in the U.S.
Yahoo scores social networking online ad win
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(InfoWorld) - Yahoo will sell display advertising for Bebo, the first such deal Yahoo has secured with a social networking site, the companies said on Wednesday.
The agreement marks a significant milestone for Yahoo, whose turbulent management troubles and sagging revenues have left it chasing Google and Microsoft for a slice of growing online advertising revenues.
Under the deal, Yahoo will sell the majority of Bebo’s display ads for the U.K. and Ireland, reaching around 11.6 million users per month, the companies said, siting traffic statistics from comScore Networks. About 75 percent of the U.K.’s Internet users visit Bebo, particularly 13- to 24-year-olds.
Yahoo already supplied search for Bebo. No information was released on how much either company will make from the deal. The new features should be visible later this year.
Yahoo and Bebo also plan to develop a toolbar that will enable Bebo users to monitor activity on the site even when they are not actively viewing it. Bebo will also weave into its site Yahoo’s Answers feature, a bulletin-board type service where people answer each others’ questions and rank those answers based on quality.
Yahoo will bring Bebo advanced ad targeting capabilities, which will enable ads to be served based on what other Web sites a person has been viewing, said Toby Coppel, managing director of Yahoo Europe.
The technology, he said, uses third-party cookies, which are bits of data sent to a browser by a Web site and store certain information about users. That data is then used by ad networks to serve up what ad networks believe are relevant ads.
“We been investing significantly in our behavioral targeting capability” in Europe over the last nine months, Coppel said.
Last week, Yahoo announced it would pay $300 million for BlueLithium, a company that sells banner advertising to around 1,000 Web sites. Yahoo said in April it would buy the rest of Right Media for $680 million, which runs a marketplace for advertising to purchase space on Web sites.
Bebo places only one ad on a user’s profile, which is intentional to preserve a good user experience, but that ad also has to be the highest revenue generator, said Joanna Shields, Bebo’s international president.
“The type of ad and the fact that the ad is targeted and relevant to users is absolutely essential,” Shields said.
Bebo’s direct sales advertising team, whose duties will be turned over to Yahoo, will now develop integrated marketing plans with brands and partners, Shields said.
The deal could be a needed boost for Yahoo. The company has seen the departure of more than a dozen senior managers since it announced a reorganization last December. Co-founder Jerry Yang, who took over as CEO from Terry Semel in June, vowed to investors in July to put the company back on track.
Software AG updates webMethods BPM suite
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(InfoWorld) - Software AG plans to unveil details of Version 7.1 of the webMethods business process management suite on Wednesday, along with a new enterprise service bus (ESB) and a supply chain performance optimization tool.
When Software AG bought webMethods on June 1, it set ambitious targets for integration of the two companies’ product lines. This is the first update to the webMethods BPM suite since the merger: Version 7.0 was launched late in 2006.
“They are making quite good progress, considering there’s a lot to integrate,” said Jason Bloomberg, a managing partner of IT analyst firm ZapThink.
Among the BPM features that Software AG plans to unveil are simulation tools for testing the performance of new business processes, preconfigured performance indicators for management methodologies such as Six Sigma, and business calendar integration tools. Those allow the automatic offloading of certain tasks into workflow scheduling systems such as Lotus Notes or Exchange when human intervention is required, said Peter Kürpick, president and chief product officer of the webMethods product line.
WebMethods is also getting its dose of “Web 2.0″ technology: a new “tagging” feature will allow users to give the objects involved in business processes recognizable names, rather than those chosen by the program’s developers or by systems integrators.
“You can have one central instance and different ways of expressing it,” Kürpick said.
“This is particularly important when you go into a vertical market,” he said, citing health care as an example where software tools borrowed from business might refer to “customers,” but users would know them as “patients.”
Other new software elements include a business activity monitoring tool, Optimize for B2B, designed to give suppliers or customers a view of the supply chain, and the enterprise service bus with support for SOAP 1.2, WS Security, and WS-I.
Software AG is already testing webMethods 7.1 with a few customers and will demonstrate it at the Integration World 2007 conference in Florida in early November. The software will be made generally available by the end of the year, Kürpick said
The company has also been working on its services-oriented architecture (SOA) management and governance tools. It has taken the policy management tools from webMethods’ Infravio line and its own CentraSite metadata store, combining them as CentraSite Governance Edition. It will unveil details of that product at the SOA Governance Summit in Copenhagen next month.
