Sunday, April 6, 2008

First K2 Insider Conference April 7 to 11

I am heading off tomorrow to the first K2 Insider Conference tomorrow morning in Denver. I am frantically trying to get some client work done, then I got TPS reports for several projects and an ice hockey in three hours. Ugh. Several went out skiing this weekend but it was just going to work for me given the amount of work on my plate.

I will be making a presentation on some case studies we have done at RDA and then Gabrielle Malherbe, Colin Murphy and myself will be leading a workshop on SmartObjects. There is actually a blog we wrote together that I still have not had time to go over and get up. In it we discuss and debate the positioning of SmartObjects in the Enterprise Architecture. A conclusion (which I fought against for while) was that SmartObjects have many characteristics of SOA but it is not SOA. Even though SmartObjects allow you to easily (and I mean easily) provision and harvest data into your workflows it still does not replace a data access layer. It is just a piece of it. LINQ, Entity, and .Net Data Services provide a richer object query and object relation mapping tools than what you can get with K2 SmartObjects. K2 SmartObjects have their place and right now I compare it to the Business Data Catalog (BDC) that is provided in MOSS. However my opinion on this may change over the week J

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