Steve Clayton rightly highlights the potential benefits of using a hosted service for applications that could well be considered ‘commodity’ these days.  Shifting costs from Capex to Opex is generally quite an attractive prospect, and if MS can deliver services at a lower cost per user - like-for-like - then more power to them.  These services offer a really good alternative, especially for small or new companies.

The big thing for me is the like-for-like part… the current Online services are pretty basic.  You’re not getting a ‘full fat’ Exchange or Sharepoint here.  There’ll be no MySites or Excel Services in your SharePoint Online environment for example, so while it may be cheaper to host sites in MS clouds, you won’t getting much of the pixie dust (as Steve puts it!).

The interesting thing for me is where Exchange, SharePoint and OCS will be going over the next few years.  As I understand it the current Online solutions aren’t running on the Azure platform.  My guess would be that this is being saved for the v.next products that will start arriving next year.

From what I understand, and I could be wrong, both Exchange and Sharepoint 14 will be offered as both hosted and on-premise solutions.  With Azure in place to manage the infrastructure, Geneva there to manage the nuts and bolts of authentication and identity, and many more ‘full fat’ services available over standard http connections, I’d hope that the v.14 products offer a more full fidelity experience.  Now those are the services I’m interested in.

I’ve been reading Hugh’s tails of life at Dell with interest.  I first became aware of Hugh after stumbling across the Blue Monster.  Something about the it stuck a cord with me, on a much smaller scale it applied to my own organisation as well as it did to MS.  Reading through Hugh’s thoughts on Dell it’s funny how many of his observations there also ring true of my own experiences elsewhere.

Anyway, one point in his recent post stood out for me:

They’re called PCs, they’re not called BCs. They’re called personal computers, not business computers. That being said, the demands of an affluent, creative American are different from the needs of an IT manager in a large widget factory. As the lines that separate business and personal get ever more blurry, I see all major computer companies [including Gosh! Yes! Apple!] struggle to bridge the gap.

This balance between personal and business computing is something that is creeping into more and more of what I do.

I think here Hugh is referring to the fact that people don’t want to buy dull black business computers for their homes - and why would they.  But increasingly the other way of looking at it - that people want a more personal experience at work - is becoming a challenge for that same IT manager at the widget factory.

For years corporate IT, and the client side desktop and laptop business in particular, has been driven by the good ol’ tenets of standardisation and simplicity.  Standardise on a platform and make it simple to support - that way your costs are lower.

All the big vendors know this is what the IT managers are thinking and pitch their wares at that market.  Dull black PC’s that don’t change year on year and are full of great management tricks and tools.  Fantastic for us IT chaps but it makes for a boring life for poor old end users.

In fairness there’s not much IT groups can do about that.  They have to go for the cost efficiencies that corporate platforms provide, and the vendors don’t offer anything exciting in that space.  As Hugh mentions, even Apple while they might make great hardware, don’t get that balance right.  In their case the problem is reversed - they’re too consumer focused.  Whilst the hardware is great to look at and use, their platform doesn’t necessarily play that well within the complex infrastructures that enterprises have built up manage their estate of computers.

It’s possible that there’s now an emerging market for business desktop and laptop PC’s that combine both the cool looks and functionality of cutting edge home computers with the component stability and management of business ranges.

To some extent this is already being shown by the increasing interest in corporate NetBooks - something HP is addressing with a forthcoming range which it’s keen to hype at the moment.

If I was Dell I’d look at whether it would be worth combining the best aspects of their corporate range - component stability, management functionality, etc. - with the concept and chassis of something like their Studio range.

Sure, the hardware is only a small part of the balance between personal and business computing, but it’s a good start.  It’ll take time for IT groups to adjust to the idea of allowing the business to have more freedom in it’s IT.  The game needs to shift away from ‘locking down’ business PC’s to just ‘configuring’ them.  It’s a big change in culture, but from what I have seen that change is starting to happen.  A vendor who can tap into that may well profit from it.

I’ve noticed that the mailbox on my iPhone doesn’t always pick up on changes that I might make on my Outlook client or Webmail.  So for example at the moment my iPhone is showing 10 new meeting invitations that I have already accepted and replied to.  I’ve also just had to re-read 14 emails to stop them being highlighted as unread.

It seems an odd problem to me… but a few people here have found the same.  I thought I would see if anyone else had noticed this (it could be our instance of exchange?)

Now whilst I’m aware that Mesh is much more than the simple file synchronisation stuff that’s included in the client, over the past few week it this that has had me thinking about it’s implications.

Most of the folders that I sync in my Mesh are personal - favourites, a few pictures, maybe a tune or two.  But the other week I had a huge amount of reading to do for a project so  I decided that I’d leave the office early and do the reading at home.  Rather than pick up my laptop I just moved the docs into a Meshed folder then went home knowing that the docs would be at home long before I was. 

