Adventures in home working

I believe that consumerization will have a big impact on the enterprise,  I for one gave up on the idea that my company would meet all my IT needs long ago, and regularly make personal investments.  In general I consider my personal tools to greatly enhance my productivity, way beyond the level that my company makes possible.  That said I don’t think it’s possible to take a top down approach to personal productivity and knowledge management as I know for certain by observing many highly productive people that there are many different approaches that suit different personalities.

The best companies will figure out how to blend top down enabablement with bottom up productivity and innovation.  It’s great to see Gartner recognising this at last, in the past Gartner’s TCO model for PC’s has promoted the idea of “stop users fiddling with their desktop”  now they seem to recognise that at least for some users that fiddling was actually productivity tuning and process innovation!  Here is an encouraging quote from Jeffery Mann, a research VP at Gartner:

When I talk with customers about how to achieve a high-performance workplace (HPW), one of the hardest things for them to deal with is the need to loosen up on some control issues, and how to do that without losing control completely. This is natural. For the past several years, CEOs and CFOs have been asking CIOs to reduce costs, reduce risk, ensure compliance and generally take tighter control of users. This has resulted in locked-down desktops, strict TCO and ROI procedures, and tight IT procedures all around. The result is that IT has collectively become “The Abominable No Man”’ in many organizations, better at refusing or blocking any initiative than facilitating it.
We cannot stay on this trajectory. The complexity of the business and IT environments is too overwhelming to pursue the myth of total control. There are too many variables and influences to permit anyone to control all inputs. Even if we could, that would be a bad thing. Real innovation is coming from unexpected and not totally understood areas, such as Web 2.0 and consumer-oriented collaboration facilities. To block access to these is counterproductive and, ultimately, futile. Increasingly, many users see access restrictions as similar to network faults: a minor irritation to route around.

Of course it’s not about no control.  In my view it’s about IT progressively withdrawing to managing only those things that are business critical and enabling security and connectivity services, and even then considering whether they need to manage applications and data or whether they can get away with just controlling a standard web service, RSS feed, or email feed.  In Gartner’s words:

Does this mean we should throw open the doors to every virus-laden, spyware-filled download we can find? Or post sensitive information on any blog site we care to? Of course not. Loosening control does not mean giving up all control. It could mean enabling four or five different products in a particular technology area instead of just one (but not any). Innovative IT managers are experimenting with virtualization to shield experimental trials from sensitive corporate processes. In some cases, it will mean trusting employees to do the right thing, something businesses are accustomed to doing in other areas (like contract negotiations or travel expenses), but not done often enough within IT policies.

I like the idea that Jeff presents here of providing a choice of applications,  as this fits very well with my opening point about the different ways that people like to work.  As we see more applications that can interact with standard web services like RSS in a predictable way we will be able to move in this more flexible direction.

Brian Madden describes how Citrix is evolving from being an Access company to an Application Delivery company:

We want to be the single company to provide access to all applications, regardless of what type they are. For Windows client/server applications, you can use Citrix Presentation Server. For web applications, you can optimize them with NetScaler appliances. For full client or offline applications, you can use desktop streaming.

I like this positioning,  within my company I have been promoting a similar change in focus away from delivering technology services, more in the direction of application delivery, in fact I used the phrase:

Delivering capabilities to productive people and teams

which is pretty snappy, and goes beyond applications because I wanted to cover more than just applications, and include data, devices, voice etc into our scope and it also allows us to break down every term to provide a lot more detail.

A few weeks ago I had a planning session with Microsoft where we discussed requirements for the version of windows to follow Vista.  During that meeting I used newsgator as an example of my ideal service, it embodies in principle – and increasingly in execution – all that I see as good in the new world of service enabled software.

I thought it would be useful to describe some of the characteristics of the newsgator approach:

• A loosely integrated client and services platform
• The services platform only asserts itself when it can add value to the user,  otherwise it gets out of the way and lets me get on with the job
• An eco-system of different client software optimised to address different platforms, user-types and user preferences, some supplied by newsgator but others just integrated with the services platform using their APIs
• Different installations of newsgator online enabled software are aware of activities on the other clients, for example my work client is aware of what I have already read or subscribed to at home
• Each installation of a client can optionally have a different configuration, so my work client could be configured differently to my home client if that’s what I wanted 
• A complementary web interface for when an optimised smart client is not available, or for when a web interface is the optimised solution
• All of my configuration data is held by the services platform and be easily extracted and moved some place else, in fact other systems can use it in place as it is all url addressable
• All (actually nearly all but they are moving in the right direction) configuration data is held by the services platform, so that once I have authenticated to it from a freshly installed client it seems like my environment again
• Higher performance than would be possible with a client only approach

In summary, the approach provides me with considerable freedom of choice, great performance, optimisation without sacrificing flexibility and openness, pretty inspiring!

