Each month we take a look back 10 years to see what was "hot" -- at least by this newsletter's standards. Often I'm hard pressed to find something relevant to today's discussions, but October 2000 was a different kettle of fish -- lots of relevant stuff.
For example, did you know that cloud computing was getting started back then? As reported on the Oct. 23 newsletter: "ERoom Technologies this week will unveil tighter directory integration for its Web-based application that provides companies with online workspaces for sharing documents and organizing projects."
A couple of days later, IBM and Microsoft "…vowed they would spark the development of a business-to-business Internet directory standard that could greatly simplify completing transactions over the Web." They were touting UDDI -- the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration protocol. Yet only four years later I said: "XRI could be considered a competitor to Universal Description, Discovery and Integration, if UDDI had ever amounted to anything." Of course, XRI (eXtensible Resource Identifier) hasn't actually set the world on fire, either.
Really big news came from Novell as it finally released (after much foot dragging) DirXML, its join engine, which is necessary for a meta-directory to work. My biggest complaint was that DirXML was only available by contracting for services from Novell Consulting. But what Novell told me about that is the same thing that's come up over and over again for the past 10 years. As explained to me by then VP of product Marketing Ben Anderson: "Because it's not the directory that is seen as the potential problem, but a company's business processes which could (and should) be changed at the time DirXML is installed and deployed. From the political problem of 'who owns that data?' to the process problem of 'how does the data flow?' it's a major business problem to use metadirectory technology efficiently and effectively. And very few directory specialists are also business process specialists."
more @ http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/dir/2010/102510id1.html
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