It’s this simplicity that I think could cause businesses a headache.   It’s never been so easy to send documents to multiple computers - including a cloud desktop - than with Mesh.  Just by saving a document in a Meshed folder on my laptop I send it to three other PC’s and a Mac.  On my folders only I have access, but I could potentially be sharing that information with anyone.

Now as a user I find this very useful, but as an enterprise IT guy it’s kinda scary.  Whilst you’ve always been able email documents home, or use a USB stick to carry documents, Mesh takes this to a whole new level.  As a business I no longer have control over where my information goes or who can access it - my workers now control this.  Hopefully they’ll be responsible and make the right decisions… but all the recent news stories about data loss would suggest that isn’t always the case.

I suppose we could be draconian and just stop people using tools like Mesh, but in truth if it’s not Mesh, it’ll be email or some other media that will catch us out.  If you can’t fully control where your information is going, perhaps your best bet is to protect the information itself.

That’s where Information Rights Management may be useful.  It’s been around as a concept and a product for years, but in my experience it’s always had a limited uptake.  In a world where information and data is flowing beyond the reach of traditional network boundaries IRM and other de-perimeterisation solutions may soon become a necessity.

Great news from the US this morning, it’s enough to make me wish I was able to vote in the US myself!  Anyways, I spotted this great illustration by Patrick Moberg an thought I’d share.

(Thanks Laughing Squid)

One of the more interesting things to come out of the recent PDC conference (for me at least) was the work MS has been doing around identity in the cloud.  It’s always looked like a bit of a stumbling block for the adoption of cloud services, especially for enterprises where simple user interfaces and single sign-on have been a focus for years.

The main points that I picked up on were:

The Microsoft Federation Gateway - provides an identity and federation gateway into MS provided/hosted services including Azure and Live ID.

The Microsoft Services Connector - allows you to federate your Active Directory with MS to gain access to services hosted in their cloud. 

‘Geneva’ Server - a standards based Security Token Service that allows federation between your AD and any other claims based service (including the MS hosted services)

Live ID and Open ID - Live will become an Open ID provider allowing the 400 million Live ID’s to use Open ID sites and visa versa.

Those are massive simplifications of course. 

Brought together these services and solutions could make life much easier for a lot of people.

- As an Enterprise we would be able to provide services from an Azure platform without any worry about authentication or identity.  Whether that be hosted Exchange, SharePoint, or just some internally developed apps the existing AD and it’s accounts can be used.

- ISV’s can provide solutions knowing that they’ll never have to worry about managing accounts and passwords for people.   No need to worry about password resets - the customer will deal with that for you.  Selling a license to a company?  No need to worry about employees leaving and still having access - the customer will remove their accounts anyway (well it depends who they are selling to I guess, but you get the idea). 

- As an end user my work username and password will get me seamless access to my work systems, and my personal ID (whether LiveID or OpenID) will work on more sites, so less accounts and passwords to remember.

I’ve just been watching this session on the ‘Identity Roadmap for Software + Services‘ over on the PDC site.  It gives are really good overview of what’s being planned and demo’s some scenarios where these new services might help.  It’s well worth a look.

With the release of the Mac and Windows Mobile CTP’s this week, I’ve been thinking a bit more about how to use Mesh more.  One obvious gap is my iPhone.  It’s a device that I carry with me more or less everywhere, but the one device I can’t use with Mesh.

It wasn’t until I watched the Mesh on Mac video over on on10 over lunch that I thought about using the mesh mobile interface that’s available on m.mesh.com.  Having tried it out I have to say that it works really well. 

From the mobile site you can access all of the folders and content that you have synced with your Mesh Desktop.  You can also read all of the associated news and updates and manage the membership of those folders. 

The iPhone will open and render many of the typical doc types (Images, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDF etc), but won’t unfortunately let you open and listen to MP3 files that you may have there.  It was worth a try I guess!

Good news is, I’m not mad and Ori had the same idea!  Channel 9 have just posted up a video of a ‘MeshMobile’ solution they’ve been building.  Take a look for yourself, but I think it’s a great idea.  It’ll be interesting to see whether anyone picks this up and starts building products.  With small, low cost, Atom based computers now commonplace it shouldn’t be too hard - as Ori has proved!

Ori Amiga: Mesh Mobile

After a couple of false starts the Mesh team have just released the Community Tech Preview of the Mesh client.

I’ve just installed it on my Macbook here and at all works very well indeed.  Once signed in you can add and sync your Meshed folders easily and get to all the same docs and files.  Good stuff!

The only thing that doesn’t seem to work (though I’ve not tried to hard I have to admit) is the remote control functionality - controlling other device from the mac at least.  Still, that’s not too important and it’ll be so handy to have all my Meshed folders available on my Mac.

