Best of the blogs: Since grid computing has been slower to take off in the enterprise than its wunderkind sibling service-oriented architecture, experience with SOA holds a few lessons applicable to grid. “If you’re keeping an eye toward the future, and you want to be in a good position for your company to take advantage of Grid when the technology has fully matured — just keep plugging away on SOA and you’ll be fine,” explains Greg Nawrocki, in Grid Meter. Hot review: ShoreTel’s Converged Conferencing Version 5.6 encompasses audio conferencing, online presentation, Web collaboration, IM, and multimedia recording within a single 1U Conference Bridge appliance. The solution was “a no-stress experience,” writes reviewer Mike Heck. “Surprise monthly services bills are history — another important consideration that outweighs the few small feature deficits.” Quoteworthy: I’ve asked for further clarification on Venezuela’s legislation mandating the use of open source software. I’ve criticized this (and other governments’ open source legislation) in the past, not because of a disregard for open source software (My entire career has been spent promoting open source), but rather because I dislike government edicts that require use of a particular kind of software. — Matt Asay, blogging from Venezuela, in Governments and Software Libre: Matt was wrong. The news beat: Oracle adds Microsoft support to enterprise manager via plug-ins that cover a range of Microsoft software, Google faces an injunction regarding its image search, and Tim Bray discusses the future of XML, blogs and document formats in this Q&A. Technology Industry