This Stephen Hawkins article on “How to build a time machine” (all that’s needed is a wormhole, the Large Hadron Collider or a rocket that goes really,really fast) is well worth a read.

The concept of time travel was, for most of my life, simply science fiction, but it’s now looking more & more like science fact. Most science-fiction plots involving time-travel tend to involve travelling to the past; this, however, is not part of the emerging time travelling theory, moving forward in time seems the only option.

We may not be able to go back in time but we humans have become adept at “capturing time” and packaging it for reuse later on; our early ancestors spent valuable time crafting  tools and honing skills that they figured would repay any time spent many times over; they were in fact investing in time assets.

Software is perhaps human kind’s greatest time asset generator, similar in concept to the tools and machines we’ve always built, but nearly totally frictionless and with the potential of immense returns on the asset once the initial upfront cost has been met. Yet many are leaving our formal education systems with no idea of the power of software to harness time, to save it, shape it and reuse it again & again. They have not been taught to program.

I’m not suggesting here that every student be forced to study computer science, no, just for them to be introduced to the practical everyday uses of programming (with some formal theory as a foundation) – Applied Computing, if you like. In fact, if hardcore geeks consider the course to be rubbish and refuse to take it, then you know you’re hitting the right note.

At a minimum, everybody should be taught the basics and the possibilities of spreadsheets.  Although using Excel for this purpose would be more “saleable” once students hit the streets and join the work force, I would think that Google Docs Spreadsheets would be a better option as a teaching tool, because:

• Firstly, it would be cheaper, no licences, minimum hardware requirement (anything with a browser) and the collaboration features of Goggle Docs in general are ideally suited for use in education.
• Secondly, such training should not be primarily vocational, it should be about learning the possibilities of end-user programming.
• Excel’s macro language is VBA, a noble language with a long distinguished history, but a language that its owners have abandoned. Google Doc’s scripting language is JavaScript, like VB a language that has often been much maligned, but unlike VB, it’s a language with a future, it’s the magic behind the browser. So students would not only learn the fundamentals of spreadsheets but would through the courses’ scripting modules learn a language that lies at the heart of their everyday computing experience.
• Google Docs can also be manipulated via a web-based API and can be embedded in web pages. So again students would learn the fundamentals of REST and basic HTML markup, the underlying architecture of the WWW .

Studying such a course, would not only teach a useful life skill (the manipulation of numbers and lists and the automation of such tasks to create time assets) but would also provide an understanding of the building blocks of modern IT.

We need more, and better prepared (dare I say, trained) citizen programmers; there’ll never be enough professional programmers to go around and even if there were, the cost will continue to be prohibitive in many situations (both the financial cost and the time cost of keeping professional programmers aligned with (or even aware of) the business needs of multitudes of organisations).

Just like the right to bear arms was regarded as a necessity in the frontier society of 18th century America, the right (and the basic skills) to program is a necessity on our modern IT frontier. Not everybody will use (or indeed even be capable of using, or allowed to use) that right, but for millions of others, having the power to build time assets for themselves or their businesses will be one of their most prized skills.

Although the announcement in April was essentially vapour-ware (no Worksheet Server V3, no Amazon EC2 images), one very significant actual deliverable was the addition to SourceForge of the Palo Excel Add-in sources (GPL licence).  This, at least for me, is very welcome as it now means that Palo is truly open source.  Prior to this, the server sources were GPL’d but not the main front-end tool used by the vast majority of end-users. In fact, the deep Excel integration offered by the Add-In is Palo’s main attraction to the business-focused “datasmiths” who make up the bulk of the product’s user-base.

The GPL’ing of the Add-in has removed the last barrier that had stopped me, as an independent consultant, from committing to the platform.  While the ‘freeness’ of open source is nice, it’s the source that really attracts me.  With access (and rights) to the source, I have no worries that the terms of use or indeed the product’s core functionality can be arbitrarily changed.  Having the source also means I can delve as deep or as shallow as I need to into the inners of the product, improving my understanding of the technology (both bugs and functionality) as needs dictate.

What has Palo BI Suite to offer, besides being open source?  Well, even if Jedox’s offering consisted of mediocre products, being open source as I explained above is in itself a huge advantage. Having an agnostic FOSS pivot engine that can be shared across many technologies, from Excel to Open Office to a PHP based website, is extremely useful.

