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.  

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

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!

Thanks to Brian and others for pointing out a set of links to white papers and articles on reporting services.

I will be interested to read the one on localization and performance monitoring. I like the fact that in reporting services it is possible to track each stage of a reports execution performance from the ExecutionLog table.

Thinking this on a bit whilst walking to the station I was considering how good it would be if the upcoming PerformancePoint product included by default a set of performance monitoring models (cubes) and KPIs for its own operations. It would be a great differentiator and would appeal to the IT decision makers involved in making the product choice. Even better if the PerformancePoint team could talk to the MOM and server teams to produce a set of IT models.

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?

Picked up this useful tit bit

Those who are trying to integrate Ax 3.0 clients with BizTalk Server 2006 and Analysis Server 2005, please note that at the time of writing this may not be possible.

Particularly with Analysis Server 2005 (AS 2005), the problem seems to stem from the fact that whereas by default AS 2006 has moved away from DSO (Decision Support Objects), Ax 3.0 is basically a DSO enabled program. Though (to some extent) Ax 3.0 is able to speak to AS 2005 using the backward compatibility feature of AS, subsequently when you try to view the cube inside Ax 3.0 it falls through.

As Touchstone do a fair bit of Axapta work this could have bitten us.