Standards Blog provides some useful information on the Workplace Office client.  The context is a series of articles looking at various ODF clients of which Workplace Managed Client is one.

I’m pleased to see that IBM are now picking up speed in their attempts to engage with their community through blogs and other direct to consumer communication channels which is good news as I have previously been a bit critical of their efforts. 

However there is still not much diversity of opinion.  In the IBM world there tends to be one information source and several commentators, which contrasts strongly with the Linux and Microsoft worlds for example where we see many independent people reporting the same thing and much more comment.  So its always useful see see independent posts like this, even if only the questions asked are independent.

Now Rod thinks that these ‘Office’ applications will be displaced by tools like blogs, wikis and Microsoft’s Excel services.  I partially agree I think these tools will just complement the traditional Office applications and extend their reach beyond the desktop and the network file server.  Here are some (mostly Microsoft)examples:

1. Applications built by using custom searches, probably encoded in the URL, against Internet and intranet search engines.  Expect to see this particularly in situations where the search engines let you reach into databases and document metadata
2. Applications built using the incredible versatility of SharePoint custom lists and workflow
3. Applications built by combining InfoPath, Word, Excel XML documents with data selectively promoted from the XML into SharePoint lists
4. Applications built processing RSS data from all manner of applications and then mashing it up with other data, or pulling it into Office or web based analysis tools
5. Applications built using the next generation of web based 4GLs like DabbleDb and Coghead
6. Composite applications built by integrating portal components, including some or the above, like Intalio’s, built from Dabble DB, FeedBurner, FeedDigest Flickr, Google Analytics, LinkedIn, Technorati, WordPress,Zoho Writer.

This is the true long tail of software,  traditional office applications enhanced and integrated with web office, collaboration and line of business applications.  However lets not forget the humble desktop application.  Its had a bad reputation in the past – largely because of DLL hell – but as new classes of applications appear that don’t need to be installed in the traditional sense but can just be streamed down to the PC, cached and executed I expect that desktop apps will get a new lease of life in the enterprise. 

Whilst I don’t personally have a lot of involvement with active SaaS projects I recently took a look at a few areas where I have seen SaaS proving popular with customers that I work with and I saw an interesting trend. 

Lots of interest in SaaS during the early phases of the lifecycle, however once a products value was accepted in the enterprise and its usage grew substantially most of the SaaS services were brought back into the enterprise.  I am sure that won’t always be the case but it was surprising consistent. 

I guess such a lifecycle is not very surprising, however it does make me think that SaaS will be most successful where:

1. the SaaS supplier can deliver some value – beyond simply scale – from hosting multiple customers on the same Internet facing infrastructure
2. the service is by its nature shared,  with no single enterprise having ownership
3. an individual enterprises demand for the service fluctuates considerably
4. the SaaS application provides capabilities that are not available in enterprise products
5. the integration with other SaaS or enterprise systems is either not required or is simple

Enterprise Web 2.0 Technological Barriers

1. How can I be certain that the information that is gathered and shared behind the firewall stays behind the firewall?

Blogging is part of the communication continuum – Instant Messaging, Email and Blogs. Your employees currently follow a policy to keep some information only “behind the firewall” when using IM and Email. They will need to follow the same rules when it comes to using and sharing information they find with your Enterprise Web 2.0 tools.

I agree with the key point,  but I also think its worthwhile questioning the amount of information that we keep behind the firewall, posting outside the firewall makes it much easier for customers and potential customers to interact with you and also helps build a community with other companies/individuals trying to solve the same problem.  Rod’s blog is an example how how hopefully his company has benefited from the discussion around the use of blogs in the enterprise.  If Rod had only blogged about enterprise blogging behind the firewall I would suspect that his thinking would have been less refined.

2. How do I control who has access to particular levels of information and databases?

Set up a simple 3 layer system. Everyone, Department Only, Project Team. For specific project blogs, set a default access level, and then make exceptions on an article by article basis.

Enterprise blogging tools like WordPress MU can dynamically re-draw pages depending on the viewers access control.

Setting up the read access lists is also fairly easy. The user experience looks like addressing an email.