With its focus on the webMethods BPM suite, Software AG will no longer sell its Crossvision BPM line, actually a rebranded version of Fujitsu’s Interstage. Its goal is to help customers migrate to webMethods over the course of several years, during which it will continue to support the discontinued product. However, “customers are not yet lining up for migration,” Kürpick said.
This is one area where there’s no rush, though, said ZapThink’s Bloomberg: the majority of Crossvision BPM customers also use Software AG’s Natural programming language and Adabas database, and they have no reason to leave the company.
Learning to love regulatory compliance auditors
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(InfoWorld) - Companies working to achieve passing grades in their regulatory compliance audits can greatly improve their ability to meet the requirements if they can somehow bridge the cultural gap that commonly exists between IT workers and those hired to apply the tests, according to a panel of industry leaders.
Taking the stage at the ongoing Security Standard Conference in Chicago, the collection of seasoned compliance and auditing specialists called for an end to the turf war that tends to materialize when internal and external auditors begin running their reports.
By fostering a more cordial relationship between IT departments and auditors, and pushing the groups the engage in more comprehensive exchange of ideas, businesses may be able to lessen the pain typically associated with allowing for the systems assessments.
Minimizing the pain
While the concept may sound corny or even far-fetched to many corporate technology workers and auditors, the experts said the best way to improve the efficacy of compliance programs and minimize the pain of the work is to do whatever it takes to get the teams on the same page.
“The perspective [of IT workers] is that audit is always out to get them. But once you get over that hurdle things improve,” said Lane H. Boyd, director of IT audits at fast food giant McDonald’s. “It really comes down to communication. You need to meet frequently and be honest.”
Boyd said it’s particularly crucial for companies to make an extra effort to encourage interaction between IT workers and third-party auditors, as the outsiders tend to come into the testing process expecting friction with internal teams.
“The security teams are most often responsible for managing outside auditors, and the perception is most often that [auditors] only come bearing bad news,” he said. “Even internally we try to work closely, but [internal IT] is typically not too happy to see us; but as this whole process matures, I expect that this [interaction] will improve.”
Aligning goals
The closer that IT management and auditing teams can become, said Boyd, the greater the likelihood the different groups can align goals, with those doing the assessments providing a “point in the right direction” of how they will look to test various systems for compliance.
In addition to helping internal teams better understand the thrust of the auditors’ work, bridging the two groups will make it easier for the assessors to tailor their work to suit the operational demands of each business, said Rick Boren, a partner with New York-based consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Any level of trust that can be established will also encourage auditors to ensure they handle with discretion any sensitive corporate information they encounter, the consultant contends.
“The same level of trust is needed for external auditors as with internal. They have to know the process for protecting clients’ information assets,” Boren said. “These auditors are being put in a position of trust and this type of relationship needs to be there for everyone to work together effectively.”
The process of building a relationship between IT and auditors will also give the internal technology managers more confidence that the assessors won’t commit mistakes, such as crashing crucial business systems during their testing — a perception that often stifles interaction between such groups, according to Boren.
Communicating with business execs
Another vitally important element of improving compliance efforts internally is to seek out wider support of the auditing process from senior business executives, the experts agreed.
Many business leaders still question why they are spending so much time and money trying to appease each aspect of the regulatory requirements, said Michael Garber, director of IT assurance management in Motorola’s Information Protection Services group.
As with many other areas of IT, finding a way to illustrate the challenges and demands of the compliance audit process to non-technical business audiences is extremely vital, the panel of experts said.
The tendency for those working in assessment to defer to industry jargon when attempting to explain issues to senior management will only make it harder for everyone involved in the decision-making process to understand how to prioritize support and spending, they said.
“It’s important to communicate to the right audience in the right language,” said Boren. “IT and security teams tend to be technical; many executives may not understand and sometimes the auditors themselves aren’t technical enough. If you can improve the understanding between these groups, you can improve everyone’s view dramatically.”
Lack of communication
Conference attendees agreed that a lack of communication among business workers, IT departments, and auditors remains one of their biggest challenges in achieving compliance, with the lack of trust between administrators and assessors proving very hard to overcome, at least one end-user representative said.
“The biggest challenge for us is distrust, with auditors consistently viewed as someone out to get IT workers,” said William Helgren, applications development lead at Premier Farnell, an electronics distributor which has its headquarters in Leeds, U.K.
“The perception is that external auditors are getting paid to find something wrong and that they will keep testing until they find something,” Helgren said. “There must be a balance of trust with both internal and external auditors, but that’s not there yet in many cases.”
South Korea nears antitrust decision against Intel
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(InfoWorld) - South Korean antitrust regulators have issued preliminary allegations against Intel for allegedly undermining competition in its PC microprocessor market, but formal charges won’t be made for at least another month.
