Highly recommend this book! Here is a mindmap of the core ideas in the book.

This post discusses the different approaches, VPN included, that you should consider when designing this inbound on-premise integration pattern. Read the full post here.

My Sessions

Some Amazing Facts

I appreciate and can relate to his conclusion and I strongly believe that the technological advances with the 64-bit chip, the multipath TCP networking and fingerprint recognition technology are technically top-notch. And yet, I still feel the announcement was rather unimpressive, even from a product management perspective. Here is a another quote from the same movie.

“No different than any other” – The Godfather

Michael: “My father is no different than any other powerful man — any man who’s responsible for other people, like a senator or president.”
Kay: “You know how naive you sound…senators and presidents don’t have men killed.”
Michael: “Oh, who’s being naive, Kay?”

Apple is regarded as the senator/president by the Apple loyalists i.e. “they don’t have features copied”. Disregarding the entire legal wranglings and love-hate relationship between the two, they are both in a way, two sides of the same coin – each has “taken” the best features from the other. The “new” Notification Center and IOS7 look? Look at Android and WP. The “new colorful unapologetic plastic casing”? Look at Nokia/WP.

However, given the definition of innovation says nothing about copying features, let’s give the benefit of doubt to iPhone 5S (it does have Touch ID) and and explore other aspects I found unimpressive.

When did the platform become about the technology?

Rahul suggests that with the maturing market, the focus shifts to the platform. I fully agree with that from a product management perspective, where we have the luxury to analyze market segmentation with a 20/20 vision. But this is not what Jobs cared about when he brought true innovation with earlier iPhone releases.

In fact, for Apple, the “platform” was never the technology – it was always about the ecosystem. The technologies from a specifications perspective were never really cutting edge. It’s the marriage of the technology with the ecosystem (apps, partners) is what blew the competition away.

English: The “Made for iPod, iPhone, iPad” emblem appearing on accessories approved by Apple Inc. for iPod, iPhone, and iPad. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Case in point: I gave up on iCloud Photostream syncing with Windows7, after many months of trying every possible fix mentioned in the forums. It still doesn’t sync photos consistently. But when it does work sporadically, it is the best way to see my photos on the big screen TV between my iPhone, iPad and Apple TV. Another example is Apple TV: the overly restrictive, closed device that does way less than my $35 Raspberry Pi XBMC, but it is still my primary entertainment device due to its ease of use, Airplay with iPhone/iPad and the native Netflix/YouTube apps.

It is the ecosystem that keeps me hooked – not the technology platform. So while I accept that with a maturing segment Apple shifts focus to the platform, that should have been with the ecosystem platform rather than the technology platform they focused on with the iPhone 5S.

Where will the new innovation come from?

I still hear my die-hard Apple friends defending incremental releases with “how much can you innovate – isn’t this innovation enough”. This is classic “anchoring” i.e. defining the boundaries of innovation based on the what the vendors would have the consumers believe – not just Apple with the iPhone 5S, but even Samsung with the similarly “incremental” Galaxy S4. Let’s go back a few years to see how the innovation came along….

• Apple gave us devices we didn’t know we needed with iPhone and iPad.
• Samsung did the same with the Galaxy Note – a device that was as ridiculed as the iPad – but became a resounding success and mushroomed an entire “phablet” category.
• The mini-tablets – which Apple criticized – but later was also forced to join, defined a consumer need.
• iTunes and iBooks changed the business models for entire industries.

The iPhone 5S release did none of that – it simply showed us a faster, thinner, lighter phone, with a potential of touch technology. Jobs would have rather showed us what we needed, not why 64-bit was the best technology due to the number of transistors in it, or the size of the sapphire crystal. Look at the iPhone tag lines as Rahul points this out in his excellent blog article:

“The Internet In Your Pocket” – for the first iPhone

“Apple reinvents the phone” – for the first iPhone

“The first iPhone to beat the iPhone” – for iPhone 3G

“25,000 apps and counting” – for iPhone 3G

“There’s an app for that. Solving life’s dilemmas one app at a time” – starting with iPhone 3G

“Over 200,000 ways to make iPhone even better” – for the AppStore

Each one provided either a value for the consumer in terms of technology or business model. What about iPhone 5S and 5C?

“For the colorful” – for the iPhone 5C

“Forward thinking” – for the iPhone 5S

Really?

