IM Planet Notes

Alot of good notes on IM Planet here, including interviews, and opinions about a few thngs. Mention of a bot that monitors convos (as part of a chat I presume) and fills in orders for securities between a broker and and a buyer. LOts of good stuff.

New IM Product Rolling Out of Oracle

New IM Product Rolling Out of Oracle as part of their Collaboration Suite. It will be compatible with XMPP.

I work with a couple of Oracle DBAs and they share the sentiment that while Oracle makes good databases, just about everything else they try to sell is full of problems :)

IMPlanet Conference Spring 2004

IMPlanet Conference Begins Tomorrow! is the headline... I was a panelist at the Fall 2003 conference on the "Buyer's Guide to Bots" panel, and it was fun. I met alot of good people and got a contract to write a bot for a gaming company.

There is also a bot panel at this one, with the following description:

How do you effectively use a software application that runs on IM networks and mimics natural conversation to support product and service recommendations?

I disagree with this approach, and I know I'm not the only one. The bot I wrote, which I know has at least a couple of hundred active users now, is specifically designed to have a workflow, and mainly work through menu choices. Honestly, why would someone type "How many days of vacation do I have left?" when they can just choose "3" from a descriptive menu? Natural language is always hyped as the Next Big Thing when new tech comes out on everything from vending machines to ATMs, but it never cathces on because it's faster to deal with a few options quickly. And especially with IM... the way language recognition works every misspelling, slang, and grammar case has to be accounted for to be even 80% effective, and I don't think that will happen until some sort of self-learning AI is integrated, which is far, far out.

And even if it does finally catch on, MAYBE natural voice commands will be a feature in some products, but honestly, what is "natural" about typing conversation to a computer? Nothing. I think small, tailored menus will be the popular winner when this all pans out.

The Road To Indigo

benjaminm's blog - The Road To Indigo outlines the Indigo programming model, an MS managed-code model for dealing with messaging, including web services. I read recently data warehouses were ideal high-impact candidates for web services, and it makes a ton of sense. Here's some notes from a presentation on the subject (same author).

I also wonder how amazing it is that there can be so many interesting blogs out there, while this one is as dry and boring as stale bread!

WebServices.Org - The Web Services Industry Portal - Web Services In Financial Services

Web Services In Financial Services is a great list and summary of the different XML standards financial institutions have to deal with. They are broken up by Banking, Securities, and insurance.

Also, Large Scale SOA Deployment Dramtically Increases Complexity is a pretty very perspective on changes an SOA will bring about.

Experimenting with Yukon Analysis Services

Experimenting with Yukon Analysis Services has the best info yet on Yukon's Analysis services...

The feature that gets a round of applause every time I demonstrate it, even from a traditionally cynical British audience, is the "one click cube", more properly known as IntelliCube. With this feature, you can point Analysis Services at a data source and it can automatically determine the appropriate fact tables, dimensions, hierarchies and levels - a wizard that can potentially turn hours of repetitive work into minutes.