Mike Coyle’s Weblog

Don Dodge has an interesting analysis of Ray Ozzie’s recent Tech•Ed speech.

I think that there will be four key drivers of this movement back to the client/server world, none of which involve dusting off your old PowerBuilder books (not that there’s anything wrong with that):

1. Tools like the iTunes Music Store and (our very own) ProjectPipe.com will leverage and blend web technologies and existing desktop infrastructure, so that the underlying, infrastructure-spanning solution “just works”.
2. A platform for desktop-level, consumer-friendly “mashup”-type applications, that glue together RSS feeds, web services, and local data in interesting and useful ways. This will probably be some sort of Firefox extension.
3. Microsoft Live, and the ecosystem that springs up around it.
4. The movement toward desktop web applications. I think that two factors will drive this:
• The continued growth of rapid web dev frameworks, such as TurboGears and Ruby on Rails, which increases the supply-side (i.e. developers, ISVs) opportunity cost of not using one of these frameworks when building an application.
• The maturity and growing popularity of embedded databases such as Sqlite, which considerably simplifies the deployment footprint for such applications.

Don states that “The seamless, blended, client-server-services approach makes intuitive sense.” I couldn’t agree more. This was one of the core problems that we set out to solve in ProjectPipe, since so much project activity occurs on the desktop, yet so much collaboration occurs over the Internet.

We’ve referred to this blend of “Thin Client” (web) and “Thick Client” (client/server) as our Right Client Architecture, where we let the user pick the right tool for the job, and we figure out how to do the integration. For a real-world example, read about how ProjectPipe integrates with MS Project and Excel.

We rolled out a new site yesterday called Approach.Botonomy.Com. It is a cross between an blog and a knowledge base of project management and software development topics.

We wanted to create a way for prospective clients and partners to get a sense of Botonomy’s approach to project management and software development. But we didn’t want to just whip up some fluffy marketing prose accompanied by stock photos of a group of people we’ve never met sitting around a conference room table we’ve never sat at reviewing a project plan we never worked on.

Rather, we wanted to provide living commentary on the classical issues affecting project teams and IT organizations, as well as our $.02 on the relevant issues of the day. Hopefully, the soundness of our arguments and consistency of our philosophy will shine through the occasional longwindedness and bad spellin.

We also wanted to put together a resource that could be used to educate those coming up in the IT ranks. I’m a big fan of books like The Pragmatic Programmer, and Eric Raymond’s The Art of Unix Programming. Those are great books that provide sage advice in terms of programming and thinking about programming. But I never found anything like that that addressed some of the broader challenges facing technology consultants and IT folk in general. I am not saying that our humble website is in the same league as these classic texts, but we aspire to help those coming after us, just as those books aided scores of current IT professionals (and will continue to do so, I might add).

While Newton saw farther by standing on the shoulders of giants, we’d like to at least lend a beat-up footstool to the new kids.

From an implementation perspective, we identified a dozen concepts that are central to successful technical project delivery and risk management (focus, client relations, source control, etc.). For each of these topics, we’ll build out the following:

• An Introduction
• Our Opinions on the topic
• Short Stories that illustrate a point about the topic
• Advice, Tips, and Tricks related to the topic
• Links to current news, articles, blog posts, etc. that are related to the topic

Since it’s built atop a blog engine, it’s tricked out with RSS for the site and the individual Topics or Content Types. Every entry is tagged with a Topic, and a Content Type (Intro, Opinion, Story, etc.). This allows for a multi-dimensional view of the content as depicted below:

We have some content already published, and other stuff in various states of completion. If you’d like to see an example, here is a Story about New Technology: Your Project is Not the Science Fair