Windows 8 Details

Over the last few days it seems if a Microsoft Windows 8 presentation aimed at PC OEM’s has leaked out onto the net.  Of course no one has confirmed it’s real, but it looks much like the documents I saw during the Vista and 7 development cycles so I’ve no reason to think it’s not.

I’m not going to republish the slides here, as clearly they should be under NDA, but not this info is in the public domain I’ll discuss major points in general and my take on the implications.

So what’s new in there? 

Industry Trends
Whilst this isn’t exactly news, it’s interesting see what MS sees as the trends that are shaping their development of Win8.  Many of these are focused around the users interaction with computers.

They describe a market in 2012 providing a wide range of hardware form factors and offering users ubiquitous internet access.  In a world where connectivity is assumed MS will continue its ‘Software + Services’ push in Windows 8.  With the recent Windows Live Wave 4 releases already providing a pretty strong platform of local applications coupled with Internet services (Hotmail, Office Web Apps, Photo Gallery etc), they mention that Wave 5 release of these apps is pencilled in for release at around the same time as Win8.

MS are also keen to point out that peoples personal and business computing experiences are rapidly merging.  This is something that I’ve certainly encountered over the past few years, and it will be interesting to see how MS counter this.  The challenge is in keeping corporate applications and data secure, whilst also providing the flexibility people look for in personal computing from the same device.

Solutions out there in the market currently use a pretty heavy handed approach, using perhaps a separate OS instance though a VM or using ‘OS on a Stick’ solutions that effectively turn a personal computer into a thin client that then connects to a business desktop.

I suspect that MS could provide a slightly more elegant solution if they choose to build that abstraction into the OS.  Windows 7 already supports booting from a VDI virtual hard disk, and can use XP Mode or MED-V to provide applications that run from a separate local OS.  I wouldn’t be surprised to see both of these technologies advance further to present a single ‘desktop’ to the user that ties back to separate ‘personal’ and ‘business’ VM’s.  Presumably this may lead to a Client Hypervisor version of Hyper-V along the lines of Citrix’s XenClient.

Apple Envy
One slide that perhaps shows MS’s overall approach to Windows 8 is actually all about Apple.  MS have looked at Apple’s appeal and described a cycle that flows from Brand Promise > User Experience > User Confidence > Realised Value > High Satisfaction and then back to Brand Promise.  In other words if it just works, people like it, you look good and they’ll will return for more of the same.

I’d have hoped that was all a bit obvious to be honest, but it’s interesting to see that it’s a clear part their thinking and even state “This is something people will pay for!”.  Hopefully MS are learning lessons from Apples success, and in fairness their own successful Windows 7 release.

Windows Store
For some time now I’ve been quite critical of MS’s late arrival into the ‘app store’ space.  As far as I know only Windows Phone has an MS operated app delivery mechanism (and to a lesser extent XBox Live).  To my mind both Windows and XBox would benefit hugely from an app store and the ecosystem of developers that it would spawn.  Frankly the PC world is still pretty much in the age of having a choice between Freeware, Shareware or full retail software.  Apple style app stores completely change this by providing users will a trusted source of apps and developers with a permanent market and a method of getting paid for their work.

I’m therefore very happy to see MS outline plans for ‘Windows Store’, an iTunes equivalent.  It seems like I’m not the only one as the slides show feedback suggesting that it “can’t happen soon enough”! 

The concept seems fairly well advanced, the slides include a wireframe storyboard of the app browsing and purchasing experience, which looks quite Zune like – a good thing I reckon.  They also show that a users apps and settings will follow them across PC’s, presumably tied to a Live ID as with XBox Live.  The app store will also provide mechanisms for delivering updates or patches to installed apps.

For developers there will be a personalised portal to submit apps, track their progress through the approval process and view analytics around sales and usage.  One of the most interesting items shown in the portal is a tab for Telemetry.  This shows that developers will be able to monitor how the apps are used and receive crash dumps that are returned by faults.  As far as I know this is far in advance of any other systems out there and should help ensure that the quality of apps delivered through the system is kept high.

