Steve's Seaside Life

Tagged: microsoft

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RSS grows beyond blogs

RssThis article describes numerous uses for RSS that go beyond the ubiquitous blog.  It’s an interesting read, especially because it confines itself to implemented uses, rather than the hundreds of uses we can envision.  On a related note I noticed this quote in an article by CRN:

Microsoft partisans imagine a day when business users get realtime pings on their Office desktop software whenever their ERP systems detect inventories below a certain level. Beneath the covers, that simple-looking alert will rely on a confluence of technologies, including Office desktop applications, Microsoft’s planned “Maestro” realtime reporting server and a back-end SharePoint Portal/Excel Server combination.

Decidedly “RSS like” capability although probably not using RSS as the format.  The same article goes on to describe some of the conditional alerting that would be enabled by Excel Server:

“You’d set up an Excel model on the desktop, export it to the server, bind it to a [database] or, via Maestro, to an application source,” he said. “The model runs constantly on the server, feeding updated dashboard data via new Office 12 tools or a [business intelligence] tool. Or [it can] send you an e-mail or an instant-messaging or a VoIP call.” Microsoft, …

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Kids and Tablets

KidsusingtabletsMy daughter has recently inherited by old Tablet PC, a TC1000.  She has an auto-immune disorder and secondary Raynaud’s and these conditions mean that she suffers from cold hands, is very stiff and not that strong.  As a result she often struggles to carry her bag around and with writing.  About a year ago I wrote an article explaining why I thought a Tablet would help here and a few weeks ago I demonstrated my Tablet to the school teachers and her assessors.  As a result they have agreed that they will try and get her a grant for a Tablet ready for high school which is great news.  In addition they will get her a book scanner.  Although scanned books are not perfect, nor many eBooks, as I mention here, they are often better than paper.

In preparation she is taking her Tablet into school 3 days a week to get used to the logistics and the envious kids and how to deal with them.  Since she got the Tablet I noticed that she has started using the computer at home a lot more as well.  I often find her sitting in bed browsing the web, writing …

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Speculating on the Longhorn experience

I guess it is fairly widely know that we have only seen a few hints of the Longhorn user experience.  What do we know:

  • It will be built on a very powerful graphics engine
  • This engine will enable effects that have previously been unheard of outside of games,  and has been designed to take advantage of increases in GPU and CPU power for the next 10 years.  This is a platform that is primarily forward looking, but that degrades gracefully on older hardware and shipping operating systems (XP and 2003)
  • It will use this graphics power, combined with further improved indexing and search to greatly improve our ability to navigate and visualise large quantities of files and images. 
  • The shell will also provide improved facilities to view document thumbnails, and full scale renditions of documents using Metro
  • Sharing of information with peers will be easier
  • Working with collections of things will be easier, files, RSS feeds, web browser tabs, collections of URLs etc
  • File location will be increasingly irrelevant as properties and associations become first class objects for access and grouping
  • Predictability, reliability, flexibility, integration, context, ease of use and easy collaboration will be the order of the day

That …

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More on Metro

MetroIn this post I described my wish list for Metro, more information has since emerged and its looking like a pretty promising technology.  The first is Metro Fact Sheet from Microsoft, some key snippets follow, first on its objectives:

“Metro,” that offers a unified framework to address the growing use of electronic document-based workflows, and inclusion of advanced graphics and extended color information in everyday documents and Web applications. “Metro” offers an open document format that uses Extensible Markup Language (XML), a public standard for exchanging data between disparate systems, and other current, industry standards to create a modern, cross-platform document and imaging technologies. “Metro” simplifies creation, sharing, printing, viewing and archiving of digital documents, while also improving image fidelity and print performance.

 

Then more information on the components:

·        A complete specification for a fixed-layout document format based on XML that offers “electronic paper” for use by any application on any platform

·        A “viewer” to view, manage and print files

·        A print-to-file converter for creating the files from any Microsoft® Windows-based application

·        A set of application programming interfaces (APIs) to incorporate “Metro” technologies and documents with traditional applications, the Web …

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Metro – head to head with PDF!

At last Microsoft seem to have decided to deliver a portable document format for distribution and archive.  It’s code named metro and was demonstrated at WinHEC.  Here is a snippet from an article in Computer World:

The format, based on XML, will be licensed royalty free and users will be able to open Metro files without a special client. In the demonstration, a Metro file was opened and printed from Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s Web browser.

Printers and printer drivers can include support for Metro and deliver better and faster printing results than with today’s printing technology, Microsoft said. On stage, a Xerox printer with Metro built in was used to print a sample slide.

It’s going to be an open specification, so says Jancology:

Metro is build on top of an XML based page description language similar to Adobe’s PostScript. This happens to be tied into Avalon — Longhorn’s presentation subsystem. Microsoft is releasing publicly the specification for Metro on Monday royalty-free.