The Korean Fair Trade Commission (FTC) sent a “statement of objection” to Intel, which contained preliminary allegations, said Nick Jacobs, an Intel spokesman in Singapore. The document is not a final decision, nor has it been upheld by a court.
“It does not itself amount to a finding that there has been a violation of law,” he said. “As such, any conclusions about our business practices are at best premature.”
A senior deputy director at South Korea’s FTC said the investigation against Intel remains ongoing.
The next step for the world’s largest chip maker is to respond to the letter of objection, after which the FTC will rule on the case.
South Korea could become the third place to rule on an Intel antitrust case. In 2005, Japan’s Fair Trade Commission helped kick off the recent spate of investigations against Intel by ruling that the company’s Japan unit stifled competition by offering rebates to Japanese PC makers in return for agreements to limit purchases of or not buy rival x86 microprocessors. Earlier this year, the European Commission ruled similarly, alleging that Intel violated EU antitrust laws by giving rebates to customers that enabled the company to win sales from rival Advanced Micro Devices.
AMD filed an antitrust suit against Intel in June, 2005 at the U.S. District Court in Delaware, shortly after Japan’s FTC revealed its allegations against the company.
“Following formal action in Japan and Europe, global scrutiny is increasingly focused on Intel’s harm to competition and consumers alike. Governments around the world must enforce antitrust laws to bring fair and open competition that will benefit computer manufacturers and buyers everywhere,” said Tom McCoy, AMD’s executive vice president, legal affairs and chief administrative officer, in an e-mail.
(Ben Ames in Boston contributed to this report.)
Microsoft, Novell open interoperability lab
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(InfoWorld) - Cross-platform virtualization is top of the list of projects that a new joint development lab operated by Microsoft and Novell will work on, executives said.
The companies expect to announce the opening of the lab on Wednesday. They first announced plans for the joint lab back in November 2006, when they formed a controversial patent-licensing and interoperability agreement.
The companies have already begun to work together on several interoperability projects, including one that will ensure that Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 will run well on Suse Linux Enterprise Server and that Suse Linux will run on Server 2008 in virtualized environments. The capability, however, won’t be available until after Microsoft ships the server next year and then releases its virtualization capability within 180 days after that.
The new lab is located in Cambridge, Mass., and is currently is staffed by two directors and five test engineers. The companies hope to hire three more by the end of the year. Engineers from both companies can remotely access resources in the lab and contribute to the work there, said Suzanne Forsberg, the lab’s co-director for Novell. She shares director duties with Tom Hanrahan, director of Linux interoperability at Microsoft.
In addition to the virtualization project, the engineers will also work on document format translator capabilities that will allow sharing between various document standards such as open XML and OpenOffice.
The goal of the original agreement between Microsoft and Novell was to ensure that operating systems from the companies work better in environments where they co-exist. The lab will have 80 servers so that engineers can test how their developments will operate in an environment similar to an enterprise data center, Hanrahan said.
Xandros and Linspire have also struck partnerships with Microsoft, similar to the deal with Novell. Red Hat, however, and others Linux vendors, have said they aren’t interested in partnering with Microsoft.
The great Office Server smorgasbord, part 4: Project pleasure with Project Server 2007
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(InfoWorld) - Welcome back to the great Office Server smorgasbord. There?ll be a related review soon covering a couple of open source answers to SharePoint, including Liferay and Plone. And come October, you?ll be seeing a fully graded review of the release versions of Office Communications Server and Exchange Server 2007.
[ See our Special Report for parts 1, 2, and 3 of this series. ]
Meanwhile, we?re topping off this four-part series with a look at how MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007) and Project Server 2007 combine to give project managers a better handle on team management.
Project 2007
This isn?t a review of the Office Project 2007 client, but we?d be remiss if we didn?t run down a few of its newer capabilities before moving to the server. The 2007 client incorporates the new ribbon-style UI contained in most of the other Office 2007 client applications. This is intended to make the UI easier to learn for new users and faster for experienced users, but we?re only lukewarm on its success in those endeavors. The new ribbon doesn?t seem to decrease complexity as much as it simply reorganizes it. Features and concepts will still need to be learned, and experienced users will still need to figure out where those same functions are located in the new UI.
You?ll find two basic flavors of the Project client (Project Standard 2007 and Project Professional 2007) bolstered by a third (Project Web Access 2007) once you?ve installed Project Server 2007. Only Project Standard can be run as a stand-alone client application with full functionality. Both Professional and Web Access require Project Server on the back end — Professional so you can access all its features, Web Access so you can access it at all.