Again I agree, but it’s worth mentioning that its not just about controlling access, but also about making sure that the people who NEED access actually get subscriptions pushed to them.  For example a Programme Manager needed to be auto-subscribed to the blogs of all of the projects in the programme,  a project manager to all the staff on his project and all his peers within a programme etc.

3. How do I protect the integrity of the information from malicious tampering by disgruntled employees or managers?

You use the wisdom of the crowd combined with audit trails and roll-back features. For example, say you are using Social Text as an enterprise Wiki to document policies and procedures. If an angry employee changed one of the policies, Social Text would keep track of who changed it, what changes they made and when. The group (aka the wise crowd) would be relied upon to catch the error. The employee could then be held accountable for their actions.

It should be noted that most companies have this problem today, but it is actually much more serious. There is no access control over most policy and procedure documents. The docs just sit there on a shared drive, available for hundreds of people to anonymously edit.

And, in today’s environment, there is an even greater risk: without the enhanced search and cross-linking features of blogs and wikis, most employees have trouble getting the information they need when they need it. The result is a high chance for mistakes because people are not familiar with the policies.

I have seen many companies start off worrying about this issue, only to find its very minor and that the mechanisms built into blogs and wiki’s easily provide self governance within the enterprise.

4. How can I be sure that information is being “tagged” properly for efficient retrieval later?

Social tagging works.

Just as the government does not have to enforce a proper price for beer or any other good or service in an open market economy, the knowledge management department does not have to enforce a rigid standard for how things are tagged. People will tag things as they want, and eventually, cultural standards will arrive. See Stu Downes Folksonomy in the enterprise for more proof.

Yes,  in fact as Stu states as the number of people who tag increases above 50 you quickly cease producing unique tags, and 50 people in a community is a viable number in most enterprises

Also, remember that things are not tagged on the open Internet, at least not according to any centrally planned taxonomy, and yet you can still find exactly what you are looking for. You use Google.

After you deploy your Enterprise Web 2.0 solutions, if you are still having trouble finding what you need, buy a Google Mini. The Google Mini doesn’t work all that well in Web 1.0 Intranets, but with all the additional cross-linking that will automatically happen in enterprise blogs and wikis, Google Mini should work just fine.

5. What kind of training do employees need before they can effectively use the technology?

Some employees will need no training. Generally, these will be younger employees and the 5 to 10% who already have a personal blog.

I have recently seen some research that suggests that people in the 35-45 age group tend to be pretty early adopters of many of these technologies. Within an enterprise – as distinct from an academic – context you often find that its this age group rather than the 25-35 group who are the blog and IM users.

Other employees will need fairly extensive training.

Enterprise Web 2.0 Cultural Barriers

6. How can I monitor the system to make certain that what individuals are saying and sharing reflects company policy?

This is less of an issue if you are dealing with Internal only deployments of Enterprise Web 2.0.

Today, you have to deal with this issue when if comes to emails, voicemails, phone calls, instant messages, etc.

The one advantage to Web 2.0 is that if someone puts up something offensive in a Blog, you can take it down. Once an email is sent, if can be forwarded on to millions.

This is also a cultural issue, many companies who allow blogging recognise that whilst there is a risk associated with employees not following company policy, that the benefit of allowing company policy to evolve in response to the opinions of their workforce, customers, suppliers and other interested parties can be very valuable.  Certainly within an enterprise this discussion and debate is even more valuable in a company that is culturally ready for it.

7. What are the legal dangers in saving and sharing so much loosely supervised input?

In some instances, there are serious legal dangers. In a consulting firm, if you promise the client to only share client information with the project team, that information better not be shared with the whole firm.

The best way to address this issue, is to develop a one-page set of rules for employees. Simple guidelines on what they should and what they should not post. The guidelines should be blunt, easy to read, and feel almost like Enterprise Web 2.0 commandments.

Thou shall not flame thy colleagues.

If the legal department helps with crafting the guidelines, along with input from HR, you should be able to minimize the implications of this risk. Note also, that this is a danger in today’s environment. Except you have little to no ability to see who read what on the company’s shared drive. The result is no accountability in today’s systems.

