Monday, June 16, 2003

IBM Web Services Demo I am attending an IBM "e-business on demand" pitch right now. I have to admit, so far, the presentation has been interesting. They have an impressive array of platforms running on multiple laptops, including a Linux laptop. This is basically a websphere app server/websphere developer studio/rational rose demo. Of course, they are starting the day with a demo of web services. I am sad to admit, this is the first real demo of a running web service, a real web service, that I have seen. They just showed us a web services demo where a .Net app called a websphere-based web service. They have two projectors up, one showing the client app and the other showing the server console so we can see the actual calls. Cool. Being a Java vendor, they are taking a lot of time to demonstrate the differences between .Net and Java. They are preaching to the choir. I used to develop Java apps before making the fabled switch off the "technical" track and onto the "management" track. As far as I know, no state agency  is using .Net. These demos bring several questions to my mind: How soon will agencies want to create web services? What should our enterprise strategy for Websphere be? What about Linux on the mainframe? How can ITS get ahead of the agencies and lead in the development of web services? What infrastructure should we build to handle future demand? How can we do all of this and provide the best value for taxpayers? I'm goning to have to chew on this quickly. Customers are waiting. 10:40:41 AM

Enterprise IM I am very excited about the opportunities that ITS has right now. We are doing a lot of very interesting things. One project that I have written about in the past is the Utah Master Directory (UMD). UMD will serve as an important piece of infrastructure for many future state IT projects. It moves forward on schedule. We already have one production application using UMD, and that is Groupwise Instant Messaging. Any state employee can install the Groupwise IM client and chat securely with any other state employee. This is what is known as enterprise instant messaging, which is still a pretty hot topic among large enterprises. UMD makes it possible. Additionally, we are engaging Novell to make improvements to UMD and the DirXML connectors to make the employee provisioning process better. It is an evolutionary process, but I believe that UMD will change the way state agencies think about things like employee provisioning. The potential benefit that UMD provides for internal applications is surpassed only by the potential benefit for public-facing applications. 9:54:56 AM

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