• What happened to opening up Apple TV for apps?
• What happened to the eagerly awaited Apple TV?
• What about new wearable gear?
• What about larger screen sizes?
• What about introduction of multiple users/profile support for families sharing tablets?
• A phone is by far the most personal electronic device we have (except for those with pace makers I guess), and there are so many segments that have not even been tapped e.g. What about health monitoring? Just think of the obesity and diabetes/stress management possibilities.
• Innovations in education with many classrooms adopting iPads?
• Innovation in enabling child safety with kids having iPhones i.e. Track my Child and alert me if a geo-fenced boundary (home-school) is crossed.

The iPhone 5S announcement was by far the least “secretive” release. Almost everything was already known before the announcement, including the fingerprint technology as well as the champagne/gold color. So the collective disappointment from the street as well as analysts show that it wasn’t the technology that was the cause, but the lack of innovation shown at the announcement (lowered price point for iPhone 5C to take on emerging markets being one of them).

Keeping aside traditional product management quadrants, and looking at the past combined innovation brought out by Apple, Samsung and Nokia to date, the incremental iPhone 5 to 5S AND Galaxy S3 to S4 still relatively stand out as unimpressive. But maybe that is to be expected as many say and maybe the only way for consumers to continue to be impressed with innovation is by swapping platforms i.e. moving from iPhone 5 to Nexus 5, or Samsung S3 to iPhone 5S. For those who are steeped in the Apple ecosystem though, the current innovation is a faster, lighter, thinner, flashy gold/champagne color with fingerprint unlocking.

Disclaimer: I own shares in AAPL, two iPhones, an iPad and Apple TV.

Running Linux Mint 15 XFCE Live CD as a VM within a Linux Mint 15 KDE VM running on top of a Windows 7 Host machine. The power of Linux and VirtualBox!

View from the Bund, Shanghai – Click on image for slideshow

This is a YouTube playlist of all videos show casing the use of Oracle SOA Suite 11g for hybrid cloud integration i.e. SaaS to on-premise.

I will be presenting the following sessions at JavaOne 2013 India:

Session ID: HOL1186
Session Title: Hands-On Introduction to Integration and Oracle SOA Suite 11g
Venue / Room: Flexi 1 HOL Room – Develop
Date and Time: 5/8/13, 14:00 – 16:00

Session ID: CON1177
Session Title: Oracle SOA Suite: the Most Capable Tool for Every Possible Integration Challenge
Venue / Room: Hall 2
Date and Time: 5/9/13, 10:15 – 11:15

Hope to see you there!

Visit the Oracle booth #608 at Cloud Connect next week (April 3 and April 4) to learn about how you can use Oracle SOA Suite to provide a comprehensive cloud integration solution. I will be at the booth on April 3rd starting at noon. Looking forward to see you there!

Update Nov-2012: The session pages now have the slide pdf documents for download. Simply click on each session link below to get started.

—-

I have 4 sessions at Oracle OpenWorld 2012.

Oracle Fusion Applications: Customizing and Extending Business Processes

I will join my colleague Ravi Sankaran (outstanding architect and advisor to the Fusion applications development team) to talk about the approaches in customizing and extending Oracle Fusion Applications with Oracle SOA Suite. CON8719

When: Monday, Oct 1, 4:45 PM – 5:45 PM

Where: Palace Hotel – Twin Peaks North

Managed File Transfer Use Cases and Oracle Fusion Applications Cloud

As part of the “Birds of a Feather” session, I will join Dave Berry and Sundar Shenbagam to discuss usage scenarios for integrating managed file transfer with Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle B2B applications, Oracle Healthcare applications, and Oracle Fusion Applications. BOF8326

When: Monday, Oct 1, 6:15 PM – 7:00 PM

Where: Marriott Marquis – Golden Gate C3

How to Integrate Cloud Applications with Oracle SOA Suite

I will be joined by Geeta Pyne (Director, Middleware at BMC Software) to address cloud integration challenges and how Oracle SOA Suite can help with a consistent approach to integration, whether on-premises or cloud. I am quite excited about this session as we will tackle the hype and myth of “simple” cloud integrations and share real-life application integration experiences. Don’t miss this one! CON8968

When: Tuesday, Oct 2, 11:45 AM – 12:45 PM

Where: Moscone West – 3003

Oracle Fusion Applications: Best Practices in Integration Design Patterns

I will be joined by Ravi Sankaran to provide a high level view of the Oracle Fusion Applications integration strategy and showing the best practice integration design patterns. You will learn how to discover integration assets, invoke web services and use cloud data integration. The session is not just limited to SaaS deployments, but will be useful for on-premises customers as well. CON8685

When: Tuesday, Oct 2, 1:15 PM – 2:15 PM

Where: Palace Hotel – Telegraph

I will also be at the SOA Customer Advisory Board on Thursday, in case you are attending. See you at OpenWorld!

