building on 29 years of software know how making sense · building on 29 years of software know how...

Grey Matter

Building on 29 years of software know how

Making SenseExtracting information from the data available to your business

Mobile platformsThe choices to be made when targeting mobile devices

Silver liningsCan you rely on the cloud for your security needs?

Issue 55 | Spring 2012

Matt NicholsonEditor, HardCopy

Grey Matter LimitedPrigg Meadow,Ashburton,Devon, TQ13 7DF, [email protected]

EditorialEditor: .....................................................................Matt NicholsonTechnical Editors: .. Sean Wilson, Paul EdwardsNews Editor: ...................................................... Paul StephensPublisher: ..................................................................Andrew KingContributors: .............................Tim Anderson, Simon

Bisson, Mary Branscombe, Kay Ewbank, Jon Honeyball, Graham Keitch, Paul Stephens

Design and layout: ..................................... Jason StanleyIllustration: ............................................................Sholto WalkerWeb Developer: ..............................................Dave Clayton

Advertising & CirculationMarketing: ................Holly Hudson, Ash Khagram,

Anna Roach

Tel: 01364 654100

Email: [email protected]

HardCopy is edited for Grey Matter four times a year by Matt Publishing, Bristol, UK. It is printed by Warners (Midlands) plc and requested by 15,000 readers.

Copyright © 2012 Grey Matter Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without prior consent of the copyright holder. All trademarks acknowledged. HardCopy is a trademark and Grey Matter a registered trademark owned by Grey Matter Limited. While all reasonable attempts are made to ensure accuracy, Grey Matter and Matt Publishing disclaim any liability whatsoever for any use of information herein. Prices exclude VAT unless specified.

Cover Image credits:©iStockphoto.com/photocanal25

4 Software News Mindjet, JetBrains, WinZip,

Paessler and more.

6 News in brief Our new-style section now

lists coming events.

9 Inside Data Using the free editions of

SQL Server and Oracle.

10 Competition Win an iPad 2 with AVG!

12 Making sense Bringing business

intelligence to your users.

16 Data presentation Building business

intelligence into your apps.

20 Mobile platforms Tools and platforms for

mobile applications.

27 A silver lining Can you rely on the cloud

for your security needs?

30 Straight talking Tim Anderson ponders

Adobe’s strategy.

32 And Another Thing Jon Honeyball ponders

the future of Windows 8.

34 Short Cuts Views from the edge.

2 Symantec7 Adobe8 Mindjet 11 AVG15 SAP Business Solutions19 Microsoft BI22 Embarcadero25 Windows Azure26 GFI29 Paessler PRTG 31 Intel33 ABBYY35 Infragistics36 Flexera

It has long been the case that we view intellectual property - software, the written word, music or film - differently to real,

phyiscal objects. This stems from a feeling that copying intellectual property without paying is somehow different because it doesn’t actually deprive the author or the distributor of anything: steal a TV, and the owner can no longer watch television; copy a song, and the owner has still got the original.

This attitude was compounded by the growth of the World Wide Web through the 1990s. Right from the start, one of the big benefits of the Web was that - once you’d paid your phone bill - everything else was free. However, once we’d got over the novelty of it all, many of us started wondering how we were going to make a living in this brave new world. Companies like Amazon and eBay didn’t have a problem as they were selling ‘real things’, but those of us in publishing, music and eventually even film had to face the fact that no-one seemed to be prepared to pay for what we produced.

Meanwhile, the mobile phone market was growing, handsets were getting more sophisticated, and something very strange started to happen. On the Web, publishers struggled to convince their audience to hand over a paltry sum to read their articles or download their music; but on the phone, users were happily handing over several pounds in exchange for a couple of seconds of banal ringtone.

And that culture continues today. As a business model, charging people to access your Web site simply doesn’t work - if you’re not selling ‘real things’, then the only model that does seem to work is one that relies on advertising. But on the mobile phone, wrap it up into an ‘app’ and people are prepared to pay. It’s something to do with the process of downloading and installing that gives you the illusion of ownership and personalisation - things that we are prepared to pay for. There’s also the branding offered by the Apple App Store or the Windows Phone Marketplace, or indeed Orange or Vodafone, that creates the impression of endorsement.

This is the magic of the app, and for the software industry its a big incentive for targeting mobile devices. It’s also a paradigm that Microsoft, through Metro on Windows 8, and Apple are keen to bring to the desktop. However there are wider implications.

One of the great strengths of the Web has been the lack of ownership: nobody decides what can and cannot be published, or charges for the privilege. As users we like not having to pay, and we value the lack of censorship; but as publishers we favour apps and, although we don’t want censorship, we would like publishers to have to jump through some hoops as that does confer some sense of value on what does get published. Apps are more controlled, both by those running the app stores and, on mobile devices, by the carriers. The app model does make for a safer and more profitable environment, but we do risk losing something important in the process.

Contents

Advertisers Index

Welcome

Register Now!HardCopy magazine is published four times a year. Make sure you don’t miss out by registering or updating your details at www.softwareknowhow.info/hc/register

Read HardCopy onlineHardCopy is hosted on Grey Matter’s software information portal. To view buyer’s guides, news, blogs and forums go to www.softwareknowhow.info

Grey Matter • 01364 654100 • HardCopy 3

JetBrains smells the CoffeeScript JetBrains • www.greymatter.com/jetbrains

Prague-based developer tools vendor JetBrains believe in a fast product

cycle, and to prove it they’ve upgraded four of their products in the past few weeks. Three of them - WebStorm 3.0, PhpStorm 3.0 and IntelliJ IDEA 11 – get support for the Ruby-influenced CoffeeScript JavaScript dialect, while the fourth, Visual Studio productivity add-on ReSharper 6.1, gets an SDK for developing its own plugins.

Other new features in the WebStorm 3.0 JavaScript IDE include a duplicated code detector, improved JavaScript debugger with

‘mark object’ action, and support for server-side node.js apps. The duplicated code detector and revisions graph also feature in version 3.0 of the PhpStorm PHP IDE, along with an integrated UML tool and integration with Xdebug and Zend Debugger profilers.

JetBrains’ IntelliJ IDEA 11 Java IDE gets, among other things, a ‘rethought and reworked’ UI with improved favourites and templates handling, plus better GitHub integration and beta support for the Groovy 2.0 language. Last summer’s ReSharper 6.0 was a major release

that included JavaScript, HTML and CSS support plus a bundled decompiler. 6.1 brings the new SDK for writing plugins to ReSharper itself, plus improved settings and location of unused .NET assembly settings, and fixes for what JetBrains candidly describes as ‘over 150’ performance issues (plus ‘over 800’ bugs) in the 6.0 release.

JetBrains makes IDEs and tools for a range of languages and platforms including Ruby, Python and Apple’s Objective-C. The non Microsoft/Apple specific products run on Windows, Linux and Mac.

WinZip 16 offers Facebook integration WinZip • www.greymatter.com/winzip

The legendary WinZip file compressor is approaching its 21st birthday, but

developers WinZip Computing, now owned by Corel, seem determined to keep up with modern trends. WinZip 16, just released, features Facebook integration, Blu-Ray support and a way around the ‘too big to email’ problem when sending large files such as audio and video, alongside more traditional enhancements including a new 64-bit

compression engine and support for RAR and 7Z file formats.

WinZip 16 offers 1-click access to WinZip’s ZipShare, a free service which lets you upload up to 100MB of files (max 20MB each) to cloud storage, then post links to them on your Facebook wall or group. Unlike ‘real’ Facebook uploads there are no restrictions on file types, and the whole process, including typing your accompanying message, can be done from the

WinZip window.A similar approach is used to circumvent

the problem of mail servers refusing to handle attachments of more than a few MB. This time the cloud service in WinZip’s ZipSend interacts with a client app, integrated with WinZip 16, that automatically diverts attachments over a specified size to the cloud, then inserts a link into the email message. Maximum data size is 50MB, or 2GB with a Pro account.

Software News

Flexera has released AdminStudio 11, an updated version of its flagship

application migration and packaging suite. The product is the first to support Microsoft’s System Center 2012 Configuration Manager with its user-centric deployment model, and also, via its Virtualisation Pack, the first to perform application suitability testing for Windows Server App-V, a central component in Microsoft’s private cloud strategy.AdminStudio 11 is ‘tightly integrated’ with System Center 2012 Configuration Manager, with an import wizard and bulk import utility which can automatically identify the best candidates for migration to the new model, so allowing apps to be distributed to users on any device. It also gathers application metadata required for conversion by analysisng elements

such as system requirements and .NET dependencies.AdminStudio 11 supports adding and editing of ISO 19770-2 compliant software tags, allowing software asset management tools to identify installed apps even after they’ve been repackaged. There’s also a new API for automating AdminStudio tasks from script and .NET languages.The edition-dependent Virtualisation Pack tests applications for App-V compatibility, differentiating between client and server apps and making relevant recommendations.

Meanwhile the workflow capabilities of AdminStudio and Flexera’s FlexNet Manager suite for Enterprises have been merged into a new Workflow Manager product.

AdminStudio 11 goes user-centric Flexera • www.greymatter.com/flexera

AdminStudio 11 suite is tightly integrated with Microsoft’s System Center 2012 Configuration Manager.

4 Spring 2012 • Issue 55 • HardCopy

News

Competition in the backup and recovery market is hotting up with

virtual environments a key battleground as security giant Symantec pitches new versions of its backup products against a major new release from virtualisation specialists Veeam Software.

Back in 2005 Symantec acquired Veritas Software and with it two separate backup products, the Windows server-based Backup Exec and the enterprise-level, multi- platform server NetBackup. Six years later the company is

still developing them as separate products (with some shared technology), and has just come up with significant new releases of both.

Version 7.5 of NetBackup features five major enhancements. A policy-based Replication Director allows easily-managed NAS snapshotting and replication, while NetBackup Accelerator is ‘next generation backup agent technology’ boasting improved data reduction. Support for VMware and Hyper-V has been improved, and there is a new Search feature and new Cloud connectors for AT&T, Rackspace and Amazon.

V-Ray technology also plays a key role in Backup Exec 2012, driving its new ability to act as a unified tool for backup, de-duplication and restore on VMware, Hyper-V and physical environments. The release, also features a redesigned admin console with ‘intelligent

backup’ auto configuration, ‘bare metal’ recovery from CD/DVD and physical to virtual machine recovery. Customers can now opt for the capacity licensing model already available with NetBackup.

The big news in Veeam Backup & Replication V6 is support for Microsoft’s Hyper-V, integrated via a single console in what had previously been a VMware-only product. There’s also a new distributed, load-balancing architecture with multiple proxy servers and repositories, giving what Veeam says is Enterprise scalability. The list of improvements include better replication performance (claimed up to 1,000 per cent), an agent for Windows-based self-compressing smart backup targets, reduced CPU usage and 1-click VM restore. Real-time statistics are enhanced, and there’s a new Bottleneck monitor.

Vendors vie for virtual backup business Symantec • www.greymatter.com/symantec • Veeam • www.greymatter.com/veeam

Mindjet brings information mapping to SharePoint Mindjet • www.greymatter.com/mindjet

In what it modestly describes as ‘good news for Microsoft’, Californian vendor

Mindjet has released Connect SP for SharePoint, a version of its free-format project planning and information mapping system which can be used as a navigation and collaboration front-end for data in a SharePoint repository.

Users can create information maps, similar to those in Mindjet’s MindManager desktop product, and link objects in them to SharePoint

documents, replacing SharePoint’s list-based navigation with a more visual, object-based representation. Links can also be made to tasks and calendars, creating ‘Project Dashboard’ maps. Tasks can be created and edited, direct from the map, and there’s an integrated task search feature. Maps can be published to SharePoint sites, making them accessible to Web users without the Connect SP application.