Standard and Professional carry most of the same features for basic project management, including project editing, all the calendar views and task creation capabilities, etc. Web Access really only allows Gantt chart views and task creation at this level, though if the OLAP capabilities provided in the new Project Server 2007 appeal to you, then Web Access is the only UI that will let your users access those features.
Where Standard and Professional begin to differ is in team management. Only Professional gives project managers full resource management features, including team assignments, collaboration support, and specific things such as timesheets. Also, only Professional can make use of the capabilities provided by SharePoint when it and Project Server are combined for better back-end data access.
Customizability, however, is a mixed bag, so shop carefully. You can customize Project Standard to a certain degree using Visual Basic for Applications. However, only Project Professional and Web Access can make use of the much beefier API offered by Project Server. Additionally, should project managers want to use the new Server?s permissioning capabilities, they will have to turn to Professional and Web Access as well. Finally, Project Server can only be administered from the Web Access UI, unless you?ve combined it with SharePoint, in which case it can largely be managed from SharePoint?s central administration screens.
For the most part, Microsoft has ensured that Project Professional is the required client version to make use of Project Server 2007. While the Web Access UI is somewhat functional, it?s really only good as an executive-style viewer of team project data and as a feature add-on to the fat client interface. Project Standard is good only for single-user project managers.
Project Server 2007 and MOSS
Architecturally, Project Server 2007 runs a middle road between Office Groove Server 2007 (which doesn?t need SharePoint at all) and Office Forms Server 2007 (which is wholly contained in SharePoint Enterprise). Project Server is definitely its own entity, but one that can be enhanced in combination with SharePoint.
Specific points of enhancement include integration with the Windows Workflow Foundation, document libraries, organizationwide search capability and team work site orientation. To clear some confusion right off the bat, however, MOSS includes a list feature called Project Tasks, which offers some Gantt-style features. This is an independent feature, however, and has no relation or connection to Project Server 2007.
If you want to upgrade an existing Project 2003 server to Project 2007, you are in for some detail work. There are no easy wizards here. Migrating data is done via a special .ini file with a series of possible switch parameters that must be configured using a text editor. And, by the way, this step is mandatory. You?re not going to get away with running a 2003 Project Server next to a 2007 Project Server and waiting until the data migrates itself through user interaction; Project Server 2003 and Project Server 2007 can?t communicate, so the upgrade process is unavoidable.
Once you?ve upgraded, it?s time to connect your existing Project Server 2007 farm to a new or existing MOSS farm. This isn?t just a straightforward matter of enabling communication between the two, however. Your first task in this scenario is to move your Project Server machines into the SharePoint domain which unfortunately means you will need to take the SharePoint farm down for this operation. The Project Server 2007 disks will need to install files on each SharePoint Server with front-facing client functionality. Once installed there, each of those instances will need to run the SharePoint Products and Technologies wizard. After that, you?ll need to decide which of those machines will become actual Project Server application servers. Only on the Project Server application servers will you need to enable the Project Application service from the Central Management console. This all sounds involved, but Microsoft?s documentation makes it a fairly easy step-by-step process. The tricky part is managing your planning process properly so you know which services need to be enabled and where.
Once all that work is completed, you?re still not done. Now, SharePoint is going to want to control the management of all team work sites. So the team sites you?ve configured under Project Server will need to be migrated to the MOSS machine as well. After that, you?ll also need to unhook Project from its internal configuration manager and wire it into SharePoint?s equivalent. Again, Microsoft?s docs make this a fairly simple set of steps, but if you?ve got a choice, installing Project Server within a SharePoint farm right from the start is easier.
Finally, all the clients who were looking to Project Server for their team sites will need to be pointed at the new sites running off SharePoint — that?s the easiest part. You will need to remember that any clients looking to access Project?s SharePoint features will still need to have the Office Project Professional 2007 client installed. We suppose that?s reasonable given the nature of Microsoft, but we were actually hoping to see some included viewer functionality within SharePoint that would allow non-Project client users at least to see certain Project files even if they couldn?t alter them. Even with the Web Access UI, however, that doesn?t seem to be possible.
New interfaces and features
So after all this installation hassle, what does Project Server 2007 really give you? First, it smartens up your Project Server team work sites. These now have access to SharePoint-managed permissions, document libraries, communication capabilities, and search indexes. SharePoint users will be able to access Project data, not just to simply manage projects but also as part of SharePoint workflows.
