Vishwas Lele, Author at Applied Information Sciences

@vlele

Since PaaS and Windows Azure have both been in the news recently, thanks to a favorable report from Gartner, I thought it might be good timing to revisit a whitepaper I wrote on PaaS. And particularly, look at the differences between Azure IaaS vs. PaaS vs. SaaS.

There’s been a lot of talk about the different cloud-based services available today, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). While each of these services is unique, PaaS stands out from the mix. This is not to suggest that PaaS is somehow better than IaaS; that would be an improper comparison. Before we discuss any further, it’s important to answer the question: what is paas cloud computing? The diagram below can help demonstrate how PaaS simply builds on the capabilities offered by IaaS. For a more in-depth breakdown, view a blog here about all the PaaS options available..

But if you are a developer, IT shop or an ISV responsible for building, deploying and maintaining solutions, leveraging PaaS is where you reap the maximum cloud-computing benefits. Read More…

Vishwas Lele

@vlele

Our Windows Azure Media Services Manager (WAMS Manager) is a desktop-based application that makes it easy to upload, tag, encode and publish your media assets. It is designed to bring the benefits of Windows Azure Media Services to end users (typically business users responsible for managing media files) without the need to write any code.

(If you would rather skip the background and a high-level description of the overall architecture and simply get access to an evaluation copy of this tool, please email us directly.)

For everyone else, we are glad that you are taking the time to read this. Let’s start with some quick background…

Vishwas Lele

@vlele

Mobile solutions are already transforming the way we do business and interact with customers, partners and colleagues, but many organizations are still struggling to fully embrace the changes and opportunities. Today’s workforce wants mobile technologies that allow them to work when they want, how they want, and from where they want. (And not to mention using whatever device they want.) Here are 10 reasons to rethink your current mobile strategy and fully embrace the concept of enabling a true mobile workforce.

1. Your workers want lightweight, handheld devices.

Slim and lightweight tablets are making it possible for mobile workers to carry them virtually anywhere without burden. Who wants to carry ruggedized bulky laptops anymore?

2. Tap into tablet innovation.

Innovations are happening at a breakneck pace in the tablet world. Even warehouses are now manufacturing tablets. Fold-up, roll-up or paper tablet, anyone?

3. Simplified app acquisition.

The app economy is expected to grow to $150 billion by 2017. Users simply love the ease of acquiring (and disposing) apps. Most of them already rely on a collection of apps to get their jobs done everyday.

Download your FREE copy of Vishwas Lele’s ebook The App Economy: Coming to an Office™ Near You here.

Read More…

Vishwas Lele

@vlele

It was great fun presenting at Windows AzureConf 2013. I would like to thank the entire AzureConf team (Cory Fowler and Brady Gaster in particular) and my fellow speakers for their valuable feedback.

Click here to watch the video recording of my session on channel 9.

You can find recordings to all other sessions (including Scott Guthrie’s keynote) via this link.

Many of you asked me for a copy of the code I used during my session. You can find all my code snippets and slides here. (Of course this is just sample code so please treat it as such!)

Additionally, Pluralsight has graciously offered to make my newly-released Windows Azure IaaS Course for Developers available for FREE beginning Monday, April 29 at 9:00 a.m. MDT, and keep it freely available for 48 hours (ending 9:00 a.m. MDT on Wednesday, May 1). This is a three-hour course that goes in much more detail on the Windows Azure IaaS topics:

Windows Azure IaaS Course for Developers

Please feel free to send me additional questions via my Twitter account. Thanks!

Vishwas Lele

@vlele

Congratulations to StorSimple for building an innovative product that Microsoft was recently inspired to acquire. For those of you who have not had a chance to look into StorSimple yet, it offers an interesting hybrid storage capability: on-premises storage, combined with Windows Azure-based storage. Simply drop their storage appliance in your network and start using it as a storage device. You can expect capabilities similar to any enterprise-class storage device, including high availability through dual-controllers, battery-backed memory and RAID.

