Japan Strategic Architecture Forum - Day 1

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Japan Strategic Architecture Forum

Today was the first day of the of the Japan Strategic Architecture Forum (SAF). So far there have been some great sessions. We will also be posting the presentations online.

The Keynote

DSCN8056

My boss, Simon Guest was the first keynote speaker of the day. He presented Microsoft's architecture strategy for Software + Services (S+S). He outlined a S+S taxonomy for describing the various elements of S+S. What was great about this presentation is that it highlighted various patterns for common solution types such as:

  • A simple HTML site
  • A Community Wiki (e.g., wikipedia.org)
  • A Photo Sharing Site (e.g., Flickr.com)
  • A Social Network Site (e.g., MySpace.com)

Each one of these patterns where overlayed over the taxonomy to show the architect how to orchestrate services provided by Microsoft for these types of solutions. Essentially it provides a great planning and road mapping tool when trying to determine how build or how to extend existing web based applications into the Web 2.0 and S+S architecture types.

 

Enterprise Architecture in Japan

My trip here I have found that there has been a great deal of work in the EA space here in Japan. Like many other geographies Visio and Word are used by architects to describe their IT assets. Automation is essential here.

eatool

The toolkit provides templates and integration adapters from Office 2003 tool sets to a repository. For the customers in Japan this is used as a jump start to EA activities.

You can find out more here (no English though):

https://www.microsoft.com/japan/business/industry/gov/download/EATool.mspx

 

News from Japan SAF

Another interesting tidbit is that Yahoo! Japan is launching some new search services using Silverlight technologies. The goals are to make search multi-dimensional instead of based on a hierarchy.

Yahoo1 Yahoo2

A video is provided on the Microsoft Japan Site that shows the beta version of the new Yahoo! Search.

Press Release: https://www.microsoft.com/japan/presspass/detail.aspx?newsid=3411

Application Specifics: https://www.microsoft.com/japan/products/expression/creatorsEX/gallery_y.html

 

Will try to update you more...