Now if Microsoft can do the same thing by utilising Windows Live to make the experience of multiple personal PC’s, work and personal PCs, a household of PCs, PCs and Mobiles, multiple identities, sharing data, PC migrations and upgrades etc more seamless and deliver freedom of choice, great performance, optimisation without sacrificing flexibility and openness then I will be very impressed. 

It’s interesting that watching Ray Ozzie perform at the Financial Analyst meeting recently he definitely seems to have a newsgator-like vision for the eco-system of Microsoft products and services, and some of his recent innovations around the use of Live Clipboard and RSS and Simple List Extensions seem to indicate that he sees the value in delivering these innovations using standards so there may be hope.

The only thing I really need to round off the newsgator experience is for every bit of configuration data to persist server side (flags, snippets, saved searches etc) and applications that stream down to my new PC automatically with no possibility of conflicts with other applications and no administrative rights to run or install, for that I guess we need them to be .Net ClickOnce applications or wait for Microsoft to build Softgrid like virtualization support into their operating systems and Softgrid like streaming into their packaging approach and yes I do know that Microsoft has just acquired Softricity!

This would be a vision for Software as a Service that would really appeal to me!

Take a look at this PDF it describes a really simple integration bus – rssbus – that is based on the RSS protocol.  It allows you to RSS enable applications and databases and use RSS to subscribe to events that these applications then publish.  There are a set of reusable modules that provide useful services as well.  The white paper is refreshing because it clearly positions the bus as a simple solution for businesses that want to get things done rather than agonise over architectural elegance, strategy, standards compliance etc, here are a few of my favourite quotes:

With RSSBus, our goal is to offer a simple, easy alternative for the small organization with
little to no IT assets, little to no professional development tools, and no professional
programmers to use them.
If you spend much of your working day developing web services for one of the major
service platforms, and you can no longer write a single sentence without a four, five, or
six letter acronym in it, perhaps you should stop reading right here and spare yourself the
disappointment.

And if your job title has “Architect” or “Enterprise” in it, then please  stop reading here. 
Just in case you didn’t notice, we said Service Bus, and not Enterprise Service Bus.  In
fact, this is the last time we will mention Enterprise.

What we are building is something different, a service platform for the rest of us, the non-
acronym-speaking crowd.  If you have bits of pieces of data that you would like to quickly
exchange with and/or connect to other systems, if simplicity and ease of use is your most
important consideration, please read on.

Check out the list of pre-built modules and you will get a feel for the sort of application events that the developers expect RSS bus to act upon:

Here is an alphabetical list of some of the modules included in the product:
AmazonOps: operations that provide access to Amazon services.
BusOps: core Bus operations (feeds, caching, meta information).
CcOps: operations for credit card authorization and processing.
EbayOps: operations that provide access to EBay services.
FedexOps: operations for FedEx shipping and tracking.
FeedOps: operations for managing RSS feeds.
FileOps: operations for managing files and directories.
FtpOps: operations for transferring files to and from FTP servers.
GoogleOps: operations that provide access to Google services.
ImapOps: operations for receiving email messages from IMAP servers.
LdapOps: operations for connecting to LDAP directories
MediaOps: operations that provide information about digital media files.
OfxOps: operations for accessing bank accounts and financial services.
PaypalOps: operations that provide access to PayPal payment services.
PopOps: operations for receiving email messages from POP servers.
QbOps: operations that provide access to Intuit’s QuickBooks.
SearchOps: operations for searching and indexing.
SmsOps: operations for sending SMS text messages.
SmtpOps: operations for sending SMTP email.
SqlOps: operations for connecting to SQL databases.
LdapOps: operations for connecting to LDAP directories.
MediaOps: operations that provide information about digital media files.
OfxOps: operations for accessing bank accounts and financial services.
PaypalOps: operations that provide access to PayPal payment services.
PopOps: operations for receiving email messages from POP servers.
QbOps: operations that provide access to Intuit’s QuickBooks.
SearchOps: operations for searching and indexing.
SmsOps: operations for sending SMS text messages.
SmtpOps: operations for sending SMTP email.
SqlOps: operations for connecting to SQL databases. 

