Long live Office 14

Having reflected on the impact of the Office 14 online and collaboration features I have to wonder what the road map for the Microsoft Groove platform is?

Groove is a very smart set of features that was available in Office that allowed users to work in an online/offline manner on documents and discuss what was happening. However, I now see that large chunks of this capability  is now being included in the next release of Office. 

Groove was always crippled by the licensing implications and was, in my opinion, only ever included because Ray Ozzie gave birth to it before he came to Microsoft. So it is nice to see that the collaboration is finally being embedded in the Office system as it should be.

Mind you I will be VERY interested to see just how they work the Licensing of all of this. Will one Office license cover online and offline etc. The legal pain is almost too painful to imagine. Just look at the pain the Microsoft Multiplexing license causes now integrating MSCRM with SharePoint . Then throw in online documents and the Azure services and you hit a world of pain!

We live in interesting times

There are so many things coming out of the Microsoft PDC that I am finding it hard to keep up so this is my first post listing some of the things that have come out so far:

Office 14 New online version of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. These will be cross platform cross browser lightweight versions of the core Office components that will be available in the “cloud” or in a hosted/on Site SharePoint environment as well as being available on a phone (I am assuming a Windows Mobile device) Channel 9 video here (9 min for the demo) There is lots of talk about collaboration and the mobile options that are raised are very powerful especially for us at Aspective where our Vodafone links really count.

The next great feature is that they have included the ability to have multiple concurrent users of a document. I cannot say how much pain this will take away.

One thing I am disappointed at is that InfoPath is not included in the scenarios. I have encountered a number of real world scenarios where people want and need a form solution that InfoPath could clearly fulfill but it is ruled out because of the cost and complexity of deploying a SharePoint Forms server solution to a public/semi private facing site.

Windows 7. Lots of talk about the UI PC Pro has lots of coverage here and there is a screen shot slide show here. if you want the news from the source this post from the Windows Team covers a lot of the key points

On a more technical level Channel 9 has an interview with Mark Russinovich here. Most of Mark’s interview goes over my head but still interesting. It seems that a lot of deep down tweaking is going on in the kernel to improve multi core performance (Over 8 CPUs and up to 256. Now that’s forward thinking!)  and even got Dave Cutler involved. There is also a discussion on User mode scheduling which highlighted a key advantage the likes of SQL Server has in being part of the same global company. Namely that the Windows kernel team clearly work with the SQL team to drive performance. Not, I suspect, something Oracle can do. Also mentioned is a parallel plug and play boot process and yet more pre-fetch/ready boost, better battery life by letting processor cores sleep in preference to just ticking over. T

The final 15 mins goes into how deeply complex Windows has become and how the work is going on the concept of minWin is going. minWin is the code name for the work on developing a core version of Windows that can be isolated from the “nice to have” bits and allow Microsoft to really get to work on a component based version of Windows. That’s a 25Mb on disk core. When they get all of this sorted out then we will see the fastest evolution of Widows ever as it will mean that individual sub systems can be upgraded without having to spend ages worrying about inter-dependencies.

Finally in the last 6 mins there is announcements that you will be able to mount and create Virtual Hard disks (VHD) natively in Windows. VHDs become first class items in Windows. You can even boot windows from a VHD. This has potentially  huge implications for me in the pre-sales arena where we run virtual machines all the time as well as for setting up development and test environments.

More  next ……

Some years ago I ran my own small development house that specialized in writing applications for small and medium businesses in my local area. Much like Vlad is often saying we had to do a sanity check on where the business was heading. At the time there were 3 key features that were on our horizon:

1. Big boys coming down the food chain. It was clear that the likes of Microsoft and alike were targeting smaller and smaller companies with their Line of Business applications. This would mean that our customers would be able to get 80% functionality for way less than we could build 100% of the  functionality.
2. Rent – a Coder expectations. Even then we were competing against the outsource world. In particular the expectation levels that they set. More and more customers were expecting to be paying outsourced prices BUT getting traditional quality, control and budgetary reliability. Shame it never works but that’s the mind set.
3. Technology Route March.  We realized that we were having to learn and assimilate at least one new technology every 2 projects just to keep up. Whilst we all liked new technology and enjoyed it it was EXPENSIVE to have to learn all the time just to keep up. We had to keep up because if we fell behind we would loose productivity which would put us even further behind the Rent – a – coders.

The end result was to realize that there were only 2 routes forward; massive scale up or pack up and join someone who has done a massive scale up. We chose the latter.

The point of all of this is that the technology route march is about to step up the pace by an order of magnitude.

Not since the release of the .NET framework have I seen as much fundamental change being released as is being let loose at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC)

Just looking through the recent channel 9 videos about what is coming at the PDC shows how massively the ASP model  cloud computing world will again be changing the way applications will work. Just watching this video shows the huge step change that is coming. An online scalable system with all the capabilities of a full scale business system, web services, databases and workflow.

All in all I feel justified in making the choices I did as only the big players can afford to maintain momentum whilst absorbing the sea changes that are coming.

PS. I am also in awe of the founding architects of the .NET vision that has taken the core concept through so many unforeseen changes whilst still being flexible enough to cope.  

Last week I posted about a demo Microsoft did at the BI conference that used their surface table to deliver a BI demo.

