My Digital Life

There’s been quite a lot of talk over the past few days about an project MS is running called Midori that may, or may not, be the makings of a new legacy free OS.

The prospect of an entirely new OS is quite an exciting one, the world has moved a long way since the WinNT code base that XP and Vista are based around was first written.  It’s probably fair to say that to some extent today’s hardware is held back by the legacy components that the OS are forced to include.

That said, as Ed Bott talks about on his blog, such a change is not something to be taken likely.  There are A LOT of existing Windows users and applications that would need to be supported in any change.  As I believe MS discovered with Vista, the cost of migrating applications to a new platform is a huge obstacle to business migration.

Or is it…

Virtualisation technology is advancing hugely, if not in overall functionality then in the ease with which it can be utilised.  Microsoft’s Hyper-V is part of the basic server OS, and as I understand it will be core to Windows 7.  Application virtualisation is maturing nicely as a tool and is, I believe, about to become mainstream.  Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is now something that enterprises can realistically consider, again Windows 7 will drive this even further forward.

With all of these components in place, the release of a new OS should be much simpler than ever before.  Application compatibility, the big killer of migrations, should slowly become less of a challenge.  The toolset needed to run applications across multiple OS’s on the one system is pretty much all there.  Of course those apps won’t benefit from whatever advances Midori might bring, but as cover for a transition period that’s not so important.  As long as they work, both independently and with each other, that’s a huge problem out of the way.

I agree with Ed that any new OS is likely to live in parallel to a standard Windows product for some time, but I do think the migration will be quicker than we’ve seen before.

Yesterday I got a HTC Touch Diamond to play with for a few days.  I’ve been wanting to see one in the flesh for a while, partly because I need a new phone, and partly because we’re a Windows Mobile house here and with the 3G iPhone looming we’re thinking hard about future direction.

The Diamond… well it’s a sight to behold.   The phone itself is tiny, with sharp styling and is very lightweight.  One comment I heard yesterday was that it makes any phone you sit it next to look 10 years old.  I like the look of it a lot.  The rear surface (as you’ve probably seen in photos) isn’t flat, it has slightly raised jagged pattern that makes it look like it’s been cut from stone, or well… diamond.

The small size of the device poses some interesting question.  Previously WM Smartphones used to be the smaller option, sacrificing the touch screen for a smaller footprint.  Now however, this full WM device with all the GPS and stuff is small enough that it doesn’t matter.  I’m not sure what future the Smartphone OS has if devices are now this small.

Powering the thing up, the first think I noticed was the quality of the screen, off hand I’m not sure what the resolution is, but I’ve seen desktop LCD monitors with worse picture quality, it’s very very good.  This allows the interface to use small, sharp fonts without them being hard to see or use. 

The main ‘home screen’ interface is miles ahead of any other Windows Mobile phone I’ve used (and that’s quite a few!).  At the bottom there’s a scroll bar of buttons for the main functions (contacts, photos, music, settings etc) that is easy to use and and quite intu itive once you realise it’s there.  You just move your finger across the screen until you reach what you want, for example photos, the bulk of the screen is used to show previews that you can then scroll through.  It’s all great looking and reasonably well thought out.

In fact, in terms of the user interface I’d say the worst thing was the underlying Windows OS.  Once you find a function or task that isn’t covered by the HTC installed user interface, the jolt of going back to the old Windows Mobile interface is quite shocking.  I’ve always got on quite well with WM before, but the Diamond really does highlight that MS need to start concentrating on the ‘Mobile’ part of their OS not the ‘Windows’ part.  The normal windows like GUI just doesn’t cut it in the mobile space anymore.

Would I buy one?  Not sure… If there wasn’t a 3G iPhone just days away then yes, without a doubt.  As it is I’ll wait and see.

…That when you close MS Word, the ‘X’ closes just that open window… but when you close Excel, the ‘X’ closes all the open Windows?  Seems like an odd inconsistency. 

A few months ago MS announced that it was going to cut off the DRM servers that support the old MSN Music service, effectively limiting what people could do with the music they had paid for. 

It turns out that they’ve now changed their mind and decided to keep the servers going until 2011… so all the bad press was for nothing.  I seem to remember saying at the time that it was crazy!

As Joe Wilcox says over on Microsoft Watch, it would have been easy for MS to turn this in to a PR win.  Why not give the people who were effected credit on Zune Marketplace?  MS do know how to do customer service when they need to but it just doesn’t seem as pervasive as it should be.  It’s a shame.

Something that surprised me about the Server 2008 launch was that there aren’t any MOM management packs available for it yet.  I’m sure people we busy getting the OS itself ready, but this won’t help adoption of the OS by enterprises.

I’m told that the MP hasn’t yet gone through beta testing but it targeted for release in Q4 of 2008.