Mindjet points out that industry reports

indicate that some workers find SharePoint hard to master, with one Forrester Research survey reporting that 37 per cent of IT buyers rated its level of adoption as “less than expected.”

“With often large investments in enterprise SharePoint installations, CIOs are tasked with getting the greatest adoption and return on this technology,” said Blaine Mathieu, Chief Product Officer at Mindjet. “Satisfying that need is our business opportunity.”

Paessler keeps the updates coming Paessler • www.greymatter.com/paessler

Agile development means frequent updates, and no-one takes that more seriously than Nuremberg-based

performance monitoring specialists Paessler AG who have just released the ninth update to their PRTG Network Monitor in just four months.

According to Paessler, PRTG 9.2 contains over 400 changes since version 9.1.6, released just five weeks earlier. Heading the list is support for VMware 5, enabling monitoring of ESX 5, Virtual Center 5, and VMs located in vApps. Also on the major improvements list is a complete rewrite of the old ‘Mini HTML’ interface for mobile clients, now reborn as the touch-optimised, jQuery Mobile 1.0-based ‘Mobile WebGUI’ and compatible with everything

portable from iOS and Android to Win Phone 7, Amazon’s Kindle and FireFox Mobile.

In what Paessler describes as “two hands full of additional awesomeness”, the desktop WebGUI has also been overhauled, with faster AJAX response and two new sensor tree views. Meanwhile users who’d rather not rely on Internet Explorer can now monitor Web page load times using a WebKit-based sensor. Other enhancements include a new WMI UTC Time Sensor which measures the difference between the system clocks of monitoring and monitored devices, and an improved FTP sensor.

Features in the other eight updates released since last September include improved SQL sensors and Active Directory integration, a

The device tree view in the PRTG 9.2 network monitoring package.

Windows Scheduled Task sensor and additional Device Tree Views.


News

On Adobe Creative Suite 4 or older? Then upgrade now!Adobe’s new upgrade pricing policy means that, from the launch of Creative Suite 6 and the Creative Cloud subscription service (due in the first half of this year), customers will have to be on CS5 or 5.5 in order to qualify for upgrade pricing. Don’t panic though, as CS3 and CS4 owners will get a special offer on the new products until 31 December 2012. CS2 customers won’t be able to buy upgrades to CS6, but can move to Creative Cloud membership. In the meantime owners of CS2, CS3 or CS4 who’d like to upgrade to CS 5.5 can take advantage of a 20 per cent discount being offered until 15 March. More at greymatter.com/adobe.

Grey Matter has been appointed an Adobe Gold Reseller in recognition of our experience with Adobe products.

Confused about the Cloud? Help is here!If want to know more about Microsoft’s cloud services platform, then Grey Matter’s new Windows Azure Helpdesk has the answers. Grey Matter is a Microsoft Approved Centre of Excellence partner for Azure. Contact [email protected] or visit greymatter.com/mcm/windows-azure.

Alternatively, if you’re an ISV and you’d like to offer your applications from the Cloud, then Grey Matter has partnered with Rise and soVision to provide Cloud Managed Services for ISVs. The service includes combined billing for Microsoft ISV Royalty licences and UK-based datacentre hardware, and allows you to bill your customers directly and to offer 30-day trials. Find out more at isvknowhow.com/Licensing/Cloud.aspx.

Showcase pages help you get the most from MicrosoftGrey Matter has launched two new showcase Web pages designed to help customers get the most from Microsoft products. Bing Maps (greymatter.com/bingmaps) takes you through applications, features and licensing of Microsoft’s online mapping service, with an FAQ. Grey Matter is the official Bing Maps Distributor for UK, Western Europe and APAC, so we probably have the answer.

Meanwhile if you’re a Microsoft Software Assurance customer you may be eligible for Planning Services days to help you plan your software deployment. Grey Matter can help you activate your entitlement and choose a planning partner. Visit greymatter.com/mcm/dps for more information.

News in brief

• Microsoft has announced that it will be changing volume licence prices in the UK on 1 July to bring them in line with its European prices. This is most likely to involve an increase so you might want to consider making any purchases before that date.

• A reminder that the Visual Studio Developer 11 Preview is available for anyone to download from msdn.microsoft.com and will remain active until 30 June. This will be a major update with Windows 8 and Azure support, .NET 4.5 and a big increase in tools for JavaScript at the tip of a very large iceberg.

• Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer delivered the keynote at January’s CES show, including some impressive Windows 8 demos. See the whole performance at http://youtu.be/qYDxMF9ea6E.

• TechSmith has launched Camtasia for Mac 2, a new version of its screen recording and editing package with improved performance, new graphic annotations and a redesigned editor with blur-out capability. The company has also shipped version 4 of Camtasia Relay, its multi-user screen/presentation recorder, with new features including camera support, a global caption editor and direct publishing to YouTube.

• SmartDraw 2012 represents a major update of this professional-quality chart design package. Highlights include redesigned project management views, new information hubs with links to external documents, automated timelines, custom chart libraries and a new Meeting View for organising project tasks by person.

• Netop Vision Pro is a new generation of this classroom management package. New features include high-speed screen sharing for video and graphics-intensive applications, a new Ultimate Web Control with on-the-fly blocking of distracting Web sites, and remote logging-in of student computers.

2012 Coming soon

• The international software development conference QCon London 2012 is celebrating its sixth year at The Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre from 7 to 9 March. Find out more at qconlondon.com.

• Microsoft is hosting a seminar on Visual Studio 2010 Application Lifecycle Management on 19 March at its offices in Victoria, London. More at www.greymatter.com/information/events.

• Grey Matter will be partnering Embarcadero at DevWeek 2012, the UK’s biggest independent conference for software professionals. The event runs from 26 to 30 March at London’s Barbican Conference Centre. Visit devweek.com for details.

Windows 8 updateIn a lengthy blog post on Windows on ARM (WOA), president of Microsoft’s Windows Division Steven Sinofsky has revealed that the Consumer Preview of Windows 8 on x86/64 will be available to the general public for download by the end of February. It is not known when devices running WOA will become available but the intention is that both ARM and Intel architecture versions should ship at the same time. For more details, and much more on WOA, see the Building Windows 8 blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/.


News

Graham Keitch looks at what you can achieve

with the free editions of Oracle Database and

Microsoft SQL Server.

Two of the industry’s leading database suppliers, Oracle and Microsoft, provide

free development and deployment editions of their flagship databases. Both provide free licences for developers and a free lightweight Express edition for deployment, with strings attached. SQL Server 2008 R2 is the current release from Microsoft although Release Candidate 0 for 2012 (code named ‘Denali’) is now available. The free editions of SQL Server include Developer and Express. Oracle also provides a free licence for developers and an Express edition, Oracle Database 11g XE.

Let’s begin by covering some common ground. From a developer’s perspective, free access to the database technologies that might underpin a project is clearly desirable for

evaluation purposes. Both vendors recognise this and offer free licences for this purpose. Developer licences provide access to most of Oracle’s database and developer tools. These can be downloaded from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) website and include tools for the Oracle J2EE environment and tools that allow .NET developers to connect with the Oracle platform from within Visual Studio.

Developers are unlikely to be content with stripped down versions of the database while vendors naturally want to expose the best features of their technologies for use in new projects. Consequently, both Oracle and Microsoft ensure the developer licence provides access to the full functionality of their respective high end Enterprise and Datacenter editions. With core functionality and code deployed across all editions of both product sets, this minimises the additional work needed should

there be a requirement to scale the database during the development process, or later.

When it comes to developer licence restrictions, we begin to see minor differences in the way Oracle and Microsoft approach things. This partly reflects historical and cultural distinctions between the two. Both developer licences now permit development, testing and demonstration usage but in some documents Oracle specifically excludes anything that relates to an existing commercial or production system. Traditionally Oracle has been associated with more complex environments, which together with some of their advanced database options can blur the boundaries between development, testing and production.

For example, Oracle Real Application Testing allows testing in real production conditions. Other Oracle database options facilitate advanced resource sharing, making it possible to offload commercial tasks such as reporting to a machine that is also used for

testing or failover. In complex situations like this, it’s necessary to ensure the hardware architecture, software and licensing models are economically configured to best serve production, development, security and high availability requirements. This is an important consideration regardless of which vendor is providing the database solution. The licensing definitions that govern permitted developer use also change quite frequently so it’s necessary to ensure you understand and agree to these.

Both vendors also provide a free lightweight edition that can be deployed in a production environment, with restrictions. These are the Express editions, referred to as XE in the case of Oracle. Oracle Database 11g XE can be installed on any size host with any number of CPUs (one database per machine). It will store up to 11GB of data and use up to 1GB of memory and one CPU. It is a suitable platform

for developers working with PHP, Java, .NET, XML and Open Source, and for ISVs who want a starter database to distribute free of charge. If and when there is a requirement to scale beyond these restrictions, projects can be migrated with relative ease as XE uses the same code base as its bigger brothers. Together with the free tools that Oracle provides for Windows developers, XE is a good choice for those wishing to evaluate the Oracle platform for their .NET applications.

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Express is similarly restricted to one processor while supporting a maximum database size of 10GB. It doesn’t provide the high availability and management tools you’d expect to see in more advanced editions but those that are provided are sufficient for small scale, non-mission critical applications. There is full integration with Visual Studio and support for the basic elements of the .NET development environment such as the Entity Framework, Common Language Runtime and Native XML.

A new feature in the 2012 release will be LocalDB. This is a small component that functions as an integrated part of a tool or desktop application that needs a local database runtime with T-SQL support. Designed for single user implementations, an application that uses LocalDB opens a file to access SQL Server functionality, including ACID transaction support.

Inside Data

MySQL Community EditionThere is also a free version of the world’s most popular open-source database, available from Oracle. MySQL Community Edition is a fully integrated, transaction-safe, ACID compliant database. Commercial customers can purchase commercial editions that meet specific business and technical requirements from Grey Matter.

Graham Keitch is the database pre-sales specialist at Grey Matter and has worked in IT for over 20 years. You can contact Graham at [email protected] or phone him or any of his colleagues on 01364 654100 to discuss whether a free developer or Express edition is appropriate

to your needs, and explore suitable licensing plans for deployment. Oracle XE, Microsoft SQL Server Express and MySQL Community Edition can be downloaded from their respective Web sites.

Find out morei


Database

Competition question: Which of the following

was NOT a new product enhancement in AVG

Internet Security Business Edition 2012?

q AVG Accelerator

q AVG Advice

q AVG Spam-a-Lot Bot

AVG and Grey Matter are celebrating the launch of AVG Internet Security Business

Edition 2012 by giving you the chance to win your very own 16GB Apple iPad!

AVG Internet Security provides all-round protection, looking after identity theft, viruses and problems you might encounter visiting harmful Web sites. This edition has been built using feedback and suggestions from AVG users. New enhancements include AVG Accelerator, which optimises your Internet connection and reduces download time, and AVG Advice which monitors your activity and makes real-time suggestions to enhance your computer’s performance. Also part of the package is AVG Email

Server Protection and File Server Protection, while AVG Social Networking Protection checks in real time links that are exchanged within Facebook and MySpace.

All you have to do to enter is answer the competition question below, fill out the rest of the form and send it to:

AVG iPad 2 CompetitionGrey Matter LtdPrigg MeadowAshburtonDevon TQ13 7DF

#

#

#

Your details

Name __________________________________________________________________________________

Company _______________________________________________________________________________

Address ________________________________________________________________________________

____________________________________________________________ Postcode __________________

Telephone ______________________________________________________________________________

Email __________________________________________________________________________________

q I would like to receive HardCopy magazine.

q I would prefer not to receive information on products or services that I might find useful to my work

(note that we keep your information private and will not sell or rent your data for marketing purposes).

issue 55Apple iPad 2entry form

WIN a 16GB Apple iPad 2!

TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF ENTRY1. No purchase necessary for entry to this competition.2. The prize is one 16GB Apple iPad 2. There is no cash alternative.3. Completed entries must be received by 13 April 2012.4. Entries submitted online at www.softwareknowhow.info/hc/competition or completed on a

photocopy of this page will be accepted.5. Only one entry will be accepted per person.6. The winner will be decided by a random draw from the correct entries received by the closing date.7. The winner will be announced on 16 April 2012 and will be notified by email or telephone.

Who is your current security provider?q AVG q ESET q McAfee q Sophos q Symantec q Trend q Vipre q Other Number of PCs and laptops in my company?

Number of servers in my company?

When does your current security licence expire?

Additional information

8. The judges’ decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into regarding the decision.

9. Employees of organisations connected with this competition are not eligible for entry.10. AVG and Grey Matter reserve the right to use the winner’s name in promotional

materials.

The competition promoter is Grey Matter Ltd, Prigg Meadow, Ashburton, Devon TQ13 7DF.

We will also accept entries submitted online at www.softwareknowhow.info/hc/competition


Competition

Making senseThese days, Business Intelligence means much more than

drilling into database cubes, as Mary Branscombe discovers.

For much of the last decade, each new year has been heralded as the year in

which Business Intelligence will be democratised, becoming accessible to the ordinary user and not just a small group of data-modelling experts working with highly specialised tools that offer little interactivity.

In fact, there’s been software available for some time now that makes it possible for ordinary business users to extract information and gain useful insight from the mass of data exposed by their business. Giving end users timely access to such information was one of the major improvements offered by SQL Server 2008, and the R2 release went further by adding ‘self-service’ analysis through PowerPivot for Excel and an improved Report Builder. These went hand-in-hand with master data management and data quality tools which help ensure that users are accessing data that is synchronised and accurate across multiple systems. As these tools have evolved, attention has returned to the back-office in an effort to ensure that the information sources are capable of reacting to a query in good time.

Any data analysis that returns information

that is at all interesting is bound to provoke more questions, and new ideas on how to explore the data in an effort to understand what is going on. This is a spontaneous process. You need to be able to ask questions and get answers in real time, and not when someone in the IT department happens to find the time to craft and run the queries you have requested. This is self-service BI, and it’s how the majority of business analysis is now being done.

Furthermore, these days we want to go

beyond traditional databases and spreadsheets. Whether it’s emails, survey responses, documents, video, sound, the fire hose of Twitter and other social networks, the growing number of ‘big data’ datasets that are increasingly available in the cloud, or the flood of sensor data generated by the nascent ‘Internet of things’, the information that is relevant to your business is now coming from more disparate sources than ever.

When it comes to external information out on the Web, we take the universal interface of search engines for granted, bringing you results from a wide range of sites and services. Business Intelligence needs to take the same universal approach, giving access to different sources that we can mine and compare through a single simple interface, rather than forcing us to learn multiple tools and interfaces.

So-called ‘traditional’ BI reporting tools have become simpler and more powerful in recent years, and they are beginning to work with a wider range of data sources than traditional numerical data stored in structured

PowerPivot lets you slice and dice data from multiple sources using

an interface that looks more like an app than a report.

CareGroup Healthcare in Boston used PowerPivot to analyse how many patients were being readmitted to hospital within 30 days, and why. So-called

‘bounce-back’ readmissions are bad news for patients and expensive for the hospital. CareGroup quickly discovered it was a particular problem for elderly patients, where it turned out to often be related to issues with taking medications. Using PowerPivot it took four hours to develop a reusable report that pulled data from Oracle, SQL and Access databases – a process that had previously taken two days every month to build by hand. As a result, nurses now call recently discharged elderly patients to talk them through their prescriptions, so avoiding many readmissions.


Business

MARYBRANSCOMBE

Mary is a freelance IT writer who’s worked on both sides of the

fence, from writing manuals to developing

a technology area for a major online service.

She’s also the editor of IT Expert magazine.

maryb@

hardcopymag.com

Case Study


Business

databases and spreadsheets. You can expect not just dashboards and reports but pivot tables and multi-dimensional models that let you explorer data visually and interactively, nesting variables and navigating hierarchies of information, or animating data to see what trends develop. There are also more specialist tools for handling less traditional data sources, although these inevitably offer less sophisticated options.

It’s also important to remember that not all information is created equal: opinions on Twitter might be influential, but they’re not easy to translate into the hard numbers required for analysing past trends and market results. Extracting information from video takes either serious back-end voice recognition processing, or someone on hand to transcribe or annotate manually before you can use it for analysis. Be realistic about what you can achieve from unstructured and semi-structured data. Look for tools that let you check back to the underlying data source so that you can make a judgement on the reliability of your insights against the original data.

Slice and diceSAP Crystal Reports is a classic BI reporting and analysis tool and, as with the reporting services built into SQL Server, the focus is on pre-built reports designed by an IT team that can use Adobe Flash and Flex which allow users to sort, filter and reformat. The filtering options are powerful enough to make the reports flexible, but this is about structured reports rather than the spontaneous exploration of data.

Crystal Interactive Analysis is a simpler tool that focuses more on self-service data access to multiple data sources, and on ad-hoc tools for creating interactive reports with tables and charts that allow you to drill down or refine with ranking and filtering. Automatically replacing the more obscure database terminology with

the appropriate business terms makes it more accessible to the ordinary user.

For many, Excel is the BI tool of choice, and with the PowerPivot add-in, it’s not limited to number-crunching and pivot tables. PowerPivot lets you access data from relational databases, text files, public and commercial data in SQL Azure, or any service supporting the Open Data Protocol (ODP), and work with them together. You effectively get the power of an OLAP PivotTable without having to create a SQL cube, or connect to SQL Server.

PowerPivot gives you friendly layouts and the full power of Excel’s data visualisations, including horizontal and vertical slicers for

interacting with the data. You can also share PowerPivot with your colleagues through SharePoint, visualisations and all. PowerPivot offers excellent performance even with large data sets containing millions of rows, so you really can explore data without grinding your system to a halt (although for the largest files you want to be using the 64-bit version of Excel).

The mashups of Web data that have been popular in recent years are good examples of a different way to explore data, organising it geographically as an effective way to visualise data. The European Environment Agency’s Eye on Earth site overlays a large data-stream of water, air and noise quality information coming from 22,000 water monitoring points in 27 countries, 1,000 air monitoring stations in 32 countries, user reports of noise levels and air quality models onto an interactive map of Europe. Programming a mashup like that is complicated, but PowerPivot makes it relatively straightforward to connect data to maps. If you’re going to do a lot of this kind of work, tools like Panorama NovaView make it much easier to add grids, charts, heat maps and other components and graphical objects onto PowerPivot data.

Getting socialManaging customer support and sentiment analysis (to see whether people talking

Data mashups are the Web equivalent of canned reports: you can’t

add data sources but you can explore interactively.

Analysing data in the cloudMore and more data is becoming available out in the cloud, either in public or commercially through the likes of Azure DataMarket. Microsoft has said it intends to put all the features of SQL Server in SQL Azure, including reporting and analysis services. Currently in beta is a DataMarket add-in for Excel that lets you purchase and import data, but Azure is far from the only cloud service offering datasets, and the types of data you can work with in the cloud are often different to those you are used to.

These data sources involve higher volumes of data that is far less structured, and often requiring you to experiment with the model rather than fill in a familiar template. Intel’s Compute Continuum GM Peter Biddle suggested recently that in five years, a fire hydrant could have a terabyte of data associated with it, ranging from water pressure history, to which fire engine last connected to it, to which films used it as a location. When everyday objects have that much data available, we’re going to need tools to filter and navigate to what’s relevant.

While every ‘big data’ source has its own tools, learning and using multiple interfaces is time consuming and can lead to errors if you can’t compare sources directly. A better solution would be connections for familiar tools that let you work with unstructured and semi-structured ‘big data’ sources alongside internal company data and other data sources that you already have. Such a tool chain for big-data analytics is something Microsoft’s Information Services team is working on under the codenames Isotope and Roswell.

According to a recent job advert, Roswell is “a new service for information workers to easily discover and publish data and applications in the enterprise.” The job description talks about accessing and unifying cloud data services and we already know that Isotope – the Hadoop service expected for both Azure and Windows Server this summer – will integrate with tools like Flume, which aggregates log data from sources like sensor networks, as well as Sqoop, a tool for transferring data between Hadoop and relational databases.

Put all that together and Microsoft will have a set of data services that scale up and down so that you can work with familiar datasets, unstructured data from the public cloud or your company servers and private cloud, all from the same familiar tools. This shift to big data and new sources is going to be the next big step in business intelligence, and Microsoft’s approach should help you continue to get value from the BI investments you’re making today.

>>


Business

about your company are angry, happy, frustrated or satisfied) are the commonest uses of the streams of social network data, and tools like HootSuite, TweetFeel, Dialogix, Radian6 and NetBase Insight Workbench can help you here. But although they are improving, most don’t yet match the features or the interfaces of more familiar BI tools.

But when it comes to information from social networks, don’t assume that analysing how people feel about your brand is all you can really do. Applications like MicroStrategy’s Wisdom helps you analyse promotions and feedback received through Facebook applications, giving you detailed demographic information about your fans and your customers so that you can do some very targeted marketing, or automate the sending of personal messages such as birthday greetings from your CMS. For more powerful analytics, SAS Social Network Analysis combines sentiment analysis, customer segmentation and fraud detection.

That said, for most of us, the truth about

what’s happening in the projects we work on are to be found as much in email as in any formal documents. The Outlook Social Connector in Outlook 2010 makes it easier to see social updates and files you’ve exchanged with contacts as well as meetings you’ve both been in, but if you want to dig into the information that is concealed in your inbox, then

check out Xobni.Xobni adds links to

information you’ve exchanged through services like Dropbox and salesforce.com as well as emailed file, link, appointment and social network updates. It also lets you see useful statistics such as when particular people most often reply to your email, when you read or send the most messages, and how often the boss emails you.

Mine and mapIf you’re working with a mix of documents, survey results, interviews and other qualitative research data, NVivo lets you analyse and structure your information without losing track of where your references come from. You can tag audio, video and image files alongside text and data, and assign concepts and relationships to ‘nodes’ that you use to build hierarchies or mind maps. The textual analysis automatically links synonyms and words with similar meanings so that you can search for one term and be sure you’re seeing all the relevant results. Video, pictures and audio aren’t automatically analysed or transcribed, so you

have to annotate them manually, but as you do so you get a visual representation of the notes on screen as well as searchable, tracked text.

You can chart the data you annotate in NVivo even if it’s not based on numbers, or visualise data using radar charts, tag clouds and tree maps to get an overview of the patterns and connections in your data. This can also help you identify where your results have been skewed by input from any specific source, such as a particularly chatty interview subject.

NVivo is best known in academic and research circles but it’s becoming popular with economists, market researchers, analysts and consultants. Australian firm Banarra is using it to measure corporate sustainability. Making sure the improvements that corporations claim are real rather than just PR puffery means analysing a wide range of source data that includes both qualitative and quantitative data.

Organising information in a more free form way is useful, whether you clip details from Web pages into OneNote and apply custom tags, or build a visual representation using a mind-mapping tool like MindManager to organise key results or topics you want to research. MindManager’s new Connect SP plugin can automatically show SharePoint document libraries and collaborations as mind maps, so helping you to explore semi-structured data.

