• Microsoft: My way or the highway with SOA? Though Microsoft can certainly afford to do "SOA their way" and though such approaches have certainly worked in the past, I wonder if this one might actually hurt them is the long run. As Joe says, "What Microsoft appears to be doing... goes completely against what SOA is supposed to be all about, which is the ability to deploy and run what you need based on what you need, unencumbered by the limitations of vendors' systems." Wouldn't it be ironic if Microsoft's way of forcing organizations to "do SOA" causes organizations to turn to SOA itself as a way to minimize their dependencies on Microsoft systems?
• Project Zero: IBM enables REST-based development - Not surprising to see IBM adding support for REST, especially since Microsoft is doing the same by adding a Web Programming model to its WCF upgrades in the .NET 3.5 Framework. In many ways, this simply underscores David Chappell's assertion that the REST versus WS-* debate is over. While we may still have a place in our hearts for one over the other, the major vendors seem to be saying "why not both?"
• Binding SOA to BPM instead of BPM to SOA - Not sure I understand the assertion that we should attach SOA to the swimlane diagram and not BPMN Nick. Pools and Lanes are used heavily in BPMN, so what is it about BPMN that you have an issue with? If it's the BPEL/automation side of BPMN, then I agree, but I think that BPMN can be very useful to organizations without that side, especially since what you get is a standard Process modeling language where none exists today.
• Why Sales isn't process driven - According to Steve Jones, the "mechanism for the implementation and measurement of a service" (process) isn't always the same thing as the drivers for and value of the service (goals). Meaning that our services ought to pay attention to user goals first and the underlying process second. It's a UCD/UX perspective for SOA...
• PowerPoint: Boon or Bane? I tend to fall into the camp of PowerPoint is a misused tool, not a bad tool in and of itself, though its conventions in the form of automatic title and bullet regions do encourage bad behavior. 
• Stuff - I read recently that it took the self-storage industry 25 years to build the first billion square feet of storage space and only 8 years for the second billion. Yet our houses have grown by 80% and we still face a storage crisis. Stuff is best gotten rid of...

• Enterprise Architecture, REST and SOA all sit down at a bar? - More on REST, SOA and EA and EA's responsibility to be relevant to project teams.

• Do Enterprise Architects ask Stupid Questions? - There are no stupid questions, only questions that self-righteous people think are stupid.

• Build versus Buy versus Opensource - Good advice if you can get Opensource in the door. Of course, vendors charging a premium to solve common problems already solved should be reason enough to adopt opensource...

• Loc.alize.us - A Google Maps and Flickr mashup that brings photos of different lands to you. I'm planning a trip to Italy right now and it's nice to be able to get more than just the top-down view that Google Earth and Maps provide. Google Earth has functionality similar to this, though I like the UI here better.

• What SOA needs to learn from Ruby On Rails - Though I'm not sure what "Canned SOA" would look like, I agree with the argument that SOA needs some measure of default convention which can be leveraged.

• The Developer Theory of the Third Place - My third place is usually one of several coffee houses or restaurants with free WiFi close to my work or home. BTW, If you're ever in Colorado Springs Scott, we'd love to have you drop by and share some of your expertise.

• Free Code - Getting IT out of the Applications business - IT takes EIM and the Business Event Ontology and gives the business (Biz Process Devs specifically) the ability to write "free code." While it sounds a little counter-intuitive, it certainly has some promise.

Since I last crafted a legitimate post to this blog, I have enjoyed several months of changes, excitement, bombardment and general much ado about everything. Here are a few highlights:

1) Finished my first Quarter of LIS in one piece.

2) Spent a week in the Dominican Republic leading a Men's Conference with 3 other men.

3) Was promoted to a new role at Compassion as the Enterprise Applications Architect. I am currently ramping down on day-to-day development work and ramping up (quickly!) into that job. It's been a lot of fun so far, except the part where I tried to work on all tasks old and new for about two months.

4) Spent 3 days (starting the day after I got back into the country) in San Diego at the Gartner Enterprise Architecture Summit. That was a fun way to get started on the new job, esp. as I got to attend with my new boss.

5) Decided not to take class during the summer Quarter (see #3), but I am getting ready to start the Fall Quarter on September 12. I'll be taking two courses:

• The Corporate Information Environment
• Legal Issues in Knowledge Management

I am looking forward to those. Not so much the cost of the textbooks, but I am looking forward to the classes themselves.

6) Compassion is at the end of a building expansion and parts of the IT department have been cube and office-less this week. One good friend also managed to find a way to move into a new house this week, I think he's been sleeping at Panera Bread. As a side note, it's too bad that good ideas always come to me too late because it would have been cool to have everyone that has been misplaced to take pictures of where they were working this week. I alone have worked from:

• My boss's office - He's on vacation this week.
• The World Prayer Center at New Life Church (Colorado Springs)
• The Lobby of New Life Church
• Panera Bread
• My house (This can be further sub-categorized into: the dining room table, the couch, a recliner and on the deck... I am a restless creature)

And that about catches you up to date (assuming you're still reading). The good news about the move this week is that it has given me a chance to catch up on some much needed research, reading, brainstorming and planning for the new job (with a little coding thrown in). Some more in relation to my new job: Obviously, this blog was created to be a place where I threw half-baked opinions about UX design against the wall. That was fun for a while, but then my ADD took me to some content about developer stuff related to all the goodies from last years' DevConnections conference. That was also fun for a while. All that being said, I think that this blog has never really had the unique personality that it needed to. What's cool is that my new job has created some interesting synergies between that developer in me (still there Ken) and the guy that thinks that UX matters. Case(s) in point: 1) When I attended the Gartner EA Summit, I heard a great talk by Harry Pierson called Beyond SOA: Understanding the User's Role in Architecture. Hey, that sounds like something I would enjoy... That was the first sign that I may not have strayed to far after all.
2) I found out after I got back and I was poking around that Simon Guest had given a talk at TechEd entitled Putting the User Back into SOA that I managed to grab the slides for. The second sign... (BTW, that link does not link to the slides themselves. I can't seem to find them anymore, nor do I remember how I got them. For the next best thing, you can head over to this link where Simon links to an ARCast episode he did with Ron Jacobs on the same topic.)
3) A couple of weeks ago, Simon posted once again about UX. This time, he was announcing a Forum discussion he will be hosting in California on "...the intersection of Architecture and User Experience." The third and final sign...
This was an exciting set of circumstances for me because I felt in my gut that those old passions were still important and had a place in my new role. This was just some great confirmation. The SOA aspect of this was especially interesting as some aspects of an Enterprise SOA have been rolled out at Compassion and we will continue to look for ways to use it to craft a larger Integration and BPM Platform. For more info on Compassion's SOA Implementation, Dan Fox, our resident Solutions Architect, Microsoft MVP and all-around genius has been posting about it at length. Check it out here. So what does all this mean then? It means that I will continue to blog (or start depending on your definition of 'continue.') about UX, but from a slightly different perspective. I will continue to talk about UI design and UX for the web, but I will also begin to incorporate some SOA, SaaS, BPM, Architecture and even Knowledge Management 'stuff.' If you actually read this far, my hope is that you would either a) stick around and continue reading what I write; or b) start today. I'm no expert on any of these subjects, but I love to read, write and discourse on nearly everything. So here's to a new phase in the journey. Stick around... let's hope I find reason to turn my entry in your FeedBurner client bold a bit more often.