what is enterprise?
What is Enterprise? - Last week, all of the employees under Paul Flessner (.NET Enterprise Servers) had a meeting. It was fairly standard, with sales figures, goals, vision, and strategy discussed. We even got a customary Flessner tirade on quality (”You want to know how you guys right here in this room can impact profitability? Every bug you ship costs us money, and that is expense right off the bottom line of every license sold!”). One interesting comment Paul had was about the term “Enterprise”. He was talking about the way that software companies use the term “Enterprise” loosely, but in reality there are some pretty basic assumptions that customers are making about your software when you say that it is “Enterprise”. These are usually quite boring, but it is surprising how often a piece of software that is marketed to Enterprise customers will miss some of them. Managability issues are often the most overlooked:
- Backup and Recovery - The administrator should have a way to backup and restore the system state. This includes user data that may be flowing through the system, and any system or machine configuration information.
- Security - The options for configuring and managing security should be available and well-documented.
- Deployment Tools - It should be easy for the administrators to set up development and test environments, and ultimately deploy those environments to production. The system should protect administrators from the sort of errors that occur when admins have to manually copy machine configurations, code changes, etc. from test to production. This is all about configuration management.
Changing topics, have you ever noticed how the two phrases “make no mistake” and “rule of the law” have increased drastically in everyday use since the Bush/Gore vote-counting exercise?
I’m still not sure how I feel about Patrick Leahey spending so much time in supposed defense of the civil liberties of non-citizens (who elected him anyway?) Playing a game of checks and balances is cool, but don’t the citizens who voted for him have more pressing issues right now? I definitely think George Tenet is out of control, though. If divulging all of the details about Michael Spann’s death is not an elaborate misinformation campaign, Tenet should be fired. He is right now reportedly continuing on his “CIA Publicity Campaign”. It’s interesting that the Frontier Post is still making noise about the so-called nuclear documents found in the Taliban safe house. Perhaps this lends credence to the theory that the Taliban honestly believed that the nuclear documents were real. The papers are also reporting that the SAS are preparing to assault Tora Bora. Does this mean that CNN is going to be waiting with cameras rolling when the forces arrive for their “surprise” attack? No need for Bin Laden to have spies, just send firepower wherever the CNN cameramen set up. It worked in Somalia…
This weekend in Seattle, about 400 of the volunteers who help others in Microsoft-related communities were in town. I’ve been feeling rather lousy, so I missed an opportunity to call on Robert Scoble and meet in person. Friday afternoon I got to meet Bryant Likes for the first time, though. It was pretty cool to finally put a face with the name that answers 90% of the questions on the newsgroups and maintains the SQL XML FAQ. Hopefully I didn’t give him a cold.
Last week, downtown Seattle saw a bunch more young guys trying to pick up chicks under the guise of protesting globalization. I think the anti-globalization kiddies would have had a much better time going to “Return to Laygoland” last night. Despite the rain and the venue, I hear it was one of the best parties of the year. Today there was a first-ever rally in favor of globalization and capitalism. Honestly, I doubt that activism and capitalism are a good combination, but it’s an amusing idea anyway.