BI tools are vital for anyone who needs to make business decisions. The advantages are both obvious and dramatic. As Microsoft’s Ted Kummert puts it, “You make people look better. They now know something they didn’t know before. They have some insight they didn’t have before. They’re going to be more effective at their jobs tomorrow. Business is going to be better.”

Nvivo lets you annotate and tag qualitative, unstructured data for analysis.

Phone 01364 654100 or email [email protected] to discuss any of these products in more detail and find out how you can make best use of the data available to your business. You can also find further details on our Web site atwww.greymatter.com/hc/Business-intelligence.

Find out morei

You can extract useful information from your email habits and using Xobni Analytics.

<<

Data presentationSimon Bisson checks out the latest tools that can help

developers present data in new and exciting ways.

We live in a world of big data: terabyte upon exabyte of information that

increasingly includes geographic data as well as both structured and non-structured content – all of it important and all of it needed to help users make the right business decisions at the right time. Some end users can handle free-form analytic tools, such as those built into Microsoft’s Office productivity suite or Tableau’s graphical tools, but not all need that level of complexity, which is where purpose-built tools come in handy.

There are also security concerns. Letting users work with all the data you have may seem attractive, but there are many good reasons for controlling user access to raw data. Industry regulations may limit access, and there may be concerns over network bandwidth or CPU usage. Licensing concerns can also encourage organisations to centralise business intelligence and analysis tools, building them into and around portals and collaboration services, or integrating them into line-of-business applications and services.

Business Intelligence (BI) development tools originate from three different roots. Some come out of business analytics tools like Crystal, some come from databases and the OLAP world. Others aim to bring these all together, building on familiar development tools and platforms.

SAP Crystal SolutionsThe tools available from SAP are among the best known, building on the familiar features of Crystal Reports. At the heart of Crystal Solutions is Crystal Server 2011 which allows you to deliver and manage information analysis and reporting across a business, while still managing licences and monitoring overall usage. Now firmly part of SAP, Crystal Reports continues to build on the work done by Crystal Decisions and Business Objects.

The tools bundled with Crystal Server allow you to set up a common semantic layer across your data sources. Instead of giving users direct access to the sources themselves, and the complex task of designing and optimising their

own queries, it provides a one-stop shop for data for anyone who needs access, tying into search tools that help report designers find the right information sources. Integrated report design tools also simplify the creation of reports that can be shared with end users, and built into dashboards or accessed over the Web.

There’s support for embedded Flash objects that make reports more interactive. Reports can also pull in data from Web services, allowing you to use live data in your dashboards. You can use the Crystal Dashboard Design tool to create and share reports on corporate portals, giving users access to sophisticated analysis and including what-if scenarios. The Dashboard Design package also lets you create custom Flash elements for your applications, adding your own widgets to a dashboard.

Developers can build Crystal Reports into their applications, and there are tools for both Java and .NET. An Eclipse plug-in adds reporting to Java applications, with an embedded runtime engine. Similarly, Visual Studio tooling means that reports can be delivered either as WinForms desktop applications or through ASP.NET to the Web.

SAP also offers a runtime licence which lets you include reporting features in applications that are shared with partners or sold commercially. Embedded reports have all the features of standalone reports, including Flash components, while also letting your code interact with report contents. If you prefer, you can use the full Crystal Reports package to build dynamic user interfaces in Adobe Flex, using Crystal components in Adobe’s own Flash Builder design and development tools.

Crystal Reports isn’t limited to creating formatted reports. There’s also support for XML output that can be processed by other applications, or as part of a Web 2.0-style mash-up, integrating report data with services like Google or Bing Maps to take advantage of the geographic nature of much of today’s business data. Mash-ups like this can be

SAP’s Visual Studio plug-in lets you design Crystal Reports screens

without leaving your everyday IDE.


Development

SIMONBISSON

Simon is a freelance IT writer and technology

consultant who has worked on large scale

Web architectures, mobile Web projects

and XML solutions for clients in both

the private and the public sector.

simonb@

hardcopymag.com


Development

interactive, using JavaScript to add additional business logic, and you can take things further with Crystal Interactive Analysis which lets you edit report workflows and add your own C++ functions.

SQL Server 2008 R2The current release of SQL Server comes with a wide selection of business intelligence features, including a set of Visual Studio extensions for BI developers. Microsoft’s Business Intelligence Development Studio is a powerful plug-in for the familiar Visual Studio IDE, with all the features you’d expect for building and managing business analytics. One thing to note is that, while BIDS does ship with the current version of SQL Server, it’s not compatible with Visual Studio 2010 (you’ll have to wait for SQL Server 2012 for that) so you’ll need to have Visual Studio 2008 to hand for any BIDS projects.

The heart of SQL Server 2008 R2’s business intelligence features is Report Server, and BIDS is where you design and develop dynamic reports. A project wizard will help you create new reports, linking them to data sources. A design view gives you tools for laying out reports, including a toolbox of visual components that includes charts and tables. You can see the source data and build the appropriate queries before previewing the report and debugging its output. While you can build reports from scratch, the wizard handles data source connection, helps design queries and sets you up with a basic report layout which you’re free to edit and refine. One option lets you create a report model that can be used by end users in the ad hoc Report Builder. You can add and edit entities, and manage the data sources available to users.

BIDS also handles the development of rules for SQL Server’s extraction, transformation and loading features, through its support for

Integration Services. You can use the SSIS designer to create a series of tasks that handle the data flow through the ETL tools, managing transformations and handling data aggregation. You can also add event handlers to report on automated ETL operations, for example emailing an administrator when a job completes, or if a job fails. SSIS scripts are written using familiar tools and in familiar languages, allowing you to programmatically manage ETL tasks in C# or Visual Basic.

More complex BI tasks are handled using SQL Server Analysis Services, and BIDS provides a selection of development tools to help design and build OLAP solutions to speed up queries and reports. You can use BIDS to combine data sources and views to create either an OLAP cube or a data mining model. BIDS doesn’t take a simplistic approach to OLAP design, and it’s capable of building large, multi-dimensional cubes with support for external functions written in familiar .NET languages. It’s a powerful tool that requires a lot of knowledge, but makes it easier for experienced BI developers to work with SQL Server 2008 R2’s analysis tools.

SharePoint 2010Microsoft’s enterprise content management tool, SharePoint, is also its enterprise portal product. While it doesn’t contain its own business intelligence tools, it serves as an effective wrapper and delivery mechanism for reports that have been created in other tools. You can use it as a host for SQL Server reports, as well as Excel and Visio-powered BI applications, while its Business Connection tools can link it to multiple information sources, including line of business applications.

Where SharePoint comes into its own is in conjunction with PerformancePoint 2010, Microsoft’s performance management tool. Building on top of Microsoft’s BI framework, PerformancePoint is designed to distil and display key business indicators on a dashboard. You can use it to deliver scorecards and benchmarks, as well as KPIs.

Alongside its display features there’s an element of analytics, letting users drill down into information sources to understand just why an indicator is in its current state. PerformancePoint’s decomposition tree lets you quickly drill down into data sets, using visual tools to display the contents of a multi-dimensional data set.

PerformancePoint scorecards and dashboards are powerful tools, and can be filtered by time as well as by content, letting end users focus on relevant information quickly. Similarly the various Web parts that make up a PerformancePoint report can be linked together to give more complex reporting and analytic capabilities with minimal programming effort. A Dashboard Designer is integrated with SharePoint’s Business Intelligence Center. Here you can create new dashboards, linking to data sources and creating and designing custom scorecards. The designer lets you configure the target values for your KPIs, as well as tying them to indicator icons. You can also select the filters

SQL Server 2012The next release of SQL Server isn’t out just yet but a release candidate is available. SQL Server 2012 introduces a new edition, specifically focused on Business Intelligence. Along with a new version of BIDS, SQL Server 2012 introduces the Business Intelligence Semantic Model. BISM mixes multi-dimensional data with the familiar relational database in a new tabular model and is able to support everything from large scale corporate BI solutions to ad hoc queries by end users.

Other new features include tools to simplify mash-up design, as well as deeper integration with SharePoint. SQL Server 2012 improves information management, helping you lock down your data sources and ensure that the right people have access the right data. Increased regulation and new security models makes it essential to manage security at an information level, preventing sensitive information leaks.

The future of data is the cloud, and SQL Server 2012 takes advantage of the work done to deliver SQL Azure. This means the BI development tools that come with SQL Server 2012, like BIDS and Report Builder, will also work with the reporting tools built into SQL Azure. Taking BI to the cloud gives you a whole new way of delivering analytics to your users, supporting massive scale cloud data as well as your own internal business systems.

>>

You can use SQL Server’s Report Builder to quickly design and layout new reports.


Development

available to users looking to drill down into data, for example adding tools that focus on a specific geography or date ranges.

Bing MapsMicrosoft’s consumer search service may seem an unusual tool to reference in a piece on business intelligence, but its mapping service makes an ideal platform for building and delivering geographic reporting tools. Replacing Virtual Earth, MultiMap and MapPoint.NET, the latest versions of the Bing Maps SDK include tools for adding your own layers to a map, and connecting to SQL Server, but you will most likely need a commercial licence for Bing Maps if you’re using them as part of a BI solution.

The Bing Maps APIs include both AJAX and Silverlight controls, as well as a set of tools for embedding Bing Maps content into mobile applications for both iOS and Windows Phone. There’s even a WPF version of the map control for use in desktop .NET applications, with support for touch. You can use the geocoding features of the APIs to take textual geographic data and layer it over a map, and the APIs contain tools for drawing polygons and polylines onto the map, as well as layering tiles. A set of translucent polygon fills can be used to display heatmaps, for example, a useful tool for showing relative values across a wide area.

There’s a lot you can do with the Bing Maps APIs (and the similar Google APIs), and support for familiar programming models make them easy to incorporate into your BI solution, and easy to mash your data with public mapping data. The SQL Server data connector is an open source project hosted on Microsoft’s CodePlex site with a range of different display types, including vector and raster data. Like the Bing APIs, there are both AJAX and Silverlight versions of the connector.

Desktop users may want to take advantage of the geographic data tools built into MapPoint 2011, which is also available with a free SQL Server add-in that lets you add map layers to reports using the desktop MapPoint client. Maps are stored in SQL Server, along with shape and point data, and there’s support for spatial queries against data warehouses.

viaEuropaA regional alternative to such services is viaEuropa from Europa Technologies which incorporates Ordnance Survey data of the UK into its cloud-hosted mapping service, and includes a free service for non-commercial use. It is standards-based so you can use it with a wide selection of data sources, making it easy to build into your business analytics platform,

and it works with Bing Maps. Products include a range of vector data sets with support for features like contours and over 850,000 named places around the world.

Currently viaEuropa is working to improve UK geocoding, using the Ordnance Survey AddressBase to link postal addresses with rooftop geocoding. Rooftop geocoding allows you to link data to specific buildings, making it easier to deliver detailed reports to field staff and sales teams.

Open IntelAn alternative to commercial BI developer tools comes in the shape of Open Intel. Designed to help build open data portals, this is a visual business intelligence tool which you can modify and customise in Visual Studio. It’s not just for your own internal servers either as it takes advantage of the storage and Web features of Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, and uses the Bing Maps tools for geospatial reports.

While Open Intel isn’t designed for complex OLAP or data mining applications, it is able to work with most common databases and data sources. You can use the built-in mash- up builder to create and edit map-based reports with support for spatial queries and map annotations. As it’s designed to support interactive portals it supports the concept of apps, although these are essentially commonly used views and reports. There’s also support for the OData protocol, giving you access to public and commercial datasets alongside your own data and so increasing the options for designing and delivering mash-ups.

