December 21st, 2007

With Office Live Workspace in play, Microsoft's Web-competitors (Google, WebEx, Zoho) speak

Posted by Dan Farber @ 1:48 pm

Categories: General, IT Management, Office 2.0, Personal Technology, Software Infrastructure, Video, Web technology

Tags: Microsoft Office Live Workspace, Google Inc., Web, WebEx Communications Inc., Collaboration, Microsoft Office Live, Microsoft Corp., Zoho, Microsoft Office, Office Suites

It was just a couple of weeks ago that Microsoft finally released the beta of Office Live Workspace (OLW) — an offering that many see as as Microsoft’s response to the pressure its flagship Office suite is getting from browser-based competitors such as Google (with Google Apps), WebEx, and Zoho.

Although OLW does in fact contain a browser-based text editor that closely mimics the rich text capabilities of Microsoft Wordpad (a rich text editor that’s built-into Windows) and a rudimentary list editor that includes rows and columns that can be exported to Microsoft Excel, Microsoft is in no way pitching it as an online office suite of the sort that Google offers in Google Apps (see my interview with Google App ‘founder’ Rajen Sheth) or that Zoho offers (at nearly 20 separate applications, Zoho could very well offer the widest breadth of productivity apps of any offering, Web-based or desktop). In my in video interview and demo with Microsoft product manager Kirk Gregersen, I learned that Microsoft really just views OLW as a collaborative infrastructure that’s designed to give users a better way to collaborate on documents than many do now with e-mail and/or USB keys.

But much the same way Google is barely willing to admit that Google Apps is designed to compete with Microsoft Office, Microsoft seems barely willing to admit that Office Live Workspace is a response to the pressure that its Web competitors are bringing to bear.

While the Web is accessible from a range of client-side technologies that’s more diverse than what is supported by any other platform, the range of Web-based collaborative offerings from Microsoft for working with productivity documents has been limited to two offerings; First, Sharepoint which is primarily a Windows Server- and Office-based solution that’s ideally suited to behind-the-firewall collaboration and second, Groove — the far more Internet-driven (than any of Microsoft’s existing tools) collaboration solution that became a part of Microsoft’s overall software portfolio when the software giant acquired Groove Networks in 2005.

But, despite Groove’s strengths as a collaborative solution that works within and across organizations, its brand equity in the marketplace, and more importantly, the clout of former Groove Networks CEO (and now Microsoft CTO) Ray Ozzie, Groove seems more like Microsoft’s forgotten stepchild rather than a brand and a platform on which to build as Microsoft looks to offer a compelling collaborative solution that works on organizational intranets as well as it works on the Internet and the Web. While Microsoft has finally recognized the strengths of the Web as a collaborative platform, especially for ad hoc organization of behind and/or outside-the-firewall collaboration, it has chosen to put its muscle behind Office Live Workspace — a free offering that is more like what WebEx offers in WebOffice than it is like Google Apps or Zoho.

Even so, that doesn’t mean Office Live Workspace doesn’t narrow the gap against Google and Zoho’s Web-based productivity offerings. Microsoft believes that the desktop is still the domain of productivity applications which is why, taken together, the company believes that Microsoft Office and Office Live Workspace make for a better aggregate solution than does Google Apps or Zoho — both of which build many of OLW’s Web-based collaborative capabilities directly in to the application.

While some activities, such as real-time collaboration are doable with the Microsoft Office/OLW duo, they may be more elegantly implemented in Google Apps and Zoho. On the flip side, Microsoft Office has its own strengths. Namely, it works well, even when you’re not connected to the Internet (thanks to Google Gears, Zoho has some offline capabilities as well) and its core applications are far more robust than anything found on the Web. For this reason, Microsoft’s introduction of OLW may very well be enough to keep the Google/Zoho-curious from straying too far from the comfort of Microsoft Office in order to take advantage of Web-driven collaboration.

That said, for those users seeking Web-driven collaboration around productivity documents, one question is “Why not WebEx’s WebOffice?” Not only has the service already been through some battle-testing (whereas OLW is in beta, WebEx is “shipping”), its neutrality in terms of supported applications (for point-and-click editing of Web-stored documents, OLW only supports Microsoft’s Office) means that WebEx has some comforts of its own to offer users.

Now that OLW is out, cutting a circuitous swath between Google, WebEx, and Zoho, I decided to spend some time in Silicon Valley talking to the three companies about their philosophies when it comes to Web-based computing and what if anything they had to say about Microsoft’s OLW. As you can see in the attached video, WebEx’s president of products and technical operations Gary Griffiths and Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna were not shy in discussing OLW relative to their own offerings. But Google, as a matter of practice, rarely if ever discusses the companies or offerings that others see as the search giant’s competition. In the video, Google’s Rajen Sheth was happy to entertain questions about Google and the way it thinks about applications and collaboration. But Microsoft was not a part of the discussion.

Check out the video and feel free to comment below on what you saw.