I’m no lawyer but I would imagine that the issues are already addressed in most companies IT acceptable usage policies for email and intranet use.

8. How do I distinguish “productive” use of the technology from horsing around?

How do you distinguish between productive use of email and horsing around? Or even worse, how do you distinguish between productive use of email, and CC’ing to CYA internal spam where co-workers fill each other’s inboxes with stuff they only ends up wasting time. “Just in case you might need to know about this in six months, let me re-cap today’s meeting”. That stuff can now be put on the blog or into the wiki, and found when it is needed.

Same comment as above,  this issue should already be addressed in an acceptable usage policy for IT.

9. How do I “manage” the gathering and disseminating of so much unstructured information?

This is like the tagging issue. There are tools out there, such as RSS that help.

However, I also believe that it is important, in the enterprise setting, to impose a little structure. Instead of having blogs, for example, have purpose specific blogs:

• People Work Sites can be a combo of resumes, current projects, contact info and personal blog
• Project Work Sites can list the client, include to-do lists, related docs, include updates, and have links to the people working on the project.

The right list of Work Site types (or purpose specific enterprise blogs) depends on the company, and like everything else, will probably evolve over time.

Hmm,  I think special purpose blogs are useful in an enterprise context, however think that an individuals contribution is best represented by an individual blog, individuals who need blogs would tend to be leaders and subject matter experts.  I also think the project blogs, programme blogs, department blogs etc are very useful, but they complement and don’t replace individual blogs.  Take as an example a project manager,  she might maintain a project blog, but her personal blog would have different content, maybe with some overlap.

10. How do I know if I’m getting my money’s worth out of the investment in technology?

What investment? This stuff is so cheap, you will hardly be able to notice the expense.

With customizations, hardware costs, integration costs and deployment costs, you are looking at less that $50,000 for an enterprise blogging system for thousands of users.

I agree, cheap.  I would start off though promoting the idea of blogs to people who will set a good example, subject matter experts, leaders, project managers etc and then let them encourage others by their example.

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.

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!

It seems to me that we find commodity items and services useful by definition! But when the price has fallen sufficiently, we no longer value them. That is, we tend to take things for granted and at some point consider their availability as good as free. Water and electricity are two good examples. We turn on the tap for a drink and flick a switch for light without even a second thought.

However I now think this style of thinking takes us to a dangerous place, its very similar to thinking about the purchase cost, rather than the total cost of ownership.  I think a much safer definition of commodity goes as follows:

A commodity is something that has a total cost of replacement that is very close to the purchase cost of the replacement, ie ownership has no value and ceasing to own has no penalty.

Now this definition might seem a bit too subtle,  but let me give you some examples of commodities and see if it works:

I can switch electricity and telephone supplier in the UK simply by making a short phone call.  I can replace my fridge by unpacking it, sliding it out of the kitchen and sliding in another one and re-packing.  These seem to fit my definition is commodity pretty well.

Now lets look at my PC, which is often referred to as a commodity,  unfortunately by my definition we have a problem,  the replacement cost is very considerably greater than the cost of replacement,  not only might I have compatibility issues to resolve but I will have data to transfer, application licences to find, media to find, software to install and configure etc etc.  Whilst the hardware might be a commodity the working system is anything but.  When looked at in this way commoditization looks like a great way to go though,  I would love to replace my PC and for all of the “state” to just transparently restore itself to the device.  With enterprise management software we are getting closer to this situation,  but we are a long way away from it in the home.  As data volumes increase and the state definition becomes increasingly complex I also think we will also continue to struggle in the enterprise.

I recently had a discussion with Microsoft planners about requirements for Windows beyond Vista and this issue was high on my wish list.  In fact I said to them that my high level requirement was for Windows to meet my definition of commoditized, and for loss and upgrade events to cost me little more than the purchase cost of the replacement device.  A more concrete suggestion was to be able to treat everything like data, ie I can just copy my PC to another PC, or to a USB memory stick and ironically Microsoft’s acquisition of Softricity might be one of the stop gap technologies that makes this more practical.  However I think the long term solution will need a lot of work by the whole industry, Graham also comments on this. 