It’s not difficult to see that this solution is going to appeal to people who have grown up with the web, who love REST and Mashups etc, and it’s simplicity could well serve as an inspiration to many big EAI solution providers as well.

I have Office 2007 running now on my Tablet and Laptop, both running XP,  but my desktop machine (2003 server) is not something I would risk putting Office 2007 on yet, mainly because I collaborate with too many people who are on previous versions of Office.  At least that was my logic until last night when I finally got around to installing SVS from Altiris.  Here is my step by step experience:

First try

• Terminal served into my desktop (2003 server remember) as admin
• Installed SVS
• Rebooted
• Tried to install Office 2007 in a layer, a layer is an SVS term that describes a way of isolating an application (by means of a file system redirector) from any dependencies on your PC and also isolating your PC from any changes that the application tries to make.  In other words – its safe!
• Install failed,  which is perhaps not surprising as I already have close to a hundred applications installed including OneNote 2007 and Altiris recommend installing on a clean machine.
• Started again

Second try

• Created an XP SP2 Virtual machine using VMware 5.5
• Installed all patches and VMware tools
• Installed SVS
• Rebooted
• Installed Office 2007 into a layer, worked fine
• Exported the layer to network drive (failed)
• Exported the layer to the VMware Virtual drive (worked)
• Copied the exported file to network drive
• Terminal served into my desktop (2003 server remember) as admin
• Imported the exported file into a layer on my desktop
• Activated the layer
• Went back to my normal user account
• Double clicked a PowerPoint file,  PowerPoint 2007 opened and ran fine (very limited testing)
• Clicked on PowerPoint 12 icon in Start Menu, worked fine (very limited testing)
• Went back to my admin account
• Deactivated the layer
• Double clicked on a PowerPoint file, PowerPoint 2003 opened
• Note: In the above activate and deactivate actions I did not need to log-off or reboot

So I now have Office 2003 installed on my desktop, and office 2007 available as a layer that I can activate as required.  I am impressed enough that next time I rebuild my desktop,  I will probably install all applications as layers,  although except for testing out new applications I don’t think I will use SVS extensively until then.  I will also look forward to some admin utilities being developed that allow me to copy files around between machines or do bulk imports and activates, so that maintaining multiple machines and rebuilding them becomes less of a chore.  Of course Altiris has enterprise scale tools to do this,  but I only have 9 physical PC’s on my home network

I get very encouraged when I hear IT people worrying about the way people actually work, and even more so when they realise that the IT industry has not taken this issue seriously enough.  IT people too often think in terms of features and not in terms of real-world business scenarios.  Stu Downes provides a perfect example on his blog where he describes the complex workflow relationship between Executives and Assistants,  when you think about how the software (Notes and Outlook for example) supports this workflow it makes me cringe.

Although I have no solutions I think we need to start thinking more about scenarios and processes than requirements and functions.  As an example I wrote up a typical personal information management process,  my intent (in summary form) was to demonstrate how to start thinking about the whole end-user experience and not just about specific service elements.  I also think we need to start thinking more about how we accommodate the needs of different personality types.

In my company we use the term Workstyles to describe this approach, and we are thinking in terms of the end-user experience, and not just the services that compromise it.  I think it’s a step in the right direction, particularly for infrastructure services where customers often don’t know what they want.

Earlier today I posted an article on Microsoft and Web 2.0 in the enterprise.  The focus of this post was the way in which Microsoft enables end-users and process/data owners at the edge of the business to take advantage of Web 2.0 concepts.  However there is another more rigorous approach than the one Microsoft provides with SharePoint and Office.  This rigorous approach comes from people working in BPM/EAI rather than people working in the desktop and collaboration space.  It’s interesting to contrast the approaches.

Here is an extract from an interesting article on zdnet concerning the enterprise mash-ups concept:

One of the premises of Enterprise Web 2.0 is that not only are these “remixing” techniques valid and viable within the organization, but that the blurriness between the boundaries of your systems and others – and your organization and others – will only increase over time.  I won’t go into the governance issues that come out of this in this post, but it’s even clearer that many of the enterprise software concepts of years past: SOA, EAI, and BPM, were terrific ideas that can solve many of these issues.  But until now they just didn’t have the proper tools to fully enable them.  It’s not to say that these tools were always bad, but we had to use them, whether they were the right ones or not. 

