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 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 17th, 2007

Google's GMail product manager: 'User data should never be held hostage'

Posted by David Berlind @ 12:22 pm

Categories: Apple, General, Mobile, Personal Technology, Software Infrastructure, Video, Web technology

Tags: Google Inc., Google Gmail, JavaScript, E-mail, IMAP, E-mail Providers, Internet, David Berlind

Last week, while in California, I made the rounds, capturing on video as many interviews as I could with interesting people that would be fun to hear from. One of those was Google Gmail product manager Keith Coleman who, in the attached video, gives us a status update on where Gmail has been, where it’s at, and where it’s going (showing us a thing or two in the current user interface along the way). If there were two things that stood out to me in the discussion, it was (1) how a complete rebuild of the Javascript engine was needed (and completed) in order for Gmail to take some of its next evolutionary steps and (2) how strongly Google feels about a user’s data (like his/her e-mail) — strongly enough that even though Gmail is an advertising-supported Web service, that the company has no qualms about letting users have access to it through user clients (Outlook, Thunderbird, BlackBerries, iPhones, etc.) to which that advertising never flows.

The recent addition of IMAP support demonstrates that philosophy in spades. Normally, when third party clients are used as a front-end to an e-mail service like Gmail, it is done through a protocol known as POP3. But POP3 is extremely limited in what it can do. For example, if you receive a Gmail e-mail into your copy of Outlook and file that e-mail into a folder, your Gmail account remains oblivious to that organizational context. That e-mail may reside in a folder in your Outlook, but it stays in the inbox on Gmail.

Although Gmail’s full support of IMAP is limited to certain clients (as far as mobile is concerned, only Apple’s iPhone is “officially supported”), IMAP support is what makes it possible for mail items that are filed into certain folders on the client side to be automatically tagged with a label on the Gmail side. Today, Gmail eschews folders in favor of what are referred to as “labels” (considered by many to be “tags”). That said, I’m relatively certain we’ll see folders pretty soon in Gmail. In the interview, Coleman says the company is hoping to add foldering capabilities soon — capabilities that would include the ability to drag and drop emails from the inbox to a folder. According to an entry on the official Gmail blog regarding colored labels (mentioned below):

We actually kinda like folders. In fact, we’re doing some work to add some folder-y-ish functionality. Stay tuned.

Going back to the broader discussion of IMAP, enhancing client-side functionality with something as powerful as IMAP when the client-side essentially strips Google of its ability to contextually serve advertisements onto the e-mail page does speak highly of Google’s willingness to set users’ data free.

According to Coleman:

One of Google’s core philosophies is that user data should never be held hostage. We want people to be able to take their data and do whatever it is they want with it. This isn’t something that’s really standard for e-mail services. Particularly Web mail services that rely on ad revenue. There’s a risk if you let people get their mail in Outlook or some other client that they’ll stop using the Web interface and they’ll end up just reading their mail in a desktop client. We believe that if we give users the best possible product and if we create a good Web interface, and let them use their data in these clients like Outlook or like their BlackBerry, that they’ll overall have a better experience and be happier with the product. So, we’ve made a point throughout Gmail’s history to give people this freedom with their data.

We launched POP access back in 2004 which lets users read their mail in these clients and then just recently, we launched IMAP [support] which is a lot like POP except it keeps your data in synch no matter where you are. Let’s say you’re reading your mail in Outook and you read a message and when you go back to go back to your Gmail, you want that message to [to be marked as having been] read there as well. That works with IMAP. With POP that doesn’t work.

Regarding the updates to the underlying Javascript engine, Coleman talks about how, as a result of those changes, not only has the Gmail team been able to add eight new features in as many weeks (colored labels [mentioned above], keyboard shortcuts, instantly opening e-mails [via prefetching], integration of AOL Instant Messaging, group chat, etc.), but about how the pace of change will be very fast which means a great many more enhancements (barring foldering capabilities, none of which Coleman would let slip in the interview) are coming Gmail’s way (some experimental, some not). However, one feature that’s here now, that Coleman did slip-in, is that the storage limit for users of Gmail currently exceeds 5 gigabytes.

One downside to all this upside news is that, for users of the Google Apps-based version of Gmail (the one that organizations would subscribe to), many of the features being rolled out to the larger Gmail population — for example, prefetching and colored labels — are not yet available (I tested this and was disappointed to see that, as a Google Apps, some of these very cool and useful features didn’t work for me). Off camera, and via e-mail, Coleman confirmed this and said that the reason is that the new Javascript engine hasn’t yet been introduced to the Google Apps-based users of Gmail. Wrote Coleman:

Colored labels are currently only available on the version of Gmail that uses the new Javascript implementation. The new Javascript is currently live for Gmail accounts on Firefox, IE7 and Safari 3, and we’re actively working to launch it for Google Apps accounts and IE6….As with colored labels, you’ll see the speed improvements [from prefetching] once we roll out the new [Javascript] to Google Apps accounts.

