NSFW. Adrian Sutton on why sexy and enterprise don’t go hand in hand:
Don’t forget as well, that consumer software generally sells directly to the end users, whereas enterprise software sells to CIOs, CEOs and CTOs who force it on their employees. A bad UI generally kills a consumer application but it’s par for the course with enterprise software because enterprise software isn’t sold to the people who actually use it. Listen in on a sales call for enterprise software and you’ll hear all about scalability, integration, security, interoperability, support, customisation, more support and corporate compliance.
It ends on a hopeful note:
… Expect to see consumer technologies and styles making the jump over to the enterprise more and more as businesses realize that it all those extra clicks add up to serious costs. Just don’t expect it to change fast - nothing in the enterprise ever does.
Via Discipline and Punish, a fitting name for this meme (also a daily read).
Out sourced. Timing is everything, and according to James Governor the Web 2.0 Intranet days are fast approaching:
Now the UI was different but the ad-hoc case management really smacked of Highrise. So much so good. What surprised me even more (I was practically doing the limbo I was so far back on my heels) was that when I asked Doug Merritt, the guy responsible for this new business line at SAPstraight-out confirmed that his team had indeed looked at Highrise in building the app.
SAP borrowing design ideas from 37Signals. This could get interesting. What if …
Mock turtle soup. Wait! Yes, they are! SAP calls it Composition on Rails. There’s a couple of Ruby libraries for using R/3 and NetWeaver. Composition on Rails is a different project, though. Composition on Rails is … get this … a Grails project:
The Composition on Rails project uses the Groovy scripting language and the Grails “Rails-like” web application framework, plus some SAP- specific extensions for Web Dynpro, Enterprise Web Services, and BAPIs, to allow quick and easy development of composite applications on SAP NetWeaver 7.1 CE.
Sigh.
As seen on TechCrunch. Matthieu Riou found the one-line quote that sums up 2007 in tech:
They’ve included several bundles of code libraries for databases and more importantly interfacing with the Facebook API.
Something to bite. Let’s finish this edition of Rounded Corners with some tech worthy material. Stefan Tilkov’s brief and well written intro to REST.
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