December 21st, 2007

Demo: ClusterSeven's Enterprise Spreadsheet Manager tightly monitors spreadsheet integrity

Posted by David Berlind @ 6:49 am

Categories: General, Government, IT Management, Legal, Reviewcasts, Software Infrastructure, Video

Tags: Monitor, Spreadsheet, Cell, Productivity, David Berlind

How many times have you stared at the bottom line of a spreadsheet that’s full of formulas knowing exactly what figures should be there, only to find that there’s a different set of numbers staring back at you than the ones you expected. You know there’s an offending cell somewhere, but the spreadsheet is too complex to find it and, with some deadline looming, out of exasperation, you start replacing formulas with hard coded numbers just to get it fixed, at least until after the deadline when you’ll have more time to figure out what went wrong. What’s the harm? Right? After all, the people looking at the final product might only be looking at a printout or a PowerPoint slide.

Well, given today’s compliance laws, the harm could be huge because of how those numbers can easily bubble up into an quarterly or annual earnings report. If such over-ridden cells end up corrupting some bigger picture report, the results could be disastrous (literally and figuratively). To help organizations and auditors keep spreadsheets from inadvertently (or even purposely) running amok, ClusterSeven has come up with a solution called Enterprise Spreadsheet Manager (ESM). In the attached video, ClusterSeven’s vice president of product marketing Ralph Baxter demonstrates how ESM can be configured to keep a watchful eye over any cell or range of cells in any spreadsheet.

As the contents of those cells change, ESM keeps track of when the changes were made, what the new values are, and who made the changes. In other words the audit trail is extremely tight. As you can see in the demo, one of the cool things ESM does is it monitors if cells are switching from their original programming type to another: for example from a formula to a hard-coded number (a sure sign that a spreadsheet and anything that depends on it could end up in a state of corruption).

ESM also graphically presents trends in cell and spreadsheet integrity. The advantage, which Baxter shows at the end of the video, is that those charged with compliance or auditing can build a single graph that includes trend lines for dozens or even hundreds of spreadsheets. Where a cell exceeds company-set thresholds for integrity (eg: varies from some number by a certain percentage, or a formula is suddenly overridden with hard-coded numbers), the trend-line fluctuates from its steady state wildly (making it easy to spot). Why would this be helpful? Well, if your annual report doesn’t look right but it depends on data coming from 100 or 1000 spreadsheets scattered throughout the organization, a single graph that monitors the integrity of all the spreadsheets that feed into that annual report can help spot the needle in the haystack that’s causing the problem. Otherwise, auditors and financial analysts might have to manually sift through every spreadsheet — a process that could take days or weeks.

All this whizbang functionality would be of limited help if it couldn’t be attached to an alerting mechanism. According to Baxter, there are ways to connect it to e-mail, internal LAN-based alerts (like Netsend) and SMS. ESM supports other spreadsheets beyond Excel (Google Spreadsheets for example). It also doesn’t come cheap with the average starting price ranging between $50K-$100K. But for some large companies where compliance is king, that could be pocket change given the sort of risk it mitigates. Finally, it requires the installation of two servers: Windows Server and Microsoft’s SQL Server 2005.

December 20th, 2007

Google Apps 'founder' Rajen Sheth: We dialog with users through new code

Posted by David Berlind @ 8:38 pm

Categories: General, Google Apps To-Do List, IT Management, Software Infrastructure, Video, Web technology

Tags: Google Inc., Google Apps, E-mail, Productivity, Microsoft Office, Online Communications, Office Suites, Software, David Berlind

Last week, while in California, I had an opportunity to sit down with Rajen Sheth — the man at Google who is credited with coming up with the idea of Google Apps. That interview, along with a demo of some of Google Apps’ more novel features, can be viewed in the attached video.

When most people hear the phrase Google Apps, they see it as a colloquial reference to some of the browser-based applications that Google serves up through the Web such as Google Documents and Google Spreadsheets. However, that’s not really what Google Apps is.

Yes, Google Apps involves Google’s browser-based productivity applications such as Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, and Gmail. But, more than that, Google Apps is a branded bundle of those and other applications (Page Creator, Web site hosting, calendaring, Google Talk, etc.) that Google targets at organizations. When accessed via Google Apps, that bundle of applications behaves in more of an organizational context than do Google’s applications on the standalone basis that the general public has access to. For example, the apps can be accessed directly through an organization’s Internet domain (eg: http://mail.yourdomain.com or http://docs.yourdomain.com) and, for every such domain, certain users get administrative privileges to globally configure most of Google Apps’ options for all of an organization’s users.

Google Apps is available in two flavors. First, the Standard Edition (GASE) : a version of Google Apps that’s free, but that bears advertising in the Gmail portion and that limits the e-mail storage to 5GB per user. Second, the Premier Edition (GAPE): a far more functional $50 per user per year version with no ads, 25GB of storage per user, 24×7 telephone support, a 99.9 percent uptime service level agreement for e-mail, access to plug-in software from third parties, and more.

In the big picture of the industry, Google Apps is viewed by many as the only suite of productivity software with a real shot at cutting Microsoft Office’s dominant market position down to size. Yes, Google Apps does some things more efficiently than does Microsoft Office. For example, as opposed to the downloads required by Microsoft Office, almost all updates to the service involve little more than pressing the refresh button on a browser (the downloadable Google Talk application is one exception). But even though Google Apps has loads of compelling features, most view its ability to compete with Microsoft Office as having more to with Google’s powerful brand name and its virtually unlimited warchest (a luxury that none of Microsoft Office’s competitors has had).