Yesterday I left a comment on a post over on istartedsomthing.  The post was about a job advert for developers to work on virtual hard disks, and it’s implications for Windows 7 functionality.

There seems to be quite a bit of focus on this line from the advert:

"Consider the simplicity of backup using a VHD, or the portability of a virtual disk backed by a single file."

Whilst that’s all very nice, for me the real interesting quote is this:

"Imagine being able to mount a VHD on any Windows machine, do some offline servicing and then boot from that same VHD. Or perhaps, taking an existing VHD you currently use within Virtual Server and boost performance by booting natively from it."

Specifically the last bit. 

If the intention is to include the ability to boot from a VHD, this implies that the platform will be built around, or at least support, a hypervisor like Hyper-V.

Of course this may be a focus for a future server version of Windows 7, but if included in the desktop as well it could make virtual desktops (VDI) and blade workstations a much more appealing prospect for the future. 

Imagine running an office full of desktop machines.  The low end requirements could be met using VM’s hosted on large servers, say 20-30 per server, presented to the user by a thin client.  If a user has a more complex requirement, you could simply move that VM to a dedicated blade workstation.  Hopefully that would use the same thin client and be pretty transparent to the end user - perhaps even VMotion style transparent.  If the user then needs to move office or go mobile just copy their VM to a remote server/blade, or to a standard desktop or laptop. 

It would need some good management tools but it could be quite a nice solution.

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. 

The arrival of the new Grand Theft Auto game has left with a bit of a dilemma… I have an xbox 360 which I’m pretty happy with.  A bunch of my workmates have PS3’s.  We’ve been talking quite a bit about GTA and they’ve been telling me how good it is, and how it’s got online play that I should join in with. 

So do I buy it for my xbox and play without my mates, or buy a PS3 and play online with them. 

I don’t like having problems like this… I rarely need much of a reason to blow cash on sexy technology so having an argument to do just that doesn’t help my bank balance.  It strikes me that the reason I have this dilemma is that there’s no unified identity or play across PS3 and xbox. 

Xbox Live is now pretty well developed, but the impression I get from my mates is that the Playstation Network is less so.  Without knowing the in’s and out’s of games development I would imagine that sorting out the online play is quite complex and that its something you’d want to do as fewer times as possible. 

Given that end users probably want cross-platform play, and that developers would probably quite like to have one way of doing things, if I was Microsoft I’d be looking at providing some sort of Xbox Live dev kit for PS3’s.

I’m guessing there are some pretty well defined API’s there that aren’t necessarily tied to a hardware platform.  And it’s not necessarily something Sony could stop (unless the PS3 developers are contractually tied to the PSN), so I imagine its technically possible.

I can see why MS wouldn’t want to do this, after all it might be one less reason by an XBox over a PS3.  But given that the PS3 seems to be gaining momentum now that Blueray has won over HD-DVD it might be nice way of MS cashing in on Sony’s success.   If PS3 users are able to play on XBox Live it would seem like quite a good way of driving new subscriptions and giving the PS3 owners a taste of what’s available on the full Live Marketplace on xbox.

Does that make sense or am I just daydreaming?

Apologies for this post, I’m writing it to collect together my own thoughts so it’ll probably be even more disjointed than usual!

So… we’re more or less a Microsoft shop here.  We run a standardised Windows XP desktop supported by Active Directory, Systems Management Server (SMS) and a host of Windows based application services.  This is all managed by a pretty skilled operations team and support by a decent service desk and desktop support organisation.  In summary pretty much all the technology and skill is Windows/PC focused.

We’re now seeing an increasing demand for Mac desktops and laptops, especially from the design community.   I need to work out what the impact of adopting a multi-platform desktop fleet will be both technically and from a service management perspective.

I no particular order I reckon I’ll need to consider the following to some degree or another.  It’s probably worth noting here that some of this may have obvious solutions, but I’ve no really experience of Macs - looking forward to learning though!

Software Delivery
Any computer is pretty much useless unless you have applications to run on it, so this is a fairly important point.  At the moment we have fairly robust software delivery and asset management.  End users request an application through a web ’shop’ and the software gets delivered through SMS onto their computer. 

How will this work with Mac’s?  We don’t really want to go back to a word where we’re handing out CD’s - the asset management of that is too hard.  So from a technology perspective we’ll need some way delivering the applications. 

That will include amendments to our shop front so that people can select between PC and Mac versions of Applications, and also the actual delivery solution.  Given that for now the Mac user base is likely to be much smaller than the PC base, it would seem to make sense to try and use SMS rather than adopt a new system - we already know and use SMS.  it looks like there are a few solutions out there to achieve this.

Applying Policy
There are certain company policies and configuration that we have to apply to our corporate desktops - proxy server settings for example.  Within the Windows world we use AD Group Policy to achieve this.  How do I go about doing this with Mac’s?  Again, there appear to be tools out there which help.

