April CTO Breakfast

I attended Phil Windley’s CTO breakfast this morning. As always we had a good discussion on all things technology. I found a couple of interesting ideas from this meeting.

First off, Nathan Conger from Novell showed us some of the latest features of the SUSE Enterprise Linux desktop. I must admit that it’s been a while since I’ve played with Linux desktops, but this latest version (available at openSUSE.org) looked really good. With multiple desktops on a rotating cube and the recent enhancements to the OpenOffice, I can start to see Linux as a corporate desktop replacement for some users. Especially if they spend most of their time in email, on the web, and using MS Office.

Another interesting item was a presentation on WeRelate.org. A non profit geneaology search engine that uses a user contributed wiki to fine tune / direct the search engine’s behavior. This site is unique in it’s mashup of a vertical search engine driven by an integrated web 2.0 user community. Another interesting twist is the adoption of community controlled related words / terms to make sure users semantically find what their keyword search is looking for.