I just wanted to share two stories with you. In this week's Secret CIO column on InformationWeek, Herbert W. Lovelace (a pseudonym of course) bemoans the emergence of corporate Weblogs, stating that they are fine for house wives and bored teenagers. But if you allow them into a corporate environment you'll immediately undermine your company's credibility and open it up to instant litigation.
It's easy to see that there are no dancing sugar plums in Mr. Lovelace's head. Instead I can only imagine hoards of over-caffeinated office workers tossing corporate secrets to the wind and shouting misinformation from the rooftops -- all thanks to evil Weblogs.
To this I would just like to remind Mr. Lovelace that most companies employ individuals who work to secure company boundaries, maintain user access/capabilities, control corporate messaging, and manage risk. A simple piece of publishing software is not going to magically undermine the efforts of these individuals.
I think to a large extent what confused you is that you are looking at how a horizontal publishing tool is being used by the average person on the Web. When desktop publishing arrived, it allowed the production of much more bad copy than good. Weblogs are similar in their horizontal application. Please don't confuse what a teenager is doing on blogger.com with what the 2,500 organizations that are using our tools are doing to improve their knowledge sharing.
I've got some great news. We've just launched a new weblog dedicated to our forthcoming enterprise application testing lab, NWC Inc. Scheduled for completion in early November, our NWC Inc. lab will help us better test a wide array of applications -- everything from P2P to ERP. But before we lay the last floor tile or pull the final cat 5 cable, you can track our intrepid lab managers (Lori MacVittie, Ron Anderson, and Steve Schuchart) as they acquire, configure, and deploy the requisite equipment. Already Lori MacVittie's been hard at work, inserting users into her new SLQ Server db.
On the SQL front, with a bit of shell scripting and some interesting uses of transformations within a DTS package, we have customers in our database. Many of them with strange names, but customers none the less. Now it's time to start scripting transactions, both to create new orders and to add to our inventory.
