Personally, I spent quite some time on the Enterprise Software Re-thinking. This is part of the Tech Talk series which has been ongoing for the past 3 weeks, and will continue for the next 2 also. The pieces are now coming together quite nicely. The more I think about it, the more I believe that the approach we are taking is the right one. The areas which need more work are (a) how to build the platform for developing enterprise software components, and (b) how are we going to market and sell to SMEs.
BlogStreet: Our proglets (10 of them) are working to identify blog rolls. They work reasonably well. We now need to put together a Blog Neighbourhood tool on BlogStreet. This week, we’ll be thinking through on how best BlogStreet should be — as a resource for bloggers and readers (there are 1000x more readers than writers).
Digital Dashboard: We were stuck for a couple days on a problem with the Apache-SOAP interaction, but finally fixed the problem. Have an RSS Aggregator in place now which uses the Outliner web service we built. Now, we are working to put the blog interface together, so we can get everyone internally creating blogs. Blogs+Outliners+RSS=Digital Dashboard.
Thin Client-Thick Server: Except the Marketing department, everyone’s now using Thin Clients. We bought a few more second-hand PCs, each for Rs 7,000 or so (including monitor). There have been some issues with the stability and hardware — rising load, increasing processes, disappearning icons, crashing applications. Nothing serious — just the occasional hiccups. Our target is that by the month-end we have a completely stable environment. Seeing how things are going here convinces me we are on the right track.
Enterprise Software: Got stuck with some problems using SAPDB. Decided to then drop it. Focus now is on using Postgres, JDBC, JBoss and J2EEas the building blocks. All are new areas for us.
Messaging: Have worked out a set of ideas to strengthen the core platform, and also thinking on how to integrate the Mail Server with the Thick Server. We also are thinking on a plan to expand in multiple cities.
This is the fun part of being an entrepreneur…each day brings its own share of unknowns. Thats why I strongly believe that for an entrepreneur its not just reaching the destination which is important, but the journey itself should be fun — one has to like, in the words of Dan Bricklin, “jumping from rock to slippery rock.”