A few months back, a key telecom customer needed to describe the semantic Enterprise Business Object (EBO) structure in a hierarchical/indented model to a flat spreadsheet so that designers can perform application mapping for the Process Integration Packs (a.k.a. PIP, basically pre-packaged integration accelerators for specific business process flows). I pointed them to a not-well publicised (and highly underestimated tool) called the XSL Mapping Analyzer (a.k.a XMAN).

Below is an email from the customer describing how useful they found the tool, in fact just one of the utilities! Thanks to the OCS Team (Balaji S G and Kurt) and KT (Sungwoo Yu) for this valuable feedback!

Side note: XMAN is actually a set of utilities my team built to parse XSL and EBO XSDs into various formats for semantic analysis of attribute level mapping; including HTML, CSV, flattened CSV and XML. It’s real power is in providing tactical SOA governance if you are using AIA canonicals, as it can help flag functional interoperability issues across projects using the same EBO, thereby encouraging service reuse and providing the ROI on your SOA. To learn more about XMAN usage, see my earlier blog post and OOW 2009 session.

— Email below published verbatim with prior owner’s permission —

Hi Balaji,

I’m glad to share my experience with Rajesh’ blog

Specially, I use to visit and learn a best practices using aia from that popular blog.

I’d like to briefly introduce my situation.

I’m working at telecom Project aims to build next generation BSS/OSS for 35 mil subscribers utilized by Oracle RODOD(Siebel,BRM,OSM, OPH and etc) .

I’m in charge of Integration team.

As we try to fit OOTB PIPs with our business, we need to analysis OOTB PIPs and design extension of PIPs.

These days our team cooperation with OCS for Communication PIP extension design on AIA Technical Document Design.

Although we cannot totally understand what existing input/output message and mapping in complex process integrations, we have to provide explain how prebuilt aia integration build interoperability with Siebel, BRM.

Basically, we can refer PIP implementation documents. However, if we closely looked at message level input/output and mapping details for reviewing service detail communication with edge application. It had been challenge.

At that time, I concerned that below so that I requested the OCS guidance

For we describe edge ABM structure or complex EBMs on spreadsheet, how can we describe different level elements on spreadsheet automatically?

Why we need to describe on spreadsheet, most of edge application function designer is not familiar with complex related xsd and different level of structure specially ebo.

So, when designed for extension of pips, Edge application function designer is unable to consider EBO structure.

If AIA team share used each operation EBM by spreadsheet, they will be easy to approach understanding EBO

Do you have any idea for that?

1.       How to automatically convert message structure xsd to table. (It could be different structure distinguished by indentation)

2.       If we describe different level elements distinguish using XPath, How we automatically extract XPath of all nodes from EBM.

Thanks to OCS(Balaji, Kurt) helps

We can utilize AIA Development Tools such as XMAN, XSD Flatter and generated XMAN reports RV11.1.

Particularly, XSD Flatter is right to solve above two problems.

For instance, I’m going to explain how I can extract element tree on spreadsheet from SalesOrderEBM.xsd

source $AIA_INSTANCE/bin/aiaenv.sh.

cd $AIA_Installed Directory/DeveloperTools/XSDFlattener/bin/

xsd2csv.sh -inputSchemaURL $AIA_Metadata_Directory /AIAComponents/EnterpriseObjectLibrary/Industry/Communications/EBO/SalesOrder/V2/SalesOrderEBO.xsd -rootElement ProcessSalesOrderEBM

As converted, I’ve got a csv file with x-path, cardinality, annotation and element tree with display hierarchy using indentation, and then reformatted below.

