Here’s a tip for all those intrepid conference organizers – in certain situations when there really is no point in scheduling a session. To help identify these here are some key warning signs:

• The session is from 7am to 8am
  • Double points if breakfast is also 7am to 8am.
  • Triple points if the session is in a different hotel to breakfast.
• It’s the last day of the conference
  • Double points if the conference party is the night before
• The session isn’t listed in the handy access program guide
  • Triple points if it also isn’t listed in the full program guide

If the session meets any of these warning signs you probably should just cancel it. If, as was the case with my BoF at Lotusphere, the session meets all the criteria the facilitator probably should just not bother turning up. Security was certainly surprised when I did.

My previous post, Atom is the New JCR, sparked some interesting conversations, firstly from Lars Trieloff via private e-mail (with a option of spilling over into a pub if we ever wind up in the same town…) and now from Dan Diephouse. Both Lars and Dan made a really good point – that JCR needs to find ways to work together well.

I completely agree that JCR isn’t very worthwhile as something that will break down content silos. It does have value as an API to work with data though. Atom is quite limited in the granularity it can work with data (which coincidentally is one of the reasons Web3S exists as well). And you still need to store your data somewhere.

It seems I’ll be heading to Boston in June to speak at the Web Content 2008 conference. The full session details are available, but the brief version is that I’ll be talking about making people important in web content management systems instead of just focussing on content and control. By letting the people who create content actually show through in the system and improve the personal connections, people work together a lot more and are more inclined to actually use the system.

So if I build a social network on Ning I can add forums which are kind of cool except that noone actually knows that new stuff has been posted and don’t bother checking back in. It doesn’t seem to matter what options you provide – RSS feeds, offers to email notifications of new threads etc – people drift away from forums very quickly once their question has been answered. On the other hand, mailing lists tend to be harder to get people to use in the first place because you have to subscribe, but then they tend to stick around longer because they’ve already subscribed. If in that time you manage to teach them a few things they didn’t know they needed to know they hang around permanently and the community grows.

A couple of days ago we had an issue where a new test I’d checked in passed locally but failed on the build machine and I didn’t get a build failure notification. Everyone who did get a build notification thought I was working on it and the build stayed broken overnight. Clearly, we need a really obvious way of reporting build failures that everyone notices and continues to notice until the build is fixed again.

Can anyone provide pointers to who the reliable mobile phone and broadband internet providers in the UK (Slough area particularly) would be?  In Australia there are a number of smaller providers (but significantly bigger than mum & pop shops) that give better deals than the major providers but I’m not sure if that’s true in the UK or how I’d find such second-tier providers anyway.

When the Java Content Repository (JCR) standard first came out it was supposed to bring in a new era of compatibility between content repositories and put an end to the content silo. There was, and still is, a lot of talk about it and just about everyone added JCR compliance to their marketing materials. Unfortunately, that’s mostly where things stopped – the implementation work that followed was generally done was buggy or incomplete and the only viable JCR implementations that I’ve seen have come out of Day Software, who lead the JCR spec effort. There are a few CMSs around that do have good JCR support – Alfresco for example – but they’re few and far between and even with that, there isn’t a lot of people taking advantage of that support and the standardization of the repository interface.

I’m setting off on a fairly major trip, firstly to Lotusphere in Orlando (20-24 Jan) where I’ll be facilitating a BOF session (BOF112) titled “Mashup Web 2.0 with Web Content Management”. Sadly it’s been scheduled for 7am Thursday, 24 Jan which seems like a rather silly time to expect people to be up, out of bed and ready for intelligent discussion. So if you’re around I’d really appreciate you getting out of bed early and coming along to make sure it’s not an empty room. Ephox will have a booth on the show room floor and cosponsor a couple of parties as well (details here). I’m really looking forward to actually getting to meet some of our clients and partners – they don’t tend to drop by Australia very often and pretty much never come as far north as Brisbane.

Tim Bray’s second, very short notice, prediction for 2008 is that Windows is going to “look bad”. It’s probably a good prediction – Vista simply didn’t do enough to make Windows competitive for the next 3 years or so they’ll take to get the next release out. Obviously Windows isn’t going to disappear but there is already a strong trend towards alternate platforms, mostly OS X, which is very likely to increase over the next 12 months. Even my wife has become an Apple evangelist (more so than me) ever since she got my old powerbook to use in front of the couch. It seems the in-laws will be making the switch in the next year as well.

Michael Krigsman sticks it to Nick Carr and includes an interesting assertion: that how good software is can be decided by how much revenue it drives:

Nick, please let the market decide whether enterprise software is “good” or not. There’s a simple metric for measuring this: it’s called revenue. Just for kicks, compare the revenue of enterprise companies, such SAP or Oracle, to consumer-oriented firms such as Twitter (click to follow me).

The conversation around enterprise software goes on, with a couple of good responses to my last post that I want to highlight. Firstly, ddoctor (aka Dylan Just who recently started working here at Ephox) in the comments:

I’m thinking of making this one of my career goals – making enterprise software not suck.

Then you’re very much in the right place – that’s what we do…. He goes on to give some very good advice on designing good UIs, but it misses a key point that I was trying to make in my last post:

I original skipped over Robert Scoble’s post, Why Enterprise Software Isn’t Sexy, it just seemed too obvious to be worth reading in much detail. I’ve been working on software that sells to enterprise customers for the past 6 years or so and no one cares about it, but release a poor version of that software for the consumer space and everyone goes ga-ga over it. EditLive! and eWebEdit Pro have been bringing WYSIWYG editing to the browser for years and no one cared because they were sold to the enterprise, but when Google put out Google Docs everyone went crazy about it, even though it has half the functionality and twice the bugs.