At M&S, we are going virtual all the way. We have delivered a number of virtualized environments for customers. Some have been for Oracle Middleware solutions, some for complete Microsoft domains. Some for open source system. And many for development instances.

We have tinkered with going totally virtual for own infrastructure over the years, but decided to avoid biting the bullet for a number of reasons: migration time/effort has typically been at the top of the list. But with the improvements in virtualization technology, advantages proven now over years, apparent “stickiness” of the leading players, our own maturity in this space, and general adoption by the community at large (more clearly read, “readily available support”), we are diving in.

Over the next few weeks and months, each component of the M&S infrastructure will be moved to virtual machines. Certain details of our infrastructure will not be posted on this blog for security reasons, but there are team members working on this who will try to keep the blog up-to-date. If you are interested in how things are going, feel free to contact us. We are excited about this ride.

A few of us have got some writer’s cramp (is there such a thing when typing?) from writing an excellent WebCenter 11g book.

Oracle Corporation has recently published a white paper written by M&S Consulting, where we take the opportunity to outline an integration approach to Salesforce.com using Oracle BPEL.

A Technical Case Study – Creating an Oracle BPEL adapter to integrate with Salesforce.com - Feb 2009

Below is the introduction to the article, which goes on to detail (with step-by-step screenshots) how to achieve integration with Salesforce.com…

SOA Labels

Among their many characteristics, all too often SOA projects have been labeled in their worst moments as:

• Overly complex in architecture, design, and communication to the organization
• Lacking the ability to control costs during implementation and maintenance
• Difficult to attract and retain talent with valuable experience, deep skills, and real success

It’s Not SOA’s Fault

Guess what. None of these are characteristics of SOA, but instead…

We are asked this question quite a lot. Find out some unique insights on M&S Consulting in this article.

The M&S business model is created from the group up to deliver repeated success, consistently: a great benefit to our organization and yours.

M&S has taken our years of Identity Management with products from companies like Oracle to integrate with Google’s popular “Google Apps” offering.  By leveraging an existing Identity Management infrastructure, organizations can seamlessly integrate with Google Apps assets like calendar, mail, documents, sites, and more without requiring their users to login, let alone even have any knowledge of Googe Apps usernames/passwords.

M&S is comfortable with the SAML protocol that Google relies on and can implement an appropriate handshake with a variety of tools and languages, including Java, .NET, PHP, and Perl.

Contact us if you are an existing Google Apps Premier or Education Edition customer that wants to leverage Single Sing-On (SSO).

M&S Consulting is excited to announce that we have launched MedPivot.com, a resource for Medical Jobs, Careers, and Resources.  The site serves as a complete Medical Business and Career Exchange, providing members will the ability to collaborate through forums/blogs, post jobs, apply to jobs, find companies, find recruiters, locate conferences, and access valuable medical news and journals.

We will be providing more information (including technical information on this Web 2.0 site) in a case study, so be sure to visit or subscribe to our newsletter to be automatically notified.

Over the years, M&S Consulting has acquired quite a bit of web real estate.  We have shared information through our own web sites, partner web precenses, industry trade journals, magazines, and more.  This recently released www.mandsconsulting.com web site will serve as a single source for M&S Consulting information and knowledge sharing for our visitors.  Subscribe to our blog (through RSS or email) and our email newsletter to stay up-to-date.  Information from the years will be included here and we will be writing new information often.

M&S Consulting has sponsored a website called 8-a.com, which is a site focused on the US SBA’s 8(a) Certification.

M&S Consulting was selected to apply the Six Sigma methodology to process improvement and defect reduction in the healthcare industry. The client is part of a large healthcare system and brought M&S Consulting on board to help in their goal of making the Radiology Department a Center of Excellence.