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Rich user interfaces are all the rage now in web-based applications, but they have to be more flexible than most Flex-based apps, as Tony Byrne explains here. A better solution is likely a set of widgets that can be assembled into a portal or mashup framework rather than a monolithic app.
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Mark McGregor on defining the differences between process and procedure. Unfortunately, he bases his premise on his statement "Process may be seen to refer to a series of actions, but it does not place a particular order on those actions.", in which he refers to the dictionary definition of process as "a series of actions". Maybe he should have also looked up the definition of "series", which is "a group of related things arranged or occurring in temporal, spatial or other order or succession". In other words, a series *is* an ordered sequence. His key insight is that process is what we do, and procedure is how we do it. Via "il blog del BPM" (my Italian is terrible, but Google's is passable).
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Why multi-tenancy SaaS is important. I've been having discussions lately with many vendors who have single-tenancy or pseudo-multi-tenancy (they give you your own instance on an EC2 server) SaaS platforms, and insist that it's what customers want. Doing multi-tenancy right isn't easy, or everyone would be offering it at least as an option.
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[...] the Blog Column 2 – links for 2009-02-02 we see the statement that refutes the difference between process and procedure as claimed by [...]
Sandy, always good to have debate. So am I to assume that you have never watched a TV series out of order, or read a book without going through the pages exactly one after another. If we also look at some of the other definitions of series we will also see that they talk about logical groupings. Whilst order may be implied it does not have to follow exactly.
I am certain that in your own businesses while you may have had a sales process with a series of activities you will have carried out the process with the activities being performed in many different sequences. e.g. as human beings we can see that there are a number of different tasks that need to be performed, but we also have the ability to choose the order depending on the circumstances.
I think the debate is actually different as witnessed by Frank’s addition to the subject. He states that he disagrees with the dictionary definition. My whole point is that many if the more technical people out there are placing their own definition on words, in other words creating an “alternate” dictionary. For as long as this continues we will always find that business people for the most part will not properly engage.
Mark, I’m pretty obsessive, so save up my TV recordings to watch them in order, and read books from front to back – sorry to burst your bubble on that one. You should be much less certain about my TV viewing, reading and business habits than you claim to be.
That being said, I am not debating that sometimes things happen in a different order; I was taking exception to your use of the word “series” to mean an unordered list, when several definitions explicitly define it as an ordered list.