However, Jedox’s BI suite is far from mediocre.  Palo is now a very polished and powerful in-memory MOLAP server with excellent integration with Excel (through the Add-In, or if you take out a support contract, via ODBO/MDX powered Pivot Tables).  The addition of a browser delivered spreadsheet (Worksheet Server V3) will add significantly to the product’s street appeal.  Version 3 differs significantly from previous WSS versions; being open source is one, but the entire product was also completely redesigned to meet the challenge posed by web-based products from the likes of Zoho, EditGrid and of course Google Docs (not to mention the ever-present threat of a MS response). Web-based spreadsheets are becoming a commodity, so Jedox’s response was to open source the product but at the same time make it more usable for real-world business analytics.

Current browser-delivered spreadsheets suffer from two shortcomings;

• Spreadsheets with large numbers of inter-related cells (typical of business models ) tend to perform poorly, in many cases being unusable compared with Excel or Open Office.
• Only available as hosted SaaS; not a major problem for some businesses, but for others, services outside the corporate firewall, especially for sensitive information such as what-if, budgeting and sales analysis models, are a no-no.

WWS V3 gets around both problems.  Performance is improved by the use of Palo as the spreadsheet’s pivot engine but also by the “lazy calculation” of related cells i.e. a cell that’s not visible, and itself not yet referenced by other visible cells, remains uncalculated, saving on the constant churning that can effect large models.  This combined with a DynaRange concept means templates and models react dynamically and efficiently to the ever changing datasets being presented to the sheets from the Palo OLAP server.   The look’n’feel is very similar to Excel with even array-formulae being fully supported.

The second problem of only-behind-the-firewall access is solved by the open source GPL licence and by the front-end being coded in PHP (very approachable to most in-house support staff and even the odd accountant).  The core (the bit not yet released) is, as far as I know, C++, so is likely to join Palo Server as being highly efficient and well engineered but perhaps beyond the technical skills of most.

The other elements to the BI Suite are the web-based OLAP-centric ETL Server (now, I see, with Groovy and Javascript scripting support) and the Supervision Server (only in paid Enterprise version) which offers fine-tuned access control and monitoring, plus drill-through functionality from Palo cells, back to the ETL fact tables. The Enterprise Edition also offers a multi-core version of the Palo server along with SAP and ODBO/MDX connectivity.

If multi-dimensional analysis and budgeting could benefit your business and spreadsheets are your preferred method of communicating and working with such analysis, you need to check this out.  Palo is a well kept secret (at least outside of Germany), hardly ever mentioned by the mainstream BI community, but don’t let that put you off; this is one of the best solutions out there, it’s open source but also comes with the backup of a professional company that can offer not just technical support but also implementation know-how (Jedox eats its own dog-food, being both a BI consultancy and development house).

Update July 4th 2009:

Beta Community Edition is now available.   I downloaded and installed WWS V3 and gave it a quick test-drive; looks good, Palo interface has the look’n'feel of the Excel Add-in and the general spreadsheet functionality is very Excel-like, incluing CTRL-Shift-Enter to assign array formulae.  Overall, the Palo BI suite offers a intuitive end-user-friendly interface; from download to effective use in less than 60 minutes, how many BI tools could you say that about?

Also, in two weeks time a pivot-table friendly ODBO driver will be included for free with the Palo Excel Add-in (previously only available to those with a Jedox support contract).

Why not join me on Twitter at gobansaor?

Unfortunately, by Monday afternoon all was not well. The jot.com domain no longer pointed at JotSpot, instead it was “parked” at Network Solutions a domain name registrar. Now this generally happens to domains when they’re not renewed or your credit card company refuses to honour your request for payment. If JotSpot were a two-guys-in-a-garret operation you could see how this could happen, but JotSpot is now owned by Google.

Google’s neglect of the product and its secrecy over future plans has been a major concern to the original service’s loyal, (but I would imagine, declining) user base, but yesterday that neglect hit a new low.

The problem was fixed relatively quickly, but due to DNS migration issues, 24 hours later, many users of the service are still locked out. That’s a problem, but hey, s**t happens. What’s really astounding is Google’s complete silence on the subject over on the JotSpot support forum.