The result of that warchest is a value that makes it difficult for organizations not to try it out. With GASE being free and GAPE costing only $50 per user per year, just use of the e-mail service alone could end up yielding savings. The availability of GAPE’s 24×7 phone support is reminiscent of the free support provided in the 1980’s by Wordperfect to users of its namesake word processing software — free offering that Wordperfect was eventually forced to abandon in favor of a more expensive paid service. With its deep pockets, Google can much afford to offer Google Apps at any price and, according to Sheth, more than 500,000 organizations are currently using it.

In the interview, we cover a wide range of questions — everything from how Google manages to offer GAPE users a whopping 25GB of storage when most corporations can only offer their own users a fraction of that to questions regarding the potential consolidation of currently bifurcated functionality (for example, tagging taxonomies and HTML authoring). Along the way, Sheth shows me some really interesting functionality including an autofill feature in the spreadsheet that draws upon Google’s experimental Google Sets functionality. In the interview, Sheth says that Google uses code to dialog with its users. Updates to the service are very frequent and sometimes significant.

Sheth also shows off how Google has made Google Calendar extensible with Gadgets. In the example he shows, a Google Gadget automatically populates the calendar with new movie openings and locations. The idea, according to Sheth, is to offer the right extensibility in the right context. It made me think a bit about how FaceBook is in many cases a collection of functionality, a lot of it without context.

Check out the video, and let me know what you think.

December 12th, 2007

With tech titan support, Green Grid to help datacenters go green with measurement standards

Posted by David Berlind @ 11:43 pm

Categories: General, Green, Hardware Infrastructure, IT Management, IT Matters Podcast, Podcasts

Tags: Data Center, Consortium, Grid, Standards, Organization, Data Centers, Storage, Hardware, Data Management, David Berlind

With so many tech vendors claiming their solutions to be green and looking for a leg up with customers wanting to be more power efficient with everything from their servers right up to their entire datacenters, one big problem in the industry is a lack of standards on how “green” is meaured and what the lexicon is from one discussion (or solution provider to the next). Recognizing that it’s in the best interests of the entire industry to be talking about green-ness in with same language and metrics, more than 100 companies have put their weight behind a consortium know as The Green Grid.

According to the consortium’s home page:

The Green Grid is a consortium of information technology companies and professionals seeking to lower the overall consumption of power in data centers around the globe. The organization is chartered to develop meaningful, platform-neutral standards, measurement methods, processes and new technologies to improve energy efficient performance of global data centers.

Helping to drive that mission are some of the biggest tech titans in the IT business; server companies such as IBM, HP, Dell, and Sun, chip companies such as Intel and AMD, and software giants such as Microsoft. Not on the list of Green Grid supporters so far, however, are two key Internet players both of which are running and/or building huge datacenters right now: Google and Yahoo! Although they could eventually join The Green Grid, it’s not clear whether the efficacy of their membership is a fair trade for their involvement in a consortium where they may be expected to share some of their secrets around datacenter efficiency.

After all, at the size and scale of the datacenters they run, some of Google and Yahoo!’s competitive advantage lies in the degree to which they can efficiently run their datacenters. Sharing their secrets with the world may help to reduce the aggregate carbon footprint of the world’s datacenters. But in terms of maintaining their competitiveness over each other, one aspect of that competitiveness lies in how well they can control datacenter costs without compromising the quality of the end-user experience.

Nevertheless, The Green Grid is fully committed to arriving at standards that its membership can rely on when talking about how green something is. According to AMD senior strategist Larry Vertal and SprayCool founder and CEO Don Tilton, the organization which is divided into three committees (technical, communications, and liaison) has been making progress throughout 2007 since its initiatives were last reported here on ZDNet. Included in that progress were (1) a multi-vendor plugfest involving the measurement of a system’s power efficiency according to standards established by one of the working groups in The Green Grid’s Technical Committee and (2) the scheduling of the consortium’s first major event where a lot of the white papers and findings of the various working groups will be shared for the first time, but only with member organizations and the press. So far, it hasn’t been determined exactly how that information is going to be made public.

To hear my interview of Vertal and Tilton, press the play button in the Flash-based audio player above. Or, feel free to download the MP3 through the Flash-based player’s menus. If you are subscribed to ZDNet’s IT Matters series of podcasts (see how to subscribe), the podcast should show up on your PC, your MP3 player, or both, depending on how you have your podcatcher setup.

December 10th, 2007

Office Live Workspace narrows Google App gap while playing to MS-Office's strengths

Posted by David Berlind @ 6:00 am

Categories: Audio from TestBed Videos, General, IT Management, Office 2.0, Podcasts, Software Infrastructure, Video, Web technology

Tags: Google Inc., Google Apps, Web, Document, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Office Live, Microsoft Corp., Workspace, Spreadsheet, Office Live Workspace

With Web 2.0 being the rage that it is, Web-based productivity software from the likes of Google, Zoho, and WebEx appears to be getting all the buzz while Microsoft which has so far eschewed the idea of a Web-based offering. But if Microsoft’s Office Live Workspace, the beta program of which opens today, is any indicator of Microsoft’s preparedness to deal with the onslaught of Web competitors, everybody from Microsoft’s followers to Wall Street can rest assured that the Redmond-based company is not about to get caught with its pants down the way it did in the mid-1990s when it was forced to regroup after being blind-sided by the Web.

