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For the past 3+ years, at Matrix we have been evaluating smart phones for corporate use. For most companies, the selection of a smart phone device is a non-issue: its RIM's Blackberry product and associated BEZ (Blackberry Enterprise) server.

Being a Waterloo University engineering graduate, I certainly would have no qualms about going the Blackberry route for a corporate smartphone device. However, working through the evaluation process at the corporate level puts a different perspective on these devices.

The biggest issues are: cost (device, dataplans, setup), maintenance, usability (not always in that order) and finally farther down the list - application platform. By application platform I am referring to custom business applications that are outside of contacts, email and calendar. I suspect as time goes on the application platform item will become more important at Matrix, but right now its not a priority.

Matrix users at present though have very basic requirements for a smartphone - they want it to work well as a phone, and be able to use it as a tool for managing their calendar, contacts and email in that order.

The Blackberry excels at these, but its requirement for a server to enable corporate messaging makes it more costly than other offerings, when you factor out the device as an application platform.

While the Blackberry Enterprise Server provides more value in terms of features, the market it was designed to serve has changed since its inception. The security measures on other platforms, while not as sophisticated perhaps as the BEZ, are good enough to be effective (more about this later). The dataplan monitoring and restrictions were something that used to be important - but now that phone companies are being forced to provide more logical plans that offer data pooling and reasonable data limits, the requirement for centralized monitoring has diminished significantly. The BEZ acts as a platform for software development - but other platforms are now providing sophisticated developer tools as well.

Finally the BEZ requirement adds yet another server (albeit virtual) that requires licenses, maintenance, updates, expertise and attention. The additional requirement of a CAL for devices connecting to the BEZ add another layer of cost - especially when you consider that many companies already pay for Exchange CALs.

So at Matrix, the focused shifted to evaluating mobile devices that could directly connect to Exchange via the Exchange push mechanism - which narrowed the search to Windows Mobile based devices.

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Just finished reading The Big Switch – excellent book. The key to making the firm I work for (Matrix Solutions) successful is to minimize overhead and infrastructure costs as much as possible. While Matrix’ only product is information, as your book points out, we are in the business of collecting, interpreting and managing knowledge for our clients – not building and managing IT infrastructure.

Therefore - I am always looking for ways to reduce costs of IT by leveraging wherever possible the kinds of ‘utility’ services discussed in the book, and have for some time been a believer in SAS.

Matrix right now is still very much in the ‘older’ model of IT services, in which we still own and manage an IT infrastructure based on Microsoft servers and applications which the company owns. (More)

It is always sad to see what starts out to be a promising innovative new technology get corrupted to satisfy the demands of the dollar.

Perfect example of this is the immensely annoying co-branded Dell/Google search Crapware that showed up in my IE (most of the time I use Firefox, but at work - well...there are a number of systems defendant on IE. ) whenever I miss type a URL or enter a URL that doesn't exist.

The 'Crapware Search Assistant' Spams my browser with a whole pile of Crap that I don't want. Fortunately (or so I thought) a set of uninstall instructions were buried on the page that tell you to look for 'GoogleAFE' or Browser Search Assistant.

I could not find an application by either of those names in my Add/Remove programs. I did find one called 'Search Assistant' that I removed.

That didn't do it.

I had to try 5 different methods of getting rid of the Crapware before I finally found one that worked.

Click if you want to read the entire sordid saga...

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Well the day is fast approaching where there will be no escaping advertising (not that there are many places you can hide from it now..)

But the situation is about to get more..dynamic with the introduction of the first dynamic display fabrics. Lumalive from Philips is about to wrap the world in glowing cloth.

The applications for this are rather staggering - from text message t-shirts, to glowing bras and undergarments to shirts that react to the proximity of friends... Not to mention the brave new world of garment hacking - wow now that will be fun.

Building gizmos to hack other peoples shirts - or even more amusing - the mass hack attack where you wifi blast a message to all the active garments within range... The possibilities are endless.

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Been giving the whole Google paying 1.6 Billion for youTube some thought. I don't disagree with the fact that youTube is a neat site, with some well implimented technology. While the technology is certainly worth something, I think that 1.6 billion is a ridiculous amount to pay for any business that, while it has great technology, hasn't figured out how to use that technology to make money.

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Am working with the new google office apps - very slick stuff. Obviously the functionality is limited - especially with the spreadsheet, but the applications are quite functional.

The only thing really preventing the spreadsheet from being generally useful to 70% of users would be the lack of graphing system, but it wouldn't take much to add one to it. By setting up an xml graph parameter system that would pass the user defined graph types along with the spreadsheet data to a server for processing into an SVG or image file, you would have enough functionality to make most users quite happy....

