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 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

December 4th, 2007

Did the W3C acknowledge CDF's potential as an office format (vs ODF) in newly public e-mail?

Posted by Dan Farber @ 12:10 pm

Categories: General, Government, Legal, Office 2.0, Open Source, Personal Technology, Software Infrastructure

Tags: W3C, Microsoft Corp., E-mail, OpenDocument Format, IBM Corp., CDF, Edwards, OOXML, OpenDocument Format (ODF), Emerging Technologies

Last week, after interviewing most of the players involved in a controversy regarding the future of the OpenDocument Format (a controversy mostly rooted in the confusion of two nearly identical but very different acronyms: ODf and ODF), I noted that some of those players — IBM, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and the principals of the now-defunct OpenDocument Foundation (ODf: an organization that, despite its name, was never the official or even un-official chaperone to the OpenDocument Format standard) — had very different recollections of certain conversations.

On one side were the principals of the shuttered ODf (again, an organization that’s not to be confused with “the Format”) who claim that in conversations or e-mails, both IBM and the W3C have, independently of each other, validated the notion that the W3C’s Compound Document Format specification (CDF) could play a role in storing and retrieving productivity (a.k.a. “office) documents (word processing, spreadhsheets, presentations, etc.).

Gary Edwards and Sam Hiser, two of the principals behind the former ODf (Foundation) — an outfit that was once a proponent of ODF (Format) — now claim ODF to be inviable as a global open standard for office documents and that CDF is the better strategic target as for such a standard. They claim that, in private conversations with IBM officials, they learned of how IBM shares this vision; so much so that a derivation of CDF (what Edwards call CDF+) is one of the linchpins to Big Blue’s grand strategy when it comes to the office productivity and collaboration tools coming out the company’s Lotus division. They also claimed that despite public comments to the contrary, the W3C also agreed that CDF could serve in a capacity that ODF (Format) has been designed for.

Both IBM and the W3C went on record with me last week to say that Edwards and Hiser’s version of events were grossly misleading. As a result, near the end of my analysis, I wrote:

As for the differences over what was said, I don’t want to say anyone is a liar. I wasn’t in the room or party to the relevant threads. So all I have to go on is what everyone on both sides of the debate is telling me. I can repeat that here (which I’ve done) and leave the decision as to which one of the three following things is true to you: (1) Hiser and Edwards are accurately representing their interactions with the W3C and IBM and the people they communicated with like IBM’s Heintzman and the W3C’s Schepers are part of a well-organized conspiracy to discredit them, (2) Hiser and Edwards are purposefully misrepresenting the content of their communications, (3) it’s all a big mix-up — an honest misunderstanding.

Why all the fuss over something that’s seemingly so obscure in nature? Especially when it involves just two people out of the thousands that stand behind ODF (Format) at organizations like OASIS (the consortium that oversees ODF’s technical evolution) and the Open Document Alliance? The stakes are unbelievably high. In fact, if there’s one industry battle that could be classified as a modern day Armageddon, the war between the backers of ODF (Format) and Microsoft which has put forth an alternative to ODF called Office Open XML (OOXML) is it.

In one corner are companies like IBM, Sun, Google, and Red Hat that believe the key to loosening Microsoft’s grip on the desktop lies in the file formats behind Microsoft Office. The way the thinking goes is that if the world’s addiction to Microsoft’s file formats can be broken, then so too can the world’s addiction to Microsoft Office and from there, then the addiction to Windows — thereby paving the way for organizations and consumers to consider competing productivity and collaborative solutions such as IBM’s Lotus Symphony, the open source-based OpenOffice.org, Sun’s StarOffice (essentially, a commercial implementation of OpenOffice.org), and Google Apps, all of which are compatible with Microsoft’s Windows but none of which require it.