Patching
This is where my ignorance of Mac’s starts to show… :)  Now I understand that Apple runs a Software Update service, and that from the client you can select which updates to install, which to hide etc.  What I’m not sure about at the moment is whether there is a WSUS equivalent that will allow an organisation to administratively select and schedule updates from a central point.   It’s possible the software delivery solution will deal with this, but for now I’m not sure.

Desktop Support
Speaking to friends at other companies that support Mac’s it would seem that although Mac’s require less overall support than a PC, the hardware does tend to fail more regularly.  Whether this is true I’ll wait and see (flame suite on none the less…). 

In either case there’s a skills gap here as we don’t currently have any Mac support skills in-house.  Potentially this might mean we could bring someone in to help, at least in the short-medium term to get us over the initial learning curve.  It’s something we would need to address fairly early on in order to provide a decent level of service.

With hardware support the likes of HP and Lenovo have hoards of guys just waiting to warranty repair faulty kit.  The impression I get so far is that the same isn’t likely to be true with Apple.  Potentially that means we’ll have to have Mac’s in stock and on-site to replace faulty units quickly whilst repairs are organised out of band.

SharePoint Compatibility
We use SharePoint to deliver our intranet and provide the usual team and project workspaces, so compatibility with this and the workflow and applications built on it is pretty important.  This will probably drive which browsers we provide, but may also have lower level implications.

Exchange Compatibility
As with the SharePoint item above, corporate email is provided through Exchange so compatibility is critical.  I’ve not looked into this yet, but I’m guessing there will be some fairly well established solutions available.

Remote Access
Within our PC platform, remote access is provided though a Cisco based VPN solution.  Although some services are also available of web based interfaces, compatibility with this VPN solution will be important for mobile and remote users.

Looking through the Cisco site it looks like there is a client available so hopefully this shouldn’t be a problem.

Authentication
All authentication is provided though Active Directory.  All users have accounts within AD, and where ever possible applications use Windows integrated authentication for sign-on.  To provide an integrated service to the Mac users i think its important that this can be maintained as far as possible - nothing worse than log on prompts interrupting your work!

There’s lots of decent information on this on the Apple site, so pending me reading through it all I’m not too worried about getting this working.

I was just catching up on what’s been happening on twitter this afternoon and I noticed that Jemima posted an article on the Guardian about Apple and its (non-)moves into the Enterprise space.

I’ll let you read the post yourself (Jemima’s stuff is always worth reading), but the gist of the story is that Apple are now moving into the enterprise without even trying.

For years Apple has deliberately ignored the corporate world.  The enterprise just isn’t where Big Steve wants the company to be.    He’s concentrated on home consumers and the education market.  That’s fair enough, I can see why.

The thing is… over the past few years Apple has pulled of something quite remarkable.  It changed the world.  It made computers, or more specifically it’s computers, cool.  Not just geeky cool, but mainstream cool. 

Combine this with Apples focus on education, offering cheap Macs to students and faculty, and the enterprise space is now seeing a huge influx of talent and skills that are expecting to find a Mac on their desk at the office.

Now I fully expect Steve to take credit for this master plan at some point, whether it was a plan or not who knows, only him I guess.  But what this means for me is that I need to start shifting IT infrastructure to a multi-platform model. 

Now I think this is fantastic.  After all, IS organisations are there to make the business more productive.  But For IT departments that have spent the last 10 years standardising and streamlining their platforms the prospect of adopting a whole new set of management systems isn’t that attractive.

It’s here that Apples indifference to the enterprise world begins to show.

Microsoft, for all its faults, gets Enterprise computing.  Really gets it.  It knows how IT works in big business and creates tools to help make IT organisations more effective.  So do a whole bunch of other companies who specialise in  deploying, managing, patching and securing large PC based environments. 

This ecosystem doesn’t really exist in the Mac world - or at least not to the same extent.  There are definitely tools out there, but for the most part they are pretty bespoke to Mac’s.  They need tools and skills that otherwise don’t exist in a PC environment.  Supporting both the Windows and Mac platforms therefore has the potential to increase overall costs. 

Help is at hand however, and we end up with a rather strange situation where the ecosystem that supports the current PC focused enterprise is possibly better placed to simplify the adoption of Mac than Apple is. 

You can already see this happening, people like Quest and other members of the SMSAlliance provide extensions for System Centre Configuration Manager and other management suites.  LANDesk and Altiris are continually adding to their own support for Macs.  Microsoft themselves recently released Messenger for Mac 7 that built in support for Office Communications Server. 

Hopefully with all this increased support enterprises can start to adopt Mac’s without having to drastically rework their internal systems and processes.  Big companies are already starting the move (here and here).  It’ll certainly make my life easier!  I wonder if Big Steve really did have a master plan?