Despite the fact that there are many specialist collaboration products that are far superior to Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange/SharePoint – IBM and Microsoft continue to be the mainstream players and certainly dominate if you consider collaboration from the “buy a platform and build on top of it” standpoint. IBM’s...
I have just posted about how impressed I am by the OneNote team, and I especially like it when they share details of how the team uses the product themselves to push the boundaries of their processes. In this extract of a long post, Chris describes how they use the...
Brian Jones’ blog is fast becoming an essential read for anyone interesting in Office 12’s file formats and import and export formats. In this important post be describes the fact that Office 12 will be able to SAVE AS PDF, a very useful feature that is of course already present...
After you have ready my posts on Office 12 and SPS, you might like to double check the new features by reading this excellent summary!
One of my friends (Simon) who doesn’t have a blog sent me this article which I though would be a really great post on using text to speech software…. For those of us who spend more than half an hour driving to work each day you may have sometimes wondered...
Ed Brill has an interesting post indicating that Microsoft and IBM are on the same track with respect to integrating an IP Soft Phone and the Instant Messaging and presence client. I am looking forward to it!
IBM is teaming with Avaya to help make businesses more agile, responsive, and productive through the seamless integration of audio and collaboration tools. This integration will introduce “click-to-call” capabilities, enabling businesses using IBM(R) Lotus Notes(R) and Domino(R) and IBM Lotus(R) Sametime(R) to instantly place a telephone call to an instant messaging or email contact while remaining in their inbox or instant messaging client. By selecting multiple names, users will be able to “click-to-conference” for faster decision making and problem solving. IBM will also be integrating audio conferencing provided by Avaya Meeting Exchange with Lotus’ Web conferencing solutions, giving Web conference participants a visual indication of who is speaking and the ability to dial out to new participants, mute lines and control volume, among other capabilities.
As I understand it IBM are releasing an API for integration some time soon, and this announcement is of one partner who is implementing that API, but I may be wrong.
and IBM’s vision for its equivalent Office System using OpenOffice.org as the client. I am also interested in tracking integration between Microsoft Office and Domino/Workplace. Stu is my guru in this area. I am off to Redmond next week for 3 days on the Office System v12 and meeting some of the Product Managers on Friday so it will be interesting to compare.
According to Microsoft figures:
Office 2003 appears to be falling behind in targeted sales for this point in the product’s lifecycle, according to Microsoft’s own internal figures and guidelines. Just 15% of PCs are running Office 2003, two years into its life, with Office 12 – the next edition of Microsoft’s ubiquitous suite – now on the horizon. However, Microsoft traditionally expects between 50% and two thirds of customers to be running the previous version of Office when the new copy ships. …
obviously Office 2003 is not going to catch up, which means that Office 12 is going to have to make up a lot of sales, and will also be critical to stimulating enterprises to upgrade to Windows Vista , as most enterprises upgrade both the office suite and OS at the same time.
I am off to Redmond on Sunday for a 3 day briefing on Office12 so we will see if it lives up to the challenge.
There is a recent trend for software to auto-update, and if you are logged in as administrator then it works pretty well, and hopefully with Longhorn and ClickOnce the experience will be good for non-administrators as well. What’s surprising is that its taken so long for the auto-update model to become popular.
About 13 years ago I developed my first distributed system on PC’s that was going to be widely deployed within an enterprise. The first thing I did (initialy just to make testing easier) was to write a stub that checked the currently installed version of the program, against the manifest file version on the server defined in the last version of the manifest. If the version was different, the stub downloaded the installer programme defined in the updated manifest and ran it, otherwise it started the application. The stub was so simple that we hoped it could cope with any update scenario and of course the stub could be updated anyway. Using this system we were able to keep thousands of PC’s up-to date without any manual intervention, other than publishing a new manifest and associated updates to the distribution points. Of course there is nothing clever in …
This is a great interview on Longhorn. Some bits I liked:
better security with application compatibility!
As you well know, most users on Windows XP run with administrative privileges, and this is because the system didn’t partition itself well. This is one of the legacies that were inherited from Windows 95. Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP all have the security built into them, but the problem is that in many of the applications that were designed to run on Windows 95, you have to relax the security in order for them to run, which meant that the people had to run as administrator. We’re just getting rid of all the user level classifications in Longhorn. We have shimming and other capabilities that we’ve done with our applications like file virtualization, registry virtualization and other characteristics that allow applications that want to write to administrative parts of the system to think they are writing to those parts, while all along keeping those parts isolated and virtualized to the instance of that application.
Search done right, like apple, I particularly like the fact that they are doing desktop search in a way that makes sense on the desktop, rather than …