Open Source, Can You Afford Not Considering?

There is a lot of talk recently about alternatives to Microsoft's desktop applications, see my recent posting “Pursuing An Open Desktop, Why Not!” as well as “P&G Flirts with Google Apps and Scares the Bejesus Out of Microsoft” posted by Tom Wailgum on October 1st, “Fighting Government Waste One Google Application At A Time”, and “Cost Savings Found When Microsoft Outlook Ousted for Gmail at British Construction Firm”.

The Open Office desktop and Google Apps are only the beginning of  a  readily growing availability of  software alternatives. Compiere's ERP and CRM applications, SugarCRM's relationship management application, OpenWorkbench from Computer Associates, Mozilla Firefox web browser, Openbravo ERP and many other can be found on Wikipedia.  The point is that many of the most sophisticated enterprise applications are now becoming available through an open source provider.

Why is this important?  Let me share a personal experience.  It was June and the Oregon Department of Human Services was going to implement the new HIPAA compliant codes for our Medicaid application in January of the coming year.  This had a significant impact on our health care partners, since they had to modify their systems in order to be able to submit electronic invoices to the State.  If our partners didn't update their systems before January they would have to file paper invoices, which we estimated would increase the States workload by around 60,000 paper invoices per month.

As we investigated the situation, we discovered that a number of different State employees were coordinating communications with various health care providers, there was no central repository of this information and follow up information was being kept on sticky notes.  There was a clear need for a relation management application, but with only six months to get this job done there was no time to go through the traditional procurement process to procure and implement potential solutions such as Siebold or SalesForce.com. 

One of our top system architects came to our rescue when he discovered SugarCRM's application on the Internet and since it was an open source application he was able to download and install it in a single day.  Our customers loved it and since it was an open source application we were able to make some minor modifications (mostly to screen literals) and have it in production within days.  We were also able to download contact information from our mainframes and create a comprehensive partner database.

The bottom line was that when we went live with the HIPAA compliant transactions and code sets almost every electronic filler was ready and there was almost no increase in paper invoice volumes.  While the cost savings were substantial the speed in which we able to meet everyone's needs was the big payoff.

As a CIO you need to be investigating these open source and other alternative software options.  Next posting will discuss what I see as the biggest payoff from the open source development model and that is collaborative development of none strategic applications.

source:- advice.cio.com/

Microsoft SharePoint gets search, file sharing features

Data capture vendor Captaris and security software developer Epok have developed add-ons to Microsoft's SharePoint Server 2007 that let users search on document images and securely extend file creation and sharing across corporate boundaries.

Captaris, best known for its RightFax software for distributing faxes, recently introduced the TIFF iFilter for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

The iFilter takes an image, scans it using optical character recognition (OCR) technology, and then stores it in SharePoint along with all its meta data. The resulting file is then available for discovery by SharePoint’s search engine.

IFilter components are used by Microsoft Indexing Service and other Microsoft Search-based products, such as SharePoint Portal Server, Windows SharePoint Services, Exchange Full Text Search and SQL Server FTS.

Captaris, which is in the process of being acquired by OpenText, thinks paper-centric industries benefit the most from its TIFF iFilter such as insurance, governments, health care and financial services.

The iFilter supports Windows Server 2003 and 2008 and works on both 32- and 64-bit versions of the Windows OS, SharePoint Server, and SQL Server.

The Captaris TIFF iFilter comes in three editions: Standard (for two core systems), Pro (four core systems) and Enterprise (unlimited cores).

Standard is priced starting at $299. Pro starts at $499, and Enterprise pricing will be announced before the end of the year.

SharePoint is Microsoft’s fastest growing enterprise software in its history and the company counts 100 million licenses and more than a $1 billion in revenue, according to figures released this summer. The platform also is attracting third-party vendors driven to plug some of the gaps in the platform.

Earlier versions of SharePoint had support for TIFF images, but it was dropped in the 2007 version of SharePoint. Microsoft released a Filter Pack for SharePoint in Dec. 2007, and specifically made apologies for the absence of the TIFF filter in the release.

Experts have also said that SharePoint has gaps in its access control story.

Epok in particular is attacking that need with an update to its cross-organization access management software called Epok Edition for SharePoint version 2.4. The platform extends user authentication to a company’s partners.

The 2.4 version breaks the restriction that only a user within a SharePoint domain can use Microsoft Office to create, edit, and then save documents directly into SharePoint.

Epok extends that capability to any Office user in any domain as long as they have the needed access rights.

The upgrades also include a reporting system that can show such facts as who has access to a document and when the document expires. And a mouse over feature on user icons shows additional access details and expiration dates.