Attached to this blog is a video of a demonstration of Office Live Workspace (OLW) given to me by one of the directors on the Microsoft Office team, Kirk Gregersen. For those of you who just want to listen, we’ve stripped the audio off the video and made that available as a podcast that can be heard by pressing play on the podcast player above. Or, you can download the MP3 through the player’s menu. If you’re subscribed to ZDNet’s IT Matters series of podcasts (see how to subscribe), the audio should automatically get downloaded to your PC, MP3, or both depending on how you have your podcatcher setup.

The demo was given to me last month (November 2007) and I’ve been embargoed from discussing any of what I saw then, until now. As you can see from the demo, OLW is primarily designed to use the Web as a shared workspace through which people collaborate on Microsoft Office-based documents. Much the same way the standard edition of Google Apps is free, OLW, which includes 500MB of free storage, will be available to users for free. Though they may not get to take full advantage of all that OLW has to offer, users need not have a copy of Microsoft Office to initiate and use an Office Live Workspace. Microsoft plans to support the service with advertising and no plans exist yet to offer an ad-free version for a fee. Gregersen told me that the company would consider such an offering if enough customers requested it.

Office Live Workspace is most definitely not a Web-based productivity suite like what Google offers in Google Apps. That said, between a lightweight Web-based word processor that includes most of the basic formatting controls (boldface, underline, text justification, indentation, fonts and typeface sizing) for writing and collaborating on what Microsoft refers to as “notes” (see image below) and a list maker that’s as close to being a spreadsheet without actually being a spreadsheet (it doesn’t do calculations, formulas, or macros), it’s clear that Microsoft is really only a few lines of code away (code that’s probably already finished, but not activated yet) from offering a fully Web-based suite of its own (continued below)

There are some big features found in Google Apps that are not found in OLW. For example, Google Apps includes e-mail, presentations, Web hosting, and what amounts to a centrally-administered portal (so important linkage and apps can be published to anybody within an organization).

The fact that Microsoft isn’t yet offering the basic integrated suite (word processing, spreadsheet, presentations, email) online, if you ask me, is a matter of choice more than it is any inability to produce such an offering. While Google Apps, Zoho, WebEx and others get all the attention in the press, the truth is that Microsoft can afford to wait. Its Microsoft Office franchise has such a giant global footprint that the company’s beancounters will probably know long before anybody else does when and if the tide starts shifting away from desktop software to something more along the lines of Webware. Should that day come (I think it will), anybody who doubts whether Microsoft will be ready with an entry is just fooling themselves. For now, the company is content to offer OLW as, what Gregersen called, “an extension” to Microsoft Office.

This isn’t the first time Microsoft has offered a Web-accessible technology so that users of Microsoft Office could more easily collaborate over documents. Microsoft’s SharePoint has been around for a while and then there is (or was) of course Groove, the company that Microsoft acquired from Ray Ozzie (now one of Microsoft’s top execs). In many respects, some of OLW’s fundamentals are the same as those of SharePoint. For example, from within Microsoft Office, users can check-out documents (Word, Excel, etc.) from the shared workspace for editing at which point others must wait until that copy is checked back-in before they can edit it. Documents can be edited offline and, when loaded back into a workspace, OLW will attempt to resolve hard and soft conflicts (a feature I haven’t tested yet). Whereas SharePoint is a solution that you must host yourself on your own servers (or that someone else can host for you), Microsoft is the host of OLW, and its free. No Windows Servers are required.

Microsoft Office documents can be opened directly from Office Live Workspace and saved back to it just the same way you might save an Office document to your hard drive. Although the equivalent of a plug-in was required to get it working on our test PC, the fact that we were dealing with the Web instead of our hard drive as a filesystem was seamless and transparent to us. OLW supports versions of Microsoft Office going back to Office XP.

Today, although any document type (including images and music) can be stored in a OLW-based workspace, you cannot plug third party document types that require other productivity software (eg: Corel’s WordPerfect, OpenOffice.org, etc.) into the solution and get the same seamless operation with them as you do with Microsoft Office-based documents and Microsoft Office. Like wikis (which can track any given document back to its first version), OLW keeps track of previous versions of a document. Unlike wikis, OLW’s “previous version” feature only goes back five versions. Gregersen told me that Microsoft would be willing to change this if enough customers said it needed to go further back.

If you’ve played around with Google Apps at all, you’ll see a lot of similarities in how the two (Google Apps, OLW) organize documents. Entire workspaces can be shared with others of your choosing. Or, if you want you, you can share specific documents with specific people. Like Google Apps, documents can be published to a URL for anonymous viewing on the Web. But, also like Google Apps, all anonymous viewers can do is view such a document. In both cases (Google Apps or OLW), editing requires users to log into the services which in turn require users to establish IDs (with Google or Microsoft). A Windows Live ID is a prerequisite to getting into (or establishing) an Office Live Workspace but a Microsoft-based e-mail (eg: Hotmail) is not a prerequisite to getting a Windows Live ID. Your e-mail address can be in any domain. Not available yet to OLW users is the idea of a domain oriented context (like what Google Apps has). For example, where the main URL to reach your documents is something like http://documents.YourDomainName.com.