Even, I can convert ABM of Siebel Integration Object Message as well.

xsd2csv.sh -inputSchemaURL $AIA_Metadata_Directory /AIAComponents/ApplicationObjectLibrary/Siebel/V1/schemas/SWIOrderIO.xsd -rootElement ListOfSWIOrderIO

In addition, I aware generated RV11.1 XMAN report already provided whole EBM csv information by support.oracle.com

Also I can generate csv report from all of EBM using eol2csv.

eol2csv.sh -inputDir $AIA_Metadata_Directory /AIAComponents/ApplicationObjectLibrary/Siebel/V1/schemas -outputDir ~/eoloutput/AIAComponents/ApplicationObjectLibrary/Siebel/V1/schemas

Thanks

Sungwoo

As described in the paper, these services are used by customers/partners to extend and integrate with Oracle Fusion Applications, whether in on-premise or SaaS mode. This post describes the keyword in detail by addressing five frequently asked questions.

Q1. What does the EXTERNAL keyword imply for integration scenarios and SaaS deployments?

To understand this, let’s look at the Fusion Applications deployment topology below Note: this shows only SOA Composite services, but is also applicable for ADF Services.

The topology splits visibility to web and service resources into two categories – internal and external. This is achieved by fronting all HTTP requests through two different Oracle HTTP Servers (OHS), one for internal traffic routed between Fusion Applications servers, and another for external sources, which has only a small subset of the routing rules to prevent unauthorized access by external systems. This approach facilitates unhindered access within the Fusion Applications domain and acts as a firewall to restrict access to external systems.

In the example shown above, internal clients (i.e. those deployed in the same Fusion Applications domain) would have access to all composite services – A, B, and C and any service endpoints that they provide. In contrast, all other external clients are restricted to accessing only services provided through composites A and B.

Another characteristic of services that are exposed externally is that they also enforce a more stringent Oracle Web Services Manager (OWSM) policy using SSL or WS-Security message protection. By contrast, services NOT marked as EXTERNAL are protected using the OWSM Global Policy Attachments (GPA) feature, which in the case of Fusion Apps do not enforce message protection and rely only on username token or SAML identity propagation.

As you may have guessed by now, services tagged with the EXTERNAL keyword in OER, are the only ones provisioned with routing rules on the External OHS and protected with a stringent message protected OWSM policy. This is what makes them suitable for application integration use cases; even more so in the cloud where deploying custom services to the SaaS WebLogic Server domain may not be possible.

Q2. The service I want is not marked as EXTERNAL. Can I just tag it with the keyword for my integration project?

As explained above, making a service “EXTERNAL” is more than just tagging the keyword in OER. The service also needs to be secured using a message protection enabled local OWSM policy and requires modification of the OHS routing rules to allow service URI access to the external world. For Oracle-shipped services, this is done by the Provisioning framework. For custom services, this can be possible in on-premise and hosted installations, but may not be possible in the SaaS mode.

Most likely, if an Oracle-shipped service has not been marked as EXTERNAL, it is due to specific functional and/or security reasons, which is usually not addressable at the customer site.

Q3. If I can’t change non-EXTERNAL services, why document them in OER?

While it is true that non-EXTERNAL services cannot be consumed by external clients, they can still be consumed by internal clients, such as custom implemented composites that are deployed in the Fusion Applications SOA domain in on-premise or hosted deployments. Moreover, apart from service invocations, many composite services also have capabilities for layered customizations for BPEL processes and Oracle Business Rules. The OER entries for these non-EXTERNAL services therefore serve as API documentation.

Q4. Are EXTERNAL services the same as “Public” services?

The two terms — “EXTERNAL” and “Public” — are frequently used interchangeably, however, they are not synonymous! “EXTERNAL” refers to service visibility in the topology, while “Public” basically amounts to the level of API support provided by Oracle. In fact, there is no attribute called “Public”, instead it is referenced by the Compatibility attribute value of Supported.

While most EXTERNAL services tend to be Public, there are exceptions. For instance, mobile-enabled services accessed by iPad or iPhone apps (external to Fusion Applications) will be tagged as EXTERNAL. However, if the only intended supported client is the pre-certified mobile app, then the service may be marked with a Compatibility value of Not Supported to effectively make it “Private”.

The Fusion Applications OER white paper also lists the various combinations of the Keyword and Compatibility tags and their implications for service use in integration projects.

Q5. How do I find all available EXTERNAL services?

Using the cloud hosted OER instance. Simply search for EXTERNAL and limit the Asset Type to ADF Service or Composite Service to filter the results.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This is a simple text search and will result in services that have the word EXTERNAL in any metadata, including descriptions. Therefore, you may get false positives. To confirm the service accessibility, always check the Keyword value on the Taxonomy tab of the service detail page as shown in the screenshot at the top of this post.