On a more granular level, we also enjoyed the new Project Web Access look and feel, which can run off a stand-alone Project Server or off a SharePoint Project application server. This has been updated to meld nicely with the new SharePoint UI. Microsoft has also updated the Project Server permissioning system. Administrators now have control over a number of new features, including calendar and Web views, feature add-ins, and specific data views. It?s a powerful new set of security controls, but administrators will have to endure a learning curve to take full advantage of it.
Microsoft has also taken a number of features from Project Server 2003 and beefed them up. You?ll find deeper Outlook integration via the new Outlook Add-In. This gets installed on a user-by-user basis via their Web Access accounts and amounts to a smarter Outlook sync feature. Once installed, it allows users and administrators to use Outlook as another interface for Project. That means project line items can show up as tasks or calendar items and be tracked all the way back to Project Server. Outlook can also act as a timesheet interface with its data again tracked by administrators via Project.
Reporting is the recipient of another big upgrade when using Project Server 2007 because its reporting capabilities can now make use of data gleaned from not just Project clients, but also Project work sites and SharePoint work sites and document libraries. Users then get the ability to arrange that data in whatever reporting front end fits their needs: Word 2007, PowerPoint 2007, or Excel 2007. Install the Cube Building Service and your users will be able to access Microsoft SQL Analysis Services to build OLAP-style views for deep drill-down on Project data. This can be viewed using Project or using PivotTable features in Excel.
Moving from project to project also gets a boost with customizable templates. Project Server comes with several out-of-box project templates, but these can be edited for specific needs or even created from scratch. Templates cover look and feel for users on the client as well as what they see on the team work site and even what they might see in outside applications such as Excel. Even better, templates run right down to the individual field level, meaning that a template can actually map data relationships between a task field in Project 2007, for example, and a reporting field in Excel. Out-of-box templates cover basic project types for a variety of vertical industries, such as construction or technology R&D, but can easily be tweaked for more specific tasks. This lets your company build a library of templates that project managers can use to quickly get a project moving.
There are more features in Project Server 2007 than we can fully cover here (new cost and budgeting features, for instance, as well as slick integration with Office Project Portfolio Server). But as a stand-alone upgrade to Project Server 2003, it?s already worth the trouble. Combined with SharePoint?s capabilities, it can be downright amazing in its integration of project management functionality and tracking in projects that never had these benefits before.
BEA’s Genesis to back open source, scripting languages
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(InfoWorld) - BEA Systems’ planned next-generation application platform, called Project Genesis, will feature an open source component and accommodate scripting languages such as Ruby and Perl, BEA officials said at the BEAWorld San Francisco conference on Tuesday.
Open source has been great for proliferating knowledge in the marketplace, said Alfred Chuang, BEA chairman, CEO, and president. In addition, he mentioned that development technologies will be open-sourced as part of Genesis and that BEA already offers open source technologies to the Eclipse Foundation. “We also believe that we likely have to be grooming and starting up a new community,” he said.
Genesis is intended to enable quick development of applications without requiring new infrastructure. It will feature tools that take collaboration, social tagging, and business process management and integrate them with existing enterprise applications. New sets of applications can be built, including mashups and composite applications as well as business processes. Wikis, blogs, and RSS feeds also are to be part of Genesis, said Rob Levy, CTO at BEA. The company announced Project Genesis earlier on Tuesday.
Chuang, however, cautioned against going open source for the sake of going open source.
“I think open source for open source’s sake has been useless,” Chuang said.
“Some companies have taken multimillion lines of operating system code and open-sourced it,” he said, critically. Although sometime-BEA rival Sun Microsystems did this with its Solaris OS, Chuang said his comment was not specifically targeted at Sun. Others have done this as well, he said.
Genesis will support Java code as well as scripting languages, Chuang said. He cited scripting languages as an area where BEA historically has not had much involvement.
A specific product plan for Genesis is set to be unveiled at the BEAWorld Shanghai conference in December. BEA officials stressed some components of Genesis, such as BEA’s enterprise service bus technology, already exist. New products are to include a rules engine technology, as well as offerings for data manipulation and structured mapping.
“Genesis is sort of where ultimately we want to take AquaLogic for this new generation of applications,” Chuang said. AquaLogic is a BEA middleware platform.
Genesis will support SaaS (software as a service) methodologies in that ISVs could use Genesis to build applications, which they could then offer via a SaaS format, Levy said.
Also, Chuang stressed that BEA has no plans to get into the applications business. While the lines are being blurred by foundational technologies for building applications, BEA is not going to provide any vertical expertise in applications, he said.