This will all occur for the sake of increased integration between BusinessWeek’s online and print properties, according to a leaked memo from editor-in-chief Stephen Adler.  “The new structure will enable us to collaborate more effectively, take greater advantage of everyone’s abilities, learn new skills, and serve our readers and Web users better,” he wrote, as reported by Chris Roush.

See how Web users got singled out?  By most accounts, they’re becoming increasingly important.  Roush touted increased circulation and newsstand sales, but also noted that page views hit a record of 64.7 million.

Furthermore, a tipster told Peter Kafka, “Ad pages way down for mag, .com up, but McGraw Hill share price in the toilet after the S&P ratings debacle.”  And a quick glance at Google Finance can at least confirm the second part of that sentence – a six-month view of the stock is pretty dismal.

We’ll see how well the transformation can turn things around, then.  “Congratulations to all on their new assignments,” concluded Adler.  Our sympathies to those who lost their jobs, as well.

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In an effort to do this, the company will be narrowing its portfolio to two key platform businesses, while seeking spin-off or selling options for its other businesses.

International Paper said that the two key platform businesses that it will concentrate on are Uncoated Papers and Industrial and Consumer Packaging.

“We already have a strong global position in uncoated paper and have a growing worldwide platform in packaging. Our portfolio changes will allow us to better focus management attention and financial resources on these key businesses, which represent over 70 percent of our sales, and can achieve both cost-of-capital returns and profitable growth,” said Chairman and CEO John Faraci.

Among the businesses that International Paper will seek sale or spin-off options for are the company’s 50.5 percent stake in Carter Holt Harvey, its Coated and Supercalendered (SC) Papers Business, its Beverage Packaging Business, Kraft Papers Business, Arizona Chemical, some or possibly all of its forestland property, and its wood products business.

“Considering our desire to develop strong businesses that can compete and grow globally, we have made choices about which businesses to focus our management and financial resources,” said Faraci. “The businesses being evaluated for potential sale or spin-off are good businesses that may be better positioned with different ownership.”

International Paper intends to evaluate these businesses until the first quarter of next year. These businesses combined made up about 30% of the company’s total sales last year.

Chris is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.

Specifically, the Company will:

“These initiatives are part of a multi-quarter business transformation strategy for JDS Uniphase to achieve profitability by reducing cost structure and improving corporate agility,” said President and CEO Kevin Kennedy. “We firmly believe that our ability to restructure major operations and rationalize our current portfolio, while investing in next-generation products, positions JDS Uniphase for success and differentiates us from the competition.”

The facility transfers to Fabrinet are expected to be completed by the end of the current quarter, ending June 30, 2005, while the remaining actions are expected to be completed by the end of the second quarter of fiscal 2006, ending December 31, 2005.

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“Our decision to fundamentally transform Sara Lee presents an ideal time for Brenda Barnes to transition to her new role as chief executive officer. We recruited Brenda last year to be my successor, and her contributions and leadership have exceeded all expectations,” said McMillan. “Brenda has played a key leadership role in designing our transformation plan and, for continuity and focus, it is appropriate that she lead its execution from the outset. Also, to ensure a smooth transition, I will remain chairman through the annual shareholders meeting in October. During these nine months, I will focus on the divestitures included in our plan.”

The company has built its transformation plan upon three pillars: organizing its business operations around consumers, customers and geographic markets; focusing its portfolio; and increasing operational efficiency to fund growth.

“Today, Sara Lee is embarking on an aggressive, strategic plan that will transform the entire enterprise into a tightly focused food, beverage and household products company,” said Brenda C. Barnes, president and chief executive officer of Sara Lee Corporation. “We are taking bold actions that will enable Sara Lee to compete more successfully in today’s dynamic marketplace and thereby generate consistent, long-term topline growth and bottomline profitability for our shareholders.”

Sara Lee will re-organize its business operations around distinct consumers, customers and geographic markets in order to build functional excellence, increase strategic focus, simplify the organization and eliminate layers.

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Corporate leaders also outlined future platforms and technologies to help IT managers accelerate their technology transformations.

As vice president and co-general manager of Intel’s Solutions Market Development Group, Deborah Conrad visits corporations and enterprise industry associates worldwide on a weekly basis. She listed a number of issues IT executives face, ranging from managing expansive computing assets and security to deploying infrastructure in support of an increasingly mobile and global workforce.

“The convergence of computing and communications technologies enables businesses to deliver more value to customers by making it easier to access information and improve response time,” Conrad said in her keynote address at the Intel Developer Forum. “Convergence represents a technological and business transformation in how new services are delivered without increasing costs.”

