Peter C Berkman B2B Weblog

As many of you know, the B2B product teams at Sun have been working for a few months now on getting the next version of our B2B Suite complete.  We have had numerous Champion customers using pre-releases of these components - this has helped us tremendously in getting the "bits" right!

 Well, we are on target!  We’ll be announcing the 5.1.1 release on December 4th to plan (as long as all the machinery at Sun allows us).

 This release will bring some of the “standard” protocol capabilities in the suite – ebXML, AS2, and an additional HIPAA validation engine option from Foresight (http://www.foresightcorp.com/ - Press Release: http://www.foresightcorp.com/news_events/releases/070814pr.htm).

 Once this is complete, the B2B Engineering team will begin working in earnest on the next major release of B2B.  This will be done in milestone-based development methodology as usual, but we will be doing it completely in our open source community (https://sun-b2b.dev.java.net/) and we will be doing it in backwards-compatible component releases.  The first will be message auditing and tracking.  So, come join our community and watch the suite grow.

 

Absolutely!

Last week I attended Sun's annual "Sun Open Source Summit".  The intent is to take a "pulse" on Sun's internal development community to ensure we're all learning from others about public community building.  for me, an old dinosaur developer, this is something very new and very visionary. 

A few years ago, Jonathan said "all Sun software will be developed in the public community" (probably not exact words, but you get the gist).  Well, we definitely all thought, at least in the old SeeBeyond teams, that this would be tragic for us - this "we" definitely included me.  However, over the past years, we have jumped in with both feet and the benefits are REAL!  And, Jonathan's vision remains the same.  He has, however, completely crystallized his message around the initial vision.  He was the "guest" speaker at the summit last week and spoke for about half an hour about the multitude of advantages to Sun and our communities.

In my mind, there are a few top-level reasons he is absolutely right.

1. Enterprise users will always (and most must) pay for indemnity for the software they use in production.

2. Those that use the software and don't pay for it would not have paid for it anyway.  But, now you have yet another user who gets familiar with your technology and when they go work for one of those companies in #1, guess who's software they are going to suggest...

3. the more "eye balls" you have on the code, the more bugs get caught and the less "bad code" can get in.

4. it gives our customers the ability to add features that we either don't have time/resources to add or deem it to be too isolated a use case.

5. and, most importantly, it provides the path for our teams to work transparently with our community of developers and customers!

 

So, in the coming weeks, you will see a number of our B2B and MDM initiatives moving "out there" to projects under our two communities on Java.net: 

https://open-b2b.dev.java.net/ is the top-level of our Open B2B Community

and

https://mural.dev.java.net/ is the top-level of our Master Data Management Community

keep an eye on these - the components will start showing up very soon!  COME JOIN US!

 

Andrea, one of our Senior Engineers in the B2B Team, wrote a great blog on the efforts she and others have been doing for the new transaction audit dashboard.  it is definetely worth the read - here...

 

 

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Sun's Customer Engineering Conference 2006

 

This is the first CEC I am attending. It is a fantastic way for Sun's field and partners to learn about all the new technologies and focuses that Sun as a whole is driving.

 

It started on Sunday night with a kind of "state of the union" meeting for each GEO group. The next few days were breakout sessions. A lot of really good presentations and great networking with others around Sun.

 

I was disappointed that our B2B products were not highlighted, but next year we'll know about it sooner and be prepared to make a "big splash"!

 

I got to meet up with the "Jersey Girl's" from our Marketing Team and won a great PINK sweatshirt for recognizing them at the CEC. I probably won't wear it, but you can see a picture here on the October 2, 2006 post (GSE Divas)