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links for 2007-07-08

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  1. If you want an industry problem that requires enterpriseyness, I got one for ya.

    Suppose you are a book publishing company. You distribute books to many different distributors. You distribute some books to some distributors but not all for various reasons.

    Each distributor has their own particular requirements to accept a book: someone want metadata about the number of pages and crap like that, others want a set of thumbnail cover JPGs; some want Word format, others want PDF, a few want Postscript. You can't afford to blow any of them off.

    So, you need to create a system for producing and packaging up books (of which there are hundreds of thousands, with hundreds or thousands being produced every month) along with their metadata (which, again, can vary drastically from distributor to distributor) electronically. This needs to be done sanely and efficiently.

    It is absolutely the very heart of your business and too many mistakes are a harbinger of death and the cause for meetings where heads roll. Serious business, mang.

    This is not at all a hypothetical example. It is extremely realistic albeit specialized.

    It is one where something cooked up over the weekend will not suffice. Chew on that, mang. The real killer is the absolute necessity to produce fully formatted Word files.

    anonymous for thisJuly 9, 2007 @ 9:26 am