The first thing was that product and market managers, executives and managers who attended were the most informed senior Microsoft staff for the topic, no posers. Second, we had real give and take, not just presentations, so we had the opportunity to challenge products and perspectives and hone the topics on the fly to our unique needs. Third, they were truly transparent with us on timelines and realistic expectations, and finally there was no selling.

So what did we learn? Well we discovered that Microsoft’s products and services really are headed in the right, from our perspective anyway, direction. Major software upgrades and rewrites will emphasize cloud capability and better integration. The systems software “stack” is being re-conceptualized for a seamless enterprise deployment.

In our case that means our systems architecture plans will serve us very well with: BizTalk serving as the workflow and rules engine, SharePoint as the portal framework and foundation for collaboration, Active Directory for authentication and access management, .Net as the common application development environment, SQL Server and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) as the primary reporting tool, Azure as a cloud development option and prototyping space, Exchange for email and calendaring, the Office (and Office 365) suite for productivity, xRM for entity and resource relationship management, and Live@edu for student accounts. As you probably already know, many of these products have been part of the college’s environment for a long time, however, the products are being re-developed to work better as a suite of solutions. This stack provides a robust and well-integrated software solutions infrastructure that will serve us well for years to come.

The re-developed Dynamics ERP (currently AX 2012) products have considerable potential to replace many of the older modules in our Orion ERP with the option of local hosting or, our preference, as a true cloud-based solution.

It isn’t very often that we see everything we had hoped for in briefings, this was a very nice exception. Well-done Microsoft.
 

With the distractions of recent news, we seem to have lost sight of the latest Apple deliverables announced this week. Although some seem disappointed in the iPhone 4S without a hint of an iPhone 5, there is still plenty of reason to celebrate.

First, the world-phone capabilities, sporting both CDMA and GSM, is a significant advancement. The introduction of Siri may be prove to be the long-sought after killer app, a robust voice user interface. The enhanced camera capability and the ability to clean up photos on the fly are nice newbies too.

But you just can’t assess a new technology product in isolation, at least not Apple products, because they are part of a larger ecosystem. The iOS5 features, iCloud service, and iTunes Music Match create a synergistic effect in creating value and an enriched technology experience.

On the surface, the newest iPhone may not be all that was dreamed of for Apple’s latest announcement, but when considered with all the other recent iOS and service features, it satisfies nicely.
 

I was lucky enough to work with the upstart Apple folks when they were huddled in the original 10260 Bandley Drive facility in Cupertino. The brilliance of the place was blinding, incalculable IQ’s, boundless energy, resourcefulness on a grand scale, and an even grander sense of what could be. And all of that was the direct extension of Steve Jobs.

Having been close to Apple during two eras; the first and most recent eras of Steve (although I did a lot of work with them for the first few years of the Sculley era too… another story) it was always obvious to me, or anyone else who was there, that his energy and vision always permeated the Apple culture and was realized in their “insanely great” products.

But Steve was more than a great idea guy, cultural icon, or revolutionary business leader. He was the driver of the new ways in which we live our lives. From GUI’s to the mouse; gesturing to Siri voice; from personal communicator, email, Facetime, cell phones to digital content management, distribution, and consumption; he has revolutionized great and small aspects of our lives that will never go back. Nothing he accomplished was ever a blip, always a permanent evolution or foundation for the next step-and-rise. His contributions to the advancement of education, the redefinition of the educational environment and infrastructure, and his commitments to teaching and learning rank among the most important in history.

I commented to my wife and a few friends that it is a strange phenomenon that I was so strongly affected by his passing. I had only met him a few brief times in 1983 and 1984 (the first era of Steve), once during the NeXt years, and then a couple of times over the last couple of years, yet his passing had the same sense of loss as a dear friend. I will miss his dryly humorous presentations at WWDC and product rollouts, seeing him wander over to the soba noodles at Café Macs on the Apple campus, and the pleasure of knowing he is busy working on improvements to my life that I didn’t even know I needed.

History will remember him kindly. IMHO, the totality of his effect on the human experience ranks him as the greatest innovator of the industrial and information ages. Apple will continue its success for the foreseeable future, and technology will continue to advance. But there is no doubt the world is a little less smart today than it was yesterday morning. Thanks Steve Jobs, we will miss you!

Although I am primarily referring to the enterprise environment, you probably have used clouds yourself, such as Dropbox, YouTube, Vimeo or some similar service. Apple’s recent announcements of cloud services are truly exciting and should result in significant quality improvements our personal digital lives. As for their full effect on our enterprise environments-it is too soon to tell.