The development team describes Open Intel as an ‘accelerator’, and it’s certainly quick to get started – and as there’s an option to use Azure there’s no need to invest in infrastructure

for public-facing analysis portals. The instructions include the scripts needed to set up the appropriate data sources. Open Intel is designed to be used with the MapDotNet tools for building and design geospatial data, with support for most common formats. You also use MapDotNet to set up the appropriate spatial indexed for your data, speeding up queries and display through Bing Maps.

Delivering effective business intelligence requires a lot of development work. Whether it’s ensuring that your information security policy is ready to support end user data exploration and analysis tools, or designing and building a report server, there’s a lot to be done to get your data, servers and code ready for BI. Business Intelligence will become increasingly important as it helps us manage and use the increasing amount of data that is becoming available – dragging it out of the warehouse and into the growing internal and external data marketplaces.

For further information on tools that can help you deliver BI solutions to your users, contact Grey Matter on 01364 654100 or email [email protected]. You can download Open Intel from http://oi.codeplex.com and there’s a 60-day trial of MapDotNet at www.mapdotnet.com. For more on viaEuropa the company’s Web site is at www.viaeuropa.uk.com.

Find out morei

<<

Open Intel makes it easy to work with geographic information, overlaying both pinpoint data and heatmaps.

Mobile platformsDeployment to mobile clients is becoming increasingly important,

but which platforms do you go for? Tim Anderson investigates.

The trend towards mobile is gathering pace. Gartner reports worldwide

mobile device sales up 5.6 per cent in the third quarter of 2011, to over 440 million units with around one third smartphones. In the same quarter, the analyst firm reports a decline of 11 per cent in PC sales in Western Europe. Separate reports show tablet sales of over 60 million units in 2011, most of them Apple iPads.

Meanwhile, according to a November 2011 survey conducted by PHP specialists Zend, two-thirds of PHP developers are working on mobile development. Mobile platforms are now firmly in the mainstream, and it is traditional PC applications that look more like a niche area.

Despite, or perhaps because of, tumultuous growth, the world of mobile development is far from settled. In the PC era you could develop for Windows and be sure of hitting most of the market. Mobile by contrast presents difficult choices. Is it better to focus on native code for one or two specific platforms, or to take a cross-platform approach using HTML5 or one of the cross-platform toolkits, or to concentrate on mobile-friendly Web applications rather than apps?

One thing that is apparent is a consistent theme of Google Android and Apple iOS dominance. In the influential US market, Nielsen research reported Android and iOS at 52 and 37 per cent smartphone sales respectively in the fourth quarter of 2011, leaving just 6 per cent for RIM Blackberry and 3.8 per cent for Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7 combined. The worldwide market is more diverse, though Android still dominates. Gartner reports a 53 per cent worldwide market share for Android smartphone sales in the third quarter of 2011, followed by Symbian at 17 per cent, iOS at 15 per cent and RIM at 11 per cent. Apple won a bigger share in the fourth quarter after the release of the iPhone 4S.

While Android is ahead in hardware numbers, Apple takes the lead if you look at another important metric: the app market. Research firm Strategy Analytics reports a 54 per cent market share for Apple versus 27 per cent for Android in 2011. Individual developers also say that iOS is the most profitable platform.

In the tablet market, analyst firm IDC gives

Apple a 62 per cent market share for the third quarter of 2011 and Android 33 per cent. Android’s share should grow, thanks to the launch of new mass-market devices like Amazon’s Kindle Fire, but Apple has a strong hold and will likely have new models of its own in 2012.

Another complication is that the Android market is fragmented. Amazon’s Kindle Fire runs Android, but with several gotchas if you want to target other Android tablets as well.

The mobile app revolution has been mainly consumer-driven, and the market may look different in the corporate world. Microsoft should have an advantage as it integrates with its Enterprise stack based on Windows Server, Exchange and SharePoint; but Apple is already making inroads as employees find iPads perfect

for meetings, presentations and more. The impact of the tablet-friendly Windows 8 is another unknown.

However you look at the figures, no single platform will dominate mobile in the way that Windows has dominated PCs – unless it turns out to be HTML 5. All the smartphone and tablet platforms have strong browser engines, usually based on WebKit, the open source project used by Apple Safari and Google Chrome. “WebKit has become the de facto [standard], which has really been driven by Apple and Google and against Microsoft. That’s driving HTML5 forward,” said Jeff Haynie, CEO of mobile tools company Appcelerator.

So there are three broad approaches to developing for the mobile client. First, you can do a native application for each platform, using the primary native toolkit for each. That means Objective-C for Apple iOS, Java for Google Android, Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 and so on. The advantage is that you get the experience on each platform, but the

disadvantage is that you have to keep several independent projects synchronised. Minority platforms suffer because of the small payback for the investment in code.

Second, you can use a cross-platform toolkit. These are numerous, with some of the best-known being PhoneGap, Adobe AIR (based on Flash), and Appcelerator’s Titanium. These toolkits let you maintain a single code base, with some conditional code for specific platforms, and compile them into native apps.

The third option is to avoid locally installed apps completely and to rely on HTML 5 Web apps. Local storage is still possible, and there are emerging standards for access to device hardware such as the camera and GPS (Geographical Positioning System).

In fact these last two options are less

distinct than they first appear. PhoneGap works by putting a native wrapper around a browser control, so that you still code in HTML and JavaScript. Titanium may also use the local JavaScript engine.

Martin Fowler, Chief Scientist at developer company ThoughtWorks, is doubtful about the value of cross-platform toolkits. “I think cross-platform mobile toolkits are a dead-end,” he writes. “It’s just too hard for them to really mimic the native experience. If it’s worth building a native app, it’s worth building it properly, including an individual experience design for that platform.” He considers Web applications a better option if you need cross-platform code.

The issues are complex. Web apps are hard to monetise, whereas users are more likely to pay for a native app, even if it was created by a cross-platform toolkit. Further, some cross-platform toolkits let you get close to the appearance of a true native application. “We wouldn’t really describe ourselves as


Development

TIMANDERSON

A freelance journalist since 1992, Tim

Anderson covers a wide range of

technical topics and is well versed in

modern programming tools, techniques

and technologies. His recent work has appeared in

publications including Guardian Technology,

The Register, Computer Weekly, Hardcopy, vnunet.

com, IT Expert and ITJOBLOG, as well as his own popular blog at www.itwriting.com.

UK developer Lee Armstrong, who has his Plane Finder app on iOS, Android and Windows Phone, found iOS sales around ten times greater than Android when he studied his figures for December last year, while Windows Phone barely registered.

Case Study


Development

cross-platform. We’re really an API that allows you target multiple different devices,” says Appcelerator’s Haynie.

The Apple iOS PlatformApple’s unique approach to mobile is based on vertical integration, or what is less kindly called lock-in. Apple manufactures all the hardware and keeps the operating system patched and up to date, rather than leaving this to the whim of operators. Developers get a consistent target, but with constraints on how apps are developed and deployed.

Apple’s position is that you should either use Objective-C and its Cocoa Touch frameworks, or else create a Web app that runs in the browser. Runtimes such as Java and Flash are not allowed, though the company did step back from an outright ban of cross-platform development tools. App deployment must be through the App Store, with a 30 per cent cut going to Apple unless it’s an internal corporate rollout where private deployment is possible, or for developer testing and debugging.

Getting started with iOS development is a matter of signing up with Apple, paying a yearly subscription (currently $99 per year) and downloading the Xcode IDE and iOS SDK. This includes an emulator for debugging your iOS apps. You do need to develop on a Mac, which can be a nuisance if you also use Windows tools.

Objective-C has a mixed reputation, but although it lacks some of the features which C# or Java developers enjoy, it is a productive language and not excessively verbose. Xcode 4.2 introduced Automatic Reference Counting which means that objects are automatically disposed, removing some of the memory management burden.

There are a few annoyances. Xcode has a strong visual designer but many developers avoid it because doing layouts purely in code is more flexible. It is a shame not to have the kind of two-way tools seen in Embarcadero Delphi or Microsoft’s Visual Studio.

Another long-standing issue is the lack of namespaces. The mechanism for avoiding name collisions is to use your own class prefix, which is not robust or elegant.

On the plus side, the GUI objects in iOS are beautifully designed, and competently written applications generally perform well. The

popularity and consistency of the development platform means a large community to draw on for help.

Developing for AndroidGoogle Android is primarily a Java platform with a difference. Your Java code is compiled not to Java bytecode but to Dalvik Executables, Dalvik being the name of the Android virtual machine. Oracle claims that Google infringed Java copyrights and patents in Dalvik, and this is the subject of litigation but has not stopped Android’s remarkable growth.

However you choose to develop for Android, you will need the Android SDK. This includes an SDK manager which then enables you to select which platforms you want to support, as well as optional packages. The SDK also installs the Android emulator.

The next step is to set up a development tool. The standard for Android is an Eclipse add-on called the Android Development Tools (ADT). This is a plug-in for a standard Eclipse installation that has been set up for Java development. The latest version includes a graphical UI designer as well as editing and debugging support.

One of the advantages of Android is that it is easy to debug on a connected device as well as on the emulator. You have to configure your device to allow USB debugging, and to allow installation of non-Market applications.

Android looks good, with huge market share, a familiar language and what is >>

Apple’s iOS powers a range of popular devices including iPad and iPhone.

Developing for Apple iOS with Xcode.

<<


Development

now a mature development environment. The downside is that it is a little bit chaotic, with numerous device profiles, a Market that is less compelling than Apple’s offering, and some Android devices not able to use the official Market at all. Android devices must pass official compatibility tests and be approved by Google in order to access the Market. Google’s statement on the latter point is vague: “Unfortunately, for a variety of legal and business reasons, we are not able to automatically license Android Market to all compatible devices.”

Targeting the Kindle FireAmazon’s Kindle Fire is a budget-priced tablet running Android 2.3.4 (‘Gingerbread’). It has a colour display of 600 by 1024 pixels and 512MB of memory. Although it runs Google’s operating system, Amazon has made the Kindle Fire its own, driving users to Amazon’s app store and services rather than to the official Android Marketplace.

That said, developing for the Kindle Fire is like developing for other Android tablets, but with a list of things that you cannot do. The no-go list includes Google Mobile Services, gyroscope, camera, Bluetooth and GPS. In-app purchasing is only allowed through Amazon’s payment system, support for which is in beta.

One benefit of the Amazon ecosystem is that it hooks nicely into Amazon Web Services (AWS), a rich cloud platform including virtual servers, online storage, database access and application services such as message queuing and notifications. The AWS SDK for Android includes libraries and code samples for all these services. There is also an SDK for iOS so that you

can use the same server code to support apps for iOS, Kindle Fire and other Android devices.

Amazon has done a better job of hooking Kindle Fire users into its ecosystem than Google has done with Android in general.

The RIM BlackBerryRIM has suffered declining market share in the face of the iOS and Android onslaught. It has responded by evolving a new platform to include touch-controlled tablets as well as smartphones, and in April 2010 announced the acquisition of the embedded QNX operating system from Harman International. The first QNX-powered device was the PlayBook tablet, launched at the end of 2010. BlackBerry smartphones still run the older BlackBerry OS, updated to version 7.0.

In October 2011, RIM announced a new operating system called BBX, really a rebranding of the PlayBook OS, which will be used for both smartphones and tablets. BBX will support apps built with native C/C++, Adobe AIR and HTML5, or it can run Android apps using a BlackBerry runtime.

