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Tagged: microsoft

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0ffice 12, a lot of responsibility rests on its shoulders

CollaborationAccording 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.

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This is probably the most important Vista news so far!

WinOE or “workflow for windows”, is probably the must important capability for business announced so far for the longhorn wave:

The Windows orchestration (WinOE) code, built from the ground up by Microsoft’s BizTalk team, is a set of high level XML schemas, .NET classes, application programming interfaces (APIs) and workflow components that will allow Visual Studio 2005 developers create business processes and human-to-human workflow processes.

Microsoft will also have an add-on service available for the Longhorn client and server version of Windows in 2006 and 2007 and will make its fleet of applications including Office 12 and the next Sharepoint Portal Server “WinOE-aware,” several sources said.

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Auto updating software

ClickOnce_thumbThere 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 …

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Microsoft and RSS – a dream coming true

I have been writing about RSS for about a year now and my vision for RSS is highly congruent with Microsoft’s.  However I have only learned that this is true today, as I have seen Microsoft’s RSS strategy unfold.  Whilst I am not surprised by the announcement I am relieved as I truly believe that making RSS a subscription protocol that supports many different application types will revolutionise the way we work, and make all of our lives just so much easier. 

I can see Microsoft themselves going wild and RSS enabling everything, especially everything in Windows SharePoint Services,  SharePoint Portal Server search, Windows event logs, Exchange Email and Calendars,  Exchange Public Folders, Windows File Systems etc etc and the opportunities for an event driven interface to a myriad of business applications is mind blowing.  In addition Microsoft make a good point that our feeds will also be a great source of information to the machine learning software that runs on our PC’s and acts as virtual agents on our behalf on the Internet, and will be even more powerful if they actually track which feeds we read.  The potential for agents that really help us prioritise the information overload will …

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Great interview on Longhorn

Longhorn logoThis 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 …

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Microsoft’s new XML formats, the power of the container model

XmlIn this post I explained that I, along with a few thousand others, was pretty excited about Microsoft’s XML format developments.  I also pointed to Brian Jone’s blog which is proving to be a great recourse.  At Tech ED Brian gave some demonstrations showing the power of the new format, stressing the benefits of the ZIP container format and the fact that different parts of a document are represented as different objects in the ZIP container.  Read for yourself,  or read on and see some of the examples which are pretty cool.

    1. Updating a diagram in a spec: I showed an example of taking a technical spec with an old diagram, and outside of Word I swapped it out with a more up to date one. The main purpose of this wasn’t to show that an end user would do that to their files, but instead to show that people could easily build solutions that push relevant pieces of content into files.
    2. Removing comments: Most people that manage collections of documents or deal with publishing documents have seen the problem that can occur with extra information in their files. I took an example of a whitepaper with a bunch …

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Office 12 new XML formats

XmlThis is big news and widely reported, and live on video.  I am increasingly impressed around the evolution of Office,  I think Microsoft is finally realising that people don’t want more incremental functions to refine what they already do.  They want new way of working to be enabled.  The new features in 12 seem to be going in that direction at least in the collaboration and information management areas, I can’t wait to see what they do when they can build on top of Longhorn and WinFS.  That’s not to say that OOo is not doing some great creative stuff as well, and of course the killer value proposition of OOo will be its ubiquity as within 3 years I doubt there will be a corporate desktop anywhere that does not have access to OOo,  I don’t think we will be able to say that about office 12, so Microsoft needs to get creative, Metro is the first glimmer of that, we will have to wait and see!

One of the best places to keep informed seems to be Brian Jone’s blog, a bit about Brian:

Brian is a program manager on the Word team. He’s been at Microsoft for …

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Microsoft starts to open up

InteroperabilityMicrosoft and Sun put on a nice show recently to demonstrate that competitors can still work together to improve interoperability for the benefit of their customers, this follows a couple of years of real progress by Microsoft in working out (with partners and competitors again) an architectural approach (web services) that allows them to innovate but inter-operate.  Of course the Open Source world has been showing the way on that for years, so its nothing new, but it’s certainly an encouraging move by Microsoft.  This last report on their approaches to Red Hat CEO Matt Szulik and more recently Michael Tiemann, president of the Open Source Initiative and vice president of open-source affairs at Red Hat is further evidence.  Certainly in my discussions with Microsoft I am detecting an increasing awareness of the real world that customers live in,  rather than the ideal world (in their eyes) that Microsoft would like us to be in, progress, slow but sure.

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Microsoft Virtual Earth and integration

Msn_veThis video shows some great integration between different information sources:

  • Satellite imagery
  • Low flying aircraft imagery
  • Vector mapping data
  • Local “yellow pages” type information

You can take this integrated data and share it as:

  • Directions
  • Blog posts to MSN Spaces

And they implied that a Win32/.net client is under development and you can image the sort of integration that that will have with GPS, Outlook etc.

Of course google maps has some similar features, what’s will be interesting about Virtual Earth is the integration and the thick client possibilities.

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Bill Gates on Microsoft’s strategy around the phone

SmartphoneThis is a good interview, where Bill Gates describes Microsoft’s approach to the phone.  A few things struck me from the interview and other stuff I have read:

  • Microsoft don’t make any money on Windows Mobile, but they seem committed to the market for the long term
  • Microsoft know that it won’t be long before the phone is powerful enough to take advantage of its operating system.  At that point they believe they will then have a real advantage over the people who squeezed their operating systems into current generation phones.  Of course as soon as the phone is this powerful it will make a great platform for Linux as well.
  • Microsoft are waiting for the phone to be powerful enough to disrupt the portable game console market,  at this point I suspect they will be ready to compete
  • Microsoft will leverage their integrated innovation strategy
  • The connected car is a huge market, this post talks about the potential
  • The carriers, rather than the phone makers are a key route to market for Microsoft,  I guess that Microsoft with its robust strategy around content and rights management is well placed to woo the carriers
  • Microsoft is to be commended …