As things change in the world I’m shifting my thinking. What people need as consumers is changing. What providers should be offering is changing. The way businesses communicate and operate is changing. At my business tier, we provide tools and services to business application software providers, as well as application-independent offerings to end-users. This article is about, and for, our […]
More people are working at home. Businesses are struggling to figure out new ways to communicate internally, with partners, and their client/consumer audience. When a company sends people home to work, I think there is more to the effort than just giving them network access. I think we need to reconsider how we communicate and what needs to be communicated.
The Nebula R&D blog just got a complete overhaul. It’s now much faster, much more visually appealing, and mobile-friendly. I’m also refocusing toward D3-specific tips.
Long-time colleague Ian McGowan asked the following in Slack today: “Tony, what is the non-MV work you’re doing? How did that transition go? What’s the story? I’m asking for, uh, a friend that’s been a PICK programmer since 1987. ;)” I thought I’d post the answer here.
I’m researching options for incorporating natural language inquiries into business applications. For example, we should be able to ask questions like “how much did we make from XCorp last year”, “how many clients do we have in Ohio”, “is Bob Smith still with XCorp”, “how many orders came in through Atlanta yesterday”, “is truck 192 on schedule”, or “where is […]
I’m looking through Amazon AWS services to possibly host testing environments, SQL Server integration, etc. This is also a part of my occasional research (Nebula R&D, get it?) to get a better idea of what companies are demanding these days.
I haven’t posted on my blog for a while (or updated the software, ouch). So I thought I’d take some time toward the end of this year to open a topic that’s dear to my heart, community in the MultiValue / Pick industry, and what we can do to improve it.
I’m often called to remedy one-off issues in D3 environments, and to look at systems for family/friends when things start running slow. Most home/business environments share these common traits: Huge logs which degrade performance, and Windows Event Logs showing a large number of application, system, and security issues.
A good comment was made by Peter McMurray in the LinkedIn Pick User Group: “Interesting idea based on a sound principle. However I wonder if anyone will pay for it.” My short answer is that there there is a lot of precedent for this in the “mainstream”, but to my knowledge no similar offerings in the MV space. So I’m […]
My MV Bot for Slack is progressing nicely. This allows MV VARs and sysadmins to proactively monitor and get notifications of local and remote server events. It notifies a Slack channel with events, and any authorized person can get the data from any device or browser.
Yes, I know I’m running a very old version of WordPress and that it’s starting to cough up errors. This entire site will get some major updates over the December holidays. Thanks for your continued patience and support.
Access to the OS file system from D3 is possible through the OSFI – the Open System File Interface. Over time I’ve noticed some confusion in how our colleagues use and under-use this feature, so I thought I’d clarify a couple points here.
(Follow-up to Shellshock1) With a pro-active response to the issue, Rocket Software has confirmed that their D3 and U2 products have been checked against vulnerabilities known to-date. But we need to take this a bit further.
A security bug in BASH has been identified. News is spreading fast all over the internet. Details here – or just Google for “shellshock”. Updates will be made to this blog page as required. This page will be focused on the MultiValue industry and will not be updated with general breaking news, as that information is easily found elsewhere.
It looks like I haven’t written in a long time. On the contrary, I’ve been writing a Lot, just not all here. And what I have written here I haven’t posted simply because I’ve been holding onto it all for editing. One of these days I need to put it into my ToDoList to just edit and publish everything over […]
I’ve had a lot of chats with people about what’s wrong with the Pick/MultiValue industry. The discussions are similar and usually end with a “that’s nice but there’s nothing we can do”.
The website http://PickJobs.Net has been re-launched with a new look and tools for matching people to work. This is a free resource for the MV industry. Thanks to Andy Betts at Right People Resourcing in the UK for hosting and rejuvenating the site!
A colleague posted an interesting request to a U2 forum today. I think my response is more general for the MV industry so I decided to blog this. In short the request is for an all-MV CRM package, with emphasis that it Must be all-MV. I don’t think that’s a good approach for any of us.
I’ve recently been wondering what services most MV DBMS VARs provide, and if they charge additional fees for some services. I’m wondering what DBMS services end-users want that they don’t get. I’d like to see more happy MV DBMS end-users. Who’s with me?