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6 <title>Petter Reinholdtsen: Standardize on protocols and formats, not vendors and applications
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15 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen
</a>
23 <div class=
"title">Standardize on protocols and formats, not vendors and applications
</div>
24 <div class=
"date">30th March
2009</div>
25 <div class=
"body"><p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
26 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure. It is the
27 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
28 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
29 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
30 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
31 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
34 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
35 independently of the server applications. One can even allow users to
36 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
37 protocol and format. In the normal case, only one client application
38 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
39 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
40 blocked from doing so.
</p>
42 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
43 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
44 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
45 requirements change.
</p>
47 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
48 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
49 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.
</p>
52 <div class=
"tags">Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard
</a>.
</div>
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