Makes you wonder how much of your commercial or indeed personal data assets you should entrust with such an organisation. Big brother may be watching you, but he’s not about to demean himself by actually communicating with you.

I’ve had this sort of problem with another Google Apps services in the past and I’ve seen problems with gmail similar to those experienced by Jeff Nolan. I’m about to launch my www.gobansaor.com business site and my intention was to host it under Google Apps (which rumour has, will soon incorporate some variation on JotSpot). My dilemma is now whether to forge ahead with my original plan to use Google Apps or use a local Irish hosting service. Or, maybe I should fork out the $50 fee for the Google Apps Premier Edition with its “24/7 assistance, including phone support for critical issues”.

Decisions, decisions.

UPDATE:

Two days after the event, Google acknowledges the problem.

UPDATE: 28th Feb 2008

JotSpot is reborn as Google Sites.

Initial quick look; I like it, keeps a lot of the simplicity of the pure Wiki side of JotSpot (the “structured  Wiki”as an alternative to a database/”application builder” is no more).  But the integration with the rest of Google Docs is to be welcomed if a bit limited at the moment (documents must be published first from within Google Docs and their URLs then  “cut and pasted” into the Sites application).

The new Google Spreadsheet’s forms functionality should make up for the loss of the JotSpot database functionality, at least for me.  Having the ability to point a CNAME at the resulting wikis is also very useful for client project collaboration.

I’m not sure who’s right, but my instinct (or is that my prejudice) would be towards the Google view. But one thing I am sure of, is ,that as the the cloud (aka the Internet) and “personal computing devices” (aka desktops, laptops,PDAs, mobile phones) fight it out for dominance, the future of the business LAN as the prime computing backbone is looking increasingly untenable. For SMEs and consumers at least, the WAN (in the form of the Internet) is the new LAN.

Not that LANs will disappear totally, the necessity to provide local wireless access and the address limitations of IPV4, plus the need to share printers etc. will see to that (a least in the short-term, but mobile 3G networks, IPV6 and services such as PrinterAnywhere may eventually address these issues). Also, the ability to act a local cache for backups and data access will ensure the LAN’s continued existence at least until Korean levels of broadband speed/availability becomes the norm in the rest of the developed world.

But what about shared private data, email/calendar, backups, security and last but not least, business applications; the big five “business” reasons that lie behind the justification for must organisations’ (and some families’) LAN setups?

Shared Private Data

Fast ubiquitous broadband and online data stores such as S3, SimpleDB, Microsoft Live Workspace and eventually GDrive, will mean that for many small and medium companies the cost of maintaining in-house data servers will no longer make economic sense. Even large organisations, who have in many cases already out-sourced their data centres to the likes of IBM and are already operating VPNs over private and public WANs, may also move parts of their data infrastructure to the internet cloud. Added value online storage services such as provided by Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets will also drive individuals and organisations in this direction.

Email / Shared Calendars

One word Google Apps. Okay, that’s 2 words and a bit simplistic but GMail and Google Calendar and particularly the premium Google Apps versions represent the future shape of business communication systems. Add in Wiki-like collaborative tools such as Google Docs and Spreadsheets (and the long awaited Googlified JotSpot) suddenly the idea of any SME running its own Exchange servers becomes harder to justify.

Data Backups

Even in current setups, an effective backup policy requires that data be moved of-site, so online backup services are a natural progression. In essence the LAN is working as a local cache to quickly assemble the backup and prepare it for transportation to another location (the boss’s home study most likely!). Online backup will probably be the first cloud service that businesses adopt. But as transactional data increasingly gets recorded off-site most of an organisation’s data will already be “backed up”; so, future backup services will be of the intra-cloud, belt’n'braces type e.g. a service that makes encrypted copies of your data stored on one service and either stores them in another online location or maybe burns the data to DVD and deposits it in a physical secure store.

Security

LANs are seen as the modern data equivalent of a medieval town with its firewall playing the role of the town fortifications. But just as increased mobility. collaboration and newer technology put an end to the justification and utility of walled towns, a similar fate awaits the firewalled LAN.