Finally, as we were packing our video gear up, I asked Coleman why Google still refers to Gmail’s status as being “beta.” After all, the service has been running since 2004. After a bit of joking around about this, Coleman mentioned that the company would like to stabilize a few more of Gmail’s features before officially declaring the beta program over. Although he made no promises, from what I heard, it sounded like that too could be expected relatively soon — probably sometime in 2008.

December 13th, 2007

Google/OpenSocial's director of engineering David Glazer unplugged: 'Shindig is live'

Posted by David Berlind @ 2:14 pm

Categories: General, Software Infrastructure, Video, Web technology

Tags: Bebo, Facebook, Network, Google OpenSocial, Google/OpenSocial, Social Networking, Networking, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion

While at Bebo’s launch event yesterday in San Francisco, I had a chance to catch up with David Glazer, the director of engineering at Google who is overseeing the evolution of the OpenSocial framework that the company announced on November 1, 2007. You can see the interview in the attached video (above).

Bebo claims to be the third largest social network in the world behind MySpace and Facebook and also claims to be the most popular social network in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand. Glazer’s attendance to the Bebo event was particularly interesting given that one of Bebo’s key messages from yesterday’s launch was how applications that are written to run on FaceBook will run without any recoding on Bebo. The FaceBook developer platform is by no means a standard in terms of programmable social networks. But Bebo’s choice to be API-compatible with FaceBook in many ways proves why a standard for interoperability between social networks (interoperability of the sort that’s the supposed province of the OpenSocial framework) can be important.

For example, given the sort of interoperability that’s being demonstrated between the FaceBook and Bebo contexts of Web-based games from Webs.com and Bunchball (described in yesterday’s blog about the Bebo launch), the benefits are pretty clear. If you have an account on multiple social networks, you can have your constituents in social network #1 (perhaps one you use as a consumer) and a separate set of constituents in social network #2 (one that you use for business). To be able to be on the first network and connect to you constituents on the second network without leaving the context of the first can, at the bare minimum, offer a much better user experience than the one we have today where you have to jump from one network to the next just to connect. This sort of interoperability is one of the goals of OpenSocial and not surprisingly, Bebo CEO Michael Birch told us yesterday that Bebo would be supporting OpenSocial next year.

I asked David Glazer to riff on the idea that the interoperability between Bebo and FaceBook could be a proofpoint for why a standard like OpenSocial makes sense. In the course of getting the answer, I learned that just a couple of nights ago, the first open source implementation of the OpenSocial framework was published on the Apache Web site under the name “Shindig.” On Wednesday, under the headling Let’s get this Shindig started, Google OpenSocial API product manager Dan Petersen posted a blog regarding the code’s availability. Glazer also told me that the framework which can be found on Google’s site at code.google.com had advanced from version 0.5 to 0.6 (as it heads towards 1.0 in 2008). Since announcing OpenSocial in November, Google has been digesting feedback from developers and has synthesized that feedback into several change to the framework.

Glazer and I also talked about the business model once something like OpenSocial takes off. For example, will s/he who houses the data or s/he who has the biggest containers of data win? It seems like they might. But Glazer points out that we could have said the same thing about HTML and things worked out there. Clearly 2008 is going to be year that we’ll get to see what sort of impact OpenSocial will have on the Web.

December 12th, 2007

Bebo CEO Michael Birch Unplugged: Facebook apps now run on Bebo, OpenSocial support next

Posted by David Berlind @ 6:38 pm

Categories: Entertainment, General, Hollywood On Demand, Software Infrastructure, Video, Web technology

Tags: Bebo, Facebook, Google OpenSocial, Corporate Communications, Games, Marketing, Personal Technology, David Berlind

I’m in San Francisco this week making the rounds and, as luck would have it (this was not part of our original plan), Bebo.com was running a launch event while we happened to be here in the city. The event took place at the Metreon right in the heart of the city. So, this morning, I showed up about a half an hour early looking to get the lowdown on what Bebo was announcing from the London-based company’s CEO Michael Birch.

As you can see in the attached video, the big news is that Bebo (which Birch claims to be the 3rd largest social network in the world behind MySpace and FaceBook, and first in London, Ireland, and New Zealand) has opened up its network to third party application developers (like what FaceBook has) through a series of APIs. Perhaps even more interesting is how Bebo has chosen to make it so that any application that’s written to run on the FaceBook platform is seamlessly portable to the Bebo platform without any recoding.

In the video, Birch talks about the typical painpoint of developers who sometimes must recode their apps to run in different platforms and how this decision will ease the burden of developers building social applications (a good example of this burden can be found in the way that Web pages are often recoded to support different browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari).