I am already very happy with the application - it translates all core spreadsheet equations without a problem. I haven't found any spreadsheets I work with so far that wont work in it. Very cool - Microsoft better be worried and Ray Ozzie better get his online office version out pretty fast!

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New furniture is required!!

Found this:

Super cool - exactly what we wanted: something that the iMac can sit on in the living room that looks nice, is not in the way, yet can be rolled over to a couch for working on when required, or rolled over to a wall for watching videos, music etc..

Beautiful machine - my fourth apple: starting back in 1980 with the apple II+, followed by an apple IIe and an original iMac.

This is an iMac 20 inch. Steve Jobs and apple are great at making the experience of purchasing a machine seem like an event instead of buying .. well a washing machine or something.

The only complaint I have is that not surprisingly all the nice movie, video and TV for iTunes cannot be purchased here in Canada - one of the features I was really hoping to capitalize on.

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Things that should not be broken- I am sorry but it is frustrating when Microsoft releases fixes for things that cause other problems. In this case, SQL Reporting Services 2000.

I had it running on a machine, and was in the process of switching it over to another production server.

I could not get the report services to work on the new machine. Tried installing it several different ways figuring it was some kind of domain related permissions issue.

After some searching around on the best Microsoft tech support system in existiance - Google, I discovered that in fact SP1 on windows 2003 breaks Report Services. Lovely.

Fortunately, some guy spent several hours on the phone with Microsoft and was nice enough to post the results of his call on his blog, which saved me having to for the third time in as many weeks, calling up Microsoft...

Anyway - the resolution is to add a DWORD entry called DisableLoopbackCheck to HKLMSystemCurrentControlSetControlLsa. Setting this key to a value of 1 fixes the problem. It has to do with a loop back security check that Microsoft introduced in SP1. This server is well protected behind a firewall, so will have limited vulnerability to the sort of attack the 'fix' is designed to protect against...

Its things like this that are very frustrating. It took several hours to track that issue down, and what value did I get from that time? Nothing other than getting the product basically working the way it was supposed to...

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I have been saying to the blackberry types for a while that the dominance of the RIM server and a key element in the blackberry business model is doomed.

Probably the biggest source of cash for the RIM is the licensing of the BES server and the CALs for the indivdual devices communicating with it.

This was fine when the market consisted of RIM and no other logical alternative. However, the market for email enabled phones is no longer RIMs to dominate. There are a number of excellent alternatives to the RIM BES server: many of which have no or very little cost attached to them.

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There are a few articles floating around about how unit testing can sometimes be a crutch and detract from normal functional/user testing. I think, like anything, unit tests have their place, and should not replace user testing.  (More)

Found this while looking for some info on the crypto enterprise library block: http://www.pnplive.com/

The patterns team does great stuff - use it all the time. Unfortunately I just heard Ward Cunnignham is leaving Microsoft and the patterns team to join the Eclipse project. I had the honour of having a beer with Ward at last years OOPSLA confrence in Vancouver...

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Looks like I am not the only software guy out there who dislikes the current state of the PC as the dominant platform. This article (http://philip.greenspun.com/business/mobile-phone-as-home-computer) goes into some detail on the subject...

Its a good read, so check it out.

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This article is really interesting, as it is the challenge I am facing currently in terms of facing down a continued use of ad-hoc, custom software development versus a structured tool and test based approach.

The article details how Microsoft rest the longhorn codebase and started again with a different software development methodology. Probably explains the shift I have noticed in the external facing microsoft things as well - such as the reletively recent shift to create the patterns library, and increased focus on tool and test based development...

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Its been ... a long time now since the dismal Site Server product was on the market. Back then, Site Server was marketed as being the tool for building and maintaining websites on the microsoft platform.

Really it turned out to be a very thin and shoddy extension to Index Server.

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This appears to be very interesting: At the OOPSLA .net vs java shootout panel, it was mentioned that microsoft is working on solving the object relational issue. I meant to follow up on this, but with everything going on, just haven't had time. Well, I finally spent a few minutes digging into this, since I am thinking about the new gizmo I want to build, and as always it comes down to the painful process of mapping the objects down to the database layer.

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Well, I have just turned down a great opportunity, and I can't seem to be comfortable with the decision. I cant go into details about what it is, but its a next generation kind of thing using technology that  I am very interested in. What is more though is that it is with people I respect, and would like to work with.

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Fascinating how things work. I recently read this article by Charles Ferguson on the upcoming battle for search between microsoft and Google: 

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/01/issue/ferguson0105.asp?p=1 

When I came across another article (here) that illustrates a number of his points while doing some research on MSDN for methods for gathering documents into a database.

Ferguson points out in his article that "(Microsoft) undercuts its competitors in pricing, unifies previously separate markets, provides open but proprietary APIs, and bundles new functions into platforms it already dominates. Once it has acquired control over an industry standard, it invades neighboring markets"

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