In a previous post I described the fact that for many people you can describe their IT needs in terms of 4 layers,  this is important because it means that if you try to provide a new IT system that meets a need in layer 4, when the persons needs in layers 1 – 3 are not already met then you will struggle to motivate people to use it, because their focus will continue to be on meeting their needs in layers 1–3.

If this is true then this model has important implications for how you meet needs in the lower layers.  Let me explain;  you really need to meet needs in layer 1 in a way that makes it easy to then meet needs in layer 2 and you need to meet needs in layer 2 in a way that makes it easy to meet needs in layer 3.  You may think this is so obvious that its not worth mentioning, however, obvious though it may be – over the last 10 years we have consistently failed to do this in the enterprise deskop services management. 

To illustrate lets consider some examples:

About 10 years ago the industry invented the idea of a standard desktop environment for all,  with a locked down standard image delivered to a small range of PC’s with a small range of approved peripherals.  Software was delivered to these devices from a central repository using remote software distribution technologies.  This was a good solution to the tier 1 need, ie:

Initialy a person is motivated to get access to a computer and software that is reliable and has good connectivity.  Until they achieve this they achieve this they are unlikely to worry too much about anything else

What we didn’t consider was the fact that as soon as we met this Access need all of our users would rapidly move on to want to meet their tier 2 need:

Once they get access to a reliable computer they will seek to maximise their personal productivity, which will often express itself as a desire to control their IT environment, customising it, installing additional software, and generally making investment decisions that match their personal priorities.

Oh dear, we solved their tier 1 needs in a way that minimised the control they had over their environment, therefore forcing people with very diverse business requirements and personality types to all use the same standardised environment.  In some businesses even the monitor size and resolution was standardised.  In addition whilst we had good software delivery tools the cost and lead-time to get a new software product evaluated, tested, packaged, purchased and deployed was so long and painful that many people gave up before they even started.  What happened, a whole load of frustrated employees who either left the company, started to use their home PC’s, started buying PDA’s, or bringing their laptops into work etc.

So what did we do next, we decided we had solved the needs of individuals and needed to move onto solving the needs of teams, where I contend our users were actually focussed on Personal Voice! 

their priority will start to turn to control over their personal voice, ie how their contribution is seen by their managers and peers and other stakeholders.

How did this happen,  well – we failed to listen to the users and listened to our customers, and many of these customers were strongly motivated to focus on managing the costs that they controlled and in many businesses that didn’t include the lost opportunity costs associated with delivering end-user productivity.  So not only did we fail to fully deliver personal productivity, but we skipped completely the need for Personal Voice and went straight to addressing team/knowledge management needs.

Then we hit a problem,  the team/KM systems didn’t get used very effectively because the people who were meant to be using them were focussed on trying to sort out their personal productivity and were concerned that if they put all of their effort into making other people a success their personal voice/contribution would not be heard.  Had we done things in the right order it should have gone like this:

Once people feel they have control over their personal voice, their priorities will switch to the success of others, or to the teams of which they are members.

In my next post I will provide a rough sketch of how to address each of these layers in a way that considers the needs of the other layers.

I am really excited about the prospects because whilst Java and .NET also promise easy application provisioning/installation, minimise dependencies on the client operating system and don’t affect the integrity of the operating system we still have tens of thousands of legacy applications around which are crying out for Virtualization.  Until this announcement by Microsoft virtualization was just not a big enough market for many of these legacy application suppliers to take notice of.

Softricity also brings some great management products to Microsoft, in particular their streaming and Internet facing software distribution and metering technologies.  These will be great solutions for enterprises that need to deliver pre-configured applications to un-managed or partially managed desktops and we may well see software developers streaming their applications directly to users, and automatically maintaining them with the latest patches and upgrades, a sort of thick client version of the previously only web based Software as a Service trend.