Epok can automatically enforce those expiration data on a user’s access to certain documents while maintaining the user’s overall access rights.

“SharePoint is creating a control problem and what we see is a huge demand wave for extranet access,” says Nigel Simmons, vice president of product management.

Epok also takes maintenance of permissions for access controls out of the hands of IT and put them in the hands of business users.

In addition, the system can be configured to require users to view and/or acknowledge certain contractual obligations related to data such as non-disclosure agreements.

The Epok Edition for SharePoint version 2.4 is priced at $25,000 per server.

Source:- networkworld.com/

Microsoft Announces BizTalk Server 2009

Microsoft renames BizTalk Server 2006 R3 to BizTalk Server 2009. The new release will be available in the first half of 2009 and will feature support for Team Foundation Server (TFS), Visual Studio Team System, and the upcoming “Oslo” modeling platform.

Microsoft announced the renaming of the next version of its BizTalk business process management server as well as detailed what will be in that product and what to expect in future releases.

Burley Kawasaki, director of product management in the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft, said Microsoft has renamed what had initially been referred to as BizTalk Server 2006 R3 to BizTalk Server 2009. Microsoft will make the new version of the product available in the first half of 2009, Kawasaki said. Microsoft has released a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of BizTalk 2009 to members of its Technology Adoption Program (TAP) members, and the company will deliver a public CTP by the end of the year, he said

Kawasaki also said BizTalk Server 2009 has new features in three core categories: updated platform support, enterprise connectivity, and developer and team productivity. Microsoft also set a roadmap for BizTalk, including plans to deliver releases every two years at most.

Under the developer and team productivity category, BizTalk Server 2009 delivers new Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) support including support for Microsoft's Team Foundation Server (TFS). TFS support enables development teams to leverage the integrated source control, bug tracking, support for team development, Project Server integration and support for automating builds via MSBuild. Microsoft also has made improvements to the Visual Studio based BizTalk project system that enhances debugging support for artifacts such as BizTalk Maps, pipeline components and XLang orchestrations, and enables support for unit testing via Visual Studio Test.

Meanwhile updated platform support includes support for Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 SP1, SQL Server 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1.  BizTalk Server 2009 also takes advantage of the latest virtualization improvements included as part of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. And the product also features improved failover clustering, Kawasaki said.

Regarding enterprise connectivity, BizTalk Server 2009 has a new Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) 3.0 registry, new line of business adapters for Oracle E-Business Suites and SQL Server, as well as enhanced host systems integration. BizTalk Server 2009 adds a new Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) WebSphere MQ channel by providing the transport, data formatter and encoder to integrate directly with WebSphere MQ via WCF and a new WCF Service for Host Applications has been added to expose the traditional Transaction Integrator to .NET Framework developers.  In addition, BizTalk Server 2009 includes updated platform support for the most recent versions of CICS, IMS, CICS HTTP transport, DB2, DB2/400, DB2 Universal Database, and WebSphere MQ. BizTalk Server 2009 also features enhanced Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and enhanced Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Guidance.

Moreover, BizTalk Server 2009 features enhanced support for Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Applicability Statement 2 (AS2), updated Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) support, new mobile RFID and device platform management, and new RFID standards support, Microsoft officials said.

Meanwhile, Kawasaki said future releases following BizTalk Server 2009 will address enterprise connectivity, enterprise visibility and support for the latest platform technologies. Future releases will feature developer productivity enhancements such as complex mapping, enhanced B2B support, complex trading partner management, expanded industry standards and schemas and low-latency messaging enhancements and ESB guidance. Future releases also will feature enhanced device support, business intelligence and BAM enhancements and will continue to take advantage of the latest advances in the .NET Framework, Visual Studio, and Windows Server, Kawasaki said.

In an interview on Microsoft's PressPass site, Oliver Sharp, general manager of Microsoft’s Connected Server team, said, "We’re beginning early planning on BizTalk Server '7' and will have more information to share about the specific scope of that release early next year."

Kawasaki also spoke on BizTalk Server 2009's relationship with Microsoft's yet-to-be-released modeling platform, code named "Oslo." In the PressPass interview, Sharp said: "Many of our BizTalk customers are running mission critical applications; they need choice and flexibility in adopting future technologies such as Oslo; therefore, it’s an important guiding principle to our planning efforts that we preserve our customers existing investments in their BizTalk Server infrastructure. Current BizTalk Server 2006 R2 or BizTalk Server 2009 customers will be able to benefit from Oslo by being able to leverage and compose your services into new composite applications. "

Source:- eweek.com/