Communicator 2007 with OCS is better than using WLM because:

Its integrated with the AD, Exchange and SharePoint

• Looks up all the numbers for you, mobile, landline, home etc from contacts or the GAL
• Uses your calendar to auto set your presence state
• Takes you to their mysite on right click
• Presence globes throughout MS Office system, including SharePoint, AD, Outlook, Word, other apps etc.

Security

• Anyone can sign up for your Windows Live ID and thus pretend to be you (all it says is ‘email address not verified’
• In WLM you can change your name to someone else. All too easy to change your name and impersonate someone else.
• When you leave an organisation, your communicator buddy list stays with the company. With WLM you take that list with you
• Communicator is possible to log conversation centrally, not possible with WLM
• Because it encrypts the traffic so people can’t intercept your messages as they travel outside the firewall

Higher fidelity presence

• You can see at a glance if they are OOF before you email them or IM them
• With Communicator you have advanced presence such as ‘in call’ and ‘in a meeting’ which are set automatically
• You can tag a contact if you are looking for them
• With Communicator you can also see the presence of those that are NOT on buddy list.  This is a big one – its people you don’t know that well that you need the most presence assistance with.  I’d have to put the whole company on my buddy list to use WLM for this.

Phone integration

• Communicator integrates with your phone
• Can divert calls to the device you choose even mid call
• Communicator lets you answer the phone on your pc if you like because the two are integrated
• You can have your phone do simultaneous ring like your desk and mobile
• Via remote call control, you can see your phone calls come in even when you are not near your phone or mobile and can choose to take them via the pc or send to vmail
• Is integrated with your voicemail letting you talk to your voicemail inbox from the client
• With Communicator you can make outgoing and incoming calls from your PC. WLM only does outgoing – and its nowhere near as good quality (IMHO)
• You can click on a phone number in a document and it will phone it, you can cut and paste numbers and edit them before dialling

Enterprise management

• Communicator client is updated once every 3 or so years. WLM has a shorter refresh cycle so requires more effort to maintain in an enterprise
• You can do multi person video conferencing – don’t think you can do that with WLM
• Can IM a distribution list
• Cleaner UI, more corporate

Extras

• No adverts
• Great API for programming BOTS and other enterprise integration scenarios
• Integration with web conferencing
• Ability to switch seamlessly from peer to peer mode to client server mode once more than two participants are involved
• Works with Microsoft’s roundtable video conferencing hardware

Its a pretty impressive list,  although I think Lotus SameTime is on track to do an even better job of demonstrating just how different enterprise real-time communication is from consumer grade equivalents.

This post is dedicated to Sam – who is trying to make all this integration work in the real world!

SharePoint 2007 strikes me as an excellent foundation upon which to build,  its extensibility seems impressive and the fact that it already includes basic versions of all the main elements, blogs, wiki’s, personal pages and people search provides them with a great learning platform.  Mike scores Microsoft pretty poorly so far:

• Blogs:B-
• Wikis:C+
• Tag/Social Bookmark System: N/A
• Social Networking: B+
• XML Syndication: N/A (feed aggregation and management)

but my point is that it’s just a matter of time,  Microsoft has all the technology infrastructure they need, all the research, all the resources and their B- existing infrastructure is giving them all of the practical experience (Microsoft thrives in practical experience). 

I am a little surprised that Microsoft haven’t purchased NewsGator though,  it seems a perfect complement to their ambitions (both within Windows/Office Live the enterprise) and and it’s all based on their technologies.  Makes me think they must have something up their sleeves.

It won’t be long though, I suspect we won’t even have to wait for a new version of SharePoint (but I have no inside information).

Relieved – because Microsoft really needed a big scare, a scare like Linux has given the Windows team, something to shake them out of their comfortable slow cycle of incremental innovation and into the real world.  I don’t think we have even seen a hint yet of what this will mean – it’s certainly a lot more than Office Live Workplace, but I am quietly confident.

Why?  because Office 2007 was all about competing with the past,  a new UI meant that the Open Source clones hit a brick wall and a new file format meant that competitors needed to spend many development cycles going nowhere implementing the incredibly complex Office XML format. 