Under the covers, however, the StorSimple appliance will seamlessly spread your data between its three types of storage: high performance flash SSDs, high-capacity SAS disk drives and Windows Azure-based cloud storage — essentially giving you access to virtually unlimited amounts of storage. However, the technique to automatically move the data between high-cost and media is not new. For years, the industry has referred to this technique as HSM – Hierarchical Storage Management, or tiered storage. However, HSM products such as IBM Tivoli Storage Manager and Oracle’s SAM-QFS are considered high-end products and are typically outside the reach of most small- to medium-sized businesses. This is why some believe that StorSimple may have an opportunity to bring HSM to the masses.

So why is this interesting? Read More…

Vishwas Lele

@vlele

We recently deployed a five-node CRM 2011 topology using Windows Azure IaaS with the following objectives:

Understand how a multiple node CRM setup can be provisioned using Windows Azure IaaS. Specifically, how the networking capabilities offered by the Windows Azure platform (i.e. stateless load balancing) map to the CRM requirements.
Develop an automated way to provision and de-provision a CRM setup. This is not only useful for dev and test scenarios, but also for production scenarios where it is notoriously difficult to conduct capacity planning before acquiring the necessary hardware. For example, it is hard to know upfront what CRM functional building blocks (aka CRM roles) the business stakeholders will want to focus on, such as async processes, sandbox, reports, etc. By dynamically scaling out the “needed” features on demand, we can enhance the business agility of the CRM.
Offer our customers an educated choice between CRM Online (no setup costs but less control) and CRM On-Premises (extensive setup costs but complete control).
Take advantage of hybrid apps that combine CRM capabilities with Windows Azure services, such as Windows Azure Active Directory, mobile services, etc.

Vishwas Lele

@vlele

If you have been following any of the news about SharePoint 2013, you already know that the workflow capability has been enhanced significantly. The most important change is that workflows now execute outside SharePoint. Please refer to the diagram below. (This diagram is taken from MSDN with some annotations.)

As you can see, workflows are hosted externally. The external host for workflows can either be Windows Azure or customer-provided infrastructure. Why is this change so important? Recall all the knobs and switches we had to turn as SharePoint developers to prevent workflow execution from overwhelming the SharePoint farm. Read More…

Vishwas Lele

@vlele

Let me state at the outset, I have no intention to compare “JavaScript with HTML” and “C# with XAML” styles of building Windows Store Apps. This is a choice you have to make based on your skillset, reuse considerations (i.e. do you plan the target the app for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 OS), whether the functionality you are targeting for the app is already available as a web app or not, etc.

For last several years I have focused on the web technologies, starting with server-side technologies but lately client-side single-page style apps. So the h5c3js model is more suitable based my skillset. (Additionally, my knowledge of XAML is limited to WF serialization format.)

This model, which allows HTML-based native Windows 8 apps, is innovative in my opinion and I applaud the folks responsible for the language projection in Windows RT.

Vishwas Lele

@vlele

On Dec 6th, Brian Keller published an updated version of his very useful virtual machine and the corresponding hands-on-lab / demo scripts for Visual Studio 2012 Update 1.

This virtual machine includes existing (but upgraded) labs from 2010, as well as labs based on new features (see screenshot below).

I thought it would be nice to simply upload the VHD directly to Azure Blob Storage and provision an Azure PersistentVM based on it. This is surely the easiest way to try all the new ALM features. And it almost worked! Except that the firewall on the virtual machine is turned on. As a result, I could not RDP into the Azure-based machine.

Vishwas Lele

@vlele

With the SharePoint Conference 2012 behind us, I have been reflecting on our SharePoint journey so far…and on the road ahead. And what an incredible journey it has been! SharePoint has allowed AIS to build mission-critical applications for various large federal government agencies and commercial organizations. And not just ECM or document management systems (which are great workloads enabled by SharePoint) but enterprise-class applications for tens of thousands users (such as the FBI’s Delta Project), built using SharePoint platform elements such as workflows, lists, libraries, search, etc.

This blog entry is comprised of two parts. The first part will focus on the SharePoint journey so far. Through a series of short video clips, I will present some of the key insights we have derived over the many years of building custom applications on SharePoint. We will end this the first part with a short demonstration of SharePoint-based Case Management application that brings together many of the key concepts. The second part will focus on the road ahead and the most important enhancements made in SharePoint 2013. Read More…

BlogPosts by Vishwas Lele - Page 8