As I stated in my opening blog for this site, I have been living and working in the center core of information technology for a very long time, over 33 years in fact. And in the course of this very long career there have been two giant leaps, historical shifts of epic proportion, affecting technology and ultimately, our everyday lives. The first of these was the development of the personal computer. It is hard to imagine our lives without these ubiquitous devices. Second was the Internet/web. This advancement provided the infrastructure and means by which all the world’s computers could communicate, including all of those personal computers. Together these two major technological shifts made the power of computing available to everyone and enabled access to a vast array of digital resources, the creation of computing communities-such as our social networks, and served a the stimuli for new business models. They changed the way we communicate, learn, shop, conduct and share research, how we entertain ourselves and even the ways in which we socialize and establish our personal networks and relationships. Few could argue the significance of these forces in the course of human history.

One of the most fascinating things about each of these giant leaps was that a very small number of people realized the significance of what was happening at the time. The realization of the importance of the personal computer and the web was a slowly evolving thing. The press coverage at the time was not in bold headlines but rather a somewhat dismissive “so-and-so” announced “new technology here” today. But this is common, huge trends are sometimes so big that they swallow us up before we realize it.

I was very fortunate during each of those major shifts to be engaged at the core of the developments. That involvement provided a perspective that made early adoption a very comfortable thing. During the early personal computing days we deployed the new technology in K-12 classrooms and developed systems to assist with assessment of academic achievement that was nearly impossible up to that point. We had large mainframe computers but they were too large and too expensive to divert from their essential business functions. It took very little time to confirm that we could improve student performance by knowing how their educational experience was going and by measuring the effectiveness of different approaches for different students, then optimizing their instructional programs.

When the web was in its nascent stages, I was CIO at a large college in California. We were an early adopter of the Internet, even with its very limited capabilities at the time, and were able to move quickly to web-enabled services when the first of the modern browsers became available.

Well, here we go again, but even bigger. I believe the most significant events in technology are currently underway, and again in a discrete one-by-one analysis they may seem like quiet little events, but in combination they represent what could be the most impactful changes since the personal computer and the web.

They are: business analytics/business intelligence, extreme mobile computing with fully ubiquitous networks, cloud computing, and the integration of social networks. Each of these major technology shifts interacts with the driving societal, business and technology trends that are taking place. We have identified the top ten trends as: experience as brand and system as experience; social computing, communities and collaboration; digital content ecosystems; service oriented systems (SOA); Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 to Web n.0 evolution; integration of consumer devices from the edge of networks; federated identity management and profile-based computing; hybridization of experiences; virtual reality & simulation; and the emergence of digital natives.

To identify and prepare the college for these extraordinary changes we have been heavily engaged in research and analysis as we begin development of our next strategic technology plan. It is this plan that will provide the framework for optimizing new technologies and trends, leveraging new technology-related behaviors and resources for student success, and ensuring maximum value creation from technology investments. For the past couple of years I have become a reluctant road warrior in pursuing the best technology ideas and strategies (sadly very little of the technology industry happenings are here at home-except one, the IT Leadership Academy we run at the college-which will be a blog topic all its own). In addition to extensive professional development and seemingly endless technology and business case presentations and discussions, my team and I have devoted most of our last years’ weekends and evenings to reading everything available on these subjects and debriefing each other. It is from these experiences that I assert the presence of this next mega technology shift.

I will be sharing details of this mega change and some of what we have learned including some of the amazing innovation going on in business, industry and education. We will also share some of the thinking that will serve as the foundation of the college’s technology environment over the next several years and a few of the very special projects that will provide exceptional support for student success.

A few weeks ago the College’s strategic communications team rolled out its new communications network web, a site dedicated to sharing all things Florida State College at Jacksonville with the world. As part of this effort I was asked to move my long-running, but somewhat closed audience, technology blog to the larger and wide open college site. At first I was very reluctant to agree.

I occasionally rant on technology misadventures, which may be fun, but not right for this forum, my blog topics have typically been such that a small band of dedicated technologists would be the only folks remotely interested, and they might just be feigning interest at that. But after a bit of cajoling and some further thought, I decided to move the topics up a notch and use the blog as an opportunity to share things that may actually be of some interest to everyday folks as well as the confirmed geeks with whom I spend the majority of my time.

I am absolutely blessed to have spent the last 33 years working in, what I believe to be, the most exciting industry of our time, information technology, or IT as it is commonly called. In this blog I will do my best to share what IT is all about, the big trends, what is happening in IT around the world, how those things affect us all, what I have learned from my experiences, a bit about working in technology-related careers, and what all of this means to the college.

My hope is to make the blog a fun and easy read that provides insight into technology and the college.