In a bit of a wizard-like way, Microsoft has templates for different types of workspaces to help people get started. For example, borrowing from Office, OLW has templates for a class workspace (for students that might be working together), an event workspace (that includes invitations, flyers, event planning lists, attendee lists, agenda, etc.), a household workspace (includes family to-do lists, contact lists, monthly budgets, etc), job search workspace, (contact list, resume template, etc), a meeting workspace, a project workspace, etc.

Lists in an OLW-based workspace (lists that can be edited directly online) aren’t just your everyday ordinary lists. Reminiscent of Jotspot’s early days (Jotspot, which was eventually acquired by Google, had spreadsheet-oriented lists), not only do OLW lists have some spreadsheet qualities (they are organized into rows and columns), they can be edited right within the Web browser and, unlike notes created with OLW’s Web-based notetaking feature (other than copying and pasting, notes can’t be exported), lists can be exported to spreadsheets. “Cells” (Gregersen doesn’t refer to them as this) can be formatted in a variety of ways: numbers, single line of text, multiple lines of text, yes/no (a boolean field), and date.

Also, just like spreadsheets, columns can be sorted according to ascending or descending order. As Gregersen shows in the video, OLW columns will play an evolving roll for collaborators through their integration with Outlook. For example, if a shared-list in an Office Live Workspace is a contact list, Microsoft Outlook can use that list as one of its address books (Wow!, this is cool!). Longer term, it isn’t hard to imagine these lists playing other interesting rolls (in terms of Outlook integration). For example, perhaps they could house data that goes with an Outlook form.

Not only is a copy of Microsoft Office not required to view a document, it’s not required to comment on a document either. Both can be done via the Web. Viewers for example who might have to log into an OLW workspace from an airport Web kiosk that doesn’t have Microsoft Office installed can view a document stored in an OLW workspace and make comments on it without ever having to invoke Microsoft Office itself. We gave this feature a try in Firefox (attempting to emulate the fact that a great many kiosks might not have Windows or Internet Explorer) and it worked.

If there’s one area where Microsoft has some ground to cover when it comes to collaborating on documents, it has to do with where OLW is relative to Google Apps. In Google Apps, collaboration is so baked-in to the application’s DNA that when I’m editing a document, those edits simply appear on the screen of other people who might be editing or viewing it. Here, Microsoft’s legacy is quite evident. In the Microsoft world, you basically engage in screen-sharing through a downloaded piece of software that makes me think of Microsoft’s NetMeeting. Whereas nothing special is required with Google Apps for a bunch of people to be able see the changes in near real-time (just a browser is required and anybody can make those changes at any time), Microsoft requires what is essentially a plug-in where control is passed around to people, each of which, when they get control, can make changes while others look on.

Whereas Google’s approach to this sort of collaboration drives like a platform-independent Ferrari, Microsoft’s is still the same old Edsel. Microsoft will of course argue that there’s a big difference between real-time group editing of Microsoft Office-based documents (using Microsoft Office) and that of Google Apps-based documents. Office-based documents are far more robust than documents based on Google Apps’ Web-based editors. Even so, the notes and lists functionality offered by OLW as Web-based tools could have the same sort of collaborative abilities that Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets have, but don’t. Give it time. The two will eventually meet in the middle and the shortcomings in either case are not dealbreakers for their intended audiences.

It’s still very early to tell (and very early in OLW’s beta program). But if your question is, is Office Live Workspace enough to keep existing Office users from defecting to Google Apps?, I’d say, at the very least, organizations who were considering Google Apps will probably have to take a look at OLW to see if it meets the bulk of their needs. Whereas getting the most out of Google Apps (particularly the collaborative parts) sort of requires you to go cold turkey on Microsoft Office (if that’s what you have), OLW offers an intermediate step that will likely give some the best of both worlds they were looking for.

Make sure you check out the video and comment below on what you saw.

See also (other coverage):

• TechCrunch: Office Live Workspace (Beta) Finally Goes Live. Still Needs Work.
• Robert Scoble (includes video): Microsoft brings collaboration to Office
• Mary Jo Foley: Microsoft’s answer to Google Docs: What it is and what it isn’t
• InfoWorld: Office Live Workspaces misses the mark
• CNET’s WebWare: Office Live Workspace (almost) brings Office 2007 online

November 29th, 2007

OpenDocument Format community steadfast despite theatrics of now impotent 'Foundation'

Posted by Dan Farber @ 1:17 pm

Categories: General, Government, IT Management, Legal, Office 2.0, Open Source, Software Infrastructure, Web technology

Tags: W3C, OpenDocument Format, IBM Corp., OpenDocument Foundation, ODf, Matusow, OpenDocument Format (ODF), Emerging Technologies, David Berlind

When in mid-October 2007, the OpenDocument Foundation (ODf, yes, that’s a little “f” that’s not to be confused with the OASIS- and 400-member strong OpenDocument Alliance-backed big F-ODF: the OpenDocument Format) announced that the World Wide Web Consoritum (W3C)-backed Common Document Format (CDF) was the heir-apparent to what it believed was a dead-on-arrival OpenDocument Format, many confused the ODf to be one in the same with the ODF and the latter to have one foot in the grave. Given the striking resemblance between the names and acronyms of the Foundation and the Format, that mistaken obituary was an easy one for casual observers to write. Especially given the way Microsoft, the company whose Office empire is probably more threatened by ODF than most people realize, capitalized on the confusion by spreading its own FUD on the story.