For example, Google Apps which includes a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation solution runs in a browser, thereby freeing customers to choose among desktop operating systems. Conversely, although Microsoft offers Mac-based versions of Microsoft Office, most businesses that standardize on Microsoft Office also run it on Windows because of how the Mac version often lags in support of important features. Case in point? Although the OOXML file formats are now natively supported in the last three versions of Microsoft Office for Windows (2003, XP, and 2007), not only doesn’t the current version of Mac Office support it natively (Mac Office 2008, due in 2008Q1, is scheduled to natively support OOXML), Microsoft’s only solution for bridging compatibility in Mac Office — a downloadable converter — is still in beta (v0.2).

Although Microsoft is loathe to acknowledge the threat that ODF (Format) poses to its franchise, actions speak louder than words. While the company has contributed resources to an open source-based ODF conversion utility, it doesn’t natively support ODF in any version of Microsoft Office. Should Microsoft choose to support ODF in Office, it would be Read the rest of this entry »

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 16th, 2007

Buh-bye hard drive: Box.net's online storage now directly accessible by multiple Web apps

Posted by David Berlind @ 2:00 pm

Categories: General, Office 2.0, Reviewcasts, Software Infrastructure, Video, Web technology

Tags: Google Inc., Google Apps, Web, Hard Drive, Service, Box.net, OpenBox, EchoSign, Storage, Hardware

When I think of the online storage market, I primarily think of 2 1/2 models. The first is the one that’s for developers: services like Amazon’s S3 or AOL’s X-Drive where, through APIs that are programmatically accessed by their applications, software developers hardwire their software to the storage found in Amazon’s datacenter instead of wiring their software to a server in their own datacenter.

The second is where there’s some online storage somewhere that one or more people upload their files to for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons could be online backup. Another could be collaboration. I copy a file to some shared drive in the cloud that you have access to. You go to that shared drive and download it. Fundamentally, there isn’t much difference between this and the remaining 1/2 a model where there’s some shared storage online, but it’s integrated into the application you’re using (where the data is often shared) is transparent to the end user. In other words, the end-user is never really thinking about online storage. An example is Facebook and how you can upload and share files (photos, music, etc.) there. Another example is Google Apps. Whether you’re uploading documents to Google Apps for sharing or creating them right in Google Apps, online storage is playing a key role in your ability to keep those documents online (and collaborate on them through Google Apps collaborative capabilities).

For more than two years, Box.net has been a player in both of the primary models — offering direct access to its online storage through a browser, but also offering APIs so that developers can hardwire Box.net’s online storage directly into their applications. But now, through a new offering that Box.net co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie (pronounced lev-ee) is calling OpenBox comes a completely different model — one where existing online services (for example EchoSign’s online document signing service) are integrated directly into Box.net’s online storage service in turnkey fashion, without the need for a software developer to mashup them (the apps, the storage) up for you. Put another way, whereas before you might have used EchoSign to retrieve and sign a file that was on your local hard drive, now you can say buh-bye hard drive and do the same thing with a file that lives in your Box.net directory.

EchoSign is just one of Box.net’s OpenBox launch partners. The others are as follows:

• eFax
• Autodesk
• Zoho
• ThinkFree
• Scribd
• Picnik
• Zazzle
• Mimeo
• Twitter
• Myxer

In the attached video, I caught up with Levie via our reviewcasting rig (this time, instead of using WebEx, we used the Java-based GoToMeeting.com) who gives us a demonstration of how it works. For example, you can see how the contextual menus in Box.net make it possible to click on a Word document and sign it with EchoSign or to pick an image and edit it with Picnik.

The most impressive thing about the service is how it obviates the need to keep your files in multiple locations. For example, let’s say you use Google Apps to create a PDF document that you want to distribute to customers that are in your salesforce.com database. Normally, the way you might do this is you would create the file in Google Apps, save it in PDF format, download it to your PC and the upload it to salesforce.com before finally sending it out. But let’s say, when originally saving the PDF file, you could save it to your Box.net account directly (instead of to Google’s storage) and then let’s say from salesforce.com, when it came time to send that PDF to a customer, you could access the box.net storage directly. In the latter situation, you’ve taken a huge amount of the friction out of the process because you don’t have to move the file around at all. It is saved, modified, and accessed from one place (in the video Levie says that Box.net is working on the salesforce integration piece… no word on Google Apps yet… I just used that as a really good example of the potential).

