Digg.com always has tons of lists of things. This site has a cool list of open source alternatives to commercial software.

http://www.pdfconverter.com/home/resources/articles/entrepreneur-softwar...

EA exists to align IT strategy with Business strategy while minimizing long-term IT costs. EA uses several tools to do this including Roadmaps, Technology Standards, and Application Release Plans. An Architecture Review Board (ARB) is used to ensure projects align with the long-term strategy.

EA has to leverage as much as possible to be successful. EA shouldn't try to boil the ocean. There are a lot of inputs that make EA

I found this blog and thought it was pretty cool. This guy is a VM specialist but has some great articles on the future of technology. I didn't see anything on 3-D printing but it's still worth a read.

http://www.trendcaller.com/

While talking with a couple of guys from Canonical, they pointed me in the direction of a tool called Likewise. This utility will allow you to connect an Ubuntu desktop to an Active Directory. It actually works too. It's a client-side application so no servers need to be touched. You just go to the Add/Remove programs, find and install Likewise and away you go. You will need someone with an administrative password on the domain in order to actually add the PC to the domain. Pretty cool though.

In looking at some open source Business Intelligence options, I found two that look pretty good - JasperSoft and Pentaho. If anyone has any feedback on either or both of these, I would definitely appreciate it. They both look pretty complete and mature. I know looks can be deceiving. I'm especially wary because these are reporting tools and they can probably do wonders with graphics and charts so I'm sure they can make their web sites look nice.

I'm also intrigued by Alfresco. That seems like a pretty nice document management solution. I haven't tried it yet but I've read that it integrates very well with Zimbra too. Could be something to check out.

For my open source desktop, I'm looking for tools that are cross-platform, open industry standard (MS) file formats, are easy to use and have active development communities.

Here is my open source desktop for business right now:
-- SUSE Linux - because of its AD and LDAP integration.

I've been thinking about what my scope and direction should be. I'm a one-man team so I can't take on too much but I still need to deliver value. Here are my thoughts:

Roadmaps Drive Everything (Roadmaps are 5-year release plans for the key applications in our portfolio. They are grouped by business area)
-- Update and maintain the roadmaps
-- Meet quarterly with each area to update them
Research to stay ahead of the curve
-- This will be more challenging without any for-pay analyst services
-- Focus on Open Source technology options and research requests

In our current cost-savings mode, we are looking at Linux for some of our desktops. I'm struggling to get Ubuntu to work on a corporate environment. Specifically getting it to authenticate using either LDAP or AD. I can access our network resources and script in ways to mount my network drives but it seems to be a challenge to take a desktop-oriented free linux distribution (Ubuntu 8.10) and get it to work seamlessly with LDAP or AD.

I found this site:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CorporateUbuntu

I got an email from a gentleman who is launching a new job board web site with a specific focus on IT Architects. I think this is a great idea and hope that it works out for him.

The site is http://www.itarchitectjobs.com/. Take a look. As of this writing it looks like they are just getting things started but it’s got a lot of potential.

Steve Stidhem

I heard from Edward Lee that Forrester mentioned eacouncil.com on one of their webinars. I created this site because Forrester didn’t have anything for us to use to share ideas with each other. Feel free to join and maybe we can use this site for its intended purpose. I know I have a lot of ideas around EA having done it for three companies now over the last six and a half years. I know from my interactions in the Gartner EA Leadership Council and the Forrester EA Council that there are a lot of smart people out there with some great ideas.

This is an example of a First Look form. The form should be filled out after the concept for a project has been defined but the technology has not been chosen. This can be very helpful in ensuring that project teams go down the right path for their solutions. It can also be used as an integration point between the Architecture team and other teams, such as Security and ITIL processes.