The explosion in the number of workers (especially knowledge workers, free agents and senior executives) operating outside the local network means that companies must already address data security in the context of public networks. VPNs can of course bring the LAN environment to the mobile worker (even a home/tiny business can use something like Hamachi VPN). But VPNs will not extend the LAN but replace it; increasingly to be used as “private pipes” between trusted peers and cloud servers.

For example, I use Hamachi to communicate with my EC2 instances and to transfer data between my laptop and my main desktop PC; something I can do securely and effortlessly from my laptop using any private or public network. As such, the firewall that really keeps my data secure is the one on my laptop not the one built into my LAN router.

You might look at the recent spate of data loses as evidence that companies should batten down the hatches and throw away the key but I’d argue that it’s a failure to face up to and manage the risks (and opportunities) of mobile data that has caused most if not all of these breaches. The first step is to focus on the “Wifi-enabled, easily-stolen laptop connected to a dodgy airport public network” as the “standard” against which your firm’s (and family’s) data security will be judged and eventually tested.

Applications

For many small businesses the business applications they use tend to be either single user packaged apps or even more likely, Excel. Having a shareable cloud-based data store is all they require to abandon their LAN. But for those businesses that rely on sophisticated multi-user systems replacing in-house servers will be more difficult. There are three options as I see it:

• Keep servers in-house but purchase or lease them as pre-configured “black boxes”. When a new version or bug fix is required, the vendor remotely updates the software; no on-site technical expertise required. Likewise, the vendor remotely monitors the hardware and slots in a new pre-configured box as required. You may argue that the LAN remains and yes it does, but this sort of setup would only be required where high-speed and reliable broadband is not yet available or where any interruption in server connection is not an option.
• Use remote pay-as-you-go, invoke-as-you-need virtual servers such as Amazon’s EC2 or Scotland’s Flexiscale. Again, using pre-configured virtual machines that can be either purchased or leased from software vendors removing the need to have in-house server or application expertise.
• And finally, the ideal for most companies, SaaS, Software as a Service, pioneered by Salesforce.com and now starting to gain traction across not just CRM, but accounting, and even full scale ERP. Even the mighty Sage is starting to feel the winds of change! Very small businesses are also well catered for, e.g. FreeAgentCentral for UK based freelancers.

Times they are a-changin’, migration of some or all data to the internet cloud is inevitable, large organisations will most likely build their own cloud, smaller businesses will need to adapt to the cloud-as-a-service model. Organisations need to start thinking about it now as all future IT investments need to factor this phenomenon in, even if the reaction is to reject it!

I’m using the free (up to six mind maps) version of MeidMeister but like other such services that require a monthly subscription for access to the unlimited premium edition I’m unlikely to bite. I’m afraid I’m spoiled by the free offerings of the likes of Google Apps and the pay-as-you-go offerings of Amazon Ec2/S3 so the idea of paying a fixed monthly charge for a ‘point-solution’ doesn’t appeal.

Perhaps their long term strategy is to be purchased by the likes of Google and indeed the product would fit in beautifully with existing Google Apps offerings right down to the wiki-like sharing facilities. Nevertheless, well worth checking out the free version and if sharing and collaborating of multiple mind maps is your thing (schools come to mind) then the €3.21 monthly charge is very reasonable. Or perhaps you could use their sponsoring facility to pay for a premium licence for your local school.

While reading Nick Carr’s post on the CapGemini’s partnership with Google to push Google Apps I recalled that another sign of Web2.0 adoption within the enterprise was Siemens use of Facebook as an intranet. To obtain a reference link I opened Google Reader and searched on “Facebook Siemens” as I figured I must have read it on a blog post. Up comes an entry in my del.icio.us account with a link to a Robert Scoble comment on a Techcrunch post. Google Reader Search included my del.icio.us account in the search because I’ve subscribed to its feed. (Before you ask, I subscribe to my own feed as a “second chance” reminder to re-read the stuff I’ve tagged as sometimes I only glance at articles to see if they are of interest, tag them if they appear to be and return when I have more time to fully digest them).

I now can search both my “knowledge stores” using the same interface. Admittedly my del.icio.us searches are restricted to meta data i.e. the tags/descriptions I’ve assigned to the link (and the link’s own heading text), but as I tend to over-egg the pudding when it comes to tags I can live with that restriction.