To help ease the transformation, Intel introduced the Service Oriented Enterprise (SOE) initiative, a modular approach to better architect an enterprise environment. SOE combines elements of mobility, grid computing and manageability into a framework to assist IT managers using all or some of these technologies to transform their businesses. It also provides a framework for enabling new capabilities and services such as RFID and Voice Over IP telephony. The goal of SOE is to enhance the IT responsiveness and management of diverse systems as companies grapple with growing mountains of data.

Intel’s Prasad Rampalli, vice president and chief architect of the Information Services and Technology Group, highlighted what Intel – a Fortune 500 company with 78,000 employees in 294 facilities worldwide – is doing within its own IT infrastructure. He described how Intel is re-architecting its computing infrastructure to help provide faster and easier access to data in an effort to better serve Intel’s increasingly mobile workforce. The majority of Intel’s employees have mobile PCs, and access Intel’s enterprise system remotely, many from wireless networks.

“We achieve agility and deliver breakthrough business value by transitioning to an environment founded on modularity, standardization, automation and end-to-end manageability,” Rampalli said. “In doing so, we are also able to hold the line on total cost of ownership by improving overall utilization and establishing an autonomic, self-healing infrastructure.”

Intel’s Enterprise Platform Plans

Intel’s Abhi Talwalkar, vice president and general manager of the Enterprise Platforms Group, disclosed a number of new platform technologies and products for the enterprise.

“Intel is uniquely positioned to work with the industry to enable high-volume platforms that support the transformed enterprise,” Talwalkar said. “Our focus is to deliver platform value upon which customers can evolve operations and build new services.”

For high-end server systems, Intel disclosed plans for new Intel Xeon processor MP and Intel Itanium 2-based platforms. The first two Intel Xeon processors MP based on the 90 nm process, codenamed “Cranford” and “Potomac,” are expected in the first half of 2005. The products will include Intel Extended Memory 64 Technology (Intel EM64T) and Demand Based Switching with Intel Enhanced SpeedStep Technology. They will be supported by a new four-way chipset, codenamed “Twin Castle,” that supports PCI Express* and DDR2 memory.

Multi-core technology is expected to arrive in high-end systems with a dual-core Intel Xeon processor MP codenamed “Tulsa” and Itanium 2 processor codenamed “Montecito.” An enhanced Itanium 2 dual-core processor, codenamed “Montvale,” will be the first Itanium processor based on the 65 nm process technology, and is planned after Montecito.

Farther out on the roadmap are a multi-core Intel Xeon processor MP, codenamed “Whitefield,” and its multi-core Itanium 2 processor counterpart, codenamed “Tukwila.” Whitefield will share a common platform architecture with Tukwila.

For two-way servers and workstations, Intel disclosed “Irwindale,” the codename for a follow-on processor to the recently introduced Intel Xeon processor at 3.6 GHz. Irwindale is expected to give customers a performance boost when compared to previous Intel Xeon processors because of a faster clock speed and larger two megabyte cache.

Talwalkar also said future Intel enterprise products will incorporate other already disclosed silicon technologies such as the server version of virtualization technology, code-named “Silvervale,” which will allow for partitioning and other security and reliability attributes.

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Reader Questions Answered By Tiberius

Ask Tiberius Your Programming Questions Here

Articles By Tiberius
My NAnt and NUncle
Content Thieves
A Stranger In A Foreign Key Land
XSL Transformation
Paranoia: Cross Site Scripting

Tiberius OsBurn is a freelance technology author and speaker based in Omaha,
Nebraska. His book, “Hardcore Development”, will be released in the summer
of 2003. Mr. OsBurn has extensive experience in VB, VB.NET, C#, SQL Server,
ASP.NET and various other web technologies. Be sure to visit his site,
http://www.tiberi.us, for his latest articles of interest to .NET developers.

If you’re pulling a lot of your content from a database, don’t count on it.

Here’s a secret – if you want scalability – check out XML, XSL and XSLT Processors. What’s a XSLT Processor? It’s an idea that makes rendering XML and XSL a breeze. And guess what? Microsoft’s .NET provides a class, XSLTransform, that’s going to make your life a breeze. Pretty sweet, eh? What’s fantastic about XSL Transform is that you can output all of your content (data, links, frequencies, etc.) into XML, then transform it into whatever you desire (text, html, xml, aspx) using XSL.

What really makes XSL Processing work well is that you can forget browser incompatibilities and old browsers that don’t have the facilities to render XML. XSL Transform along with CSS will format your website so well, even your mother can’t tell the difference between the transformed web page and one painfully hacked out in HTML. Seriously, though, the real money is in the speed and scalability of your system – that’s why, if you can do it, you should move all ‘static’ content from the database to XML documents. When I say ‘static’, I mean the data in your database that won’t change, or is very unlikely to be changed.