Brian Madden doesn’t think this is too big an impact on Citrix as a company,  but I do I think it will drive Citrix into an even smaller niche as enterprises see client side virtualization as meeting some of the needs that they currently use Citrix Presentation Server for and of course it disrupts or kills Citrix’s own virtualization product.  The comments on Brian’s blog post provide an excellent discussion on the impact.

A few weeks ago I was raving about Altiris and their SVS product,  now I see SVS having a very limited life.

One final point is that this is great news for Microsoft provided they aggressively drive adoption as widely as possible because it will greatly simplify the application compatibility issues that hold people back from deploying new operating system versions, it will also reduce the testing lead-times for Microsoft.  This dual affect with probably increase adoption rates, re-invigorate windows as a platform and provide Microsoft with more time for innovation.  It also probably means that Microsoft could provide many of its own applications (Office 2007 etc) as a service.

On the whole I am excited though, because my focus is on the user experience,  or how we deliver capabilities that make a real difference to the way people work and live, and as the capabilities get richer, more flexible and more integrated that just enhances our ability to make a difference!

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

Operating System Virtualization:  users have one PC (virtual or physical) that’s their’s and they can use it for whatever they want (within reason) and another (again physical or virtual) that’s managed by the enterprise.  The flow of data between these two machines is controlled via firewalls, AV etc.  The most popular configuration with users is to have the enterprise PC as the virtual PC,  not surprisingly the most popular configuration for enterprises is the converse.  The combination of VMware free player, Microsoft’s low cost (no additional cost for MSDN subscribers) Virtual PC and hardware support in future processors from Intel and AMD is making this increasingly practical.

Application Virtualization: users have one PC that is under their control but enterprises provide isolated applications that can run on top of an application virtualization layer.  In this mode the enterprise can be assured that their application configuration can not be compromised by applications that users install (apart from drivers) and that they can deploy, activate and de-activate these applications quickly and simply.  Application Virtualization will often even allow multiple versions of the same application to run concurrently on the same machine.

Enterprise Portals: users have a PC that is under their control, and access all key applications and data via an enterprise portal.  Such portals normally provide support for a wide variety of application types including Web, Java, and Citrix.  Its not a stretch to imagine these portals also being the access point for downloading applications that run on the application virtualization platform described above.

SSL VPNs and network access control: SSL VPN’s are rapidly replacing IPSEC VPN’s as companies move to an application access rather than a network access model.  Many SSL VPNs include network access control capabilities that involve an agent being downloading and scanning the PC to make sure that it meets enterprise criteria (patches, AV, firewall configurations) prior to the connection being established.  This capability is often combined/integrated with Enterprise Portals.

Network contraction: a few years ago it was common for the only firewalls in an enterprise to reside at the perimeter of the WAN.  An increasingly popular model is to protect the enterprise applications in the datacentre with firewalls and also to protect PC and workstations as well.  In some companies they are dispensing with the WAN altogether and PC’s running local firewalls effectively live on the Internet or behind commodity firewalls, and the enterprise perimeter has contracted to surround just the datacentres.  These datacentres often publish all of their interactive services via an Enterprise Portal as described above, and control connections to that portal using an SSL VPN and network access protection.

Personal Allowances: The final piece of the puzzle for me is how to handle the merging of business and personal use that we are increasingly seeing.  The model that appeals most to me is the allowance model.  Provide employees with all software they need for core business processes and a role specific allowance to invest in everything else including phones, displays, desktops, portables, tablets, productivity software, home networking etc.  Define standards and publish best practices to help people make sound decisions and to help them be as productive as possible, allow employees to supplement the allowance with their own money if they want to.  Because individuals then own the devices it also looks like employees will take on more – if not all - responsibility for acceptable usage compliance.

It’s very important to note that Server based Computing is not the only approach, this document discusses all of the mainstream and the main evolving approaches.  However because Server based Computing is the most popular generic term in use it has been reused here.

What problem is Server Based Computing trying to solve?