The result of this cross-social platform portability can be seen in some of the 40 or so developers that were present at the launch whose applications are already showing up in the Bebo application directory. For example, two gaming companies — Bunchball.com and Webs.com (publisher of The Social Gaming Network) — both of which had FaceBook applications, now offer their applications on Bebo in such a way that a user in Bebo can invite any friends they want to a game, regardless of whether those friends are their friends in Bebo or FaceBook. If a Bebo user invites one of their friends listed on their FaceBook account to a game, that invitee can participate in the game without leaving their FaceBook context (and vice versa).

This sort of interoperability of friendship and personal information across social networks is also the province of the OpenSocial framework (an open source framework announced by Google on November 1, 2007). Today, neither Bebo nor FaceBook support OpenSocial. But, as you can see in the video, Birch says that Bebo will be coming out with support for OpenSocial in 2008.

Also in the video, NBC Universal vice president of Digital Product Strategy and Development Sab Kanaujia demos how NBC (one of Bebo’s launch partners) is taking advantage of Bebo’s programmability with an application that essentially immerses Bebo users and their friends into the hit TV show The Office.

Check out the video and feel free to comment below on what Birch and Kanaujia had to say.

December 10th, 2007

Give Mother Earth the holiday gift of freecycle.org. I have.

Posted by David Berlind @ 12:50 pm

Categories: General, Green, Web technology

Tags: Earth, Group, Junk, Recycling, Freecycle.org, Freecycle Network, Membership, David Berlind

Taking care of the planet seems like such a big job that sometimes, it seems like it’s relatively impossible for us to really make a difference on an individual level. You hear about big issues and how, for example, if we all lowered our carbon footprint by just a little bit, the cumulative impact on the earth could be extraordinary. But a lot of people need feedback to stay motivated. Sure, keeping all but the most necessary lights off or buying a hybrid car will help. But it’s really hard to size up what other people around the world are doing along those and other lines and get a feeling for the difference your contribution is making. As humans, positive feedback really works as a motivator. Without it, it’s human nature to lose interest and at that point, it takes people who simply operate on faith (that what they’re doing is making a difference) to make a difference.

For example, I’ve often wondered why someone does’t print big bold text on the side of the recycling truck that says “Thank you for doing your part to save Mother Earth.” I’m a rabid recycler. It’s not uncommon to find me fishing used yogurt containers and the like out of our garbage can, rinsing them out, and saying “tsk, tsk” to who ever forgot they’re recyclable. I’ll spend half my Sunday with a box cutter if that’s what it takes to make sure that every box we’ve gotten in the mail gets recycled (if it doesn’t get re-used first). On recycling day, it’s not uncommon to see 2-3 cubic yards of recyclable material sitting outside the Berlind household. But I have no real sense of the difference I’m making. Not even a “thank you” can be seen on the side of the recycling truck (even something small like that would make me feel better about all that effort).

Enter Freecycle.org.

Freecycle.org seems to me to be the biggest of all the grassroots movements on the Web that seeks the Earth’s sustainability through re-use. The idea? Instead of throwing something out (perhaps something that can’t be picked up by the local recycling truck), post it on the Web to other members of your local Freecycle group as being free for the taking. Looking to get something for free? You can publish wanted ads too.

A friend of mine recently turned me on to the existence of the Freecycle group in my area. I’m not sure if all groups work the same but the one I’m a member of uses Yahoo Groups as the place to which four different types of posts get posted: OFFER, WANTED, TAKEN, RECEIVED. As a member of the group, I elect whether to have new posts forwarded to my inbox as they are posted to the Yahoo Group, or aggregated in summary form twice per day.

If one man’s junk is another man’s treasure, then nothing proves it more than freecycle.org. Knowing that one of my daughter’s favorite things to do is play pretend make-up (and knowing that her preference would be to use real make up brushes instead of the toy ones… but not real make-up), I decided to buy her an inexpensive blush brush at the local drugstore. Its cost was $3.99. But just before going to the check-out counter, I spotted a huge make-up kit with about 10 different brushes for different sorts of applications and a boatload of real make-up (blush, eye-liner, nail polish, etc.) for $9. Just to have the brushes for $9 was a far better deal than the one brush I had in my hand. So, right there, I made an executive decision. I decided to get the kit, take the brushes out for my daughter, and give all the make-up away through Freecycle.

When I got home with the kit and explained to my wife what I’d done, she bet me I’d have no takers. Not having an ounce of femininity in me, how was I to know that make-up (even new unopened make-up) is of limited appeal to make-up buyers? But I accepted her bet because for the last couple of weeks, I had been watching as items were being offered (items that I never dreamed anybody ever wanting) and subsequently taken. I sat down at my PC and wrote my first Freecycle.org offer advertisement:

OFFER: Stocking Stuffers? A bunch of unopened make-up from CVS

A whole bunch of unopened, still-in-the-original box, brand new (purchased today) make-up (blush, mascara, eye-liner, lipstick, shimmer powder, nail polish, etc.) that came with a kit that I purchased from CVS because of the brushes that were included. I’m keeping the brushes for my daughter to play with (with her dolls) but you can have all of the make-up. Would make great stocking stuffers!