Hopefully this post has addressed most of the questions about the EXTERNAL keyword usage. If you still have some, feel free to sound off in the comments.

One of the common queries I get is how on-premise customers without a dedicated OER can find a concrete service WSDL URL for their specific environment using the cloud hosted OER instance.

To answer this, let’s understand the two attributes on the OER service details screen.

In the Cloud OER instance, the Abstract WSDL URL link points to the Oracle-shipped non-customized service definition, which can be used by partners/ISVs for developing tenant-agnostic apps (more on that in future posts).

The concrete WSDL URL can be found in the Service WSDL URL link (highlighted in the screenshot above). In an on-premise deployment, this link points to the runtime WebLogic Server where the service has been deployed. Since the cloud OER instance is not linked with on-premise customer-specific runtime environments, the link does not work (as expected). However, you can still derive the on-premise environment-specific concrete Service WSDL URL via a simple substitution.

Replace

rep://FUSIONAPPS_HCM/

with

https://host:port/ for the specific Fusion Applications environment.

The Fusion Apps repository team is working on making usability improvements to document this in-place, along with adding additional service metadata that you are sure to find very handy when consuming the services. Stay tuned!

AIA Essentials Book

I was recently asked by Packt Publishing to review the above mentioned book. I have worked in AIA development for three years (and still work closely with the team) driving many cross-functional Process Integration Packs (PIPs) architecture initiatives, developing Foundation Pack developer productivity tools, managing SAP PIP development and leading pre- and post sales solution architecture support for strategic accounts to enable successful implementations. Having seen issues faced with complex SOA based integration projects first-hand, it was an interesting opportunity to review a book that attempts to explain the “essentials” of my product from an implementors perspective.

Swiss Army Knife. Image courtesy of Josh Linkner.

In enterprise business applications, complexity stems from complex enterprise needs. To give you a flavor of these, here are just a few examples of requirements that lead to creation of complex platform infrastructures that make up the complex enterprise software.

User Interface

• Translation for multiple languages
• Localization for different areas (e.g. currency, dates etc)
• Complex Query Needs (custom fields, saved queries etc)

Customizability/Extensibility

• Adding custom attributes, objects
• Modifying out of the box functionality e.g. business processes
• Modifying the look and feel for personalization by end users (e.g. MyYahoo)
• Verticalization needs (e.g. industry specific flavors)

Operational

• High Availability (for planned downtimes)
• Selective feature uptake (to avoid re-training thousands of users)
• Performance requirements for high volume, latency, throughput etc.

Functional

• Complex security needs (users, roles etc)
• Organizational setup (e.g. business units, divisions etc)
• Error handling and compensation for rolled back business processes

In addition, there are a few additional factors to consider for large enterprise software products:

Development Scalability
For multi-product application suites, economies of scale is achieved by consolidating common functions into a common platform, which then have the same complexities that the applications face when trying to develop products for a wide range of customers. This adds a layer of “knobs” to tune over and above the functional knobs that the application software provides.

Integration
No enterprise software lives in an island and integration with other systems is usually one of the big costs in application deployments. Integrations are inherently complex due to the nature of trying to tie together heterogenous applications with different data models, granularity, cardinality, semantics and protocols.

Standards
To allow for a plug-n-play model, most platform level APIs are driven with facade style interfaces that can plug-in to various implementations e.g. jazn; that add a layer of complexity. Use of standards-based technologies (BPEL, ESB, Web Services) also contributes to some level of complexity, as those standards are aimed towards satisfying requirements from all the participating members who created those standards.

Perception
I do not pretend that all enterprise software are absolutely user-friendly, but do realize that large chunks of enterprise software are targeted towards specific roles, which may seem very unfriendly to users who are not in that role. For example, a snazzy, graphical UI is not necessarily “simple” for data-entry clerk as it is to a knowledge worker.

When you think about it, a large percentage of the world economy depends on enterprise business software (ERP, CRM, HCM etc), and requirements such as above tend to add complexity.

Note that while the software can be complex, there is no excuse for not making the end-user experience as smooth as it can be. Although in my experience, some complexity does tends to bleed into the user experience, especially in on-premise deployments. The SaaS model, to some extent, shields end-users from most of the complexity, but once you start getting into requirements such as integration, complexity does find its way through during implementations.

Quora: Why is enterprise software often so complicated?