This extract shows where the top down BPM approach is starting from:

We’ll always have a need in certain areas of our software to exert absolute control and impose rigid constraints.  But the Web 2.0 community has clearly demonstrated that there are more supple, malleable ways to connect systems and people that generally work better. For example, Business Process Management, or BPM, is one of those areas that’s well positioned to exploit this simpler and more effective view of enterprise services and integration. 

and provides some useful links about where a new role for BPM might be taking us:

one of the original creators of the concept of BPM, Ismael Ghalimi, is doing just that with a Web 2.0-style named offshoot which he refers to as BPM 2.0.  BPM 2.0 emphasizes simple, inexpensive tools, true end-user wiring together of business processes, dynamic executable languages like BPEL, and many other Web 2.0 style-techniques, including zero-deployment footprint BPM clients enabled by Ajax.  Ismail’s company Intalio, where he is CEO, has recently released a product that actually delivers on this and he goes on to describe the mashup possibilities that can be explored with straightforward tools like his.

It’s interesting that Microsoft have developed a new BPM like workflow engine – Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) that will provide the platform upon which Office and SharePoint will implement their workflow capabilities.  Microsoft’s BPM tool BizTalk will be based on WWF in a future release.

During the last couple of months I have been discussing some of the business implications of Web 2.0 with Doug Neal,  you can read the result in this document - Management Messages on Web 2.0 – What you need to know about the next generation of the Internet.  The discussion got me thinking about the characteristics of web 2.0 and how they might apply to the enterprise.  Rather than create my own definition of web 2.0 I used this great visual from Dion Hinchcliffes’s blog on the SOA and WebServices Journal site as a start point.

Drawing my own version (not as nice) I then over-layed it (in yellow) with the areas that are addressed by Microsoft’s Office 12 (now Office 2007) and Exchange 2003/2007.  I have a rough and ready PowerPoint presentation on the same topic as this post,  which you can use if you email me for permission first.  You can download it here:

File Attachment: Microsoft and Web 2.ppt (287 KB)

You can see that Office 2007 gets pretty good coverage,  although I have taken the liberty of redefining/substituting Ruby of Rails, BitTorrent and Skype with other web 2.0 essentials VOIP, RSS and XML, to increase the relevance. 

I have explained my rationale in point by point fashion below, and although I have stretched the point in a few cases for effect,  in the end I concluded that Microsoft have done a pretty good job, although their success will throw up significant challenges to many enterprises that are not ready for Web 2.0 thinking, but more on that in another post. 

Because of NDA restrictions I am not able to talk about every feature,  the following is a sample drawn from previously published Microsoft documents, reviews, PDC sessions and videos.

Blogs:  Office SharePoint 2007 includes a blog template

Wikis: Office SharePoint 2007 includes a wiki template

Podcasting: Office SharePoint 2007 allows you to create document libraries, which can contain media files, and then publish them via RSS feeds with enclosures

Filtering: Office SharePoint 2007 allows you to create custom views with filters, these views can can be saved.  Any SharePoint list and in SharePoint everything is a list can be further filtered, sorted, joined etc with other data using Access 2007 and Excel 2007

Sharing & collaboration: this is a core capability of Office 2007 system

Social book-marking: one of the weaker areas of SharePoint,  you can create lists of links and share them but without the elegance and power of Internet social book marking systems

Rich Internet Applications: SharePoint itself is a fairly rich Internet application,  but more interestingly Outlook, Excel, Access, InfoPath and Project are all rich web services clients that allow you to publish via web services protocols and more importantly work on-line and off-line with server side data, but using the power of the rich clients.

Ajax: SharePoint is not a very sophisticated Ajax application, but Outlook Web Access connected to Exchange 2003 is one of the best examples of a great Ajax application, and was in fact the first true Ajax app.

Secure Sharing Extensions: invented by Microsoft for synchronising list data between systems,  I don’t think its used by Office 2007 right now,  but you can bet that it won’t be long.  However Groove, Outlook, Access and Excel are all able to synchronise replicas of SharePoint lists for use off-line.

RSS: SharePoint is a first class RSS engine, allowing you to subscribe to changes in any SharePoint list, and everything in SharePoint 2007 is a list,  the subscriptions can include enclosures.  If you subscribe to changes the feed body will include information on which list fields changed and the delta change.  If you don’t list RSS then you can also subscribe to email notifications, and these can have sophisticated criteria.

