It’s been a while since my last post. And there has been a reason for it, actually. I’ve been working on a new project, the Social Media Scripting Framework: a PowerShell-based environment that abstracts the complexities of modern Social Media Channels from the PowerShell command-line.
There is not question that Social Media Technologies have opened the door, not only to new ways of interaction and relationship, but also to new ways to evaluate and measure them. However, after looking at the current ecosystem of tools and solutions for a while, I’ve observed that many of them, and sometimes all of them, follow similar structural patterns. For example:
- Form factor: SaaS delivered through the web. This, actually, is a very convenient way to provide a service while hiding the complexities to the consumer. But, unfortunately, this virtue is at the same time the main drawback. More often than not, our SaaS provider only focuses on a discrete set of functionalities and forces us to look somewhere else to fill in the gaps. At the end of the day, we end up with a collection of web services that we try to “orchestrate” by means of some sort of “digital craftsmanship”.
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Several months ago, I happened to share a nice conversation about the potential of PowerShell as part of the IT/Enterprise Architecture. Then I discovered that the benefits of architecting IT-aware Applications are still widely unknown or misunderstood. That’s the reason I would like to share my thoughts on this subject pointing out the special role that PowerShell can play in this field.
IT-aware Services and Applications
IT-aware Services and Applications incorporate the necessary instrumentation so that IT and Operations Teams can control, monitor, diagnose and operate them using the same semantics that the business uses in addition to the classic IT constructs and abstractions.
These utilities allow IT and Operations to be aligned more efficiently with the business because the own business concepts are completely integrated with the environment and the tools that both IT and Operations use to do their work.
This Instrumentation Stack can be break down into different components or services that need to be implemented inside the applications:
- Activity Tracking and Performance Monitoring. In the Microsoft world, this is usually implemented as Logging Facilities (Log4net, Enterprise Library Logging Application Block, etc.), Performance Counters and ETW Providers.
- Command and Control: PowerShell in the Microsoft ecosystem.
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It’s been a long time since OpenOMS got a major refresh. That is why I’ve been working on an update during the past weeks and, finally, I can show some visible results of this work. You can find a new OpenOMS deployment on the following URL: http://thinkinbig.org/oms/
This new instance will host, not only my Projects but also some Demo Projects that will allow you to experience how OpenOMS really looks like and how it works for IT Service Management and Software Engineering.
It has taken me a significant amount of time to move all my Project Notes into OpenOMS Issues and Cases. As you may know, all these notes where previously hosted on a separate blog: “ThinkInBig Project Materials”. This blog has been closed as long as OpenOMS is now replacing its functions.
Many of you may have noticed that the previous demo is not working properly. This issue comes from the fact that SourceForge blocks outgoing e-mail traffic as part of their Security Policies. Unfortunately, OpenOMS needs a reliable e-mail service for user maintenance and event notifications.
I’m aware of this issue for some time. But, even though it turns out that SourceForge was not the best place to install this demo, I couldn’t find the right time to move OpenOMS to a different hosting provider.
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