This opens up all sorts of easy to implement knowledge management (KM) scenarios for both individuals and organisations (previous attempts at corporate KM have been, to say the least, a disaster), possible examples:

• Students and teachers recording notes and lectures using Google Docs , which can then be subscribed to via RSS and subsequently searched using Google Reader Search.
• Same as above but using blog posts as the recording mechanism.
• Short notes and records (time sheets?) could be recorded using Twitter, again subscribed to via feeds and thus enabled for inclusion in a searchable knowledge store.

This type of knowledge sharing is not suitable for highly sensitive data but is ideal for community data and for non-sensitive/semi-private data (such as my del.icio.us bookmarks). Search enabled Google Reader may prove to be the killer app that RSS and KM have been waiting for.

• Google Docs & Spreadsheets are ‘good enough’ for most of the trivial lists and calculations I require in my personal life and indeed for most business purposes as well, at least those that don’t require a pivot table.
• These spreadsheets and documents are important but not necessarily in the ‘state secret/I-could-tell-but-then-I’d-have-to-kill-you’ scale of things, by building them in Google Apps they are securely backed-up and easily accessible.
• A lot of the spreadsheets are collaborative in nature, and in the collaboration field, Google Spreadsheets just gets better and better.

Today, Google announced further additions to their spreadsheet product. The AutoFill feature adds functionality I’ve come to expect from Excel, but with a twist, integration with Google Sets. But the additions that really caught my eye were the new data import functions. Now again, Excel has had web queries since Excel97, and it always amazed me why online pretenders to the throne tended to ignore the most common source of tabular data on the web, the HTML table; something to do with the great XML/Tables divide I guess!

Google now not only fixes this omission,providing access to HTML tables and comma/tab separated file, but also provides access to RSS/ATOM and generic XML sources. All that’s missing now are functions that can read other common online data files formats such as Excel, MSAccess, XBase and of course SQLite.

This addition of HTML import support and the AutoFill feature will further reduce the number of times I’ll need to fire up Excel for personal tasks, but the RSS/ATOM/XML import feature also has potential as a tool in my micro-ETL toolbox. Using Excel as my only micro-ETL tool is possible when the data is either already in Excel/CSV or accessible via a COM API or via ODBC drivers, otherwise I can call-in either Ruby, Talend, Kettle or even RSSBus. But now I’ve another option, if the data is public and published as RSS/ATOM or some other variation on XML, I can use Google Spreadsheets to fetch the data and import the resulting tabular dataset into Excel via a Web Query or via the GData API.

One other thing. While researching this post, looking up links etc. I used another new feature Google added today, Google Reader’s new Search facility. As most of my references are discovered via the blogs I subscribe to, the ability to restrict searches to that subset of the web is fantastic; I even used it to search through my own blog posts! If del.icio.us offered the same option it would make re-finding stuff even easier. I did try to use Google Co-Op to build a search engine restricted to my del.icio.us links but it didn’t seem to like the volume of links (4000 odd) I sent it.

The macros can be saved as bookmarks and can also be shared with others (although I couldn’t get the sharing feature to work). I’ve already automated a number of tedious tasks and had hoped to use it with Google Spreadsheets, alas either the nature of Goggle’s JavaScript or inbuilt protection within Goggle Apps stopped the recorder for working. Pity, as there’s three things missing from Google Spreadsheets as it stands, pivot table support, offline ability and macro support. Google Gears will undoubtedly solve the offline problem, charts are essentially a graphical pivot so I guess a table pivot must be a possibility, iMacros or something like it could perform the duties that VBA provides to Excel. As with Office macros, security issues may well dampen the parade – iMacros allows access to the PC’s file system and a macro can be invoked from a bookmarklet camouflaged as a standard link – but I’ll not worry until (or if) the product goes mainstream.

From an ETL point of view iMacros can act as a powerful web scraping tool and as a automated form-filler. There’s also a commercial version of the product ($499.00) that exposes the tool via an ActiveX API which means Excel/VBA can be used as a web scraping/ form filling environment. If the price tag is too steep then the excellent scRUBTt is both free /open source and is ideal if you’re scraping a lot of data on a frequent basis while for small or once off tasks this equally free and open source Firefox extension is good enough.