Foreword

Dear Architect,

We have been actively working on enhancing your experience both in terms of delivery channel and high quality content. To do so, we have decided to stop our print edition and become a fully digital resource. With the dynamic and flexible digital format, you can search inside articles, send by email, and access related information and multimedia with a simple mouse-click. And, of course, you can still print the whole magazine or an individual article if you want to.

Let's start from delivery channels. Some readers were already receiving the Journal as a quarterly newsletter containing a link to the PDF. Those subscribed to the printed edition are now receiving this newsletter too, sent to the email account used when you originally subscribed.[1] This newsletter is now enriched with a selection of relevant architecture articles, featuring content published by Microsoft as well as other media groups and independent voices. The newsletter frequency becomes monthly (the Journal will keep its quarterly cycle). Content won't be limited to articles: You'll also get taped interviews, demos, case studies, gadgets, calls for papers, and a wealth of other resources to help you in your work as an architect, aligning technology to the business.

The editorial coverage is also being re-aligned and enhanced. We'll continue to cover current and forward-thinking topics of interest to the industry (we are working these days on "Architecture during uncertain times: Giving value back to the business thru smart technology decisions"), looking at issues from development to infrastructure from the architect's eye. Our coverage of concrete platform solutions will be extended to new depths. You'll find useful information about putting ideas into practice in both the featured articles themselves and the complementary readings through our partnership with MSDN Magazine for software developers and Technet Magazine for IT professionals.

Dear reader, while discontinuing the print magazine represents a disruption, we are excited about the improvements to relevance, accuracy, and quantity of information we will be able to deliver to your inbox.

Diego Dagum
Editor-in-chief

[1] You don't lose your right to unsubscribe to this newsletter.
Find how at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/aa699369.aspx.

Contents

Mapping Applications to the Cloud, by Darryl Chantry
Will all applications run in the Cloud? Should you attempt to port all of your existing applications to the Cloud? Should all your new applications be developed in the Cloud?What is this Cloud thing, anyway? These are a few of the questions that arise whenever you start thinking about using cloud services.

Toward an Enterprise Business Motivation Model, by Nick Malik
This article outlines a new structure that can be used to model a wide array of business motivations in context with the structure and activities of the business. Adopting this structure can support an effort toward greater enterprise architecture maturity.

Developing Parallel Programs, by Ranjan Sen, Ph.D.
Parallel programming is becoming the mainstream paradigm in day-to-day information processing. Its aim is to build the fastest programs on parallel computers. This article shows how the methodologies for developing a parallel program can be put into integrated frameworks.

Enterprise Social Computing, by Kendrick Efta
Starting small, certain enterprises reproduced the effects of consumer-focused social computing technologies within the firewall. As success stories are being seen and case studies take shape, organizations can begin to plan social computing investments that involve customers, partners, and external communities in order to harness all that collective intelligence.

A Pragmatic Approach to Describing Solution Architectures, by Mike Walker
Production environments often fail to realize the solution architectures described in the documentation. In this article, we look at how we view, approach, and maintainarchitecture descriptions that will help guide decision making at the implementation stage.

A Language for Software Architecture, by J.D. Meier
Building software applications involves many important decisions. By organizing these decisions as a language and a set of mental models, we can organize and share knowledge more effectively. Rather than a sea of information, we can quickly browse hot spots for relevant solutions.

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This article was published in the Architecture Journal, an online publication produced by Microsoft. For more articles from this publication, please visit the Architecture Journal Web site.