In recent Advisors, I have talked about data security and perimeter security (see "Are You at the Controls? Do You Know Where Your Data Is?" 10 June 2009 and "Is Your Perimeter Secure?" 17 June 2009). The feedback I have received indicates that it would be useful to talk about some basic concepts and terminology of security. So let's start with this question: "What is security?"

Business process management (BPM) is a business science applied by organizations to evaluate various aspects of how work is completed. Today, the term implies incorporating methods based on technology and nontechnology for completing that work. This term is also used by some vendors to describe new and/or updated products that provide automated workflow technology, for the most part, within a service-oriented architecture (SOA). This Executive Update discusses a decision framework for evaluating BPM technologies.

This is the fifth and last of a series of Executive Updates in which I have been presenting and interpreting the results of a recent Cutter Consortium survey on the subject of open source Java frameworks (OSJFs). In Part V, I move on to the findings for development/testing, middleware, and comprehensive OSJFs. Then, before summing up the series and to put the OSJF findings into context, we take a look at the non-Java frameworks that respondents have been using.

Collaboration is a hot topic within Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 technologies. It seems that everybody wants it, but what does it really mean for an enterprise? How can collaboration help improve internal processes and development? And how can it improve interactions with customers and partners? In this Webinar, Mike Rosen, Director of Cutter's Enterprise Architecture practice, first looks at what we mean by collaboration and why we do it. Then, he looks at the impact on traditional business transaction processing when we try to add collaboration. Mike will discuss a detailed example of an extended business transaction and the benefits it can deliver, and finally he'll take a look at the application architecture necessary to integrate Enterprise 2.0 technologies into real business transactions at an enterprise level.