My Digital Life

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.

Looks like the Mac Live Mesh client has been released - despite the ‘Microsoft Confidential - Internal Use Only’ lable at the bottom of the installation window :)

Anyways, here it is: https://www.mesh.com/Web/MacDownload.aspx
Update:  I may have spoken to soon there… although the client installed properly, once it started it asks for an update but then fails to find the files it looks for on the web.  Not sure if thats just me though.

Liveside have just posted about a cool new technology MS is building called DeepPhoto.  It looks like a mashup of tools like Virtual Earth and PhotoSynth and allows photo’s to be mapped against the geometric data being built up by the virtual earth team.

With all of this information combined you can do some pretty interesting things.  The video demo the LiveSide guys recorded shows how knowing the real world 3D references for objects in a photo allows the technology to de-haze images that are hazy for example.  The real interesting stuff for me though comes at the end of the demo.

A photo of the Yosemite valley is mapped against the geometric model from Virtual Earth.  This allows the software to increase the accuracy of the 3D view by extrapolating colours and textures from the real image.  You can then move around this composite view in 3D - in effect filling in the gaps between the photos in a PhotoSynth scene. 

Working for a company that does loads of GIS work, and produces visualisations of new projects, I can see this sort of technology as being genuinely useful to business.  Assuming there’s some sort of API for adding your own data into the views (hyperlinks and additional models for example) it would be a very powerful way of visualising the sort of change we plan and design every day.

The LiveSide Video:

I’ve been playing about with the Mesh preview for a week or so now and overall I’m pretty impressed.  Unfortunately I’ve not had time to look at the dev side of things (or it could be that I couldn’t code my way out of a paper bag…) but its clear from talking to developer buddies that they’re equally interested. 

Anyway, I was chatting about Mesh earlier and the subject of Office and other ‘business’ apps came up.  Or more specifically what, if anything, Mesh would mean to them.

I guess the most obvious place that Mesh could integrated is Groove.  It’s one of Ray Ozzies former projects and has more than a little in common with Mesh - or at least the functionality provided in the preview. 

The most common use  of Groove is peer to peer, you’d create a workspace or share a folder with a number of people, but there’d be no central point where the data was kept waiting for other people to come online when you were away. 

There is however the option to use Groove Enterprise Services to provide the equivalent of the cloud Mesh, a centralised service that clients could sync with which would then be available to pass on changes to other users as they came online.  Using Mesh as the sync provider for new iterations of Groove would seem to make sense.  The question to my mind is quite how that might work. 

One option would be to allow clients to sync directly with the Mesh cloud.  Although that would be the obvious and easiest solution it may not always suit enterprises.  Clients would all be syncing directly to the Internet over the corporate network, not ideal unless you have huge bandwidth.  Some companies may also be unhappy about having a copy of all their synced data sat outside of their network.

One way to provide enterprises with some additional flexibility might be to provide some form of internal Mesh - an internal Mesh cloud that clients can sync with privately.  Potentially this cloud could then sync with the main Mesh cloud in a controlled way to allow a company to better manage the bandwidth over it’s Internet connection.

How would such a Mesh cloud be delivered?  Maybe as part of Exchange or SharePoint?

One of the examples Ori Amiga gave in his Channel 9 video showed how updates made to data in an application could be synced in near real-time to other Mesh clients.  In his example he used a family tree application, but for some reason it reminded me of the Excel Calculation services in SharePoint 2007. 

ECS allows you to maintain a central version of an Excel worksheet and show updates in real-time via a SharePoint webpart (that’s a huge simplification I know).  Presumably if Excel was able to use Mesh, changes to shared workbooks could be synced with other users of that workbook.  How useful that might be I’m not sure - I’m not a huge Excel user - but the same could apply to PowerPoint or Word.

The other day I read a blog post about using Mesh as a messaging platform, unfortunately I can’t find it now to reference it.  The gist of the post was that Mesh and Feedsync provide the basis for simple IM and email tools. 

Thinking it through a bit more though surely Mesh would make a great platform for an enterprise Twitter style messaging platform?  This could be a component for Outlook or Communicator that connects directly to Live Mesh or possibly connect the notional local cloud I mentioned up above. 

Of course this all just speculation, but given the obvious investment MS has made in Mesh it would seem sensible to use the framework in some of its other products. 

As you might have spotted, due to the work I’m doing at the moment I keep a pretty close eye on Microsoft and what its doing.  Over the past week or so I think thing they’ve had a fairly good week, news about the Live Mesh platform has started to arrive and it looks great, most of the comment I’ve read about it has been very positive.

So why go and do this?  ‘Microsoft to nuke MSN Music DRM keys‘. It looks like MS are decommissioning the infrastructure that support the DRM used for music bought on the old MSN Music site.  What genius made that decision?  How expensive can it be to keep those servers running?  Surely they’re never going to get busier or require scaling now MSN Music is gone.  Given all the free storage and hosting MS is throwing about chopping off this service can’t really improve the bottom line can it?  All this will do is generate bad press and piss people off… it seems crazy.  Oh well.

Like quite a few people I tend to keep my personal and work identities slightly separate, and part of that has been maintaining a domain for email - and more recently this blog. 

Back when I had a bit more time (and spare cash!) for geekery I used to maintain an Exchange server at home, mainly so I could learn about exchange but also to make use of webmail.  These days I don’t bother and have just been using the POP mailboxes provided by my hosting company and Outlook.  The problem is now I’m spending more of my time mobile I really miss having a decent webmail service.  Especially since I’ve been messing around with Exchange 2007 at work, the freebie ones the host provides just don’t cut it.

