I am looking for some examples of innovative uses of social networking for a purely commercial environment. I can see the uses that Twitter might have for micro blogging for anything (application event logs springs to mind amongst other ideas).
Does anyone have any further examples or ideas they may want to share for ways that we can embed this kind of technology in our infrastructure.
For reference we are are an organisation which uses primarliy Microsoft technology (SharePoint, VS 2008, ASP.Net etc.).
Feel free to reference specific code examples, tutorials or just to make subjective comments on the concept of Social Networking for the business environment.
Sites currently being looked at include: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Maps.
GREAT EXAMPLE here http://brandonhallawards.com/08/958-BLOGS-Sun.doc
by the way, are there any others?
I am also interested.
- Echo
With a little effort, you may use Captcha for Air Force recruiting instead of these old-fashioned color blind cards.
You can even do it online!
Don't forget the very common practice to use IM in corporate settings. It's often much easier than phone or mail, even if it is often not allowed by the IT security staff. Granted, it may not be truly innovative but the subversive factor counts, IMHO.
Related
This may appear as a subjective question but i am asking from an technical architect point of view.
What would be your choice if you were building E-Commerce based Application to help giant companies carry out their marketing and sales campaigns. I looked into open source frameworks such as Magento that works with ZendFramework using the PHP,MySQL And Apache stack. Other basic frameworks like OSCommerce seem reasonable. Whats the leading E-Commerce framework for .Net Technologies? I also looked into Zoho and it seems like using their applications most of the requirements can be knocked off but I also feel I may face flexibility issues down the line with what they provide.
Please try to mention what architectural benefits do you see in the frameworks you know about. Thanks, as always, and its always great to hear the expert opinions on stackoverflow.
For "Giant companies" your question is formed badly and has no information to actually answer it.
For micro and middle sized companies (10 -500 persons in company) go for Magento EE or Magneto CE version and Magento optimized hosting solution
I will be starting a senior design project in a week with 2 or 3 other engineers. We are electrical engineers but we will need to do some coding for our project.
Right now, I think using Google Code + Visual Studio + AnkhSVN is a good solution on the code side. We also need to:
Maintain design documents
Have a smooth way of communicating
Would you recommend anything in particular beyond a central network storage, and e-mail?
Edit: We are not going to set up or configure anything. I would rather just pay for cheap (
Yes, a good wiki such as Atlassian's Confluence.
Wikipedia has a great list of Collaborative Software. I think a decent content management system would be essential for maintaining design documents (especially over plain network storage).
You might try Basecamp , the basic plan is enough for you already.
My company has a control panel website written in ASP.NET. We run an online service used by over 20,000 users worldwide, mostly from the US, Japan and several European countries. It is used mostly by business users.
We face many problems using ASP.NET and development times are lengthy. I played around a bit with Flex and I can see why it would cut down development times however I am afraid we would not be able to support browsers that do not have flash installed. Considering the fact that many of our customers are business users in companies that might not allow to install flash.
Your opinion and suggestions will be appreciated.
This isn't really a programming question, it is a commercial question for your product management and marketing people. Flex requires Flash as you are aware, so the answer is to find out the degree to which Flash is supported in your customer base - and the version. Start with your biggest and highest profile customer. If you can't get away with it there it is a non-starter.
I am pretty sure that your feature set will be better as well as your development time if you use Flash/Flex for your control panel, so from that standpoint I would strongly advocate it. You may also be able to influence your customers' environments if you are adding highly valuable features, so the objection may disappear if the value is high enough.
However the value has to be quite high for people to contemplate such a change to their working environment. This is especially true in environments who feel that Flash is a risk and have removed it because they tend to be paranoid about software on the desktop. Shorter development times is not a good argument for anyone on the commercial side of the house when faced with such trade-offs, so beware of forwarding that in a customer context as a compelling argument - it isn't.
HTH and good luck - I hope you manage to switch over, you will have a huge amount of flexibility and sizzle added to your apps.
In your current ASP control panel you should put in a small flash script to see how many users can access it, if all or most users can access it then then it shouldn't be a problem to use flex. Over all most users have flash and it shouldn't be a problem.