What are the downsides? As far as I can tell, cost is the biggie. Box.net will offer anybody 1 gigabyte of storage for free. For box.net to maintain 5GB of storage, the cost is $8 per month and for 15GB, it’s $20/mo. These prices aren’t bad considering the sorts of services that your files can be frictionlessly integrated with. But, cost might come up in the discussion for people already using services like Google Apps. Users of the paid Google Apps service (cost is $50 per user per year) get 25GB of storage (in addition to all the applications that they have access to).

While Google Apps isn’t integrated into OpenBox yet or now, that business model and cost , where the storage is transparently integrated into service for such a low cost sets a precedent that may cause some people to question Box.net’s fees. Bear in mind that the 25GB of storage is mainly e-mail (but some have figured out how to turn it into more general purpose storage). But if you did the math on storage alone, the cost works out to be $2 per GB of storage per year. Under that formula, Box.net’s 15GB storage would cost $30 per year. But under Box.net’s formula, 15GB of storage costs $240 per year. That’s a big difference.

Bear in mind this is a simplistic analysis. It’s not an apples to apples comparison since the the two companies offer entirely different services around their storage infrastructures and Box.net doesn’t necessarily charge organizations on a per user basis the way Google does. As more users are added, Box.net starts to look better. But these are the sorts of analyses that organizations will do when trying to determine the value of services like Google Apps or OpenBox. Quite frankly, I think the OpenBox model is SO cool and innovative that it would behoove Google or Yahoo to acquire it and integrate into their portfolio of offerings. But, given Box.net’s neutrality, that may not be a good idea as all companies (not just Google and Yahoo) look to keep users on their networks as much as possible.

Check out the video.

Related — TechCrunch: Box.net Releases OpenBox Platform for Integration of Web Applications

November 16th, 2007

OpenDocument Foundation's 'woes' have little to do with OpenDoc Format's future

Posted by Dan Farber @ 11:22 am

Categories: General, Legal, Office 2.0, Personal Technology, Software Infrastructure

Tags: Drama, Fact, OpenDocument Format, Disagreement, OpenDocument Format (ODF), Emerging Technologies, David Berlind

I’ve been so busy with other stuff that I’ve only peripherally been paying attention to an ongoing meme on the Internet about how the World Wide Web Consortium’s Common Document Format (CDF) had been identified by the OpenDocument Foundation as a superior document format to the OpenDocument Format that it had been backing for so long. On the heels of the controversy, the OpenDocument Foundation was shuttered yesterday.

But in the headline of the aforelinked Ars Technica story — OpenDocument Foundation closes up shop after slamming OpenDocument Format — hides a subtle truth regarding the relationship between the OpenDocument Format and the OpenDocument Foundation: the future of the OpenDocument Foundation has nothing to do with the future of the OpenDocument Format. In other words, any indication by anybody that the OpenDocument Format has been vacated by its supporters is pure FUD. The only reason I say this is because even I fell victim to the wrongful association between the two when, during one of the recent Dan & David Shows, we talked about how it appears as though CDF is the heir-apparent to ODF. Not only is that not true from a pure news perspective, even the W3C’s Chris Lilley (one of the consoritium’s resident experts on CDF) has discounted the OpenDocument Foundation’s theory. Lilley told Andy Updegrove:

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.

Updegrove, who provides legal counsel to OASIS (the consortium that continues to evolve the OpenDocument Format specification), continues in his post to provide the inside scoop on why the Foundation had its change of hearts. I can’t vouch for the story but it basically described as a case of sour grapes. Bites Updegrove:

…..The Foundation has been very clear that it thinks that the OASIS technical committee has taken the wrong direction in its development approach with ODF. Disagreeing with an architectural approach is, of course, an opinion that any member of any TC is entitled to hold. Unfortunately, the Foundation wasn’t willing to take non-acceptance of its preferred approach lying down.

