Steve's Seaside Life

Tagged: Futures

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Which Office Suite?

Which Office Suite? Is shaping up to be a fascinating decision making process.  I am not ready to expose all of my thinking on this topic but it goes something like this:

 

  1. Some people think its easy, MS Office alternatives are cheaper and most people don’t use the bells and whistles in Office so people will migrate provided the alternatives meet peoples core needs.

  2. I think its more complex than this and as a minimum the costs of migration, lost productivity, and compatibility and rework need to be factored in

  3. Intertia is a big one in Microsofts favour, for a business that has SW Assurance or an EA, the decision is deferred probably for at least 2-3 years after their EA expires and probably longer if they do a lot of data interchange.  That probably means 4-5 years from now!

  4. But this is the trivial stuff.  Sure direct and indirect cost comparison is important but I want to consider:

    1. How do people really use Office and is it really true that people only use a small amount of the functionality, and if they do, do they all use a different small amount?

    2. I also want to consider …

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More integration of Microsoft Products?

Microsoft Watch describes the trend at Microsoft towards more integration of Microsoft Server products.  Although the areas of integrations described don’t seem that great to me:

  • Management packs for all Windows Server System products that will allow them to be managed by Microsoft Operations Manager 2005;

  • Windows Installer and Windows Update support for all Windows Server System products; and

  • Consistent methodologies and prescriptive guidance support for all members of the Windows Server System family

There’s more on this topic here:

http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3359261

However whilst the Architect in me likes the idea of integrated products, built in a layered infrastructure fashion, with each layer isolated by standards, I don’t see this happening with Microsoft.  What I see is ever tighter integration between products, locking the products into a set that all need to be purchased from MS, and all upgraded together to get real business advantage.  At enterprise scale linked upgrades of products always spells trouble, (making the business case, getting the agreement, managing the disruption, risk), and the assumption of everything from Microsoft is equally troubling, unless their is a REALLY compelling value proposition, and that’s definitely not evident today. 

Loosely integrated products by contrast, ie those that rely on stable …

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My personal information processing pipeline!

In this blog I talked about a generic concept of operations associated with a conceptual information lifecycle. 

however with the advent of RSS, we now have an Open and Simple way for applications to publish, for users to locate and  subscribe and for subscribed content to be accessed, processed and ultimately scanned and consumed, discussed, archived and subsequently retrieved

In this article talk about my personal application of tools and techniques to that lifecycle.

  1. Publishing, I used to use radio for all of my web publishing, either directly through the Radio Userland Web UI, or through MailEdit which provides an email interface which I can use through my BlackBerry.  MailEdit uses a number of directives to define for example the title for the entry and the categories that it belongs to.  I use autotext on the BlackBerry to make entering these easier.  I now use Blogmedia that uses the BlogWare SW.  I tend to write the entries in Word though because the screen area is bigger and because of the spell checking, and then just paste and post.  You can read my blog here

  2. Location, like most people I locate RSS feeds …

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Information Bridge Framework

My first thought when I cam across IBF, (who could miss it!), was that it was another Microsoft thick client solution.  I am still not sure but it looks like it might be a bit more creative than that for the following reasons:

  1. I have always been a big advocate of standardizing the infrastructure capability layer and integrating it with the line of business layer.  That way an enterprise has its infrastructure in common, regardless of which process or division of the company you work in.  IBF looks like it addresses that need pretty well

  2. I have also felt that the ad-hoc processes and information and collaborative processes are under emphasized in businesses that have a lot of formal mega processes that they like to optimize.  I talked about this in another blog entry.  IBF allows you to integrate ad-hoc and formal business processes.

  3. It seems that a lot of thought has gone into making the maintenance of the IBF client environment as ‘thin’ as possible.  It still requires a client component to get started though.  I need to look into this more to be sure but it looks hopeful.

  4. Its all about consuming web services, caching them …

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Exchange Futures

Infoworld talks to David Thompson, a Microsoft corporate vice president who has been in charge of the Exchange Server group since early this year.   It maybe just me but I get the distinct impression that the Exchange Group is in a bit of a state.  They don’t seem to really know where storage is going because of the flux around Longhorn server, and they don’t seem to know where to take Public Folders and other Document management like capabilities because they are dropping the old store and because of ‘competition’ from SharePoint services.  Core email does not have much growth potential in it, so all that seems to be left to work on is Edge Servers!  Not a very exiting roadmap!!

Last year I thought that the ‘big thinking’ that must be going on in Microsoft was starting to pay off in terms of well architected products that did not overlap and were being rebuilt from the ground up.  Now I am not so sure,  I see the delays in the foundation layers, ie SQL Server and Longhorn Server, triggering panic in the Office tools and Collaboration space, who are probably starting to think more short term about customer …

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RSS and its role in Information Management

The Problem

 

Internet users have largely given up trying to keep up to date with the vast amount of content being published on their ‘favourite’ web sites, let alone the slow moving sites that they need to track but are not motivated to visit ‘just in case’.  Portal vendors have tried to help by allowing users to aggregate bits of many web sites together, to minimise the number of web sites a person needs to access, particularly in a process context.

 

Proprietary approaches to Syndication, or the publish and subscribe model to information access has been tried several times on the internet, taking the form of for example Internet Explorer channels, and PointCast personalised news feeds.  Avantgo continues to find a niche publishing channels to PDA’s.

 

Email has become flooded with newsletters, status updates, just in case cc emails, and application specific notifications.

 

RSS to the rescue

 

Recently however with the advent of RSS, we now have an Open and Simple way for applications to publish, for users to locate and  subscribe and for subscribed content to be accessed, processed and ultimately scanned and consumed, discussed, archived and subsequently retrieved…

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Who will Longhorn appeal to?

Right now it seems to me that Longhorn is being targeted at three communities:

  1. Home users, particularly those looking for a great multi-media experience

  2. Knowledge workers, especially those at the top end, who aggregate, integrate and assemble lots of information from many different sources

  3. Mobile workers, for whom thin client computing solutions don’t work and to whom the blend or personal and corporate features will appeal.

It’s got lots of other features that will appeal to the mass of task and structured task workers in corporate environments, but true thin client approaches will probably appeal more strongly for these users IT managers, particularly with the current wave of smart client rich UI toolkits that run on top of a JVM.

So how might this pan out in reality:

  1. Microsoft might get 20% market share from portable users

  2. A maximum of 20% market share from high end knowledge workers, who are not mobile

  3. Maybe 20% that it picks up just so they can use the same environment as the rest of the people in the office

So maybe that leaves 40% of users who will either switch to thin clients, unless Microsoft can convince businesses to stick with them because of the benefits …

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A good description of WinFS?

I have been looking for a good description of how Longhorn would behave in a client server environment.  The Longhorn evangelists have been posting some scenarios, but they don’t completely work for me because they are not general enough to allow me to easily extend them to my own environment. ...

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In pursuit of personal and team productivity

There is a conflict between people and the companies they work for, (well probably lots, but I’m only going to talk about one of them). The bigger the enterprise a person works for the more focussed that company is likely to be in central server centric computing, central support, consolidation, BPM, single sources of information etc. All very important for sure, but these companies will probably not even consider team productivity and almost certainly personal productivity as worthy of investment. These companies are on a crusade to save money, real money, i.e. savings off the bottom line. 1 hours labour saving per month for a big company project would be amazing….