This leaves the huge Office 14 team to focus on the future, solving the problems of inter-enterprise virtual teams, improved ad-hoc real-time collaboration, collaborative authoring, more transparent offline/online transitions with SharePoint, richer web functionality etc.  I have no doubt that Microsoft has the skills (look at SharePoint, OneNote and Excel services for example) it’s all about the motivation – and right now their motivation (loss of one of their premier cash cows) must be at an all time high.

I’m excited by the potential as well,  Office is still the most important IT tool I use and I see tremendous potential for improvement if Microsoft gets it right,  what’s equally interesting is to see that IBM are even making a serious attempt at integrating their collaboration tools with Office (Quickr and SameTime) and as a user of both that’s also very good news.  Right now Quickr seems better integrated with Windows for example than SharePoint 2007 is!

It’s a simple idea – basically it exposes a whole load of existing material on the Microsoft web site through a simple interface that allows a communications team to identify appropriate content for different audiences at different phases of a project.

The sample below shows a few of the topics that are recommended for “influential knowledge workers” to review 1 month prior to deployment.  It’s a great idea much more approachable than previous attempts.  However as I reviewed the content I couldn’t help but feel that it talked as much about potential issues as it did about business benefits.  That may be commendable (Microsoft being honest) but it’s a bit of a worry! 

By way of contrast I watched this demo of Zoho Notebook and was blown away by the capabilities of this free of charge and legacy free product!

Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s):

The 2007 Microsoft Office system does not support upgrading from a prerelease version of the 2007 Microsoft Office system. You must first uninstall any prerelease versions of the 2007 Microsoft Office system products and associated technologies.

Correct the issue(s) listed above and re-run setup.

The online read-me that can be found here, helpfully informed me that:

The Office 2003 Web Components feature installed with Office 2007 Beta2 causes the Office 2007 product to block its installation. Users should use Add Remove Programs in the Windows Control Panel to Remove the Office 2003 Web Components, and then install the final Office 2007 product.

I searched through Add Remove Programs and could find no sign of the Office 2003 Web Components, so I installed Office 2007 and then downloaded, installed and un-installed the web components with no luck.

At this point I started searching around and found this article that explains that the error actually refers to the following much more comprehensive list of software:

This issue occurs if either of the following conditions is true:

• A beta release version of a 2007 Office program is still installed on the computer.
• A component from the beta release version of the 2007 Office suite or program is still installed on the computer.

You must remove all beta release versions of the 2007 Office suite or program from the computer before you install the original release version of a 2007 Office suite or program.
Additionally, this issue occurs if any of the following items are installed on the computer:

• 2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS (Beta)
• 2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF (Beta)
• 2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as XPS (Beta)
• Microsoft Expression Web Designer Beta 1
• Microsoft Expression Web Designer CTP1
• Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats (Beta 2 Technical Refresh)

Interestingly this list doesn’t mention the Office 2003 web components.

Anyway Office 2007 RTM still failed to install, giving the same error. 

Finally I came across the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility, which I ran and discovered that Installer files were still on my machine for several of the uninstalled Office 2007 components even though there was no evidence of them in Add Remove Programs. 

After deleting them using this utility Office 2007 seems to have installed.

Voice Messaging System

Voice mail can now be stored in the mailbox and accessed from a unified inbox in Outlook, Outlook Web Access, on a mobile device, or from a standard telephone. This unification improves employee productivity by simplifying access to the most common types of communications. It also dramatically reduces cost by removing the need for a standalone voice mail system and by taking advantage of any existing investments in Active Directory. Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging can be connected with a legacy private branch exchange (PBX) infrastructure through an IP gateway, or can be directly connected with certain IP PBX installations.

Self-Service Voice Mail Support

Using Outlook Web Access, users can request a reset of their voice mail PIN, set their voice mail greeting, record their out-of-office voice message, and specify mailbox folders to access when calling in by phone to hear e-mail messages through text-to-speech translation.

Outlook Voice Access

Users can access their Exchange mailbox using a standard telephone, available anywhere. Through touch tone or speech-enabled menus, they can hear and act on their calendar, listen to e-mail messages (translated from text to speech), listen to voice mail messages, call their contacts, or call users listed in the directory.

Play on Phone

Exchange Unified Messaging allows users to playback voice messages received in their Exchange inbox on a designated phone. This feature is useful when a user is in a public place and does not want to play the voice mail over their computer speakers. Play on Phone routes the voice mail to a cell phone, desk phone, or other number specified by the user.