The simple fact is that the Foundation got out voted. No more, no less, no back story – end of story….

….[In publicly announcing that CDF should replace ODF], what were [the OpenDocument Foundation founders] Gary, Sam and Marbux thinking?…..

….the simplest explanation would appear to be simply that when the Foundation’s founders decided to turn out the lights, they decided to poke a sharp stick in the eye of those that had rejected their approach.

If that sounds like too harsh a judgment, we can fall back to the next most charitable one, which is that the founders are so convinced of their own insight that the rest of the world must be wrong – all of those community members in all of those countries around the world that rallied to the ODF cause - must be deluded and not capable of the same clear vision that the founders of the Foundation possess.

The drama is practically made for a soap opera. All that’s missing is some sexual tension that only the new TV series Chuck has successfully managed to blend with geekdom (with apologies to Beauty and the Geek which is enough to make any self-respecting geek vomit). OK, so apart from the soap opera that’s underway, what are the armchair quarterbacks saying?

Well, going back to the Ars Technica story, here’s what its author Ryan Paul had to say:

The heated debate over open document formats continues to escalate, even as businesses in North America exhibit utter apathy about XML-based standards for documents. Despite the raging controversy, PDF remains the single most ubiquitous document format used in industry. As the controversy continues to unfold, it’s likely that Microsoft’s format will win by default, simply because it’s tied to the most popular office software.

ZDNet’s own Mary Jo Foley (not necessarily an armchair quarterback) asked:

As a result of the latest infighting, is Microsoft now all-but-guaranteed that OOXML will sail through the ISO standardization vote in Feburary 2008 because ODF — and its backers — will be in disarray?

Infighting or not, the question of whether OOXML will get the ISO’s imprimatur as an international standard in February 2008 is one that many are waiting to see answered. Was this “infighting” and should it have a material impact on the OOXML? Not if you ask me. Disagreement has always been a part of the standards setting process and the process would irretrievably break down if, every time there was disagreement, the participants simply left the room. The fact that one party has broken away from the process is immaterial to the futures of both ODF and OOXML.

October 31st, 2007

There's much more to GMail's support of IMAP than meets the eye

Posted by David Berlind @ 3:57 pm

Categories: General, Google Apps To-Do List, IT Management, Office 2.0, Personal Technology, Software Infrastructure, Web technology

Tags: Folder, Google Inc., Google Gmail, IMAP, E-mail Providers, E-mail, Internet, Online Communications, David Berlind

If you’re like me and you saw last week’s announcement from Google regarding GMail’s support of the IMAP mail retrieval protocol (and you know what IMAP is), then you probably reached the same conclusion I did: Given the way GMail lets you tag e-mails with labels (as opposed to the way most other e-mail systems handle e-mail organization via foldering), Google has come up with a way to synchronize labels in GMail with folders of the same name (as each label) in your e-mail client. Typical clients could be Outlook and Thunderbird, or a smartphone like a Treo, iPhone, or BlackBerry. If you reached that conclusion, you were right. But, based on my podcast interview with GMail associate product manager David Murray, there’s a bit more to the IMAP announcement than meets the eye.  Through the embedded player above, you can playback the audio, download it, or, if you’re already subscribed to ZDNet’s IT Matters series of podcasts (see how to subscribe), the interview should appear on your PC, MP3 player, or both (depending on how your subscription is set up).

Most e-mail clients support IMAP. But not most e-mail services (like GMail, until now). As opposed to the POP3 protocol that pretty much every e-mail service and server supports (the alternative to IMAP that e-mail clients can use to retrieve e-mail from e-mail servers and services), IMAP supports bidirectional synchronization of your inbox as well as any folders that you’ve created to keep your e-mail organized. I often lament how some of the various e-mail services out there don’t support IMAP. First, who doesn’t need some way of keeping their e-mail organized? Second, who wants to have separate organizational frameworks on their clients and servers that are completely unaware of each other?