This ‘static’ data can be stored as XML – releiving pressure from an expensive database query that could be used for something more useful, like a dynamic search against an author column. By moving the burden from SQL and network traffic to mere I/O, you’ve bought yourself some real scalability.

But, uh, ok. I’ve got all this data in XML, and it looks like crap. I can’t make sense out of it and the guys in marketing are going to be screaming bloody murder…Relax. This is where XSL comes in. XSL stands for eXtensible stylesheet language – you can just think of it as a script that formats XML into a nice looking page. XSL can take any XML document and make it into anything you want – whether that’s another XML document, a text file or an ASPX page. The key here is that XML is your content and XSL is your presentation layer – and XSLTransform is the glue that binds them together.

Here’s some code I’ve used on my site tiberi.us

A quick walk-through of the code will show the power of the XSL Processor.

Our two parameters that we pass to this method are the URL of the XML file and the URL of the XSL file. After we have both of these parameters, we can transform our two files into something useful. Notice that we’ve created a StringWriter object and have fired up an XMLTextReader and passed in the URL for our XML file.

Now, here’s the real meat of our method…

The XSLTransform object that we’ve instantiated will do the pack-mule amount of the work here. Once we let it know where our XSL file is, and passed it an XPathDocument, we can do the Transform.

Notice that the oXSLT.Transform method takes three arguments, an ‘input’, an args list for XSLT, and an ‘output’. We’re passing in an XPath Document for our input, NULL for our arguments and we’re dumping the transformed XML into a StringWriter. Although you could use an overloaded method of the Transform method that directly references the URL of the XML and XSL files, I’ve decided to walk you through the long way of doing the Transform so you’ll learn what this object is capable of.

Although we are passing in NULL for our XSLT arguments, we are taking advantage of something very cool – the ability to render portions of our XML based on parameters provided in our XSLT args. We could write our XSL in such a way that it refers to parameters we’ve set up – such as the current time.

And in our XSL sheet, we’ll refer to our parameter we’ve passed in, rather than rely on a script embedded in the XSL.

To take the XsltArgumentList to the next step, we could render off of the <xsl:if> conditional statement based on the parameters you’ve passed in via the XsltArgumentList.

Now that we’ve got a good grounding of how XSLTransform works, let’s talk a bit more about scalability and how we can push the envelope even more.

There are three strategies that most businesses would use when applying the power of XSL Transformation.

Strategies for XML and XSLT
1. Transformation on Demand
2. Transformation Factory
3. Cached Transformation Factory

Transformation on Demand
When using the Transformation on Demand strategy, HTML or ASPX pages are created dynamically by applying a XSL style-sheet to an XML document and using a transformation object to create the output. When a user requests a resource on your website, an XSL Transformation object is used to format the resource according to the layout in the XSL document. You may wish to pursue this strategy if you’re creating an XML document by using the System.Data.SqlClient.WriteXML() method based on a dynamic query from your end user, if your XML or XSL documents are created on the fly, or if you need absolute dynamic information pushed to your end user.

Transformation Factory
In a Transformation Factory, HTML or ASPX pages are created from the XML and XSLT and saved as ‘static’ pages. By using a Transformation Factory, you can create hundreds of static pages from dynamic sources and save the overhead of creating these pages on demand. You could set up a Transformation Factory to whip through thousands of XML files, apply the XSL and save the output as HTML, ASPX or any other format you desire. End users would connect to these ‘static’ pages without the overhead of the ‘on-demand’ XSL Transformation. You may wish to use this strategy if you don’t anticipate the ‘look and feel’ of your website or the information to change. There is no need to apply an XSL to the XML every time an end user requests a resource on your site.

Cached Transformations
A cached transformation is simply a transformation that takes places on a given schedule, say 24 hours. The result of the XSL Transformation is cached for a day or until needed and dished up to the end user. This is the strategy most ‘dynamic’ sites should take unless you need to dish out dynamic information that is up to the minute – like the information needed in a stock market application. Most business needs are met with a daily or twice daily caching of information.

Simply cache each page with a cache time expiration of 24 hours. You can also create a dependency to any file (in this case, an XML file), so if the file changes, your cache is updated with the information in the updated file.

To conclude, XSL Transformation is a very slick and needed technology. This powerful tool allows you to scale upward rather than outward – giving a needed break to your corporate pocketbook.

Tiberius OsBurn is a freelance technology author and speaker based in Omaha,
Nebraska. His book, “Hardcore Development”, will be released in the summer
of 2003. Mr. OsBurn has extensive experience in VB, VB.NET, C#, SQL Server,
ASP.NET and various other web technologies. Be sure to visit his site,
http://www.tiberi.us, for his latest articles of interest to .NET developers.