Outlook 2007 Experience

Outlook Web Access, an AJAX application since its first release with Exchange Server 5.5, provides a rich, Outlook like experience in a browser. New features in Outlook Web Access 2007 enable users to:

• Schedule Out of Office messages and send to internal and/or external recipients
• Use the Scheduling Assistant to efficiently book meetings
• Access SharePoint documents without a VPN or tunnel using LinkAccess
• Use WebReady Document Viewing to read attachments in HTML even if the application that created the document is not installed locally
• Access RSS subscriptions
• View content in Managed E-mail Folders
• Retrieve voice mail or fax messages through Unified Messaging integration
• Search the Global Address List

Search

Information can be quickly found from a mobile device using the search capability of Exchange ActiveSync. When executing a search from a mobile device, both the local device store and the user’s entire Exchange mailbox are queried. Results found through the over-the-air search of the Exchange mailbox can be rapidly retrieved to the device. This capability enables access to information sent or received days, weeks, or even months before, regardless of the storage limitations of the mobile device.

Direct Push

Mobile devices incorporating Exchange ActiveSync maintain a secure connection with Exchange Server 2007, receiving new or updated e-mail, calendar, contacts, and tasks as soon as they arrive on the server. This push method optimizes bandwidth usage while keeping users up-to-date.

• Multiple monitors attached to a single card – no problem
• Multiple monitors attached to multiple cards with the same driver (which normally means the same chip set family) – no problem
• Multiple monitors attached to multiple cards with different drivers – no support for Glass

or more details check out this link

Perhaps even more important they will open up each research activity to peer review before it starts so that hopefully the research results will have more authority.  This blog post includes the details and the comments make interesting reading.  The following extract gives some indication of how the peer review process could improve the quality of the research:

The peer review feedback could let us know (just a sample):

• if the hardware used was the kind of hardware that would be used in real world situations?
• if the topology made sense, or did we need to evaluate different topologies?
• were the workloads real?
• what were some common variances in workload?
• were we using the software to manage and download patches that our peers would use?
• were there factors like quarterly financial report generation that meant that a realistic experiment would need to span more than the period specified?
• did the assumed distribution of patches make sense or were there fewer or greater number of patches?
• did our peers actually care about the failures we would measure?

It seems to me that it’s these middleware and customization features in SharePoint that set it apart from the competition in this space.

Joe Wilcox talks to the same issue on the Microsoft Monitor blog, where he says:

Middleware, you ask? Whatever SharePoint was it certainly isn’t just portal software in the 2007 version. Microsoft has turned SharePoint into a multi-facited product for many business line applications, like business intelligence, workflow and search. Will SharePoint do any of these functions well, or has Microsoft tasked it with too many things? We won’t know until Microsoft gets the software out of beta and businesses put SharePoint into real production use. Functionally, SharePoint Server 2007 is middleware, whatever the origins.

These features are going to be a shock to IT managers and a delight to users, the inability for IT to respond to users needs has already led to an explosion of client side application development using Excel and Access, but now similar rich capabilities are going to be possible using Excel Server, Forms Server and the amazing tricks you can do using just SharePoint lists and workflow.

Fans of web 2.0 technologies will be happy as well with built in support for blogs, and wikis and the fact that pretty much everything in SharePoint 2007 is a list and every list can be RSS enabled!  Podcasts are pretty easy as well, just RSS enable a document library, set the RSS feed to include enclosures and drop mp3 files into it and you have a podcast feed.  I discuss this in more detail in this previous post.

Dion Hinchcliffe has a useful post that talks about blogs, wikis and web 2.0 as the next application platform (I used his diagram above),  I think SharePoint 2007 meets all his requirements, but I think in his model he misses the importance of Lists as a way to make databases more approachable for normal users.  SharePoint also offers some pretty compelling integration with Excel and Access for power users allowing easy, bulk data entry, visualization and analysis. 

And finally Outlook offers limited offline support, although look to products like those from Colligo for more comprehensive offline support.

There are many small areas where the off-line experience is just not what you would expect,  sometimes only a read-only copy is created, sometimes not all list types are supported, links don’t work – the list of limitations goes on.  Admittedly Colligo – the authors of the blog – make their own tool for offline use of SharePoint but they make no secret of that fact.  Anyway if you think all your off-line issues are met then think again, check out the Colligo blog and the Colligo alternative (Reader and Contributor)and if you want the best Off-line experience it’s probably still Lotus Notes.

