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 ……

This is one of the most bizarre coincidences I have seen.

Today there was a major email discussion and debate within our team about the performance of the Outlook CRM add-in. Some users were reporting problems whilst others had no problems at all. It seemed to be one of those intermittent bugs  that is so hard to track down and which seemed to defy reproduction.

Dont we just love them!

When I got home I saw a post from the Dynamics Team blog that listed a range of hot-fixes that are publicly available! What timing.

I dont know if any will be relevant to our team but they are well worth checking out if nothing else than to give some focus to testing unusual scenarios.

Within the Microsoft Dynamics world there is a methodology for implementing projects that is widely used, not just in the CRM sphere but across the board.

Now this methodology has recently raised some discussions in the Dynamics NAV world as it is being re-visited.

A good overview of why it is used is given by Rebecka Isaksson here

A quote that sums it up well is:

it is important to remember that an ERP or CRM implementation is quite different from other software development and implementation projects. In particular the ERP implementation that very often impacts pretty much everyone and everything in the organization where it is introduced. Someone said once that “ERP implementations are 30% about technology and 70% about organizational development”

Ad additional case for Sure Step was posted here by Vjekoslav Babić. This outlines the reasons why employing a methodology like Sure Step significantly increases the chances of the project succeeding.

However, a counter point has been put up in this essay “Read my lips: No New Models” (PDF)

So Vjekoslav has posted a repost here which deals with the points raised.

Whilst these discussions are largely NAV/ERP based the same points relate to CRM deployments. I would even go so far as to say they are even more relevant as CRM projects probably go deeper and lower into an organization than many ERM systems so getting user buy in and adoption is even more critical.

My personal opinion on Sure Step is that is is a very good foundation on which to build a methodology but in its entirety can be cumbersome for use in smaller projects. It also has the same issues as any other methodology in that it requires buy-in and discipline by the client and the client’s users and frequently this is plunging them into a totally alien environment.  

<Shameless plug>

One of the many good points of working for Aspective is that we are a part of the Vodafone group.

This means that we have access to some very powerful mobile solutions and I am hoping that I can work towards explaining how this can fit into an overall solution. I am not just looking at mobilising CRM as Ten Digits and CWR have that space well covered but I am also looking at the impact of the explosion of ultra mobile netbooks as well as the issues of data security.

I have to say that the implementation of the “Netbook” could have a HUGE impact on how we deliver solutions and information to the wider workforce and this is a theme I will come back to once certain NDA’s have passed.

</Shameless Plug>

PS if anyone wants to send me any shiny kit I will of course be happy to look at it from a business perspective