Free Software Linux

When you finally feel like doing something more productive with your iPhone (in between playing the Ocarina, tossing virtual cows and simulating a glasses of beer, we're sure) then be sure to check out Soonr, a new application that allows you to sync files from your desktop to Soonr's online storage and then view them on your phone. Soonr can handle over 40 different file types and provides you with a whopping 500 megabytes of free online storage. 

Why would a highly-diversified Enterprise CMS technology corporation with licensing revenues in the billions of dollars be interested in a tiny company that specializes in support software for open source projects?

Bamboo Solutions provides a number of web parts and applications for the SharePoint platform. One that is particularly interesting is their MashPoint solution - a free version of the MOSS Business Data Catalog. Now that solution proves even more enticing as Bamboo announces a Mashpoint API which serves to offer a REST-based interface to not only MashPoint, but to SharePoint itself.

Amazon Web Services, the hosted application environment from Amazon.com, announced the availability of the Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) in Europe. Having Amazon EC2 in Europe will mean developers and businesses can build applications and websites on the EC2 platform with less latency, as computational data will not have to travel across the Internet as a part of the workload.

Everyone knows that the most important thing is the data itself and not the storage or access of it through applications. We don't need Zoho to tell us that. We also know that more and more we are using other storage formats for our data than relational databases -- take XML repositories for instance -- and that we are using other methods to retrieve our data other than SQL. But what Zoho says we don't know, or don't realize, is that we can use the SQL query language to access our data even when it's not stored within a traditional relational database. At least we can now using Zoho's newest technology CloudSQL.

Making predictions is hard - especially about the future, as the saying goes. Against this background, I had low expectations of the “2020 FLOSS Roadmap”, which came out of the recent Open World Forum in Paris....On Open Enterprise blog.

I was going through my email today and found a recent email from Matt Rechenburg of OpenQRM who just released OpenQRM version 4.2. In the latest addition OpenQRM has support for provisioning server images in the cloud. Here’s the list of features:

According to Chris Petersen, APAC director of channels at Open Text, it is unlikely that enterprise data will ever go to the cloud due to regulatory issues and bandwidth costs. In a recent interview with ZDNet Asia, Petersen gave his outlook on the enterprise future in the cloud. Despite the fact that many and many more companies warm up towards cloud computing, Petersen insists the organizations will continue to store a large part of data in-house and demand on-premise software.

Yes it's true. We are suggesting you forget about that diamond necklace or that life subscription to GQ magazine and spend your money on a conference or two. Forget about Christmas. It's highly overrated anyway. Now conferences, that's the ticket. Need to get some good networking done, learn some new tips and tricks for content management, Web 2.0, social media, maybe cloud computing. After all, we spend three quarters of our lives working. Here are a few that might tempt you...

One advantage to storing your data in-house, as opposed to storing the data remotely, is the ability to keep and track key metrics on this data. Visualization and reporting tools allow us to keep tabs on data storage, usage and harvest these data for analysis. For those looking at cloud computing options, what avenues for data visualization exist? Not many, which is why Google has announced new and expanded capabilities of Google Visualization API that will allow users to display data from virtually any data source connected to the Web.

Some people enjoy the thrill of the crowds, the keynote speeches, meeting partners and vendors, and seeing first hand all the neat new things to come -- that's why they go to conferences like Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference 2008 (PDC2008). Some are either too cheap to go, or their companies are too cheap to send them. For those of you that fall into this category, you must live vicariously through the media and other bloggers to get your conference thrills. We didn't get to the PDC2008 Conference either, but here's some highlights we have gleamed by listening to those that did go.

Enterprise content management provider Open Text has announced a "first-of-its-kind" records management and archiving capability for Microsoft’s new cloud-based operating system Windows Azure. Azure is Microsoft's new cloud-based operating system. Open Text will incorporate these cloud-based capabilities into its Enterprise Library Services offering early next year.

You can just imagine the excited faces in the crowd at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference this week when Ray Ozzie started talking about Microsoft's move to the cloud. We're sure anyone who develops on and uses their technologies is likely thrilled to finally be heading there. But does it really matter to the larger IT world? To those who work with Amazon or Google? Has Microsoft merely met up with the competition, only to continue to support its own technologies and solutions?

One of the anomalies of the currently-fashionable cloud computing is that people tend not to talk about the underlying operating system – presumably because they tend to think the cloud *is* the operating system. The fact is that both of the main cloud computing systems – from Amazon and Google – have been running on GNU/Linux. In other words, not only is open source running vast swathes of the Internet, but now it's holding up nearly all the clouds, too....On Open Enterprise blog.

Are you one of those people who stare longingly at the cloud and wonder what it's really all about? Do you want to learn, but can't get away for more than a day? Well then head on over to the Cloud Computing Expo and sign up for the Cloud Computing Bootcamp scheduled for November 19, 2008 in San Jose, California.