That sounds confusing, especially as BBX devices are not yet available. However RIM is focusing on HTML 5 and a framework called WebWorks (originally BlackBerry Widgets) which targets all three platforms: BlackBerry OS, BlackBerry Tablet OS, and the forthcoming BBX. WebWorks uses the WebKit browser engine so you develop your app with Web technologies, supplemented by JavaScript wrappers for device APIs.

RIM’s biggest challenge is to keep pace with the wider mobile market. BlackBerry Enterprise Server and strong Exchange

integration is no longer enough. “RIM and Microsoft are fighting for third place. I would go long on Microsoft,” commented Jeff Haynie at Appcelerator.

Going cross platformIn the fragmented world of mobile devices, one mitigating factor is that all recent smartphones and tablets come with high performance browser engines, including fast JavaScript runtimes. Many cross-platform toolkits exploit this, with the best known being PhoneGap. Using PhoneGap, you write your application in HTML and JavaScript, and then package it with a native wrapper so it can be deployed like any other native application. Further, PhoneGap includes cross-platform JavaScript APIs for device features including the accelerometer, camera, GPS, storage and network. PhoneGap supports iOS, Android, BlackBerry OS, HP’s near-abandoned WebOS, Microsoft Windows Phone 7, Symbian and Samsung Bada.

PhoneGap was developed by a company called Nitobi which has been acquired by Adobe. It is an open source project though, and has been contributed to the Apache Software Foundation where it is currently an incubation project. This open approach has won PhoneGap support from many companies. IBM, for example, promotes PhoneGap as a way of building clients for its WebSphere application server.

Sencha Touch is a JavaScript app framework aimed at mobile enterprise developers. “Sencha Touch is designed to let you do anything you could do with Cocoa touch, or an Android SDK, or a Windows Mobile SDK,” CEO Michael Mullany told me. “Its intent is to equip you to develop native quality experiences with native style interaction.” Data integration is another priority, with data binding to a variety of sources and support for local storage. A Sencha Touch app can be browser-hosted, or converted to a native app using PhoneGap.

Another notable cross-platform toolkit is Appcelerator’s Titanium. Titanium also uses JavaScript, but instead of a user interface composed using HTML and CSS, it uses native controls. The consequence is that you have more fidelity to the look and feel of the operating system, but there may also be more work to do customising the app for each platform.

Adobe also has a cross-platform mobile development solution, based on the Flash runtime and Adobe AIR. The company successfully side-stepped Apple’s ban on Flash by creating a packager that bundles it into each app. This has now been extended to

RIM’s Ripple Emulator lets you test and package WebWorks apps, including the ability to

simulate the accelerometer and GPS. >>

Phone 01364 654100 or email [email protected] to discuss the development solutions that are available to you for targeting mobile platforms. You can also find out more at www.greymatter.com/hc/mobiledev.

Find out more...i

<<


Development

Android as well. Considering the strength of the Flash design tools, along with Adobe’s Flash Builder IDE for developers and middleware platform to connect to application servers, this is a compelling offering. That said, Adobe states that its future strategy is now focused more on digital publishing and HTML5 than Flash, raising doubts about the future of AIR for mobile.

Microsoft Windows PhoneMicrosoft has two Smartphone platforms, both built on Windows CE but very different. The old Windows Mobile supports development in C++, or with .NET using C# or Visual Basic. You will need Visual Studio 2008 or earlier, as it is not supported in Visual Studio 2010. Although Windows Mobile is pretty much obsolete, some businesses still find it useful, particularly if they have existing applications to maintain. It is also a more open platform than Windows Phone.

The new Windows Phone platform uses

Microsoft’s Metro design style and is the outcome of intense usability research. The development platform is .NET using Silverlight or XNA: only phone manufacturers and telecom operators are allowed to use native C or C++.

Visual Studio 2010 (either the free Express version or the full version) forms an excellent development environment for Windows Phone, though the complexities of managing state when your application can be shut down at any time take some adjustment if you are familiar with desktop Windows. An emulator is provided, or you can sign up as a developer for $99 and debug on an attached device.

The ‘Mango’ update to

The significance of Microsoft Windows 8Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform, which was meant to recover ground lost by Windows Mobile, has so far failed to grab much market share despite praise from reviewers, and despite offering developers a strong and familiar development platform with Visual Studio and Silverlight. The company is not giving up though, and Nokia’s partnership with Microsoft and launch of new devices have given the platform a much-needed shot in the arm. Is it too late though, with users seemingly content to choose between iOS and Android?

This is open to speculation, but there are a few reasons why Microsoft’s mobile platform may yet be significant. PC sales, though still huge, are flagging and Microsoft knows that it must find a way to compete with the iPad and iPhone. Windows Phone 7 was the first attempt, but an even bolder step is to come, in the form of Windows 8. Microsoft has taken the blocky Metro design of Windows Phone 7 and applied it to Windows itself in the form of a touch-friendly new platform that is baked into the next version of Windows, as an alternative to the traditional Windows 7 user interface. Further, Windows 8 will run on ARM as well as on Intel x86 processors, enabling cheaper, more power efficient tablets. A Windows 8 tablet will be nothing like the Windows Tablet devices we have seen in the past.

The Windows 8 developer platform is based on a new Windows Runtime (WinRT). The goals of WinRT include sandboxing apps so that they cannot infect or bring down the operating system, and forcing developers to use asynchronous APIs for all slow-running calls so that apps remain responsive.

WinRT supports three development models. The first is HTML and JavaScript, using JavaScript libraries for access to platform-specific features. The second is .NET, with the user interface in XAML, the design language of Windows Presentation Foundation and its cousin Silverlight. The third is native C or C++ code. All three perform well.

WinRT is a new platform, though it has some elements in common with Windows Phone 7 including the .NET runtime, XAML for the user interface, and the overall Metro style. Although Microsoft has not said so, it seems likely that WinRT will also come to a future version of the phone, unifying the two platforms.

What this means is that the long-term fate of Windows Phone is linked to the success or failure of Windows 8, and in particular its new Metro side. If Windows 8 Metro is a hit, that success will lift Microsoft’s Smartphone as well.

Metro-style Windows 8 is Microsoft’s big hope in the mobile market.

Windows Phone in Autumn 2011 substantially improved the platform. Silverlight was upgraded to version 4, background tasks introduced, a local database added, the mobile browser was upgraded to Internet Explorer 9, and more.

This is technically a strong platform (though it still lacks C or C++ development) but the main concern among developers is the small size of its installed base. Nokia’s entry into the market is helping, but whether it can really carve substantial market share away from iOS and Android is still an open

question.

Nokia’s Lumia range of

Windows smartphones has

reinvigorated Microsoft’s phone OS.

Can you rely on the Cloud to handle your security

needs? Kay Ewbank checks out your options.

I’m writing this article sitting at an airport. My travelling companion has

just finished checking his emails on his smartphone and is now downloading a presentation to his laptop from his corporate network. He does have an official office, but spends much of his working life in other company offices across the UK and Europe.

This snapshot of working life in 2012 explains one reason why many companies are moving their security measures into the Cloud: because it fits the way their business users work so much better. Locally based security for emails and Web sites was fine in the days when workers went to work reading the newspaper on the train, sat at their desk and turned on a connected PC. As services, data and the people who access them move outside the corporate firewall, it makes sense to move security to the Cloud too.

There are other advantages, of course. From the viewpoint of the IT manager, moving to the Cloud means simpler security. Cloud-based security means you don’t have to set up the hardware needed to run the software, and you don’t have to install and configure the software. Getting the server working is someone else’s problem, and the up-front costs can be avoided.

Once up and running, there’s no local security server to manage, and you can pass all the appropriate data through the security so that no matter where your users are working, or what device they’re using to access the data, they’re still protected. This minimises the need for training and help desk support, and users don’t have to get used to different security options when they change devices.

Another advantage is the reduced need for bandwidth. The likelihood is that nearly all the emails sent to your company are spam of some form or another, so if these are blocked before they ever reach your network perimeter, email

traffic is massively reduced.Looked at from a user’s viewpoint, what

you want is transparency. What you don’t want is security that is intrusive, because users will be frustrated and either complain or try to circumvent the safeguards. For example, we all applaud the idea of checking the security of Web sites, but most of us curse when those checks mean the site takes longer to load, or worse still is blocked because of an apparent problem.

Pay as you goOne benefit of Cloud-based computing is its more manageable price. If you opt to have local security systems then you need to buy your software licences in order to get started, along with the servers to run the software on, so the cost is weighted towards a high initial outlay. You also need in-house staff with the expertise to manage and maintain both the hardware and the software. By contrast, a Cloud-based system means paying for what you use, while keeping the systems running becomes someone else’s problem.

Against this is the fact that you will probably be paying more each month for the software, so taken over a number of years the Cloud-based system will in all probability end up costing you more. You also need to consider just what your money gets you in terms of service level agreements. How many days of the month could the service be completely unavailable while still meeting that SLA? You may think it unlikely that the time could stretch into days, but in some cases things could be that bad.

And what happens if the SLA is broken? If the hosting company just hands back your monthly fee with an apology, no matter how heartfelt, you’re not going to be popular with your bosses.

Of course, if you run security software

locally and you experience a hardware or software failure, the security software will be offline until you replace the part that’s causing a problem, so going for the local option means you still need to think about ensuring continuity.

Security reachOne question you need to consider is overall security. It’s clear that Cloud-based security will control threats as they enter your organisation, but what about potential internal threats? If the security is checking emails in the Cloud before they enter your organisation, for example, what happens if someone inside somehow attaches a virus to an internal email? If you’re not checking internally too, your entire organisation can still be compromised.

A differentiator between the available services is what content or data is protected. Most will check emails for viruses and malware, and will block spam from arriving in email inboxes. Most have options for scanning Web sites for problems, and can be used to block specific Web sites, types of Web site, or online applications - do you really want your users playing Farmville all day?

Some have software with the ability to check instant messages. If your company allows (or even encourages) the use of instant messages for business use, this is an important area for control. Beyond these basics you’re into a grey area of what constitutes security and what is really content control. Several of the services covered below let you guard against sensitive data being transmitted out of the company without permission, for example.

The requirements for keeping information secure are very clearly defined which means the central features provided by each of the products mentioned below are very similar. The differences and the way you might choose between them comes down to two

A silver lining

Kay is a database consultant specialising in EIS, financial analysis and GIS systems which has involved integrating with existing security installations and advising on firewall and anti-virus solutions. Her clients have included Ansbacher Bank, BASF Systems, Global Portfolio Management, Reiner Moritz Associates and the Scottish Office. She is also a part-time sheep farmer.

[email protected]

KAYEWBANK

>>


Security

main criteria. Firstly, whether there are any other products from the same company that you might want to use; and secondly, the price.

Symantec.cloudSymantec has a long history in the security market, and many people will have encountered its Norton range of security software. Symantec.cloud is a new offering that builds on MessageLabs. However the Norton heritage still shows through, with all the advantages and drawbacks that implies. If you liked the strong control that Norton applied to the computing environment, then you’ll like Symantec.cloud. If you felt that it interfered with the way you work, you may feel the same about Symantec.cloud.

The Cloud-based service has options for security for emails, Web browsing, instant messages and endpoint protection. In the case of Web protection, all Web requests are scanned in real time, and you can block Web site categories, file types and specific Web sites. The rules can change according to the time of day and whether the user is working within the corporate network or remotely.

The Email Security.cloud option protects against viruses and spam. If you want to scan emails for inappropriate content then Symantec Content Control.cloud let you do so in the cloud. Similarly, Symantec Image Control.cloud can be used to scan email and attachments to identify, control and stop inappropriate images from entering or leaving your network. Finally, Instant Messaging Security.cloud provides similar protection against viruses, URL filtering and content control when your users are using Instant Messaging software.

