Adventures in home working

I have been playing around with SharePoint 2007 for a while now and I think I am most impressed by the power that it puts into the hands of IT savvy end users, to create line of business solutions and to enhance these solutions further by integration with Office 2007.  

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.

Although I work from home and tend to be always connected to the Internet, I still find that I really like to use products that allow me to work off-line.  Not only is the performance often better, but it’s more reliable and I still spend a couple of hours a day disconnected.  lack of off-line support has been one of the biggest issues with SharePoint 2003 and although I have used Groove as an off-line client I have never been that satisfied with it.  Enter Office 2007, which includes off-line support for SharePoint 2007 primarily via Outlook 2007, but also for specific purposes via Groove 2007, Excel 2007 and Access 2007.  Take a look at the demos and you will come away pretty impressed, however that’s the purpose of demos!  Take a look at the Offline SharePoint blog and you will get a very different impression. 

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.

Microsoft’s Knowledge network looks interesting, it uses a client side component to gather information from your PC including email authors and recipients, Outlook contacts, IM contacts, manager (as defined in Active Directory), managers direct reports and your direct reports and SharePoint 2007 colleagues and it also analyses email subject and body text for keywords that reflect your areas of expertise. 

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.

I do a lot of Microsoft watching, and its pretty difficult to get a good overall impression of what’s going on in the company.  I have just discovered that all of the briefing sessions from the Microsoft Financial Analysis meeting are now available as online webcasts, even better they also make available all of the transcripts and presentations!

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

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!

Microsoft have just published a set of short videos that give a great introduction of the new features in Exchange 2007, definitely worth checking out.  Most of these videos use OWA, for more information on Outlook 2007 with Exchange 2007 check out the better together site.  I liked the unified messaging videos best!

Integrating Communications With Exchange Unified Messaging
110 KB | 300 KB
Phone-Based User Experience With Outlook Voice Access
110 KB | 300 KB

I must have been asleep during May because I missed the announcement of this tool, which is an add-on to Office SharePoint 2007 and also includes a client component that allows an individual to control the information from their local Email folders and IM that they want to submit to SharePoint search so that it can be mined via SharePoint people search.  Microsoft certainly seem to have taken privacy concerns seriously and also used a lot of social networking smarts as this snippet from their blog shows:

When you run the KN client for the first time on your local machine, you can choose which Microsoft Office Outlook folders are included in your local analysis. (The KN client supports either Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007.) After the KN client is done with its local analysis, it will recommend keywords and contacts for you to act on. The word “recommend” here is very important in that KN is only recommending keywords and contacts. It is only you who can decide what to accept, edit, or reject before your profile information is published to the server. You can also decide at this point whether or not you are willing to help your colleagues in an anonymous manner.

 

Once your profile information is published to the server, when your colleagues use SharePoint Server’s search facility to try to find someone with a particular area of expertise or particular contacts, the KN server responds to the query with personalized results that are displayed according to social distance and inferred relationship strengths, which were calculated by the innovative algorithms that we’ve developed.

 

So, KN can save you significant time when you’re trying to find the right people to connect with. It also allows you to choose the information you want to selectively share with your manager, your immediate workgroup, your colleagues, or your whole organization.

Definately looks like this is a blog that’s worth subscribing to.

I keep hearing people describe IT as increasingly commoditized and they are often discussing PC’s and office products at the time.  This gets me frustrated because in my experience these particular technologies are anything but commodities.  Although there are very many definitions of commodity I used to think that Peter Cochrane was getting close when he said:

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. 

Brian Madden provides some useful insights into the affect of Microsoft’s intention to acquire Softricity.  I for one believe this is a really big deal as it will bring virtualization technologies into the mainstream.  One of the things that has held virtualization back is the fact that every enterprise has had to package it’s own applications.  With Microsoft behind Softricity it’s likely we will see a good proportion of enterprise desktops with the Softricity client installed and once that happens we can expect software developers to provide Softgrid packages as a matter of course and this will be a very big deal indeed.  Mainstream use of virtualized applications will mean that applications will increasingly be seen as similar to data, ie we will be able to copy them from machine to machine as we upgrade or move offices, it also probably means that we will hopefully see some innovations around licensing, with more applications being linked to the individual than to the device.

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.

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