Web Admin Blog

The 1.0 release of Google Chrome has everyone abuzz.  Here at NI, loads of people are adopting it.  Shortly after it went gold, we started to hear from users that they were having problems with our internal collaboration solution, based on the Atlassian Confluence wiki product.  They’d hit a page and get a terse error, [...]

Vignette, the Austin-based Web content management company,  has an annual show called Vignette Village.  A whole crew went from our company; Mark and I represented the Web Admins.
I got a lot out of Village though I wasn’t expecting to.  There was excitement in the air and clear commitment to continued development of their core Vignette [...]

InformationWeek did a big story on enterprise search, and used NI as their lead example!  Note all the system info in the article that I fed them. And we’re getting a lot of fun out of Graff’s quote about how it’s easy to sign off on more resources forus, we’re including that in every purchase [...]

It’s been in the news that Microsoft is pushing “rewards programs” for people to use Live Search and the Live Toolbar.  But did you know they’re trying to get your local IT department to do it for you?
Yep, the program’s called the “Search@Work Rewards Program”.  If your IT department puts IE, with Live Search as [...]

We’re trying to come to an agreement with a SaaS vendor about performance and availability service level agreements (SLAs).  I discussed this topic some in my previous “SaaS Headaches” post.  I thought it would be instructive to show people the standard kind of “defense in depth” that suppliers can have to protect against being held [...]

The industry is abuzz with people who are freaked out about the outages that Amazon and other cloud vendors have had.  “Amazon S3 Crash Raises Doubts Among Cloud Customers,” says InformationWeek!
This is because people are going into cloud computing with retardedly high expectations.  This year at Velocity, Interop, etc. I’ve seen people just totally in [...]

There’s a lot of promise in the new SaaS (software as a service; what used to be called ASPs, or Application Service providers, till Microsoft crapped all over that acronym) and newer PaaS (platform as a service) spaces (and look for a steady stream of new “aaS”es to come).  However, there are a lot of [...]

Dave Artz has put together a simple Webcast tutorial on how to use webpagetest.org to measure and fix up your Web site.  If all this talk about Web performance is a bit overwhelming, it’s a great novice tutorial.  He walks through the entire process visually and explains each metric.  Great job Dave!

We use Oracle Application Server as our Java app server at NI. Yeah, yeah, I’ll wait till you stop laughing.
Why not JBoss or WebLogic or WebSphere? Well, a couple reasons. We made the decision five years ago, and JBoss wasn’t solid then, and we needed J2EE support so plain Tomcat wasn’t enough. [...]

Well, I’m finally home with a spare minute to write. I and the two guys who went to the conference with me (Peco and Robert) got a lot out of it. I apologize for the brevity of style of the conference writeups, but they were notes taken on a precariously balanced laptop, under [...]