The Portable Consultant

The Enterprise Architecture Centre of Excellence (EACOE) Canadian Seminar originally planned for Oct 6-8 in Toronto (see previous post) is being rescheduled for early 2009.

The goal is to offer the 5-day certification workshop, requested by many of the registered participants, in the next session.  A new date for the seminar will be announced when it is available.

Cheers,
-pmh

Seminar for Enterprise Architecture Implementation and Management Enabling the Zachman Framework and Managing Change

Toronto Oct 6-8, 2008

Enterprise Content Management, ECM, almost always involves deep changes in an enterprise’s information architecture beyond the specific solution.

A group that I’m associated with has a seminar taking place in October (Oct.6-8) on Enterprise Architecture. The seminar sponsored by the Enterprise Architecture Center of Excellence (EACOE) and Arcus Group. The seminar is being held in Canada (Toronto) for the first time, details can be found at this page on the Arcus Group site.

This 3 day event is focused on Architecture Management and Implementation. The first day is geared to senior executives who wish to launch or refresh enterprise architecture departments within their IT organizations. It will provide the necessary basic information about the purpose and benefits of Enterprise Architecture and show best practices in managing the human, process and technology sides of change.

For the second and third day, focus will be on implementation strategies and activities that result in concrete action plans with clear steps on how to implement Enterprise Architecture models and standards based on one of the industry’s leading frameworks called Zachman Framework.

The seminar leaders are Sam Holcman and Merril Mascarenhas. Sam is Managing Director of EACOE and President of Pinnacle Business Group and Zachman Institute for Framework Advancement (ZIFA)and is a recognized expert in research and application of business process engineering and enterprise architecture.  Merril is Managing Partner of Arcus Group and an expert in the human side of Change Management.

Cheers,
-pmh

The Portable Consultant now finds himself the owner of no less than five Microsoft Windows systems, including two laptops. Even taking into account the eventual conversion of some of the older systems to Linux, there will likely remain three or so.

To make a long story short, I’ve been interested in Windows Home Server since Todd Cochrane of the Geek News Central podcast covered it at a tech conference some time ago.

Being frugal, I wouldn’t consider getting a complete turnkey solution such as the HP MediaSmart Server. I’d rather recycle an old, suitable PC -initially, at least. WHS is said to live happily on a Pentium III, 1 Ghz box and the fact that it can be headless (no monitor, keyboard, or mouse required) is a bonus since my townhouse is short of horizontal surfaces for that sort of thing.

Of course, being frugal, I will be comparing WHS with any open source options but I recalled that the Microsoft product had some efficiencies that might justify the cost and one of these is Single Instance Store which promises to reduce the storage required for the OS since only one instance of any given Windows system file would be stored.

To verify this, I checked with the Microsoft product pages.

You likely know where this is going… I couldn’t find any reference to SIS after ten minutes of browsing and following product page links. I’m sure it’s there, but I couldn’t find it among all the Let’s-not-confuse-the-Simple-Home-User text.

So I tried the Wikipedia entry for WHS… Complete Success!

Wikipedia has a complete, clear (even for the-Simple-Home-User), and concise description of the product complete with links to entries for terms such as SIS itself.

Now, it is likely that Microsoft had a hand in writing and/or editing this entry. No matter. The simple straightforward style got me past all their marketing department’s product jargon to answer the questions I had about the product.

Moral of the story: No online product research is complete without a visit to Wikipedia.

Cheers,
-pmh