Having done a bit of digging around the web this morning I found the Windows Live Admin Centre, or what used to be called Custom Domains.  Now perhaps this is something everyone knows about, but its new to me and I’m pretty impressed.  I’ve not tried it out yet, but according to this wiki article once I sign up it’ll let me point my domains MX records at the Hotmail mail servers and have my email delivered to Hotmail accounts for my domain.  Sounds like a great solution to me, I can still use Outlook at home and get a decent webmail interface for when I’m mobile somewhere.  I’ll be trying it out over the next few days to see how well it works.

There’s a good post over on the MS Digital Memories Experience blog about how you can use the various Windows Live tools to add Geotags to photos without the need for GPS.   It’s then followed with another post about linking your photos to a tour within Live Search Maps.

It got me thinking… That’s pretty cool stuff, and well done to those guys for putting it all together, but something that does all of that in a more integrated way would be so much nicer.  I’m a fan of Live Photo Gallery and given there are so many other Geotagging tools out there it would seem like a great thing to add to this ’software’ part of the Live ’service’.  Given MS’s other mapping and virtual earth tools this shouldn’t be a too hard to integrate (can you tell I don’t do development?!).

What I’d really like to see though are the things like Photosynth and Deepzoom.  Photosynth still impresses the hell out me, and I can’t wait to see it working in a product form.  I’ve used it in some demos at work as an example of what sort of technology we can look forward to and it always seems to capture peoples imaginations.  Everyone can think up a use for it.  Hopefully something will appear before too long. 

Having played with the PhotoZoom site a little I reckon that would be another good addition to Live Photo Gallery.  It’d certainly be a good example of Software + Services - click a button on your desktop and MS processes your photos in the background.  Quite what format they’d be delivered in I’m not sure, perhaps similar to what’s on the site now, an object you can paste into an email or website.  Sounds good to me.

Anyway… enough rambling from me. 

I just noticed that PC Magazine have posted a review of the Office Live Workspace beta.  It’s quite an interesting read and they make some fair points about functionality and beta issues. 

I couldn’t make it to Mix this year, which is a real shame as from what I’ve heard it was a great conference.  To try and catch up I’ve spent a good few hours this week watching videos of the sessions over on the Mix site. 

Now I think the Mix site is great, having these sessions online and freely available is fantastic resource for anyone who couldn’t make the conference.  Whether they’re professional geeks like me, students or people who were there and missed a particular session.

So last night I found myself sat on my sofa with my laptop and headphones watching the Steve B interview.  As good as the Mix site and videos are, I realised it would be much nicer to be watching these things on my TV.  I did briefly consider how I could hook up my laptop, but I figured it would be much easier if I could just watch them through Xbox Live.

There’s some pretty good content on Live these days, especially in the US (the UK seems to have a lot less for some reason).  To my mind the more content that’s available. and the more choice available the better it is for the customer (user?) and therefore for MS.  Content like the sessions from Mix are like gold dust for geeks and IT pros, and making this stuff available on XBox Live would seem to be a quick win.  At the very least it says good things about MS’s openness and willingness to share MS resources with the wider world. 

(Though Steve B might want to beep out his email address!)

Yesterday I was doing my daily trawl through Google Reader and came across an interesting post over on Liveside.net about Re-branding Microsoft.  I commented on it at the time but was thinking about it a bit more while I was driving to work this morning.

For the most part I still disagree with the post about blogging at MS, but I do agree that the Microsoft brand and image is a bit on an enigma.

I’m quite fortunate that my job within a large enterprise customer gives me pretty good access to resources and people at MS and the other big software and hardware companies.  When you’re working closely with MS the lasting impression (in my case at least) is one of a company built on smart (very smart), enthusiastic and interesting people.  I like being around those guys and working with them - things get done, and usually get done quickly and well.

Taking a step back and talking to friends in other positions and other companies, some of their views couldn’t be further from mine.  They’ve been conditioned by OS release after Office release after patch release into the view of a bland, arrogant monopoly. 

I guess this is partly what the Blue Monster is all about, trying to get that internal MS out to the wider world.  I think the MS blogs really help here, there are some amazing resources out there that do more for MS than any campaign ever has.  (For example although he doesn’t know it, and has never met me, I for one owe Joel Olson a beer someday for all the help his SharePoint blog gave me a few years ago!)

So where am I going with this…?  Well I’m not in marketing, I’m an IT guy.  But despite this I can see a glaring opportunity, a case in point:

Last Friday I was at the Insight customer event in London.  It was a good day with interesting seminars and good range of vendors there to talk to.  The company that left a lasting impression on me was SanDisk.  A strange choice really considering there were huge stands from the likes of HP and Sony and people dishing out free gadgets for attention.  But SanDisk did something different.  On their stand they had a magician.

This guy was good.  He was using card tricks and slight of hand to tell stories about encryption and removable storage.  The cards went blank to show they were encrypted and came back when you said the magic password.  Now that description doesn’t do him justice, but rest assured he was funny, talented and left the people spoke to with a smile on their faces.  Whether he sold many encrypted USB drives or not I don’t know, but he did a damn good job selling SanDisk.

In contrast, the MS stand was your average bunch of Vista desktops and sales guys.  There were a few bits about OCS and other cool stuff, but it was… well… just an average stand.  You didn’t walk away thinking better or worse about MS.  It was indifferent.

If it was me I’d have gone there with two or three PC’s and some big screens.  I’d have had Photosynth on one, SeaDragon on another and maybe someone with Popfly on the third.  I’d have got a big projector and beamed Photosynth or SeadDragon onto a wall or the ceiling or anywhere people would see it.  I’d bet money the stand would have got more attention and that most people would walk away with the wow they were missing.

Sure those aren’t products you can buy, and they won’t directly make MS a penny, but they do impress.  They do inspire.  They do show MS doing something different, something interesting that will, as Hugh says, change the world. 

Sell Microsoft not the products.