There’s an unwritten rule in the software business that any integration between two systems must be described as “seamless,” the result being that the word no longer has any meaning. My favorite seamless integration storyline took place years ago when IBM had a joint marketing pact with Vignette, and offered “seamless integration” between the WebSphere application server and the Vignette content management system. In fact, the two systems weren’t integrated at all by any definition of the word “integrated” that I know about. We had to write our own interfaces to move data between them. The funny thing is, that is seamless integration if you think about it, in that there’s no seam between two things that are not connected at all. For example, my shirt neatly integrates sleeves, cuffs, pocket, collar . . . but not seamlessly. There are seams all over the place. Whereas the shirt is seamlessly… Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Vignette
Integration Chickens
Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves . . . — William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act I. Sc. 2 The Programmer finds that the integration chickens have come home to roost . . . I remember when Vignette first arrived at our company and the people who had made the decision to buy it would show up at meetings in their complimentary Vignette polo shirts and explain that the project was going to be delayed just a bit more because they still couldn’t work the bugs out of the Vignette installation — but hey, willya look at these free shirts we got?! Well, we’ve been trying to work the bugs out of it for three months now, and to integrate it with IBM’s WebSphere for a client project. We tried Vignette 5.5 with WebSphere 5.1, which… Read more →