XML: XML data is everywhere in Office 2007,  my particular favourite is the ability to extract from XML word documents properties that are automatically promoted into list meta-data when a document is uploaded into a SharePoint document library.  If you change the document, or change the list meta-data both are automatically kept in sync.  You can then perform all manner of actions based on the list meta-data including searching, sorting, filtering, analysis or graphing in Access or Excel etc

VOIP:  Office Communicator 2007 is an excellent VOIP client, with Active Directory integration, presence support and the ability to integrate into PBX systems, audio conferencing systems and web conferencing systems.

Unintentional uses:  Take data in Access or Excel and publish it to SharePoint,  take SharePoint lists, many of them if you want, link to them in Access and Excel and then join them with data from other systems, visualise them, run reports on them etc. 

User contributions: SharePoint makes it very easy for users to contribute data (from Excel or Access) forms (from InfoPath), Emails (from Exchange) Documents (from Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote) Calendars, contacts and tasks (from Outlook) and discussions.

Effortless scalability: Effortless might be stretching it a bit,  but SharePoint 2007 and Exchange 2007 are definitely more scalable than previous versions and seem to be able to meet the needs of most enterprises

Radical decentralisation: SharePoint, Excel Server, InfoPath server definitely push a lot of capability out of the enterprise core and closer to the end-user,  but the real radical decentralisation comes from allowing people to take that SharePoint data into Groove, Excel, Access and Outlook.  Groove even lets you take data from SharePoint and then replicate it to peers in other companies.

Self Service: SharePoint is built on a delegated, self service model

Software as a service: Many enterprises will access SharePoint and Project Server in this way either through an ISP, and OutSourcer or an internal shared services model

Right to remix: The ability to create process portals that integrate web parts, or to aggregate data from multiple SharePoint lists, or SharePoint’s meta-data aware full text search application are all examples of re-mixing.  Also the ability to do application to application RSS subscriptions, however the ultimate in remix power is provided by Excel and Access as described previously.

Participation: RSS and Email subscriptions, discussion databases, off-line and on-line support, web access, rich client access and search are all of these are great examples of technologies that will increase participation.

Mash-ups: At the risk of repeating myself image that you can automatically extract data from Excel and Word, promote it into list meta-data, aggregate that meta-data, subscribe to the result in RSS, or download it and integrate it with other list data, local data or enterprise data in Excel and Access.  The mash-up possibilities are endless,  of course the potential for end-users creating massive support issues must not be forgotten (unintentional uses!!)

Beta: whilst the Office platform itself may not be beta, all of these end-user innovations definitely will be!

User control: users have a terrifying degree of control,  not only can they have personal web sites, personal portal customisations etc they can also extract or take replicas of on-line data and do what they want with it.  All subject to security access controls.

RSS, SOAP, REST:  All of the interactions between Outlook, Access, Project, Excel, InfoPath and SharePoint/Project Server take place using published web services.

Small pieces: PowerPoint slides can now be built up by picking and mixing slides from slide libraries,  XML documents can now publish document properties into SharePoint lists, every thing in SharePoint is built from lists, all examples of small flexible pieces that can be combined into greater wholes

Hard to re-create data:  SharePoint can store links to enterprise data,  for example SQL server data.  These links can be maintained in one place and accessed easily in client applications.  Active Directory data and other line of business data can be indexed by SharePoint search.  Spreadsheets can be published from Excel Server just using Ajax web clients, without the use of Active X controls.  Project data can be accessed using Project Web Access, again without using Active X controls.

Copyrighted & IP Content:  SharePoint document libraries can be protected using rights management policies.  Users with permission can download the documents, but depending on the policy they can be prevented from sharing them, printing them etc.  In addition documents can be set to expire after a certain time.  This is great for controlling leakage of information, but also enforcing copyright and increasing information integrity.

This post is intended to assess whether Microsoft “get web 2.0” in the enterprise, my conclusion is that they do.  It is not meant to address whether Office System 2007 is a great product or not, or to imply that other companies can not do the same or better,  the post is long enough as it is!  If you want to read more of my posts on Office 12,  you can find them here.