GFI MailEssentialsGFI’s MailEssentials Complete Online is a hosted email security and spam filtering service that provides anti-spam and anti-virus checking before emails enter your corporate network. The checks on emails can be carried out on

both inbound and outbound emails. There’s also an optional archive service that can be used to keep copies of emails so you get off-site archiving as part of the service.

GFI has a stated aim to provide software for small to medium businesses, and in general the software does live up to its promise to be easy to use, and in my experience draws fewer complaints from users than some other software. It also allows you to try most of its options in the free trial version – some trial versions block features so you can’t see how well they work.

KasperskyKaspersky is generally quite non-intrusive so users aren’t irritated by it. The company entered the hosted market a little later than some rivals, and say they’ve learned from the mistakes of others. The administrative interface is clean, and fixed-price billing has the advantage that you know what your costs will be.

Kasperksy has Hosted Email and Hosted Web security, both administered from a Web portal. The Email security has filters for spam, malware and phishing attempts, while the Web security checks for and blocks any viruses and spyware that is hidden on Web sites, as well as providing Internet content control and the

option of blocking files of particular types. The Web security also offers the option of scanning outgoing traffic to stop data being transferred without your knowledge, and to ensure that spyware isn’t sending information gathered illicitly.

BitdefenderBitdefender has Cloud-based software for protecting endpoints and emails. The

Cloud Security for Endpoints protects systems remotely, while the Cloud Security for Email protects against viruses, spyware, phishing and Trojans. Outgoing emails are scanned as well as incoming, and unsolicited or problem emails are intercepted.

Cloud Security for Endpoints can be used to protect laptops, desktops and servers from problems including malware. Administrators can set access options for applications, Web usage depending on the time of day, category of Web site, or keywords being entered in search terms. Roaming and remote users can be protected using a personal firewall with intrusion detection.

Bitdefender claims that its software protects systems in a quiet and non-intrusive way, but behind the scenes it takes quite a tough approach as to what’s allowed and what isn’t. It checks any running programs to see that the way they’re working remains within ‘normal parameters’, and if that isn’t the case, the application is stopped. There is a 30-day trial version that’s worth trying to make sure your current applications will co-exist peacefully.

Mcafee Cloud SecurityMcafee’s Cloud Security platform offers the choice of deploying as Software-as-a-Service, locally, or a combination of the two. Administrators can use it to secure email, Web and authentication data to and from your organisation and the Cloud.

The software is split into a number of modules. The Email Gateway offers built-in encryption for emails as they are sent or received, even from mobile devices. There’s also an option to archive emails in the Cloud. The Web Gateway can be set to enforce your company’s policy on acceptable Web use. It also lets you define and control the way 1,000 Web-based applications can be used. Other

Setting security levels in GFI MailEssentials.

Viewing reports in BitDefender CloudSecurity.<<


Security

options provide identity management and control of REST Web services.

Mcafee is owned by Intel, and the products in the platform have some features aimed particularly at larger companies. The Cloud Security Platform is integrated with McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator platform, which is designed as a central administration tool for managing enterprise security.

Trend Micro Hosted SecurityTrend Micro Hosted Email Security protects emails from spam and malware such as viruses, spyware and phishing attempts. It also has the option of encrypting emails while in transit to ensure the information remains secure, and there’s the option of filtering the content of outgoing emails for compliance purposes.

Trend Micro tends to score well against other products in blocking spam and malware, and the company is confident enough to promise good money-back terms in its service level agreements, claiming to offer three times more compensation than other vendors. You can try the service for free for a month to check it out for yourself.

Websense SaaSWebsense offers a range of options including Hosted Email Security which guards against spam and threats such as viruses, encrypts emails in transit, and has a content filter to prevent confidential data being transmitted without authorisation. Web Security Gateway is also available with options for managing who can see what in terms of Web categories, and for blocking problem Web sites.

The service offers strong filtering, including URLs. This does mean you can protect against users visiting sites where there might be problems, but it can also result in frustration and lost time. In the event that Websense decides a site should be blocked, but you know it to be acceptable, then you can gain access by filling in a form to release the link, and then waiting for Websense to remove the block.

Microsoft FOPEForefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE) is an Internet-based service that protects your business’ inbound and outbound email from spam, viruses, phishing scams and email policy violations. It’s part of Office 365, Microsoft’s

hosted email and calendar offering that also provides Web conferencing and lets you edit Office documents.

Forefront Online Protection for Exchange traps spam and viruses before they reach your network. There’s an add-on called Exchange Hosted Encryption (EHE) if you want emails to be encrypted as well.

The main advantage of FOPE is its close integration with Office 365. Earlier releases of the service were less than flexible in the options you were offered for creating and managing custom rules for company policies to filter what was marked as spam, but this has been improved in the most recent version.

To discuss your options for moving security into the Cloud, contact Grey Matter on 01364 654100 or email [email protected]. You can also find out more about the services mentioned at www.greymatter.com/hc/cloud-security.

Find out morei


Security

Straight talkingTim Anderson is worried that Adobe is leaving

developers uncertain of the future of key products.

Businesses like safe bets. When the future of a platform is in doubt, it is

hard to justify investment in projects based on that platform. That is common sense, and makes it all the more curious when companies undermine their own platforms by putting out confusing messages about future strategy.

This practice is surprisingly common. In June 2011, Microsoft gave an early demonstration of Windows 8, explaining that apps for the new platform would be developed with HTML and JavaScript. Microsoft had spent the previous ten years evangelising the .NET Framework. Developers put this together with the downplaying of Silverlight at the company’s late 2010 Professional Developers Conference and became uncertain about the future, not only for Silverlight but for .NET itself. Would the new app model in Windows 8 work with .NET applications? What is happening to Windows Presentation Foundation?

As it turned out, those questions were not answered until the BUILD conference in September 2011, a gap of three months during which Microsoft chose not to comment. Microsoft platform developers offering solutions to clients had no clear answer if a potential customer, or a rival supplier, questioned the future of .NET and pointed to statements about JavaScript and HTML5 becoming the development platform of Windows 8.

Now it is Adobe’s turn. In November 2011 it issued a press release announcing a shift in business focus, “to target the explosive growth categories of Digital Media and Digital Marketing.” The other side of this coin was that Adobe would “reduce its investment, and expected license revenue, in certain enterprise solution product lines.”

What did this mean? Great news, of course, for Adobe’s digital media and marketing products, but the implications for developers have been drip-fed through a number of statements, blog posts and reports of meetings. VP Danny Winnokur posted on 9 November that “Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations.” It seemed that while mobile Flash was dead, mobile AIR, which compiles the Flash runtime into an app, was alive and well.

Next, on 15 November, product manager Deepa Subramaniam posted that while Adobe is still “committed” to Flex, the XML-based approach to coding for Flash, it is shifting engineers from Flex to HTML and donating the Flex SDK to the Apache Foundation as an open

source project. “We recognize we could have handled the communication better,” she adds.

More bad news came in December from reports of a meeting with Flex developers in San Francisco. While reiterating its commitment to Flex, Adobe also revealed that Flash Catalyst, its interactive design tool, is to be discontinued; and that the design view will be removed from the Flash Builder IDE, as well as the Data Centric Development tools.

In the meantime, there was news of redundancies at Adobe among staff who had worked on enterprise development. “A ton of really talented people got let go. This is one of the strangest things I ever saw,” posted Duane Nickull, formerly a senior technical evangelist.

The reasons are certainly strategic, rather than being forced through financial necessity. Adobe is doing well financially, and reported an 11 per cent year-on-year revenue increase in its latest results, announced in December 2011. It generated $1.5 billion in cash.

Then in January, VP Arun Anantharaman posted about the future of LiveCycle, Adobe’s middleware and Enterprise services product, stating that Adobe is “prioritizing our engineering investment” around several core services. These include modules to handle PDF forms, rights, output, process management, digital signatures and PDF generation, the Workbench and Designer tools, the Correspondence Management solution, ECM connectors for SharePoint, Filenet and Documentum, and LiveCycle Data Services.

What is missing? It is easy to spot some things, such as the composite application model called ‘Mosaic’, the other solution

accelerators, and Collaboration Services. More striking though is the uncertainty about Adobe’s

overall strategy. It was only in June 2011 that Adobe was talking proudly about its new Digital Enterprise Platform, which was meant to be replacing LiveCycle.

The background to ADEP (Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform) is this. In October 2010 Adobe acquired Day Software and with it the foremost REST (Representational State Transfer) expert Roy Fielding. Day’s core product is a Web content manager called CQ5 which is built on a Java-based repository called CRX. Fielding’s vision for CRX included not only Web content but enterprise applications: “The Content Repository API for Java Technology (JCR) is poised to revolutionize the development of J2SE/J2EETM applications in the same way that the Web has revolutionized the development of


Back End

“The reasons are certainly strategic, rather than being forced through financial necessity.”

Straight talking

Grey Matter • 01364 654 100 • HardCopy 31

Back End

network-based applications,” he wrote in a white paper.

ADEP is or was Adobe’s implementation of that vision. Adobe strategist Ben Watson told me that “The core of the platform now becomes the repository that we got from the Day acquisition. We are also following their leadership around the use of RESTful technology, so changing how we do our Web services implementation, how we do our real time data integration into Flash using data services.”

Adobe’s ADEP Web site still presents this vision, while the LiveCycle page states that “The next evolution of LiveCycle is here. The new Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform (ADEP) brings together core LiveCycle capabilities and much more.” However, these pages are unchanged since Adobe’s November announcement, and it is not clear what the strategy is now. It seems telling that Anantharaman wrote in January about LiveCycle futures, not ADEP futures. A reasonable guess is that the CQ capabilities will stay focused on Web content rather than application services, and that LiveCycle will remain with its somewhat cut-down range of services.

The high level point is that Adobe’s

customers should not have to scrabble around for titbits of information regarding what is happening to its enterprise platform. Everyone understands that the IT world is constantly changing, because of the rapid advance of technology, and that plans which seemed sensible a few years back may no longer make sense today. Adobe has seen the rise of Apple with its dislike of Flash, the growing use of Smartphones, the advent of the iPad and other media tablets that are changing client computing, and the previews of Windows 8 showing a new locked-down, Flash-free personality. It has also seen the eBook revolution driven by Amazon and Apple and wants to remain at the centre of the digital publishing world.

Jonathan Campos is Principal Architect at Miller and Associates, working on Android, Flex and AIR development. “The consistency of Adobe AIR provides a stable environment to build, test, and deploy that no other platform can touch,” he says. “The drawback is Adobe’s recent focus away from development tools and more on digital marketing and media. This makes me, and many others, wonder what sort of development tools will be coming out in the future for enterprise development.”

Change and the need for change is expected; but the way these major strategy shifts is managed and communicated is critical. Adobe has not handled this well.

Fortunately, there is a positive side to Adobe’s strategy shift. This is that the company now has a clear focus on HTML5. The consequence is that future versions of the Creative Suite will be less dependent on the Flash runtime. Tools like Adobe Edge, which authors HTML5 animations, will evolve rapidly, and designers can also expect Dreamweaver to gain more advanced capabilities.

Flash is still important, of course, particularly on the desktop where it remains invaluable for overcoming cross-browser issues and for delivering multimedia content. It is worth recalling that Adobe has recently delivered Flash Player 11, including the hardware accelerated graphics rendering engine called Stage 3D, enabling console-like gaming but running in the browser. This is supported in Adobe AIR as well. Adobe’s new focus does not make Flash any less capable. “We are already working on Flash Player 12,” says VP Dany Winokur, adding that “we will design new features in Flash for a smooth transition to HTML5 as the standards evolve.”