I'd like to implement a social network for students and teachers. I just can't decide wether to go with Elgg or OpenSocial. I like Elgg only because it is being used by a growing number of online education sites (and I think it integrates very nice with Moodle). But, I also like OpenSocial because it is supported by Google. When I think long term I kind of lean towards Google...
...and there is also Google Apps Education Edition.
Elgg is more a community script, while opensocial is a set of protocols to develop an social website. You probably will be better off with elgg, and it will be easier to install onto a webserver. Opensocial is more a framework and a way to access data, not a one-time community website. If your looking for another option, buddypress.org is also a good wordpress-based social network platform.
The alternatives are not just Elgg (software) and OpenSocial (specification).
Quite a few Open Source projects exist on which a decentralized social web can potentially be built:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network
My company (a large organization) is developing a "road-map" for evolving their rather old, tangled confederation of systems to an SOA model. A few people are pushing hard for using Websphere Integration Developer and Websphere Process Server as the defacto platform for developing future applications...because they feel IBM is a stable vendor, the tools are made for the enterprise, they drank the "business agility" BPEL kool-aid, etc.
Does anyone have positive or negative thoughts on this platform? Do the GUI tools help eliminate monotonous/redundant coding...or just obscure things and make things harder to maintain? Basically, do the benefits justify the complexity?
My experience with the IBM Java tool set is pure pain. Days to install lots of different versions of different components all incompatible with each other, discover a bug in component A get told to update to see if it fixes, updating component A breaks component B and C, get told to update these etc.
I find Eclipse with out the IBM extensions far more stable and quicker and provides more features (as its stable versions are a couple releases ahead of WID/RAD).
I would advise against going the IBM way for development tools. As for process server I have less experience but the people in my team using it seemed to enjoy it as much as I enjoyed WID. not a lot.
So far I havent been impressed by any tools with the "SOA" and/or "BPM" labels on them. My "roadmap" would be very very iterative to see some results with the archetecture as fast as possible while trying to grab some of the easy fruits. That way you gain your feel for what works for you and your people.
I would never let any vendor push me anywhere in the "scuplturing" of the architecture.
I agree with other users complaining about WID. The only reason we are using WID is that a decision was made a while back to use IBM products across the board by our sales department.
That's right, our sales department made the decision to use IBM products.
Development has been painful and frustrating. We have lots of stability problems with Process Server, sometimes it doesn't want to start or shutdown properly. Yeah you can easily draw processes in the IDE, but most any toolset provides that functionality these days. It is nothing special or unique to WID or IBM. IBM is a few iterations behind mainstream.
There are plenty of open source implementations out there that offer great support. Checkout JBoss or RedHat, they are pretty good. If that doesn't float your boat, you can always use Apache tools.
Walter
Developers don't choose WID, WMB, or WPS. Managers do, because IBM is a "stable vendor".
Look at JBoss, or K.I.S.S.
WID/WPS is actually pretty simple. The original intention was for analysts and business people to "compose" services (DO NOT LET THEM DO THIS!) so the UI is simple and easy.
Most of the work will be in defineing and implementing the back end services which depending on the platform will mostly involve wrapping existing code in SOA service.
The most important thing to bear in mind is that SOAP is technoligy and SOA is an architecture and a state of mind.
There is a zen to a succesful SOA implementation. Its all about "business services", if you have a service that you cannot describe to a business user in less than six words you have done it wrong! Ideally the service name alone should be enough to describe the functionality of the service.
If you end up with a service called "MyApp.GetContactData" described as "get name, addresses tel fax etc." then you are there. If You have a service called MyAppGetFaxNoFromOldSys" described as "Retrieve current-fax-nmbr from telephony table in legacy system" you are doomed!
Incidently most of the Websphere tooling for WS* is pretty nice. But I would recommend the very wonderful SAOPUI tool from http://www.eviware.com which is very good for compsing/reading WSDL based messages and also function as a useful test client or server.
Do the GUI tools help eliminate monotonous/redundant coding...or just obscure things and make things harder to maintain? Basically, do the benefits justify the complexity?
As a Developer, I find the tools at varying levels of being bug free. 6.0.1 was a pain, 6.2 is so much better. But once you develop with the tool, there is minimal effort to maintain it. I develop in hours what java developers take days to do. It is also easy to maintain as changes can be made very quickly. I cannot answer your question from the perspective of an architect or a Manager but i would agree with comments of some others here.