**Please go through interesting 12 inventions (innovations) in Part 1 & Part 2.
13. Unified Communication, Gurdeep Singh Pall, Microsoft
Gurdeep Singh Pall is lead-ing Microsoft’s charge into unified communications, a change he describes as being “as fundamental as the shift from the telegraph to the telephone.” Pall and his team have melded presence, IM, e-mail, voice, and collaboration capabilities into Office Communication Server 2007, Microsoft’s UC platform, and are now working on what’s next.
Competitors coming from the conventional voice market aim to extend the PBX-based model of communication into data networks, Pall says, while Microsoft is developing new methods to communicate and collaborate via software.
Eighty percent of people tell Microsoft that the desktop is their primary communications tool at work, but the phone is still a separate, critical island. “We knew part of what we needed to do was make the phone work like the other tools people use to communicate and collaborate,” Pall says. So far, Microsoft offers presence, calendars, and application and document sharing to help collaboration.
Next for unified communications: Pall envisions deeper integration with the desktop. A lot of institutional learning happens in meetings - in conversation, video, or document sharing, he says - but much of that content is lost without a way to store, search, and retrieve what was said and presented. Pall sees all facets of collaboration eventually being searchable, savable, and shareable content.
Read the full story on Information Week
14. Open Frameworks – Rod Johnson, Spring
We’ve come a long way from the first versions of J2EE. We’ve learned to avoid invasive programming models, we’ve developed a rich set of frameworks and APIs, we know how to develop apps based around simple objects. Are we there yet?
This question is best answered by Rod Johnson, the father of Spring. The Spring Framework open source project began in February 2003, based on the Interface21 framework published with Rod’s best-selling Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development.
InforWorld Q & A excerpt: (Read Full Interview)
InfoWorld: Explain your role in the development of the Spring Framework. And could you briefly compare Spring to other frameworks, such as JavaServer Faces and WebWork ?
Johnson: The Spring Framework grew out of my first book on J2EE, Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development, which was published in late-2002. That book really helped to start what we might call the lightweight revolution in 
J2EE. It really argued that the traditional model was way too complex, and with the book I actually published 30,000 lines of code, which was originally intended to show my view on how things could be done in a simpler way through an application framework. But of course, many readers became very interested in this and quickly I was persuaded to make it an open-source project. So development started in earnest in early-2003. Compared to other frameworks, Spring really created a niche for itself. So Spring is what we call an application framework, and it actually addresses multiple architectural tiers. So if you look at frameworks [such as] Struts or WebWork, they more often than not just address one architectural layer. So Struts and WebWork are both Web frameworks. Compared to JSF, Spring and JSF are not really in the same space. JSF is essentially a component model for rendering Web resources, whereas Spring is more a framework that aims to bring an overall structure and coherency to your application as a whole. So Spring actually can be used with JSF. Spring does provide its own MVC (Model-View Controller) Web framework, which I guess can be regarded as being in the same space as Struts and WebWork, but on the other hand, Spring is a modular framework.
Also read: Introduction to Spring by Rod on TheServerSide
15. Video Conferencing – Cisco Telepresence
Read the full story at DesignNews
While testing the TelePresence video conferencing system in 2006, Cisco engineers experienced an unexpected, telling moment. A child, seeing his mother on the system’s life-size video display, crawled beneath a conference room table, hoping to find her when he came up on the other side. But she wasn’t there. “I can’t get to you, Mom,� he called out as he looked between the chairs for her.
Although it didn’t particularly surprise Cisco engineers at the time, that tale has evolved into a handy bit of corporate folklore, to be passed along to first-time TelePresence users. Prepare yourself. The system you’re about to use is that good.
Indeed, the system’s high-definition video images are so un-television-like that a few curious corporate executives have strolled behind the TelePresence display wall, the better to make sure the people in those images aren’t really hiding back there.
“Most people are agape when they walk in,� says Jim Kittridge, senior vice president for Wachovia Corp., the giant financial services company that has purchased three TelePresence systems and plans to buy two more by year’s end. “They literally gasp; they can’t believe what they’re seeing.�
“There’s a general market bias against video conferencing,� says Nora Freedman, a senior analyst for IDC, a market research firm. “Most people don’t know how to use it. And most of those, even if they did have it available, wouldn’t use video conferencing because of their own personal hang-ups.�
A New Era?
To be sure, Cisco isn’t alone in its creation of Jetson-like video conferencing systems. Hewlett Packard, Lifesize, Polycom, Teliris and others have jumped in with big, strong new products, thus reinvigorating the video conferencing space.