What do I want from this format:

  • The fidelity we have come to expect from PDF when we want it
  • The reflow we have come to expect from HTML when targeting different screen formats
  • Full support for …

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Microsoft starts to Talk about Longhorn again

Longhorn logoMicrosoft has started to talk up Longhorn again, so they must be getting more confident as we move towards the release of the beta.  Here are some of the main articles and interviews, and my extracts and observations.  My overall observation is that these articles show a very feature driven view of Longhorn.  Not at all the experience driven vision that was presented at the 2003 PDC.  Hopefully this is just because Microsoft are only talking about specific features they feel confident to discuss right now.  As the whole Longhorn wave of Operating System, Office tools and third party applications begin to be talked about we will see a real step forward in the user experience.  However I don’t think we will really see the vision until we see the client and server vision coming together and by that I mean.

  • Longhorn Client and Longhorn Server
  • Office Client and Office Server
  • WinFS Client and WinFS server and a WinFS integrated SharePoint Server
  • Longhorn Client Security integrated with the federated and peer group security features we see glimerings of with ADFS and Groove
  • Office Communicator and Live Communications Server extended with Groove like peer group collaboration
  • Groove like capabilities built into …

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Will Longhorn be compelling enough?

Longhorn logoMichael having read my post supporting Microsoft’s decision to back port the Pillars of longhorn is worried that Longhorn may not be compelling enough:

When I read articles like WinFS on XP, a VERY big deal! from Steve Richards in his blog (Adventures in home working), I have mixed feelings.

On the one hand, I agree with Steve that it is very cool that these features will be available on more platforms. It is possible to put too much pressure on a release by putting so much into it exclusively anyway, and features that are only on one OS are by their very nature limited in their appeal.

On the other hand, I worry about whether that will make the OS release less compelling when it becomes clear that many of the pillars in the original Longhorn Wave are no longer just for Longhorn. Understandably slow to go into more detail too soon about what the new defining pillars are this time, there is some hang time that pundits will write about the “fact” that apparently there are no pillars. Despite the fact that only morons and Microsoft haters (two very different groups in most cases) would usually choose to believe …

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WinFS on XP, a VERY big deal!

WinfsIt’s been widely reported (see this article for example) that Microsoft are back porting WinFS to XP.  This is a very intelligent strategy on Microsoft’s part.  A few months ago I wrote about strategies that Microsoft could adopt to compete with Linux, well I missed the most important strategy, which goes like this:

  • Back port the pillars of Longhorn to Windows XP
  • Wow 3rd party software developers with the new platform capabilities (PDC Tech-ED)
  • Convince their bosses that a new version of their applications – that takes advantage of these capabilities – will allow them to sell more copies, or convince people to upgrade
  • Establish Longhorn’s credibility as a stable and secure platform (because of the Longhorn Fundamentals)
  • Fix the problems that prevent applications running without admin priv and make installation with admin priv easier.
  • Demonstrate that Longhorn and XP can provide both Rich and Reach capabilities, via Terminal Services,  an upgraded Web browser and Smart Client support in the form of Java and Click Once .NET applications (in .NET Whidbey)
  • Convince the hardware vendors that Longhorn will help them sell more hardware
  • Provide time for the new third party applications to arrive that take advantage of Avalon, WinFS and …

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InfoView

A week ago I blogged a little about InfoPath and the fact that Bill Gates had said that InfoPath will probably be the closest thing today to the dominant Microsoft forms technology moving forward,  so Bill why not just buy InfoView and leave InfoPath for forms design and offline usage scenarios.  What’s InfoView:

With InfoView your organisation can:

  • Publish InfoPath forms to the web – providing external users who do not have InfoPath on their desktops the same rich and dynamic user experience of InfoPath forms with web forms
  • Leverage XML standards to capture data via web forms and route data into back-end systems with no manual operation

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Could Microsoft Kill Linux?

I have speculated before on the subject of Microsoft’s options concerning competing with Linux, but it seems to receive little serious debate, so I thought I must be off track, either technically or commercially.  In my view Microsoft would extend its Services For Unix product to comply with the Linux Standard Base requirements and would therefore support Linux applications.  For many corporates this would be a dream come true, access to all of the Open Source applications that support either Windows, Linux or both, and of course it would also benefit both users and developers.  However Microsoft have told me they have no interest in doing this (but they would wouldn’t they).  So in that context it’s interesting to see this article by John Dvorak, How to Kill Linux, where he says:

The immediate usefulness of Linux running under Windows is obvious. You can use all the Windows drivers for all the peripherals that don’t run under Linux. Drivers have always been an issue with Linux as PC users have gotten spoiled with Windows driver support. Today’s user wants to grab just about anything and not worry about installing it and making it work.

That said, there is no …