Looking to not only address that pain, but also make its GMail service more appealing to enterprises, Google introduced IMAP support last week and is still in the process of making the feature available to 100 percent of its GMail service users, including users of Google Apps (a bundle of Google services that’s targeted at organizations and that integrates GMail with Google Docs, Google Calendar, and other Web-ware offerings).

What, beyond basic synchronization of GMail folders with client-side mail applications, can users look forward to.  One of the most interesting apsects of GMail’s IMAP support is the way in which the synchronization process deals with e-mail that’s dragged into a spam or junk mail folder on the client side.  For example, as I described in a blog post that I published earlier today, that act triggers the same business process on the server side as the one that would be triggered if, when opening a message via GMail’s Web interface, you pressed the Report Spam button. Likewise, whatever rules on GMail’s server that may have resulted in the false classification of an e-mail as spam are reconsidered when a user moves an e-mail that GMail put into the spam folder to a folder for legitimate mail.

Another VERY interesting feature of Google’s IMAP support is the way in which the tagging of an email with multiple tags results in that same email being filed in multiple folders on the client side.  Provided your email client somehow makes it possible to store an e-mail in multiple folders on the client-side (many don’t), the same is true in reverse.

Because of the way IMAP supports the nesting of folders, supporting IMAP meant that Google had to figure out a way to hierarchically nest labels.  So, along with the introduction of IMAP support, Google has introduced the slash (”/”) as a means of telling GMail that one label is a parent to another.   For example, in GMail, the parent-label “Northeast” could have child-labels as in “Northeast/Massachusetts” and “Northeast/Connecticut”.  On the client side, such a hierarchical taxonomy would be reflected in parent and child folders with no limit to nesting depth.

The introduction of hierarchical tagging begged two more globally directed questions for Google; First, will the hierarchical tagging be made available in other Google services (ie: Google Reader, Google Docs, etc.). Second, when will (note, not “if”, but “when”) Google’s customers be able to unify their taxonomy across those other applications so that users can see everything that’s tagged with the same label (eg: “Northeast/Massachusetts”) regardless of what service it comes from.

Google can’t not do this as there’s a strong likelihood that information workers will be collecting/receiving data through a variety of conduits (e-mail, RSS, shared documents, instant messaging, search, etc.) that they’ll want to group together under one heading.  As I’ve written before, once Google makes this move, it will be essentially the same thing as Yahoo’s del.icio.us with the one difference being that Google will undoubtedly AJAXify it’s search results so that search users can very easily and contextually apply their taxonomy to one or more entries on a search results page without having to reload any HTML.

When I asked Murray about this obvious next step for Google, he concurred that it all made sense but fell short of confirming that anything like that was in the works.   For the most part during the interview, Murray stuck to issues relating to GMail. But he did say “we are converging in terms of our offerings, [and] the UI affordances….we know that we don’t want people to have to reinvent the wheel or learn 20 different types of user interfaces.”

Speaking of AJAX, I asked Murray about the rumors that more GMail interface improvements were on the way and he confirmed that in the next couple of weeks, users of GMail should notice better overall performance to the Web interface thanks to a pre-fetching feature thats part of a complete refresh of all of GMail’s underlying AJAX engine.

There was no mention of any offline capabilities along the lines of what my fellow blogger Garett Rogers wrote about with respect to going offline with Google Calendar. But, I don’t think it’s possible that GMail’s AJAX engine would go through such a complete rewrite unless it had going offline via Google’s offline technology known as Google Gears (the way Google Reader currently does and Calendar will) in mind.  So, my sense is that we should expect that pretty soon and why not? One of the advantages of Web-based solutions like GMail, Salesforce.com, and others is that updates and bug fixes can be rolled out to end users whenever Google wants to.  Unlike with shrink-wrapped software where significant complexity is involved in pushing new code down to local clients, updates and fixes are available immediately to end users of Web-ware the next time they hit the refresh button on their browser.