First we need to understand the issues we are trying to solve with these technologies:

• Installing applications on many client devices is difficult for a whole host of reasons but mainly because:
• the clients are not all exactly the same so what works on one does not work on all
• its difficult to predict who needs which applications
• some of the people we want to use our applications use client devices that are not under our control, so we are not able to install software on them
• it takes time and effort to package up an application in such a way that it can be automatically deployed and does not conflict with other applications or the PC operating system in undesirable ways
• Installing applications requires administrative privileges on the PC, most companies do not allow users to have these privileges because of the security, acceptable use compliance management and TCO implications.
• Once an application is installed it needs to be maintained with bug fixes, configuration changes and new versions
• When people move location, visit another location or work from home they want to be able to continue to access their environment
• When PC hardware fails people want to be able to just plug in a new machine, or sit at the desk next to them and carry on
• Deploying applications to many PC’s takes time, introduces risk, and costs money; these three factors create an inertia that resists change.  The result is the client software gets out of date, or different versions exist on different machines resulting in inflexibility.
• In environments where theft is a risk, PC’s are very attractive targets!
• Using appropriate technology SBC can provide desktop platform independence, and increase the usable life of desktop equipment.
• Eliminates the need to upgrade desktop hardware in order to support new applications services or upgrades.
• Using appropriate technology the solution can provide more predictable WAN utilisation.
• Centralised processing resources can be rapidly reassigned during temporary periods of increased utilisation of business critical application services. This mitigates the need to procure additional equipment to accommodate these periodic peaks in utilisation, for example year end processing.

Why do we continue to deploy PC’s

These problems are pretty serious ones, so next it’s important to understand why we still often deploy PC’s:

• Many applications do not work, or are not supported unless they are running locally on a PC
• Many applications can only be cost effectively deployed on PC’s
• We have automated management tools, packaging tools and conflict resolution tools that help us get closer to the objective of managing thousands of PC’s with a similar fixed cost to managing hundreds and a very small variable cost per extra PC.
• Many applications integrate at the client, so multiple applications delivered from different servers do not provide the same user experience
• Users often get confused by the extra complexity of some alternatives
• Some people need access to applications when they don’t have access to the network, or that connection is too slow or un-reliable

Where is Server Based Computing most popular today?

Despite some of the issues raised above Server Based Computing  is increasingly popular, and very popular for certain scenarios:

• Delivery of applications to clients that are unmanaged or managed by a third party
• Delivery of line of business applications to large numbers of casual users
• Delivery of software for test and evaluation
• Rapid, on demand deployment
• Rapid removal of application services
• Delivery of applications to unsupported locations like branch offices
• Delivery of applications to hostile environments, or high theft risk environments, or environments needing maximum flexibility
• Delivery of applications to task and Structured Task Workers with a small number of applications and well defined processes
• Enforces “business use only” disciplines
• Centralised data management and security
• Provides the flexibility to, rapidly, and securely enable access to business applications for external business partners or new business units, without having to invest in additional infrastructure.

What are the alternatives?

There are however a wide array of technologies that solve these problems, it’s worth restating the basic approaches to solving the traditional PC application delivery problem:

• True thin client.  Make the client device as simple as possible, ideally stateless, i.e. you can plug in another one and it will just work.  Don’t allow any applications to execute on the client, just allow presentation.  In this alternative all applications are server based.
• Re-buildable client. Maintain a record of the desired state of a device on a server, if a device fails for whatever reason then its ’state’ can be recreated fairly rapidly from the server.  Many systems management tools allow this and Operating Systems are getting better at this all of the time .  In this alternative applications can be delivered using all of the techniques described below.
• Connect to your PC from anywhere, rather than run all of your applications on the server, its possible to use a traditional PC most of the time.  However when you are at home, or working at another business location connect over the network to your PC, and use remote display technologies.
• House your PC in the data centre, solutions are emerging that allow users to connect to an individual PC, (blade format device), housed in a data centre.  The PC system unit is accessed over the network.  If your PC fails its easy to swap to another.  This option is commonly described as Consolidated Client Infrastructure or CCI.
• Execute applications on the server, and run the minimum client side code to render the display and manage keyboard, mouse and peripheral connectivity.  X Windows, Windows Terminal Services and Terminal Emulation products all fall into this category.  More than 80% of Windows Terminal services and Citrix deployments are actually delivering applications to Windows clients rather than thin clients.
• Download web pages and scripts in real-time.  Clients that allow simple presentation and sometimes validation code to execute on the client, but download the application in real time, every time you need it .  The key thing is no change to the configuration of the client is needed for the application to download and run – many web applications fall into this category, the vast majority execute JavaScript/JScript on the client.
• Download applications that rely on client platform extensions.  Clients that have some fairly rich set of standard services installed that let application code be downloaded in real time execute safely, normally in the browser, but not as general purpose as .NET and Java.  Internet Explorer itself falls into this category as it includes significant functionality that’s not pure HTML and CSS .  Flash and other Active X controls or alternative Plug-in standard are more obvious examples.
• Download complex applications in real-time. Allow more complex application to execute on the client, but download the application in real time, every time you need it .  The key thing is no change to the configuration of the client is needed for the application to download and run, the applications are self maintaining, i.e. new versions are downloaded in real time from the server. Java applications and some Microsoft.NET Framework v2 applications using ClickOnce  deployment.