For Cisco, however, the move to video conferencing was a classic case of a technology powerhouse entering a new field and re-thinking the products from the ground up. Although the company didn’t make cameras or video displays, two of the key links in the technical chain that comprises a video conferencing system, it had gathered a mountain of expertise in Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), which would provide the knowledge to break down camera images, send them over a network and receive them on the other end.
“We’re in the VoIP business and this is just a video version of our phone,� says Dave Mackie, principal engineer on the TelePresence project. “It’s a natural extension for us. I tell people that ‘TelePresence is just a really big phone.’�
Cisco’s effort began with a question from its chief development officer, Charles Giancarlo. “Charlie asked me, ‘Is something changing in two-way collaboration?’� recalls Phil Graham, senior director of engineering for Cisco. For Graham, the question turned into a technology hunt, followed by the writing of a technical brief. At the time, Graham’s brief noted, HDTV was gaining momentum and new codecs were coming on line for both audio and video.
Not long after, Graham’s brief spawned a project and a project team. Thus, engineers began the process of defining a video conferencing system that would actually be appealing to corporate clients. Their definition turned into a list of approximately 20 “Rules of TelePresence,� which included edicts involving the size and appearance of images, as well as its sound and ease of use.
“Our business unit was formed by people who hated video conferencing,� Mackie says. “It wasn’t that they hated the idea of video collaboration; it was just that they hated the implementations of video conferencing that had existed to date.�
In essence, Cisco engineers wanted to create an experience, not a product. For users, that experience involved seeing, hearing, picking up subtle details and feeling comfortable. For Cisco engineers, it also involved designing rooms, picking out colors, selecting furniture and lighting and, of course, sending images over the Internet. Doing all that meant they had to gain expertise in areas outside the company-prescribed boundaries. And in cases where vendors couldn’t supply the proper technologies, it meant they had to create their own specifications.
Dec 07 they finished a complete year of it launch and here are the stats
· 100 Customers
· 40 Countries
· 190 Global Cities
· 160 Internal TelePresence Systems at Cisco
· 242 Internal TelePresence Systems by July of 2008
· 40,000+ Internal Cisco TelePresence Meetings
· $41 million + in avoided travel internally
16. Wiki meets Blogging – Ross Mayfield, SocialText
Mike Heck of InfoWorld writes:
Socialtext’s hosted service, built on the open source Kwiki package and a number of extensions, combines the simplicity of wikis with blogging and collaboration functions that help avoid e-mail overload.
Foremost, Socialtext gives you the advantages of a wiki, providing simple, collaborative page editing where others add comments and documents to posts. But I especially liked the unusual ability to add live chat to workspaces, the contents of which are also captured, as well as the integrated blogging features. Typical blogs work well as general publishing platforms but aren’t good for collaboration. Socialtext’s alternative approach tightly integrates blogging with the main wiki, such that each post is actually a wiki page.
Publishing is simple; you build on pages via the Web or post using e-mail messages. Current thoughts are displayed in chronological order, so readers always see what’s new. Yet, as opposed to typical blogs, Socialtext keeps an archive of every entry; relevant search results “bubble up� to the top of the blog. Additionally, users subscribe to only the updates they want (via e-mail or RSS).
Socialtext’s approach provides an unexpected by-product: a wikipedia for your organization. With just a little work I reorganized the taxonomy of pages, creating a knowledge base of linked and categorized content.
Although JotSpot offers more developer tools and functions than Socialtext, its closed architecture requires special skills for expanding your wiki. That’s not the case with Socialtext, making it a bit stronger as an overall collaborative solution.
17. Social Entreprise Applications, Oracle Fusion
Read the full story at SearchCRM
In Nov 07 Oracle gave the world a glimpse of what to expect in its forthcoming Fusion applications - a combination of “best of” functionality from its many recent acquisitions - while maintaining that it has lived up to its promises.
What the first iteration of Fusion applications will look like - they will be based on standards-based middleware and will embed business intelligence capabilities and make use of Oracle’s WebCenter product. Web 2.0 technology will also feature prominently in future releases< initially embedded in CRM and human capital management applications. Oracle has begun developing Web 2.0 features into its CRM application. One feature, a sales library, will allow sales reps to access materials such as individual slides in PowerPoint presentations and product sheets, and share and vote on the best materials in a sales community. Other interactions, many of them are social in nature. Features will include tagging to help search for relevant content in the system, and Google mash-ups.