Within 4 minutes, I had my first response. I couldn’t get a TAKEN post into the Yahoo Group fast enough. By the time I did, six more people responded saying they’d pick it up with in the hour if they could. My wife was astonished. To be honest, so was I. Not that the make-up is junk. But if one man’s junk is another man’s treasure (figuratively speaking), then Freecycle is like the Internet’s junk-treasure exchange. Even better, by joining, you get some sense of the movement that you’re a part of. On the home page, the Freecycle.org Web site says:

Welcome! The Freecycle Network is made up of 4,188 groups with 4,177,000 members across the globe. It’s a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It’s all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Each local group is moderated by a local volunteer (them’s good people). Membership is free. To sign up, find your community by entering it into the search box above or by clicking on “Browse Groups” above the search box. Have fun!

And the bit about the local moderators being good people is true. The local moderator of my group just put out a note about how many members are in our group and how prolific those members have been in posting ads: everything from used wallets (yes, used wallets) to, well, make-up! It’s just the sort of feedback that makes me open every e-mail I get from the group, hoping that maybe, there will be something I need, or something I have that someone else has asked for through a WANTED posting. If there are global grass roots movements on the Web that can keep stuff out of landfills — ones that you can join in a way that your personal contribution can make a difference to the Earth as well as to someone else, then Freecycle.org is one of them. Consider joining.

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 7th, 2007

Second Kindle bug hits (not a crash this time) and how Amazon will 'patch' Kindles

Posted by David Berlind @ 10:09 am

Categories: Entertainment, General, Hardware Infrastructure, Mobile, Personal Technology, Software Infrastructure, Web technology, Wired & Wireless

Tags: Amazon.com Inc., USB, Amazon Kindle, David Berlind

Earlier this week, I shared with you a video of Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader in a crashed state. It was my first Kindle bug (brought on by an attempt to connect it to my PC via USB). While the crash itself hasn’t happened again, my Thinkpad T42 refuses to recognize the Kindle as a USB mass storage device (the way it should) when I connect the two of them with a USB cable. In the Kindle’s favor, I’ve had USB trouble with this Thinkpad before (but rebooting usually takes care of it) and other PCs (including a Mac) are recognizing the Kindle without any problems. Not in the Kindle’s favor is the fact that, after unplugging the Kindle, other USB-based mass storage devices (USB keys, my digital camera, etc.) aren’t having any problems. If they were, I would not have been able to suck the following image of the Kindle’s display in a corrupted state out of my Nikon D70 (continued below):

(continued from above) The corrupted screen eventually went away after I clicked the Kindle’s Home button (a button on the keyboard that takes you back to the Kindle’s home page where all the content you have loaded into it is indexed). I’m not exactly sure what sequence of buttons I pressed to arrive at this corrupted display in the first place (so I’ve been unable to reproduce it).

I’ve been sending a ton of questions Amazon’s way as I prepare to do a much more exhaustive write-up of my findings. But one of those questions that’s relevant to issues like this is whether Amazon can patch the Kindle with new software (for added functionality or to correct bugs). It should be noted that the Kindle is a Java-based device and, just like with other runtime platforms (Flash, .Net/Silverlight, etc.), the Java architecture is really well-suited to devices like the Kindle into which new software may have to be securely loaded over a network. That doesn’t mean that all of the applications on the Kindle are based on Java. When asked about that, Amazon spokesperson Andrew Herdener told me that “Many of the applications for Kindle are written in Java.”

Even if some of the applications are not written in Java, that doesn’t mean that the Kindle can’t be updated. When asked if Amazon could update the Kindle’s firmware, Herdener said “Yes, we can do updates over the air, over USB, and from SD memory card.”

By over the air, Herdener is referring to the Kindle’s built-in connection to Sprint’s EVDO network (a fully transparent networking connection that Amazon refers to as WhisperNet). As implied earlier, the Kindle can be connected to a PC via USB — a feature that’s also useful for transferring other files to and from the Kindle (eg: one of the supported file types like TXT files or MP3s). And finally, underneath the back cover of the Kindle is a single SD memory card slot. While on the topic of that slot, I asked Herdener whether it explicitly supports the High Capacity version of SD (SDHC) and he responded that “Although not officially supported, some HC cards do work.”

More to come. And if you’re interested in discussing the Kindle, feel free to chime in on the raging debate taking at the end of my last blog on the ebook reader.