Google Office 2007: Now compatible with Vista

In case your company spent too much on Vista licensing this year, it looks like you can still save some costs on your productivity suite!!

I know MS is just trying to get into the hosted space for email, but Google is already offering all the important productivity tools with 99.9% uptime….email, calendaring, spreadsheets, & word processing….even blackberry if you want it! For $50 per user!!

This is a neat idea and certainly fills a void for a lot of cases. The case of schools is a huge one in my opinion students can cross the boundaries of home and campus and maintain a familiar application at little to no cost. That is fantastic! Small businesses and un-tech savvy users is another great example, if they can get easy access to this stuff…they have a viable option to reduce the costs of their business….

Of course I would need to know a few things before I started moving my business onto the latest fad software:

1. What about email retention & discovery (all companies need to worry about this now)?
2. Where is the diagramming software?
3. Where is the project application?
4. Where is the presentation software (an online app would be great for this…never get up to speak without your presentation online)?
5. Why is this better then starOffice (ok hosted email is cool, but starOffice is cheap and fairly solid now)?
6. Am I going to get advertisements in my apps for this price (ok, probably not, but does the licensing prevent them from doing this)?
7. Why isn’t jotspot or blogger included in the deal (that would take care of number 3 and a lot more)?
8. What is the plan when Office Live comes out with twice the feature set at the same price (isn’t that what they do, make everyone else’s ideas better)?
9. Will Maps be included at any point (a la MS streets & trips)?
10. Why isn’t the IM application included…or any conferencing suite (we need easy, trackable, auditable collaboration software!)?

Hosted eMail Services

There has been much debate and many new reports about hosted eMail services lately. A lot of this is due to the increase in SPAM, regulations, and viruses traversing the internet. MS has commissioned a paper on the benefits of hosted solutions over in-house messaging management….

David Spark asked me to look at this paper on Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services. From the looks of it, the same ask has been making the rounds to Terry Zink and Alec Saunders….but there aren’t very many opinions expressed on the wiki or the discussion group…I started to input my thoughts on the subject and the absense of supporting research…..

The paper itself seems to be based on Osterman Research work and there are some interesting research points that simply aren’t supportive of the claims in the paper. Some of the issues are…..

1. In general the paper’s “findings” are not supported by the research quoted
2. No discussion of the existing market is included
3. No context is given for claims of cost savings or reliability
4. Enterprise environments are not considerred
5. Comparison against tenured appliances is not included
6. Labor is generalized as high cost with no numbers to back it up

Now I’m sure there is plenty of data to support and refute the six items above in the context of hosted messaging services (especially in the case of the Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services)…..but they are not included in the paper and there is an opportunity to include them for people to see…..

So if you have an interest in hosted messaging components, you might want to take a look and ensure there is a consise opinion on the wiki fro the community (and other vendors) at large.

If you don’t have the time to comment, at least go vote on the hosting poll….

(results from the poll to be posted soon)

Seattle Mind Camp

Only a few tickets left for Seattle’s Mind Camp 3.0!! Better hurry if your planning on attending. Andru has assured me the audience will be top notch thinkers in the Seattle area along with those that wanted to know what a top notch thinker really was. I’m sure I fit somewhere between the two so am excited to attend this year. Everyone has great things to say about Mind Camps of the past…Blogging is welcome!!

Also if you are interested in sponsoring, there are some great opportunities for large and small organizations alike to sponsor the event.

Shoot me an email or post a comment if you want to discuss messaging and communities (wikis, portals, email, mobility, etc) at MindCamp 3.0. I am hoping to provide some more venues to discuss messaging, wikis, and collaboration in the seattle area. November 17 is the next Exchange User group (if you are interested in attending that let me know), I will of course do everything I can to use the Exchange user groups to discuss messaging at large (not just MS) so let me know what you want :-).

Corporate SPAM

Recently EMC’s CDO Mark Lewis started a discussion about Corporate SPAM. If you have ever been in a large corporate environment, you know what he is talking about…. (payroll notifications, giving campaigns, press releases, etc, etc). Mark goes on to say that corporate spam is not a good way to manage inclusion. It forces unwanted content into the information stream of every day lives. This is certainly true and it there is a fine balance that organizations have to deal with. This problem is especially true as tactics to market to internal employees is on the rise and employees are increasingly annoyed at dealing with unwanted content.

Mark suggests a way to handle the situation, using a portal is his example (although there are other ways to deal with the situation). Portals are great because people can choose to use them or not, although ensuring people know about the portal can be an email campaign all on it’s own. That is where most companies hit the dilemna of whether to SPAM their employees or simply make the information available and tell no one.

The answer is a little less cut and dry though, some companies have a culture where corporate information over email is the best way to go, the employees expect the information here and look forward to it. Some companies are on the opposite side of the fence and don’t want any information in email. Then there is the whole wide world (WWW) of in between… Some companies want certain information in email and other information left on a portal site, some companies have graduated from the web 1.0 and are ready to subscribe to RSS feeds of the content they want, some companies want SMS messages sent to them for certain things (like building power outages) while other things are emailed (like their boss died) and yet different content is available as an RSS feed (like the pay schedule), some companies want to open corporate google and search for information, some companies want to use a custom internal application to discover this kind of information.

In the end, the culture of the company drives what is acceptable. Search will become more important as company content grows and employees turnover ( even though this is not in Mark’s three categories) , portals have some longevity here too (the pull technologies are improving with wikis etc), push technologies such as email and RSS feeds will continue to be prevalent as well. The culture will dictate what is needed and will dictate when the needs change, if you are managing your culture then you can influence this, if your culture is just inherently strong then you should be listening already.

I know the post is a big pitch for eRoom, and eRoom is a portal and it does store documents, but it doesn’t work with IE7 yet, you can’t get an RSS feed out of it, and the search capability is substandard. Yeah I know I work for the company and shouldn’t say things like this…. but these things really need to change, the backend of eRoom is documentum (which btw, rocks!). Of course EMC put together a good answer for this, let Sharepoint front-end documentum. I really hope this comes out quickly and I hope that it either kills eRoom or drives that team to drastically improve the product.

Exchange Wiki Claimed

In case you missed, Ehlo’s post yesterday afternoon, The Exchange Team claimed the Exchange 2007 wiki so go check it out.

KC was also nice enough to share in my comments why the wiki looks oddly like some of the tech tips….Thanks Vivek for making that information available to everyone.

Powershell and the Exchange command set will be a difficult thing for a lot of people to wrap their heads around. This kind of early perscriptive guidance is good so please keep it up. I will try to do a little more here as I make it through Bruce’s Book…