Groupware goes head to head. Good to see that the Good Ole Domino Versus Exchange Rivalry isn’t dead. The authors of this particular head-to-head picked Domino.

We should also mention that many companies are showing an impressive return on investment with Lotus Domino and we’re not surprised. It features a more consistent framework than Exchange, its common toolkits are more tightly integrated, and above all it’s a much better platform for developing applications. Quickplace was also our preferred application for sharing information among small teams. We were able to move around Quickplace much easier and it only costs $89 per user. ZDNet Aug 25 2003 6:40PM ET [Moreover – Knowledge management news]

This is from the SearchDomino newsletter archive…

NEW IBM TOOLS FORTIFY IM | eWEEK

IBM has released the IBM Community Tools suite. It combines the IBM
MQ Event Broker, IBM Lotus Instant Messaging and Web services running
under WebSphere Application Server, Apache and DB2. The tools can be
used to locate experts, start impromptu discussions and alert and
survey large groups of people in real time.

>>READ the full story:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1216378,00.asp

MORE INFO:
Featured Topic: Lotus Instant Messaging
http://searchdomino.techtarget.com/featuredTopic/0,290042,sid4_gci905368,00.html

Article: Study predicts enterprise IM boom
http://searchdomino.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid4_gci906195,00.html

[SearchDomino]

SVG links and resources

Data-Driven SVG Apps: A Rapid Development Approach
http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2002/02/13/svg.html?page=1
 
Consider the business example of a building floor plan. The user wants to be able to pull up a digital image (GIF or JPEG file) of the floor plan; review and annotate the drawing to note locations of electrical outlets, phone jacks, and ethernet jacks; and save the changes into a database. Annotations are done by creating red rectangles for electrical outlets, blue rectangles for phone jacks, and green rectangles for Ethernet jacks. In addition to the graphics, the user can specify properties like the number of electrical outlets at the location, the number of phone jacks and the telephone numbers at each location; and the number of Ethernet jacks and the IP addresses at the location. For the above example, the appeal of SVG is that an XML document can be created dynamically on the server while pulling content (graphical and business) from a database, while changes made by the user can be updated in the database. This role is traditionally performed by the middle tier. The middle tier, in this case, will create the SVG file by extracting data from database, and parse the SVG file and update the database. [Full Article]
Demo that shows dragging houses onto a satellite map and then entering data.
 
Includes detailed explanation of how-to. Data is stored in an Oracle
Example of a database-driven map using PostgreSQL and the PostGIS plug-in
http://www.svgopen.org/papers/2002/foerster_winter__atlas_of_tyrol/
 
PostGIS adds support for geographic objects to the PostgreSQL database, follows the “Simple Features Specification for SQL” defined by the OpenGIS Consortium (OGC) and allows to store, index and query geometric features like point, line, polygon, multipoint, multiline, multipolygon
and geometry collections in 2d as well as 3d coordinate space. [Full Article]

Finished Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods last week. What a good book! I could really relate to the sometimes comical things that happened to him as he prepared for and embarked on his journey along the Appalachian Trail. His observation of the progression of the states of filth you go through on the trail are right on. (I’ve never hiked the AT, as Bryson calls it, for any serious length but I did spend time in the Mt. Rainier back-country which I’ll have to blog about when I get some time).

The description of Bryson’s early encounter with Katz, a man Bryson hadn’t seen in many years and who would turn out to be his companion on the trail, had me rolling in laughter.

The book is a good mix of facts about the famous trail and its environs as well as a humorous travel narrative. Don’t expect a nail-biting, life-or-death, man-against-nature, survival-against-all-odds story.