This week while helping my company host their Information Workers Conference in Nashville, I heard a new technology term.  The term was mashup.  When I heard the term used in conversation, I immeadiately knew what type of technology the person was refering.  I must have been a little hungry, because all I could think of was mashed potatoes.

    This made me wonder where this new term came from and is it here to stay? So to find out more, I went to Wikipedia. The site described a mashup as "a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool."  This doesn't really sound like anything new or groundbreaking to me.  Companies have been using APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) for years. Most examples to mashups refered to the integration of data from sites like Craig's List , My Space, and Google Maps. To me a mashup is just a new hip phrase coined by the X and Y Generations to describe the meshing of web services, widgets, and snippets of code to create a more "cool", one stop web site.

    Later that night, I was reading an article on KMWorld and the term mashup was mentioned again. I was drawn to read the article not because of the reference to mashups, but because the author thought that the enterprise poral is at a "dead end".  (My Comments.) Twice in one day this supposed new technology term crossed my path. The author refered to mashups as "poor man's portal".  In a way, this has some merit, but I don't think a mashup can have enough functionality to be compared to a true portal. I think that the mashup is a just a term created in the social and consumer web spaces that has started to be mentioned by IT professionals. Will the term mashup infiltrate it's way to an accepted widely used IT term? It's really too early to predict. My best gues is that mashups are here to stay. Are mashups a portal replacement? Definitely not. They are defintely a web component that can add value and make simple web integrations in social networking and consumer computing. Only time will tell if the mashup will prevail and become a widely accepted technology term. 

What do you think?

Today, I took and passed the 70-630 Configuring MOSS 2007. This was my first Microsoft Certification Exam and I was a little nervous before the exam. I had been studying for the last few months and was well prepared.  In preparing for the test, I tried to find people who had blogged about how they prepared.  I could not find any information. So, I decided that after I passed, I would start my own blog and my first post would tell some of the souces and techniques I used to study.  So here it is.

• Microsoft Online classes-  I when through the classes on the Microsoft Learning website. These were a good introduction to the topics, but truely don't cover to the depth of the exam. (If you look at the course preparation guide. It mentions this.) 
  
• Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Unleashed   This is a well rounded book that covers alot of areas on the exam.  This book has alot of great administrator information. It is a particularly good resource for Records Center management.
• Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Administrator's Pocket Consultant  This is a much smaller book than the first, but is full of very useful to the point content.  There is no fluff in this book.  It is a great resource for Content Management, Farm configuration, and especially search.  Yesterday, I actually got the opportunity to hear Ben Curry, the author, speak on MOSS search.  He was a great speaker and it was a good last minute review over search for the exam.
• Real World SharePoint 2007   This is a very unique book each of the 16 chapters has a different author. I especially like the chapters on Excel Services, Upgrading from SharePoint 2003. 
• Blogs.  I read countless blogs and googled many topics.
• Measureup.com  Before taking the exam, I highly recommend using a test simulator.  There are tones of these on the market.  I used MeasureUp.com because they were reasonably priced compared to some of the competitors.  They also provided a short study guide that was a great review item to look at before the exam.

I hope this helps someone else pass the exam.  Good Luck!