But that and other FUD couldn’t be further from the truth. Based on dozens of interviews that I’ve conducted over the last few weeks, the OpenDocument Foundation, whose three principals are Sam Hiser, Gary Edwards, and a legal eagle who goes by the nickname “Marbux,” went out on a very thin limb where no one else — not the vendors behind ODF, not OASIS (the consortium that hosts the technical committee responsible for the standard’s development), and not the World Wide Web Consortium (chaperone to the Common Document Format [CDF] standard) — was willing to join them.

Not only does it appear as though they were on a thin limb with their opinions that ODF should be buried and that CDF should take its place, they crawled out even further when they publicly disclosed that the W3C and IBM shared those opinions as well. Any statements corroborating the ODf’s position from either organization, particularly IBM given the millions of dollars it has invested and continues to invest in ODF, could very well have cast a dark shadow on the productivity document standard that just recently earned its stripes as an international standard from the International Organisation of Standardisation (ISO). It’s an honor that Microsoft’s competing Office Open XML (OOXML) has so far been denied (but it is up for reconsideration next year).

Citing specific interactions (conversations, emails, etc.) with the W3C’s lead contact for CDF Doug Schepers and Doug Heintzman, director of strategy for IBM’s Lotus Division (where IBM’s collaboration technologies are developed), Edwards claims that both organizations were supportive of his and Hiser’s belief that, at the expense of ODF, CDF should be the strategic target for anyone seeking to store their documents in a file format that was universal, open, and that provided a clear transition path from formats that predispose or lock customers into certain applications like those (formats, applications) from Microsoft.

It is true that Edwards and Hiser interacted with both the W3C and IBM. Unfortunately for them however, this is where Edwards’ and Hiser’s recollections of those interactions varies wildly from those of Schepers (W3C) and Heintzman (IBM).

One thing that’s important to keep in mind about how standards are set (and how decisions are made in technical committees at consortia like the W3C [CDF] and OASIS[ODF]) is that the process often involves vociferous debate among those involved. To the extent that many of the participants who contribute to technical committee meetings are also employees of vendors with some interest in the standards associated with those committees, part of their roles in the process is to represent those interests. Since not all vendors’ interests are aligned, disagreement and debate comes with the territory. They’re to be expected. But so too is a willingness to compromise. At some point, in the name of progress, everyone who participates in the standards setting process knows they may have to give-in on certain issues that may be of import to their employers.

Representing the OpenDocument Foundation, Edwards and Hiser were both participants in the Open Document Format technical committee work at OASIS and respected ones at that. But somewhere along the line, their beliefs regarding ODF and CDF could not be reconciled with the positions of the other committee members. Pretty much everybody I spoke to agreed that this was one of those disagreements that happens in the standards setting process where someone wasn’t going to get their way. It happens. It’s a part of the process. But what happened next is not nearly as common. Claiming that the OpenDocument Format wasn’t nearly as “open” as its supporters claimed it to be, the ODf walked off in a huff.

If IBM or Sun, two of the OpenDocument’s Format’s biggest supporters walked away in such a “huff,” it probably would have meant the end of the OpenDocument Format. But in the bigger picture of the OpenDocument Format, between its backers at both OASIS and in the OpenDocument Alliance, the OpenDocument Foundation’s irreconcilable differences with the rest of community were just that: irreconcilable differences that lacked any potence to affect the momentum or direction of the Open Document Format. Unfortunately for the OpenDocument Format community, the ODf’s “huff” was a molehill that became a mountain when, in addition to the ODf<>ODF naming confusion, Edwards and Hiser not only became very vocal about their convictions (convictions that are voluminously documented in easy to find passages around the Web), they cited the W3C and IBM as having tacitly endorsed those convictions.

This is where Schepers (W3C) and Heintzman (IBM) as well as others in both organizations feel as though Edwards and Hiser are grossly misrepresenting the content of their interactions. According to W3C spokesperson Janet Daly, when Schepers first heard of the Foundation’s interest in CDF, he did what the W3C often does — he reached out to the Foundation with an invitation to further the conversation. According to Daly, “Any time it looks like a third party may be doing interesting work with one of our recommendations (that’s W3C-speak for “standards”), it’s not unusual for us to want to learn more.” But this is where the W3C’s account of that “conversation” and Edwards’ account differ. Whereas the W3C viewed the “conversation” as par for the course outreach, Edwards’ e-mails to me describe the ODf’s interactions with the W3C as more of a relationship that had to be kept secret from OASIS. Wrote Edwards to me via e-mail:

….When the Andy Updegrove published his article (W3C’s Chris Lilley: CDF Not Suitable for Use as an Office Format Can’t Replace ODF), a member of our team sent a copy of earlier eMail exchanges with our W3C contacts to Updegrove arguing that Andy’s article mis-characterized both our relationship with the W3C and, the work we were doing with CDF and WICD. All of which is true.