I have been increasingly using Skype and decided to share my experiences to date:

Overall Summary

• Closest I have had to the perfect phone while working from home,  but still issues that I have to work around

Skype delights

• I can sit at home with my headset on listening to music, watching videos and making and taking calls in considerable comfort
• I have a very long headset cable so I can move around quite freely
• I can wind up the volume for telephone calls so that I can always hear people,  I can use the in-line volume control for my headset and the dedicated keyboard keys for this which makes it very easy
• I can easily forward calls from my Treo to my Skype-in number,  which means I don’t get interrupted on calls and avoid the low signal strength issues I have at home.
• I have a single source of contacts for Skype (via the Outlook tool-bar), Lotus Notes and my Treo 650.  I sync my contacts over to Outlook using DoubleLook.
• Its cheap,  I make lots of calls to the US and Skype to Skype and Skype to Land-lines is excellent quality most of the time.
• When video is important Skypes integrated video is great.
• The kids love it,  they use it to Skype each other and me from their rooms and to call their friends
• The ability to send voice mails instead of emails
• It’s IM is pretty good with history, search etc,  Although nowhere near as good as Trillian Pro.
• I can use it on my Tablet – over wireless – from anywhere in the house

Skype tweaks:

• Tools – Options – Hotkeys, enable hotkeys,  I find mute and focus really useful
• Tools – Options – Advanced – ‘Enable contact list and history quick filtering’ – enables word wheel type searching,  really great if you have a lot of contacts
• Tools – Options – Video – Disable – Start Video Automatically – uses too much upload bandwidth, only use video when you really need it,  unless you have lots of upload bandwidth (I have 256K on ADSL)

Skype problems:

• Registering for conference calls is a real problem.  The DTMF tones that Skype generates are rarely recognised.  I have tried several different conference solutions and never managed to get reliable results, sometimes I can connect first time,  other times I give up after 10 tries requiring several redials!  However it is possible Gizmo can do it and DTMF tone generators are more reliable. 
• Skype breakup when CPU utilisation is high,  this just means I have to keep a watch on my task bar, where I can see task managers CPU indicator, not a big problem
• Skype breakup when uploading screen changes in web conferences,  this is Dependant on the software I am using,  If I use Lotus Sametime with true colour then it is particularly bad and I have to learn not to speak when I flip slides for a few seconds.
• Poor quality when calling mobiles, especially internationally

Useful add-ons

• Best add-on so far is SkypeMuter which PAUSES Windows media player when you receive or make a call.  Very useful, although on my machine it sometimes seems to just toggle Media player, ie it un-pauses it when you Start or Receive a call,  but in general I think its great and its free.
• I have tried Pamela which promises to provide great functions including excellent voice mail and voice recording.  I have had a couple of issues with it degrading the call it is recording though so for now I have disabled it until I have time to do more testing,  however its definitely worth watching as it evolves.
• I was incredibly excited to find Unyte a free (for now) web conferencing product nicely integrated with Skype,  it really is a 2 click product.  I loved it and used it all day long when I installed it,  but I am fairly certain that it somehow crashed by Netgear router twice that day!  Again another one to watch to see if Unyte really was the cause.  It really is a wonderful product.  Also I noticed no voice quality issues when using it!
• A freeware DTMF dialer, which is more reliable than Skype.  You can store up the DTMF strings you need and play them back on demand.  In my case I have to take off my headset and put the microphone near the headset but it works 70% of the time, so its a big improvement.
• The Skylian plug-in for Trillian Pro so I can have one tool for presence and Instant Messaging

Alternatives:

• Gizmo.  Good voice quality, integrated recording, better DTMF support – sounds perfect so far!  however dialling free-phone numbers costs money and its way to unstable crashing at least twice a day on Windows 2003 Server SP2.
• Windows Live Messenger (beta), Good voice quality – however dialling free-phone numbers cost money and no one else has it installed, so its not getting much use.

David Chappell is an authoritative commentator on middle-ware,  in this post he explains why workflow is important and confirms that the addition of workflow services to Windows will also be important:

Yet one application of workflow technology is by far the most important in a service-oriented world: providing logic that coordinates the activities of a group of services. Sometimes referred to as orchestration rather than workflow, this coordination is fundamental to creating composite applications. And composite applications look like today’s most promising approach to building new software that really meets business needs.

As I’ve argued elsewhere (here and, at greater length, here), the coordinating logic of a composite app requires a particular kind of supporting platform. Workflow/orchestration technologies provide this platform, and without it, composite applications are tough to build. Developers and architects will need to learn how and when to use what workflow offers, something that’s sure to take time. Still, by including workflow in Windows, Microsoft is clearly indicating that it views this technology as a standard part of the modern developer toolkit.