Well nismith got backstage for this demo and got a sneak peak.

UPDATE – looks like the video has been pulled – dont know why but I have emailed to ask for it back

A very cool demo – reality, no (unless Microsoft want to loan me a Surface Table, Hint Hint),  but a good thought provoking idea.

EDIT

I have come up with a nice scenario that could merge BI and the Surface platform:

We shop at our local Sainsburys’ which has a loyalty card scheme called Nectar. It also has a Starbucks in store.

My idea is that in the Starbucks they could have Surface tables. if you put your Nectar card on the table it could read the unique barcode on the card and then display the BI data about the spending I have done over time at the supermarket.

I could then look at my spending patterns whilst sipping my latte and the supermarket could also be serving up contextual adverts.

I win by seeing where my budget goes and the supermarket wins with access to an engaged audience.

No doubt one day!

Slightly off topic but…

Scott Hanselman has developed an application called Baby Smash that is a WPF application that allows babies to interact with an application designed for them by “smashing” on the keyboard.

As I understand it it was a way for him to explore the WPF framework that would also be of use for is new family. By a combination of seeking feature requests and a conspiracy over at Channel9 the most requested feature was for a networked Massively Multiplayer Online BabySmash so Babies can Smash together.

The end result is that he will be developing such a feature live during his PDC talk and inviting the audience members to join in and try it.

So the image is…

A room full of grown up geeks smashing their keyboards and “imitating” a bunch of 2 year olds.

please God let someone video it!

Today I heard again an urban legend that Microsoft Dynamics CRM was an application that Microsoft had purchased from another company much like it purchased Axapta, Great Plains and Navision.

THIS IS NOT TRUE.

The person who was spouting this should really know better especially as they were presenting themselves as an authority.

If you don’t believe me check out:

Aaron Elder’s MSDN Blog which shows the “About Screens from V1

Or

Wikipedia

Or

Channel 9 Interviewing the Head of Dynamics See 02:33

“Our CRM system was built completely here at Redmond. It wasn’t acquired in.”

Or

Channel 9 Video interviewing the developers see 06:40

Is that enough!

So the next time someone spouts this FUD you can slap them right back down!

Thanks to Jane for an interesting write up on the ReMix UK conference particularly the internationalization section.

What she also pointed out was Fiddler a network analysis tool that could be useful at some point.

I had hoped that this site on enterprise CALS which was pointed out to me might just hold some answers to the licenses and functionality for Sharepoint 2007.

Wrong, WRONG, WRONG!

It is saying that there will be a standard and enterprise version of the product and some bits on what is in each but not in nearly enough detail.

One interesting point is that is says you need an enterprise licence to use Forms Server. I have received information that contradicts this so I will have to follow it up more. This is a critical factor as I am pitching Forms Server in a Sharepoint 2003 environment and they don’t want to upgrade yet.

The worst part is STILL NO PRICES! We are weeks away from launch. I am pitching it as part of solutions as Microsoft want but I cant give any prices!

Way back at the Microsoft Partner Conference I saw a short demo of RSInteract. This is a totally web based report building tool that sits over SQL Server Reporting Services (2000/5)  and I was impressed.

Today I had a web demo of it again including the new OLAP report building in the new release. As always in a demo there is a lot to take in but some of the things I really liked were:

• It is very light weight being a pure web app.
• The ability to edit an existing report is very easy.
• The user can preview the changes without having to commit them.
• Multiple combinations of tables and graphs can be built into one report. This is a really nice feature.
• The functionality and UI has been broken up in a nice easy to understand manner.
• None of the underlying Reporting Services power and functionality has been lost. It is just made easier.

The down sides to this silver bullet of report writing are:

• It does not use the report models for relational data sources. You have to create and expose views for the end user.
• there is an additional cost over and above SQL Server Licences. That said when compared to other ad-hoc report builders in the market it is still cheap with what appears to be much greater functionality.

I have just installed it and will be evaluating it myself over the coming week so more later.

Does anyone have any experiance with this product or something similar for comparison?

A couple of weeks ago I unfortunately ran over a badger. The result is that the car is in for repairs and I have been given a Vauxhall Astra as a loan car.

I think that Vauxhall is branded Opel elsewhere.

A couple of months ago I had to hire a car for a business trip and I hired a Vauxhall Zafira.

I will never again drive a Vauxhall car for one reason. They have changed the functionality of the indicator stalk. (And the windscreen washer but that is less noticeable.)

In a normal car the driver has 3 feedback methods as to the status of their indicators.

1. An audible ticking
2. A light flashing on the dashboard
3. The position of the stalk

Now for no good reason Vauxhall have decided that that last form of feedback is no longer necessary. In their cars when you flick the switch it activates the indicator but THEN RETURNS TO ITS REST POSITION!

In addition to this stupidity if you don’t press the stalk enough then it only activates the indicators for 3 flashes, but you have no way of knowing this.

The result is that if the indicators fail to cancel, say you are changing lanes, then you have to manually flick the stalk the other way. But you then end up with them switching to the other way and so on.

I totally fail to understand the mentality of a design team that considered this an improvement. It must be the only case in the history of car design where a conscious decision was taken to REDUCE functionality and HINDER drivability.

In conclusion NEVER drive a Vauxhall they are dangerous!