It’s interesting though that neither Microsoft nor Colligo make it easy to get a comprehensive and detailed view of what works off-line and what doesn’t and in which products.  some sort of mega table is required, if anyone knows where to find that information please post a comment.

Once assembled you get the chance to decide whether the resulting Keywords, Colleagues, or External Contacts are visible to – Only Me, My Manager, My Workgroup, My Colleagues, and Everyone.  The information is then published into your SharePoint 2007 “My Site”.  Integrating this information into the My Site is a great idea, because it already contains a lot of rich information about you, including – if you choose to keep one – a personal blog as well as AD info about your title, department, manager, group memberships, interests, skills, your picture and your colleagues.

Knowledge Network uses this information to extend the people search capability of SharePoint 2007.  You can find out more information about Knowledge Network from the excellent blog and web site.

If you want a good overview of social networking in general then I recommend this overview from Dave Pollard.

These resources provide an excellent checkpoint on pretty much every significant activity that Microsoft is engaged in.  The information is pretty high quality, it’s obviously got a sales feel to it, but the audience is financial analysts so Microsoft are fairly frank about their challenges and the presentations provide a lot of financial insights into both Microsoft and the industry in general.

Hint: It’s a good idea to double click the video in the webcast viewer,  at the highest resolution it looks pretty good in full screen and you can just about follow the demonstrations.  You might find it useful to download the slides though, as in the full screen view they are difficult to read.

The sessions are not very easy to navigate to though, so as I was watching them I created this list of shortcuts to the key information:

Colleen Healy, General Manager, Investor Relations, starts the day with a 10 minute introduction, a full transcript is provided along with a webcast and PowerPoint presentation,  unless you want an overview of the day you can skip this session. 

Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive Officer , gives a good 25 minute overview, a full transcript is provided along with a longer webcast with demonstrations of Vista and Office 2007 and PowerPoint presentation this session provides a good overview of Microsoft’s strategy

Kevin Johnson, Co-President, Platforms & Services Division and Bob Muglia Senior Vice President, Server & Tools Business spend about an hour giving a fairly detailed analysis of infrastructure side of the business, there is a good discussion of how this division supports the other divisions and a good analysis by Bob Muglia of the workloads that Windows is strong in and what they are doing to improve share of workloads they are weak in (HPC, Edge and Internet facing Web), with additional contributions by Yusuf Mehdi chief advertising strategist, a full transcript is provided along with a long webcast and PowerPoint presentation this session is definitely worth watching, it’s full of facts and figures and useful insights.

Jeff Raikes, President, Business Division describes the growth opportunity of the information worker business, and expands that to discuss the Microsoft Business Division more broadly to provide a sense of they are looking at this business, a transcript is provided along with a webcast of about 40 mins and a PowerPoint presentation, I haven’t watched this yet.

Robbie Bach, President, Entertainment & Devices Division introduces his much expanded division which has grown from the Home and Entertainment Division to become the Entertainment and Devices Division, and in the process added mobile and embedded devices; Media Center; responsibility for music, TV, and video; and responsibility for games for Windows, a full transcript is provided along with a 40 minute webcast and PowerPoint presentation

Ray Ozzie,Chief Software Architect, spends about 30 minutes giving an overview of the move to services and how this will impact the relationship between Windows and Windows Live, this is an excellent presentation, it shows that Microsoft have a value proposition that’s pretty unique and gives a good overview of how Microsoft plan to capitalize on this uniqueness, a full transcript is provided along with a webcast and PowerPoint presentation

Ray, Kevin, Jeff and Robbie then field questions so their is no PowerPoint for this session, but the usual transcript and webcast are available

Kevin Turner, Chief Operating Officer, kicks off the afternoon session with a 30 minute presentation, a full transcript is provided along with a webcast and PowerPoint presentation

Craig Mundie Chief Research & Strategy Officer, then gets a 45 minute slot, a full transcript is provided along with a short webcast and PowerPoint presentation

Chris Liddell Chief Financial Officer gives a 30 minute presentation, a full transcript is provided along with a short webcast and PowerPoint presentation

Steve Ballmer, gives a 45 minute summary, a full transcript is provided along with a short webcast and PowerPoint presentation

Steve, Kevin, Chris and Graig then field questions so their is no PowerPoint for this session, but the usual transcript and webcast are available

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!