Something that isn’t covered is how the applications themselves will be delivered.  We’ve seen MS dabbling with streaming applications over the Internet with the Office 2010 beta, which I understand was a big success.  Given the current trend towards application virtualisation I could see Windows Store making use of App-V or a similar technology to deliver apps as discrete objects rather than the traditional MSI’s.  Given MS’s own desire to replicate Apple’s ‘It Just Works’ view of the world using virtualised apps would seem to be be a good route for Windows Store.  It would help minimising the errors and incompatibilities that can plague large app portfolios.

Personally I think Windows Store is an incredibly exciting development for users and developers.  What I’m curious about is how this might then relate to business use of Windows.  Presumably it wouldn’t be to hard to extent this model out into the Enterprise space.

There are already solutions out there that provide ‘shopping cart’ style interfaces into Microsoft’s Configuration Manager (SCCM) application delivery tools, but this sort of interface would certainly be a welcome addition for businesses.  I guess there would be a couple of approaches that could be adopted.

For one, Windows Store itself could provide a way for companies to allow users to buy software through it.  This would probably need an approval mechanism to ensure that spend was authorised, and also an alternative method for invoicing and payment.  It would also be desirable for companies to be able white-list or black-list apps. 

It’s a challenge for sure, but it’s not too hard to envision it happening.  With MS’s ability to federate it’s Online services with internal company Active Directories they could potentially access a primitive authorisation matrix through the ‘Manager’ information in AD.  And Group Policy would be a perfect way of switching the Store into a ‘business mode’ that doesn’t bill the users directly.

The second method might be to build a similar interface that can be hosted internally and used with SCCM.  Providing a similar user experience on company machines has obvious benefits to users and IT alike.  Indeed given the focus on bringing together people work and home experiences the ability to switch between them at will is probably worthwhile.

Identity and Authentication
There a couple of slides around Win8’s proposed methods of authentication and how it might handle user data.  The obvious flashy thing here is the proposed use of facial recognition for logon, the idea being that a webcam connected to the computer would recognise that you have say down in front of the computer, determine that it’s you and then log you on.

I’ve played with some tools for this before, and it’s a very nice user experience.  If MS can get it right and fix the false-positive issues that facial recognition systems can have (i.e. holding up a photo of the computers owner to logon…) it could be a very nice addition.

The other item of note was how Win8 will handle user profiles.  It seems that Windows user accounts will be ‘connected to the cloud’ so that user settings, and presumably documents, will follow them from PC to PC.  With Microsoft’s Mesh synchronisation technology now mature and forming part of Windows Live Wave 4, I suspect that this will also be the basis of continuously sync’ing user profiles with a Live back-end service.

I’ve wondered whether they’d do this for some time.  Indeed when Mesh was released I wondered whether having the ability to sync both document data and user personalisation info into the cloud might lead MS to presenting actual Windows desktops from it’s Azure platform.

 

There are plenty of other bit and pieces in the presentation.  But to my mind those are the main things to consider. 

Of the rest the Fast Startup looks good, it’s a hybrid system boot mechanism that uses the hibernate function to cut out some of the boot process and hugely reduce startup time.  It’s worth noting that this and Sleep will be the default startup and shutdown actions in Window 8.

So all in all it’s very positive stuff, I suspect that MS will be very unhappy it’s public.  It certainly gives the opposition something to aim at.  I have to say if I was MS rather than clamping down on the now public info I’d make the most of it – fill in the gaps on what’s already known and start the hype early.

For more info there’s good ccoverage over on Windows Kitchen.

iPhone 4 in business

With the iPhone rapidly becoming an accepted business phone for many companies, I’ve been interested to read about the changes that the forthcoming iPhone 4 and iOS 4 will bring.