There were however a couple of problems with this action. For one thing, we were not authorized by our W3C contacts to share these discussions with anyone, let alone the lawyer for OASIS who had already declared a hostility to anything the Foundation might do….

….I hope you can understand our reluctance at this point to discuss this issue in detail or provide evidence certain to compromise the positions of innocent and sincere bystanders.

The implication of Edwards’ note is that the conversations with the W3C had matured far beyond a level of basic outreach and involved a relationship that saw merit in the Foundation’s thinking about CDF as a better strategic format for universal document interoperability than ODF.

The W3C however has a different version of its interactions with the Foundation. The reference to Andy Updegrove’s interview with the W3C’s Chris Lilley (who is also intimately familiar with CDF) is significant. In that interview, Lilley flatly rejected the idea that CDF should be the target in the world’s search for an open, universal file format for productivity applications:

So we were in a meeting when these articles about the Foundation and CDF started to appear, and we were really puzzled. CDF isn’t anything like ODF at all – it’s an “interoperability agreement,” mainly focused on two other specifications - XHTML and SVG. You’d need to use another W3C specification, called Web Interactive Compound Document (WICD, pronounced “wicked”), for exporting, and even then you could only view, and not edit the output.

The one thing I’d really want your readers to know is that CDF (even together with WICD) was not created to be, and isn’t suitable for use, as an office format.

In a subsequent e-mail to me, Sam Hiser argued that the Foundation’s words had been twisted and that it never suggested that CDF would take the place of ODF. However, in both e-mails to me and posts to the Web, Hiser and Edwards have made it clear that the day that ODF-supporter and Massachusetts CIO Louis Gutierrez resigned was the day that ODF died, in their estimation. In his e-mail to me, Hiser wrote:

It’s unfortunate you’re pointing to the Updegrove|Lilley statements. They are as confusing as can be…Right about now Andy’s bloated corpse may be floating down [Boston's] Charles [River] and Chris [Lilley] is doing his best to shade for his W3C colleagues his 180-degree incorrect statements.

On November 10th, in a public thread on the OpenDocument Fellowship’s Web site, Edwards wrote:

Chris Lilley’s comments are in direct opposition to those we received a week ago from Doug Shepers, the head of the CDF Workgroup. doug however asked that we not publicise his comments until Sir Timothy has had a chance to weigh in.

In my interviews, not only does the W3C reject the reference to W3C director Sir Tim Berners-Lee as a fabrication of the facts and stand behind Chris Lilley’s statements 100 percent, the W3C also remains emphatic that its conversations with the Foundation were never more than cursory in level. In fact, Read the rest of this entry »

November 21st, 2007

How Microsoft could save businesses time & money when it comes to patching Windows

Posted by David Berlind @ 3:27 pm

Categories: General, IT Management, Security, Software Infrastructure, Web technology

Tags: Software-as-a-service, Microsoft Windows Update, Microsoft Windows Server Update Services, Customer, Server, Truth, Microsoft Corp., Option, Microsoft Windows, Operating Systems

A ZDNet reader that goes by the name of R.E. Riker posed an interesting question to me via e-mail the other day. He asked if maybe, giving the high frequency of updates that it issues for its operating systems (in his case, Windows XP), if offering more frequent Service Packs or update roll-ups wouldn’t be the more sensible thing to do for some of Microsoft’s customers.

In my back and forth exchange with Riker, I learned that he maintains about 70 systems in an environment where new updates from Microsoft must be tested before they are deployed. This can’t an unusual requirement out there in the business world.

For Riker, Microsoft’s monthly issue of such updates (on the second Tuesday of each month) makes such testing impractical. On the other hand, if Riker waits for Microsoft to issue the next Service Pack (which could be years), that’s too long for the systems he oversees to go without certain critical updates. Especially security-related ones. In his first e-mail, Riker wrote:

I would like to see Microsoft offer an option for security patch rollups at least on an annual basis (maybe semi-annually). In other words, compile an update containing all of the security patches for the past year (or half-year) that we could download, test, and then apply to our machines. I know ideally it would be better to apply the monthly updates, but that just isn’t feasible for many people, myself included. But I don’t want to stay completely unpatched or wait years on end for the next service pack. Trying to talk directly to Microsoft is next to impossible for us small fries. Would you be willing to maybe at least broach the topic either directly with them or through a blog? Thank you for your consideration.

I responded to Riker asking why he just doesn’t turn off automatic updates and then deploy them on a less frequent basis. Riker responded:

The option to turn off automatic updates and only update manually would be fine if it were only one or two machines. Going beyond that it becomes rather inefficient considering just the bandwidth alone.

And, well, I currently support 30 XP boxes with probably 40 more yet to upgrade (that’s right, we have 40+ machines on older OSs) . Of course, MS’s solution would be to upgrade all our PCs and set up a [Windows Server Update Services] Server. Ummh, well, first, if I had the resources for that, I probably wouldn’t be here begging. Second, I have a problem with a company asking us to shell out even more money to solve coding problems in their software! [DB's note: He has a good point. According to the WSUS requirements page, Windows Server 2003 is required. In other words, keeping XP up-to-date requires additional software licensing and hardware investments, not to mention time].