There is a variant of this option, where the application does change the configuration of the client, these applications often provide tight integration with the operating system, high performance graphics, integration with local peripherals etc.  However they are still deployed in real-time and self maintaining .

• Store the file on a file server, but execute it on the client.  Some applications will work that way, but often applications need to be installed on the client to run correctly.
• Package an application in such a way that it is installed in real-time when a user first invokes it.  Some Linux Distributions and SoftGrid for windows provide specialist tools to achieve this that provide application isolation features and optimise the packaging to minimise download delays.  These products also ensure that the configuration of the PC operating system is unchanged, ensuring that other applications are not affected by the installation and that the application can be automatically de-installed.
• Manual Installation.  manually install an application by running an installation script, a refinement of this is to provide some form of on-line catalogue from which people can download and then install applications.  For most applications (see above for different approaches) the application will change the configuration of the client (create shortcuts, install files into shared areas, change the registry) and will therefore require administrative priv.
• Push installation.  A refinement of the previous approach,  applications are automatically distributed to the persons PC using an automation tool (SMS, Unicenter, LanDesk) and the system executes the installation in the background.  The decision to distribute the application may be manual (a list of PC’s) or may be based on the PC being identified automatically as the result of matching a query (all Thinkpad x23s), being added to a group (everyone in finance) or a some other policy (everyone at location B).  A refinement of this is publishing; where a stub is installed which shows the applications icons, file type registrations etc.  When the application is first invoked it is installed on demand.
• Application appliances or virtual machines.  Using a technology like VMware Player a whole operating system and set of applications can be installed by copying a file, (or couple of files) to the PC.  This virtual environment may contain a whole managed or unmanaged PC in which case all of the above application delivery discussions apply equally to the Virtual PC.  However the Virtual PC may in fact be thought of as an application (or an appliance), examples might be a Virtual PC that is actually a complete functioning database server, or proxy server, or isolated (hence safe) web browsing environment.  using VMware ACE it is possible to provide PC appliance that is configured and locked down to provide very well defined role.

Which of mix of these approaches fits your business need will depend on trading off performance, flexibility, usability and cost.  It will also depend on your application portfolio and which of the approaches your applications support.

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.

Of course Monad goes way beyond the capabilities provided in a UI as these Exchange 12 examples show:

# Set the send quota for ALL mail enabled users in the DL called “RemoteUsers” to 1000 KB
Get-DistributionGroup “RemoteUsers” | Get-DistributionGroupMember | Set-Mailbox –ProhibitSendQuota 1000

# Mount all mailbox databases on server HONGKONG1
Get-MailboxDatabase –server HONGKONG1 | Mount-Database

# Only remove storage groups that contain the word “temp”, with confirmation support
Get-StorageGroup | where { $_.Name –imatch “temp” } | Remove-StorageGroup –confirm

# move ALL users from server PORTLAND to the TUCSON server, database “DB1”
Get-Mailbox –server PORTLAND | move-mailbox –targetDatabase “TUCSON\DB1”