To get the client head over to the Mesh site on your Mac and follow the usual process for adding a device.  It might be worth hurrying though, I beleive that the Mac CTP has a limited number of places for now.

In that blog the product team are able to talk about not only the product itself, but also the ‘why’ aspects of the design decisions they’re making.   I’m not sure that’s ever been visible before outside the usual marketing pitches.  For me it’s fascinating reading - but then I am a bit geeky.

I’ve been trying hard to increase the visibility and transparency of the design decisions made during work here.  It’s not always obvious to the customer or end users, and making the reasoning behind your decisions available should make for more open discussions and hopefully a better product and happier customers.  I think there’s a lot to be learnt from MS and Windows 7 teams approach.

I’m sure some of this is due to the current iPhone and Apple buzz, but I don’t think the WM comparison is something we can ignore.  For one thing Android is a platform rather than a ‘product’.  Where as the iPhone is a complete product - hardware, OS, applications and services, Android is very similar to Windows Mobile in that its a platform you can adopt for your hardware or apps. 

It strikes me that Android is a lot like Chome in that I imagine its seen as a vehicle for the delivery of Googles cloud services.  Although I don’t think Google have really chased the Enterprise market in the past they seem to be building up this side of their business, putting in place the building blocks they will need to move in and squash MS.  There’s a lot of money to be made in the enterprise email and office apps market and Google seem to be chasing that cash with a bit more vigor these days.

Googles enterprise email offerings are very competitive.  On price alone they are hard to ignore.  You loose some of the functionality you get with something like Exchange and Outlook, but especially in todays market, it does put you in a place where you start wondering about whether the functionality is worth the extra cost. 

One gap in the email offering seems to be mobile services.  Services like Blackberry and WM push mail are ubiquitous in business today and will be important for business adoption.  Sure there’s a mobile GoogleMail site, and a client for Blackberry but having their own platform out there that can do push mail, run the core Google apps and provide a platform for third party apps is a very attractive piece of the overall solution.

The fact that few articles are comparing Andoid to WM really surprises me.  And if I was a WM product manager I’d be both happy and worried about that.  Happy because the market seems to be pitching Android against Apple.  Worried because no one is talking about my product.

Edit:  I just spotted a great review of the T-Mobile G1 and Android over on Engadget that gives a good description of Androids integration with the Google cloud.

The installation is here and is available for PC and Mac and supports IE, Firefox and Google Chrome. 

An interesting note from the release material is that it seems like Apple are blocking a release for iPhone… I guess it gets in the way of their own plans?  What with Silverlight on its way to Windows Mobile and Nokia, and WM Mesh clients on their way too, I’m going to feel a little left out with my iPhone.

Given MS’s current marketing campaign if I were them I’d be tempted to build iPhone compatible clients anyway.  Then I’d show them working as much as possible and let Apple publicly deny them to users…

Its a collection of four online elearning clinics on the the MS virualisation products.  Obviously they’re not at detailed as proper training courses, but they look like a decent overview to see what the products are all about.  Not bad for free :)

Included are:
Clinic 5935: Introducing Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008
Clinic 6334: Exploring Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008
Clinic 6335: Exploring Microsoft Application Virtualization
Clinic 6336: Exploring Terminal Services in Windows Server 2008

Link:
https://www.microsoftelearning.com/eLearning/offerDetail.aspx?offerPriceId=228501

To be honest I’d never heard of better place until a few months ago.  I came across it while I was doing some reading into alternative fuels, and it struck me as a fantastic idea.  The Wired gives a much better overview than I could, but in short Better Place proposes to build whole new infrastructures for the use of electric cars and vehicles.  To help achieve this Shai has re-thought the business model we use for buying cars and fuel. 

Cars are offered at a discount, subsidised by the energy companies in the same way as mobile phone companies subsidise handsets.  As a customer you subscribe to a monthly energy tariff as you would a mobile phone.  The phone becomes a car, and the cell stations become recharging points. 

With Better Place and the energy companies building the network of charging points and providing a standardised battery technology, the car makers can concentrate of building cars to make use of that infrastructure. 

They’ve already got Israel and Denmark lined up, and Renault/Nissan designing and building cars.  Take a read through the Wired article and see what you think.  It’s an idea that could change the world.

It hit me earlier that it’s not the content that I don’t like - most of it is very good, its the format.  In most cases either the whole magazine or individual articles are presented in what are essentially glorified PDF files.  For me at least that format just isn’t nice to use.  What works in print doesn’t necessarily translate into digital media.  Perhaps it’s just me, but I’d rather have articles published in a blog like format - something I can subscribe to, search etc.  in my view Car magazine does a much better job.  Sure the PDF style approach has its purpose, and I can see the benefits for the publishers, but I don’t think it works for publishing content online.

On the plus side, it’s great to see such good content being available for free.  Drivers Republic in particular has some fantastic features and it’ll be interesting to see how it develops over time.