I guess what I am trying to find is some balance between not patching immediately (which just doesn’t work for us for multiple reasons) and going unpatched until a service pack is released (which is too long to go unpatched). I don’t feel like that is too much to ask especially in an environment where the hacking has gone professional. It was bad enough trying to cope with the script kiddies. We can’t compete with professional hackers as it is, but we don’t stand any chance at all with unpatched boxes. As small as we are, we’ve already seen some spear phishing attacks.

Finally, if he could have it his way, Riker writes:

Realistically, I don’t think I could do it more than twice a year. And I am certainly open to some other mechanism as long as it is relatively user friendly and I can download it once (even if it involves multiple files as long at that doesn’t get completely out of hand like the update catalog), test it out on a machine, and then apply it to the rest of them.

So, I did what Riker asked. I checked-in with Microsoft and here’s the response that was offered by a spokesperson:

Customers have many choices for servicing Windows. Windows Update is designed for customers who want to update individual PCs as Microsoft releases updates – either automatically or when the customer is ready. A second option is Windows Server Update Services, a free server role for Windows Server customers, which allows network administrators to control the distribution of updates across their network. Other options include full-featured software management tools like System Center as well as 3rd party programs.

Microsoft traditionally releases security updates on the second Tuesday of each month and encourages all customers to install them as quickly as possible. The servicing tools mentioned above are designed to make this as seamless as possible. Microsoft is in constant communication with its customers to better understand their needs and desires and builds its products and services to meet those needs.

Unfortunately, Microsoft’s response will be of little consolation to Riker who would easily fall behind if he relied on self-patching via Windows Update, but according to a schedule he sets (instead of Microsoft’s). Furthermore, I think Riker’s subtle point about who should bear the cost associated with patching numerous systems in a business environment is dead-on. After all, a good many of the patches that Microsoft issues are to deal with defects in the operating system.

I’m not saying “defect” in a negative way nor am I derogating Microsoft for the situation. The truth is that no software — not Windows, nor any of its competitors, nor any applications — is without its defects. The question is, if software is defective and the customer will require it to be patched and there’s a need for something like WSUS in order to manage the that patching according to business requirements (as is proven by the very existence of WSUS), then should the customer be expected to bear additional cost to get that WSUS functionality, or should it be offered for free? Or, should the customer be expected to bear the additional time and expense of aquiring, deploying, and maintaining a server on which to run WSUS? (WSUS is a free download but Windows Server 2003 is not).

While you contemplate that question, perhaps Microsoft will consider this suggestion which I’ve sent to it through my contacts: If there was ever a great opportunity to leverage the benefits of software-as-as-service, then perhaps this is it. Why, for example, couldn’t Microsoft host a multi-tenant WSUS server on the Internet for free? One that system administrators like Riker could turn to for the same WSUS functionality that they’d get if they ran WSUS locally, but without the headaches of running their own WSUS server? Would there be issues (like security) to work through? Sure. But Microsoft is capable of working through them and to the extent that it’s always looking for ways to better service its customers — especially the finicky small to medium businesses that are tough to satisfy — wouldn’t a hosted version of WSUS make sense?

Are you (or should you be) running a WSUS server to better manage the patching of your client systems? If Microsoft offered a cloud-based version of it — one that was integrated into its Windows Update service in a way that allowed you manage all of Windows’ patches on your schedule, would you take it? Or, even if you wouldn’t, should you still be asked to bear the cost of running a local WSUS server even though the purpose of it is largely to manage “manufacturer defects?”

What do you think?

November 16th, 2007

Are mashups the lightweight cousin of ETL?

Posted by David Berlind @ 5:48 am

Categories: General, IT Management, Software Infrastructure, Web technology

Tags: ETL, Mashup, Databases, Enterprise Software, Software, Data Management, David Berlind

Of IBM’s various mashup building tools, Exeed Technologies Jacob Ukelson who attended Mashup Camp Dublin and blogged about it (one of his most trafficked blogs according to him) wrote:

….it is like the mashups are the lightweight cousin of ETL - for display rather than bulk load purposes. It will be interesting to follow and see how ETL tooling and mashup tooling come together at IBM, especially since the both the ETL and mashup tools tools are part of the Data Integration group at IBM….

ETL stands for Extract, Transform & Load and the bulk loading Ukelson mentions is probably a reference to the way ETL runs behind the sceens — moving data (sometimes in bulk or in batch jobs) from one place to another (often a data warehouse), sometimes massaging it along away.  Eventually that data turns up somewhere (on a display or a report) either in detail or as part of a roll-up.

By their very definition, data warehouses could be thought of as mashups.  Of course, you’re traditional mashup is far more display-oriented and the ability for them to bulk process largley depends on where the code is being executed (client vs. server).  Client-side Javascript-driven mashups are not as well suited to stored-procedure like iterations on databased data which is why they often marry related items from disparate resources one record at a time as Ukelson says, for display purposes.

But server-side mashups (often powered by scripting languages like PHP) whose end result is still display-oriented could handle the sorts of roll-ups that might normally be driven off data warehouse queries.

If ETL and mashups are simply dots along the spectrum of integration, what are the others and where do they lie?