Murray and I talked about the release cycle and according to him, a new release of GMail is going out almost every week now. Some of the changes (like the addition of IMAP support) are more obvious than others (eg: bug fixes).  According to Murray, Google takes problems with the user interface very seriously (not just in Gmail, but in all of Google’s services) and has the equivalent of an emergency response team that, like antibodies, converge on bugs and knock them out pretty quickly.  In a something of testimony to  the advantages of Web-based software over its shrink-wrapped competition, Murray claims that the engineering turn around time to address some bugs has been as little as 15 minutes.

Murray and I covered a lot of other ground as well.  For example I asked him whether or not Google might eventually embrace folders instead of labels in its GMail user interface and he talked about that being a major issue for other GMail users as well (expect some changes there!).   We also talked about APIs and whether Google might be opening Gmail up to developers any time soon.

October 26th, 2007

It's no iPhone killer. But then again Nokia's E90 goes after a different target: the 'Bizirati'

Posted by David Berlind @ 11:53 am

Categories: Apple, General, Hardware Infrastructure, Mobile, Office 2.0, Personal Technology, Telephony, Video, Wired & Wireless

Tags: Apple iPhone, Nokia Corp., Video, Camera, Corporate Communications, Marketing, David Berlind

OK, so what smartphone

• Does audio, video, and still images (replete with a 3.2 megapixel camera)?
• Comes unlocked (ready for a SIM) to connect to a GSM network?
• Supports HSDPA (the faster of the two GSM flavored nets, the iPhone supports the slower one known as EDGE)
• Can browse the Web via a cellular or WiFi connection?
• Makes for both a great phone and a great messaging device (and can attach to corporate email)?
• Has a hardware-based keyboard and a separate numeric keypad?
• Has a removable battery?
• Supports Bluetooth’s A2DP stereo headset profile?
• Can open and edit Microsoft Office documents (and open PDF docs too)?
• Supports the IMAP protocol for e-mail retrieval (better for folder support in email).

If you guessed Nokia’s E90, you guessed right. OK, so the headline gave it away. While at Interop in NYC, I took a spin by Nokia’s booth where the E90 was on display. Now, I’ve given a lot of video attention to some of Nokia’s hottest mobile devices. In June of this year, I covered (via video) the N95 which comes with a 5-megapixel camera (is it a camera with a phone or a phone with a camera) and then last month, I covered (again, via video) the newer N95 as well as a prototype of the N81.

But, despite it being out since February of this year, I’ve yet to cover Nokia’s E90 Communicator. One reason maybe is that they were hard to come by for a while. While at the Nokia exhibit, I asked one of the booth personnel how new the E90 was and I was told that it just started shipping “again” after Nokia had some inventory problems. However, when I asked some of the Nokia representatives if they’d be willing to go on camera to do an interview about the E90, I was told that none of them were authorized spokespeople. So, the inventory comment may or may not be true.

Even without them going on record though, I have to say, even with the iPhone being out right now, the E90 has some features that could quite possibly make it the ultimate business communications and mobile office device. Obviously, a lot of business people are buying iPhones and shoehorning it into their business lives (despite its shortcomings; no removable battery, no SD card slots, a soft-keyboard, lack of AD2P support, usage of the slower of AT&T’s two networks, inability to attach it to T-Mobile’s network without a hack, etc.).

The size of the iPhone’s display and the usability of its built-in Web browser make the iPhone the best choice for working with highly visual content (video, Web sites, etc.). But, given the way the E90 overcomes almost all of the major shortcomings of the iPhone and given its relatively robust support for Microsoft Office (great review of that here), the E90’s relative shortcomings in terms of display size and browser usability (it’s not that it’s unusable, it’s just not as good as Safari on the iPhone) may be sacrifices worth making. It’s usage of the faster HSDPA flavor of GSM (which is pretty snappy when you watch the video) can be a plus too for browsing the Web. However, those things said, there’s one other sacrifice that relegates the E90 to the business elite. At bare minimum, an E90 is going to set you back by at least $800.

Anyway, the folks at the Nokia booth wouldn’t go on camera because Nokia is pretty strict about who can speak on behalf of the company. So, I picked up the E90 and went solo. You can see the video by clicking the play button above.