“Harnessing Collective Innovation”
June 27, 2006
Dion Hinchcliffe is our favorite blogger right now. His last two posts are manna from the blogosphere. Our clients consistently improve our software by forcing us to innovate and doing some of the innovating themselves. It’s the free-form nature of Enterprise 2.0 applications. For instance, one of our clients asked us if we could change our user interface because their clients needed it to be “stoopid easy.” Sure. We can do that. Another one of our clients asked us to create a set of Xforms for the Crossing the Chasm market segmentation process that guides the marketer through the process, performing the analysis online and providing video clips of consultant guidance. All without programming and infinitely reusable. It’s these continuous improvements and user-directed modifications that are so easily implementable in such short time frames that remove all doubt that legacy enterprise apps and the new enterprise web 2.0. apps are worlds apart.
Filed in Collaboration Software, Enterprise 2.0, Software as a Service, Thin-client hosted service, Web Office and Collaboration, Wiki-based authoring
June 28, 2006 at 3:14 pm
1. Don’t program. 2. Reuse. I think you hit the nail right on the head.
Don’t program means you need something that is declarative, and high level. Often you get this by using the right tool for the job. The tool that provides just the right level of abstraction.
Reuse means create something generic enough. Something that applies to other similar cases. However, if you solve a problem with 1,000 lines of code, one might be able to reuse those lines, but one will tempted to just rewrite them instead of going through exercise of reading and understanding 1,000 lines of code someone else wrote.
To implement forms, XForms, the technology you mention, gives you the right level of abstraction so you don’t have to write code, and so you can reuse the forms. But hey, I might be biased as I am working on an open-source Ajax-based implementation of XForms (Orbeon PresentationServer)
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Alex
June 28, 2006 at 6:45 pm
Hey Alex. Thanks for the comment. We’re just getting started here, as you can see. We appreciate your insight– and your bias!