To be honest there isn’t a huge amount of info out there, but the info that is available is quite positive.  There’s a page on apple.com with some basic details.  The main areas that Apple seem to be addressing are security and management, both of which have been question marks in the past.  Specifically the talk about:

Data Protection
Security enhancements in iPhone OS 4 protect email messages and attachments stored on iPhone 3GS by using the device passcode as an encryption key. New data protection APIs can be used for custom and commercial apps so that business-critical information is protected even if a device is compromised.

This is good news, but I still think Apple need to be clearer about exactly what sort of encryption is used etc.  The 3GS’s are meant to be encrypted, but there’s pretty strong indications that this isn’t quite as strong as you would hope [1, 2, 3].  If Apple can get this right it’ll open a lot of doors from them in business, as they’re still some way behind RIM’s Blackberry and Microsoft’s Windows Phone platforms.   Both of these offer significantly more control over encryption, and in combination with device management tools can both be configured to accredited security levels (up to ‘RESTRICTED’ I believe).

Mobile Device Management
Deploying and managing large iPhone fleets will be even easier with iPhone OS 4. New Mobile Device Management APIs can be integrated with third-party solutions to wirelessly configure and update settings, monitor compliance with corporate policies, and even wipe or lock managed iPhone devices.

To their credit Apple have supported a level of device management for a while through their implementation of Microsoft’s ActiveSync.  This at least allows basic policy enforcement on devices connecting in through Exchange.  By providing more complete API’s into a management interface however hopefully iPhones will begin to support a much wider range of management features.  The obvious gaps currently are around password/pin polices, encryption and granular control of features and functionality.  There are a number of products in the market to manage mobile devices [1, 2, 3], so hopefully we’ll see these begin to support the iPhone as well.

Wireless App Distribution
iPhone OS 4 enables enterprises to securely host and wirelessly distribute in-house apps to employees over Wi-Fi and 3G. Apps can be updated without requiring users to connect to their computers.

This has the potential to unlock the iPhone/iPad to a new group of developers.  Previously it’s been quite tricky to develop in house Line of Business applications,  and critically, to distribute them out to a fleet of devices.  The ability to deploy in-house apps over the air will make this much more attractive to organisations. 

SSL VPN Support
SSL VPN support in iPhone OS 4 gives users another way to securely access enterprise resources. These new protocols can even be leveraged to connect seamlessly to a corporate network via VPN on Demand. Forthcoming apps from Juniper and Cisco will support SSL VPN on iPhone.

VPN support is obviously a nice thing to have, but I’d be interested to hear how often this is used.  In a world where you’re developing and using internal applications it’ll be a very useful tool if those aren’t published to the internet, but for basic email etc generally the existing ActiveSync connection probably offers enough transport security.  I guess web access policies could also influence the use of VPN’s if you wanted to force your users through a company proxy server of some sort.

Improved Mail
iPhone OS 4 allows users to set up multiple Exchange ActiveSync accounts and now works with Exchange Server 2010. With the new unified inbox feature, users can see messages from all their email accounts conveniently displayed in a single inbox, or they can quickly switch between inboxes to see messages from any single account. If users receive an attachment that they want to save or edit, Mail now lets you open attachments with compatible apps from the App Store.

Again, I think the mail changes are more ‘nice to haves’ rather than significant improvements to the business features.  Though the unified inbox is very well implemented when you see it in use.  With the support for multiple ActiveSync accounts, it will be interesting to see how they have implemented the policy management.  If you have two ActiveSync connections, each with difference policy enforcement settings, which one wins?  Is it whichever is more secure?  If so who decided what the more secure value is?  I also wonder if this could potentially allow information to leak from one system to another.  If mail is synced from one company onto the iPhone, could it then potentially be synced back down to a separate mailbox with the iPhone acting as a hub?  I can see how that might be useful for personal contacts, but for potentially sensitive emails etc, it could be a problem.

Who needs PowerPoint? Try Prezi instead

Well to be honest I do… but thanks to Eileen Brown I’ve now discovered a pretty decent alternative in Prezi.  As part of my job I often have to put together presentations for various strategies or projects.  I’m always quite conscious that traditional built pointed PowerPoints are liable to bore people to tears, so anything that can help liven things up a little has to be good. 