…and another thing

Jon Honeyball ponders the future of Windows 8 in

the light of what he saw and heard at this year’s

Consumer Electronic Show.


Back End

was truly Windows 8 supporting because it would be nearly gone by the time the OS arrives. So everybody has been keeping their secrets very close to their chest. No-one demonstrated any meaningful Windows 8 ARM tablets. Again, if they announced them at CES, then they would be out of date by the time Windows 8 ARM actually ships.

And Microsoft itself was saying nothing about nothing. While I would concede that a keynote from Steve Ballmer is rarely an eye-opening or educational event, this time it was even worse. The phrase ‘content free’ would be generous. Even Microsoft knows this, which is why it has abandoned the CES keynote slot for 2013. It just doesn’t fit into their news cycle.

Windows 8 Beta 1 will hopefully be in our hands by the time you read this. It is due late February, and is now called a Customer Preview Experience or some such nonsense. In the past, a beta was a beta – you knew where you stood. It was put out for software and hardware companies to start checking for bugs and compatibility issues. Today, it is just a PowerPoint slide on a timeline of the marketing team.

Of course, much rides on the quality of this beta. If it is stunning, then Microsoft is on a solid flight path to launch in the early Autumn. If it is a dog, then all bets are off. And the paranoid silence surrounding the team means we have no idea whether the ARM version will ship at the same time as the Intel version.

A few vendors did poke their head above the parade and demonstrate interesting ideas. A laptop with a full-width touch pad was interesting, and something we will see much more of in the future – especially when customers start using the Metro interface.

Another showed an early implementation of Thunderbolt on Windows, which is very heartening to see. But driver support might be a little weak for the time being, although LaCie showed a Thunderbolt to ESATA interface box specifically designed for Intel/Windows boxes (not Macs).

So we are in the calm before the storm. Everyone is storing up their innovative ideas for the Windows 8 launch. Some are being cunning and keeping the really interesting stuff for the months after Windows 8 launch, fearful that being part of the main party will only ensure that they get lost in the noise.

What is clear though is that this is a time for radical solutions and crazy thinking. The move to a touch interface which is coupled to a full-power OS is something we have not seen before. iOS devices like the iPad are exceptional multi-touch devices, but the underlying OS is deliberately reduced in functionality. You might want to call Android well featured, but few would disagree that it lacks the depth of a full Windows release.

One of the technologies which Windows 8 will help enable is very high resolution displays. I have seen some 300dpi panels and they simply blow you sideways. Yes, it is some nine times sharper than a conventional Windows desktop (which is normally 96 pixels to the logical inch in both dimensions), but nothing prepares you for the shock of looking at a display which is truly print quality. This is the breakthrough that we have been waiting for, both on tablets and on desktops/laptops. It reduces eyestrain; it stops you having to zoom in and out all the time; it is going to be absolutely huge.

Because of this, as developers be prepared

This year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held in Las Vegas in early January

was truly epic. Everything about it boggled the mind – the sizes of the halls, the 150,000 attendees, the time taken to move from one meeting to another. The queues for the buses. Some of the stands were the size of small market towns, while the queues to see the best bits just ruined any sort of scheduling.

But there were some important themes going on. Firstly, almost nothing was being said about Windows 8. Normally, such silence this close to the release of a major Microsoft operating system would be a significant worry, verging on panic. But the alignment of the planets is different this time around.

For starters, you have to understand that most of the big PC manufacturers are on a six month cycle, or thereabouts. So devices shown in January at CES will be fading stars in their ranges by the Autumn. Because of this, no-one would be prepared to show anything which

Problems with AndroidA rather sad prediction for you. I took the opportunity at CES to talk to a number of vendors who make Android based slates. Some of them are deeply worried about the fragmentation of the platform, the poor updating cycle, and other problems that the platform has acquired. When asked what their future Android plans were, one even went as far as to say “Windows 8!” Maybe there is some truth in these rumours that putting Android onto a device actually costs more than deploying Windows, due to the licensing fees that Microsoft charges on its patent libraries. If so, it will be a sad day when a strong potential competitor for Windows starts to fade away on the larger tablet market space. We need the competition here, and there is no doubt that Microsoft is working at a furious pace because it recognises just how far it is trailing both iOS and Android.

Grey Matter • 01364 654 100 • HardCopy 33

to go much richer in terms of the content that you display to users. We will be able to display more on the screen, of course, but do not be tempted to just cram in more stuff for the sake of looking busy. Far better to reconsider the UI features and really ensure that they are making best use of this new resource.

And it goes without saying that your code really should have a good makeover to ensure that there are no nasty depends or start-up

from companies such as Apple are going to blow open the entire marketplace for educational books, for example. Whilst it is easy to see how this benefits Little Johnny doing his physics homework, think for a moment how this will affect something as humble as the help file and other interactive training material. A lot of this stuff has lurked around for years, and a 300dpi Windows 8 environment might come as somewhat of a rude shock.

assumptions about LPI. We have been used to checking for orientation, increased screen sizes and so forth for years, but changing LPI/DPI is going to require careful thinking, especially as a window is dragged from a 300dpi display to a 96lpi display. Do we keep the same layout and just “go soft”? Or will good apps recognise the change and assist the user appropriately?

There is much to think about here. The new eBook technologies which are appearing

Disability supportGiven that we are in 2012, you might be somewhat stunned to learn that there are applications out there which do not support the disability features which have been carefully designed into our operating systems. Windows has a huge array of them, from large fonts to high-contrast designs to tools which can read directly from the screen. Imagine my shock at finding a world-class vendor who supplies software on their platform for Windows which uses a cutesy re-skinning library for Windows. Everything looks like Windows, but its subtly different. It’s like a Windows app, but not as we know it, Jim.

Personally I abhor such re-skinning. I have no problems with radical user interface design - I normally applaud the free thinking involved. But there has to be a benefit, a purpose to the skinning which makes the result better than a standard Windows application. When you are dealing with a bog standard application that does boring day to day things, such re-skinning seems somewhat stupid.

It is especially stupid when you discover that all of the disability features of

Windows are rendered useless when using such an app. The high contrast tools fail, the reading technology cannot make sense of the self-drawn buttons: it has become an opaque black hole of an app to the disabled user.

I cannot believe that I have to write that every development team should have at least one test environment configured for such settings, and that this should be part of the QA sign-off procedure. But when a multi-billion dollar company makes such a goof simply because it thought the re-skinning was “cool”, you have to despair.

Please check code this way, and really ask yourself if any failures are acceptable. Of course, there are some combinations which are logical. For example, if you are writing a tool for very precise image editing and colour balancing, then supporting the black and white high contrast facilities might seem a bit daft, and you would be right. But the number of applications which have a legitimate ‘Get out of jail free card’ here is really quite tiny.

Back End

Paul Stephens takes a sideways look at the world of IT.

Short cuts


Feet of clay in Cupertino?Has Apple’s legendary obsession with secrecy backfired in a big

way in British Columbia? This is the question that’s been taxing us here in the Short Cuts office as we try to piece together the threads of a mystery that could lead from the development labs of Cupertino to the retail outlets of Vancouver.

Given Apple’s fondness for giving nothing away, we can’t say we were all that surprised by the recent claim, in Adam Lashinsky’s book ‘Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired - and Secretive - Company Really Works’, that new Apple employees are put to work on fake products to see if they can be trusted not to email the details to gizmodo.com, or leave the prototype on a bar stool on payday evening.

But then a story breaking on Canadian TV network CTV made us wonder whether Apple’s loyalty-testing strategy might have gone horribly wrong. The station reported a spate of incidents in the Vancouver area in which customers had bought iPad 2s from reputable retailers, only to open the boxes and find lumps of modelling clay where their gleaming new tablets should have been.

The police’s theory is that members of the criminal classes are buying iPads then swapping out the machine, re-shrink-wrapping the boxes (nice touch) and taking them back for a refund, leaving the unsuspecting retailers to sell lumps of clay to the next customer.

However we think there might be a more embarrassing explanation. Could it be that Apple told a bunch of newly-brainwashed – sorry, inducted - employees that the lumps of clay they’d been assigned to work on were actually a new, ultra-uncluttered iPad design (“not even an Apple logo to break the perfection of the line – awesome, huh?”), and that someone forgot to tell them the truth before they got them boxed up and shipped out to BC? Far-fetched perhaps, but for us it’s all just a bit too much of a coincidence.

• The Vancouver story got us wondering whether the practice of putting new employees to work on fake products might be more widespread than previously thought, and whether this might not be the first time it’s gone wrong. Our investigations revealed some shocking examples of products that were never meant to reach the shelves:

Windows Vista: “Bill was getting paranoid about new employees giving our technology away,” said a subdued Steve Ballmer, “so I said, let’s give them something so bad it’ll make those Linux guys think we’re losing our grip. Then we forgot about it and the next thing we knew it had shipped and we had 140 million dissatisfied customers. To be honest it’s been a nightmare.”

BlackBerry Playbook 1: “It was more a test of intelligence than trustworthiness.” said former co-CEO Jim Balsillie, “We didn’t think that anyone would think we were serious about shipping a pad computer that

Back End

couldn’t do email, but these guys did – and they shipped it.” Former co-CEO Mike Lazaridis added: “On reflection it was a dumb move.”

XML: “Of course it wasn’t supposed to happen.” said a W3C spokesperson, “We had some interns in one summer and for a joke we told them to design a language with no vocabulary. Next thing we knew they’d put it on the Web site and now 75 per cent of the world’s cloud storage is occupied by unnecessarily verbose tag names, 63 per cent of them generated by Microsoft Office applications. To be honest it’s not something we like to talk about.”

Sony Playstation: “We suspected that our competitors were spying on us,” said a senior Sony source, “so we thought we’d fool them into thinking that we were going to sell a machine with a DVD drive, fast processor and plenty of RAM for less than the price of a cheap laptop. Unfortunately the Sumo was on in Tokyo and by the time we got back from the honbasho our subordinates had launched it. The whole industry’s been losing money ever since.”

Server Virtualization: (that’s enough fake products – Ed).

Tubes4YouShort Cuts strongly approves of Innovation

Centres, such as the one run by Plymouth University at Redruth in Cornwall where start-up software firm HeadForwards does outsourced development for telecoms giant NTT – an appropriate focus in the county where mighty transatlantic cables come ashore, providing vital communications links to the Americas.

At Kent University’s Innovations Centre in Canterbury the application focus is different, although quite possibly still appropriate. Here development firm Tinderhouse has just shipped an app which uses GPS to tell under-19s the nearest place to stock up on free condoms provided by Kent NHS Trust’s C-Card community-based contraception scheme. “Apps like the Kent C Card demonstrate how mobile phones provide direct access to relevant information,” said Tinderhouse Director Nick Tatt, “in this case, the nearest condom pick up point in Kent.”

Our only gripe is that the app is currently only available on the iPhone, which we regard as discriminatory against users of lower-priced Android handsets. As the old saying goes, “It’s the rich who get the pleasure, and the poor who have to make do with a browser-based interface…”

Was this iPad-sized lump of modelling clay an employee loyalty test too far from the ultra-secretive Apple?

Kent NHS’s new apps tells under-19s the nearest source of free condoms – but not if the only phone they can afford is a cheap Android handset.

“Whaddya mean you prefer Android?” No, seriously, this is Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer doing what he does best (showmanship) during his CES keynote session with radio personality Ryan Seacrest. In fact he was saying how pleased he was with the Xbox; that’s just the way Steve says he’s pleased.

building on 29 years of software know how making sense · building on 29 years of software know how...

Documents