Update 5-June-2012: Great answer by Jignesh Shah and my response.

Oracle Fusion Applications are designed and built from the ground up using a service-oriented architecture (SOA). As I have discussed in an earlier post, visibility and control are the key tenets to SOA governance, and the first step in integrating with Oracle Fusion Applications is to find out what are the integration options available. Oracle Enterprise Repository, an industry-leading metadata repository, provides this visibility.

Oracle Enterprise Repository for Oracle Fusion Applications can be used to discover functional and technical information about integrating with other applications, including web services, business events, interface tables and data model documentation among other artifacts.

Oracle Enterprise Repository for Oracle Fusion Applications

To maximize the usage of the repository, I have posted a white paper “Making the Most of the Oracle Enterprise Repository for Oracle Fusion Applications” – also available from the Help link on the top right of the repository. I thank Nigel King, Tim Hall and Kris Doherty for their valuable inputs and reviews on the paper. I hope that our customers and partners will find this a useful resource to mine the repository content. In future posts, I will discuss various best practice integration patterns i.e. how to integrate with Oracle Fusion Applications.

Note: Access to the repository and the white paper requires an Oracle account.

The task of setting up my new iPad and iPhone recently was an eye-opener to the dependency I now have on cloud services. I expected it to take a few days to totally get all my stuff (email, contacts, calendar, photos etc) on the devices, however, it was a pleasant surprise to get it done in less than a few hours.

No, the credit does not go to the devices…it goes to the cloud! This is what my current setup looks like for the various personalized services and how I keep the iDevices and other laptops in sync.

Email Accounts: Gmail …setup using Google Sync on mobile devices. Work email is setup using IMAP which is auto configured via a custom profile. Thunderbird IMAP setup on the laptop.

Calendars: Google Calendar …setup using Google Sync on mobile devices. Work calendar is set up using CalDAV which is auto configured via a custom profile. Thunderbird Lightning CalDAV setup on the laptop.

Contacts: Google Contacts …setup using Google Sync on mobile devices. Work contacts directory are available via a special VPN based app. Thunderbird SyncML extension Zindus setup on the laptop.

Passwords and Personal Data: KeePass …the encrypted password database is shared via DropBox and accessed via HTTP using the MyKeePass app on the iDevices.

Chat: Skype, Yahoo! Messenger…iMO app connects to all the common messaging platforms. Work IM is configured using the Oracle Beehive app provisioned via a custom profile. Pidgin IM setup on the laptop.

My Documents: Dropbox …although the native app is quite good, what’s even better is the GoodReader app for the iPhone/iPad that can sync with Dropbox as well as email attachments, Google Docs and WebDAV servers. Secured TrueCrypt containers also synchronize well with Dropbox, however I haven’t found any mobile app that can securely browse and access those documents. Password-protected zip files (with AES encryption) have file names exposed and I have still not found any iPad app to open encrypted 7z files. Please comment if you have found any way around this. Update 07/29: iUnarchive app on the iPhone/iPad does open password protected zip files.

Not My Documents: Google Docs …this is stuff I want to read/keep but not use up my Dropbox storage and I could afford to lose e.g. pdf articles, free ebooks etc. Again, the GoodReader app does a great job browsing and downloading content from Google Docs. What could be made better is a sync feature as well as ability to view documents without downloading. Update 07/29: Using iUnarchive, I also sync the eBooks on the server with the built-in iBooks app.

Browser Bookmarks: Firefox Sync …using Firefox Home app on the mobile devices. Tighter integration with Safari or a native FF browser would have been ideal.

Pictures:  Picasaweb …browse and upload using Piconhand app or show slideshow using the iShowPhoto HD app (both free). Picasa setup on the laptop.

Videos:  YouTube and Picasaweb …native YouTube app. Upload using Picasa on the laptop.

Music: Pandora, ShoutCast and various other streaming sites and apps. For purchased/ripped content, sync via iTunes library (eagerly awaiting wireless sync in iOS5).

TV/Movies:  Netflix, Hulu, YouTube (yes, I am a CordCutter) along with iTunes Home Sharing, along with YuppTV for international news and music.

Telephony:  Google Voice, Skype …enough has been said of them.

News: Flipboard, Feedly …the apps use Google Reader RSS subscriptions as well as Twitter lists.

Thanks to the cloud, personalizing and setting up any new connected device or laptop now only requires a few settings and app installation. Now that’s what I call magical.