Paul's Down-Home Page

I actually had real work to do this week, so I couldn’t attend the PDC. That’s too bad, because there’s a lot of interesting stuff happening there. For example, MS today took the wraps off Windows Workflow Services, their platform for workflow integration. There are some interesting touches that I think will help distinguish their offering from their competitors, including integration with Visual Studio and a marketplace for workflow actions (which MS is calling “activities”.) When I get some time, I’ll have to dig into this and see what’s what.

In related news, MS also started talking about changes to InfoPath (hint: no more requirement for a client-side application) and their new Office server platforms. It’s very interesting that they’re focusing on BI and content management as first-class tasks in the new release; we’ll have to wait and see what capabilities they’re able to get in for the 1.0 release.

There’s a fascinating article in the most recent issue of RISKS Digest about anomalies and Byzantine failures in flight control systems. I can’t explain it nearly as well as Peter Ladkin, who wrote it, so I won’t try. Although Exchange and Windows aren’t generally vulnerable to Byzantine faults, it’s a fascinating area of study in security-critical systems: how do you design systems that keep working when their inputs are lying?

I’ve been heads-down on some deadline-critical work, so I hadn’t followed the Notes/Dominio 7 release as closely as I evidently should have. I woke this morning to find out that— oops— IBM isn’t shipping DB2 support in Notes 7. See Ed Brill’s page for his take on it, including the news that you can apply for access to the DB2 functionality. I have to wonder whether there are secret criteria for the application process; I guess I’ll find out when I apply. It’s too bad that this feature didn’t make the cut, although IBM had a tough decision: slip to keep the feature or ship without it. Given the customer uncertainty over the impact of moving to DB2 as part of Workplace, I’m sure they would have liked to ship this feature on schedule.

Interestingly, the reason Ed cites for not shipping the feature is that not enough customers were testing it. Microsoft has worked long and hard to build a real-world customer testing program, the Technology Adoption Program (or TAP). TAP customers run pre-release builds of Exchange in production, with full support from PSS. Of course, MS also dogfoods new releases in their own environment; between the TAP and internal MS users, my recollection is that there were about 150,000 mailboxes running live on Exchange 2003 during the latter part of its dev cycle. I expect to see the same thing– probably with bigger numbers– for Exchange 12. Perhaps IBM should consider a similar approach.

Pace this ZDNet story, which describes how MessageOne has seen a spike in workload with the unwanted arrival of Katrina in the New Orleans-Biloxi-Gulfport-Pensacola strip. The article makes an excellent point: the time to get a recovery or continuance solution in place is before the bad weather starts. Just like flood insurance, if you wait too long you won’t be able to get protection in time.

All I can say is “wow!” There are a ton of new features and enhancements– very impressive for a point release. Please let me know if you find anything that doesn’t work properly.

Steve Friedl just posted the first public draft of “An Illustrated Guide to IPsec“. It’s very well done, with lots of illustrations that help explain how IPsec works. It will help if you already know the basics of IPsec, but there’s a good bit of intro-level information for those who aren’t already IPsec gurus.

Wonderful news: Microsoft’s Jesper Johansson is blogging. (You may remember him as the guy who said it’s OK to write down passwords). Check it.