So what is Prezi then?  Well it’s an online presentation tool, but the difference is in how you build up those presentations and what they look like when played back.  Rather than write a long (probably inadequate!) explanation they’ve got a decent intro video:

So as you can see it’s a bit different from the normal PowerPoint type app :)

I guess the closest I’ve seen has been Microsoft’s Office Labs pptPlex which is a free add-in that provides similar functionality inside of Powerpoint.   Prezi is just more like a ‘Deepzoom’ sort of experience – which is odd given Deepzoom is an MS technology.

Having played with it a little today, I reckon Prezi is a good little tool.  It makes it much easier to tell a story in your presentations, and hopefully keep people engaged in what you’re saying.

The ability to embed external media like images and videos is well implemented and very useful.  Indeed, I’ve not tried it but I think you can even embed normal slides from slide share – though I’m not sure why you’d want to!

Prezi has three options for getting access to it.  You can sign up for free, but you only get 100MB of storage and all your presentations are public and branded with a Prezi watermark.

There are then two costed options, ‘Enjoy’ at $59 a year and ‘Pro’ at $159 a year.  Both have the option to make presentations private, and have the watermark removed.  ‘Enjoy’ has 500MB of storage, and ‘Pro’ 2GB and a Desktop editor so you can create and view presentations offline.

The free versions inability to save a presentation privately is – in my view – not very user friendly.  I can see why they’ve done it to drive sales of the costed options, but even so you’d have to careful what you post up, especially if they’re work/business presentations.

Personally I feel that the costed options are a little too expensive.  As good as it is, I’m not sure that it’s worth that much or that the offline app would be worth a $100 premium. 

It’s a balance really of whether you feel that the impact Prezi can potentially give your presentations is worth the cost.  I think it has real potential, but there are a few niggles that it would be worth them looking at.

  • – The saved presentations are pretty big – a basic demo I did with two paragraphs came down as a 20MB zip file!
  • – As Prezi is a Flash app, right-clicking on it just brings up the normal Flash menu, not much they can do about that, but there are some tasks where right-clicking would improve the navigation.  And of course it won’t work on an iPad, where the interface would seem to really suit it!
  • – There are only a couple of styles provided, and whilst you can pay $450 for a custom one, the ability to change fonts and colours etc would seem to be a pretty basic feature people would expect.

Like I say, I really like Prezi, you can create some really striking presentations in it.  Will I buy it?  Probably not… With information security such a big factor in business these days I don’t think I could save presentations online without knowing more about their security model etc, and $159 a year is too expensive for a version that would give me the ability to work offline and keep the presentations within the companies control.  Still it’s a very nice little app!

Building a race car from scratch

Years ago when I was first looking into getting my Elise I spent quite a bit of time on the British Cars BBS, which at the time was a lively place to find out about such things.  I remember have a couple of chats to a guy who went by the name of DP on the site.  He had one of the few Elise’s in the states at that time, which was quite a feat as they weren’t actually street legal over there.

Anyway, last time I remember him posting there he was looking into building his own car from scratch based on a layout with the driver and engine side-by-side with chains driving both the front and rear wheels.

dp4267 dp4393

I kept up with the project at the time, but today I noticed a post on Jalopnik about a new ‘DP4 Super-kart’.  Turns out in the 8 years since then Dennis has been busy building on those original plans and developing a number of different cars based on that layout. 

The latest project looks pretty impressive… it’s smaller than an original Mini but powered by a ~200bhp motorbike engine though a 4wd system.  If the video below is anything to go by it looks like a lot of fun.  Especially when you consider that’s the cars first real run so it hasn’t had much development on it’s setup etc.

He’s also got a really good blog detailing the development of all his projects including the DP4.  If you’re a car geek it’s well worth a read.  It’ll be interesting to see how his other projects go, as they include electric track cars based on the same sort of designs. 

There’s more info on the Palatov Motorsport site and DP’s own site.