Software plus Services

Having rebuilt my laptop last night with Win 7 RC and my main day to day software, today I am finding all the little extras that are just indispensible.  One of these is the add-in from Microsoft Office labs that provides an extra Tab in the ribbon (across all tabbed Office products) that gives you a search tool so you can find all those commands that you either know exist or are sure that they should exist.

The obvious response is “I thought the ribbon was supposed to be so intuitive that….”.  Well it is, but there are some things that either aren’t in the ribbons (!) or you just cannot find for looking.

e.g. In Word

and in Powerpoint

Whether you are jumping up and down with excitement (:-)) or not convinced but are thinking you have nothing to loose why not try it out, after all it’s a freebie….

http://www.officelabs.com/projects/searchcommands/Pages/default.aspx

OK so I’m a Geek, fan boy, enthusiast, idiot, lunatic, moron (*delete as you wish!!), but I have been on Win7 since Jan including interim builds and I like it.  It has taken some effort over the past few days to resist getting the RC from the various torrent sources and wait for the official MSDN download to be available.

And here we are 30th April and RC available on MSDN.  Well I say available, but only after MSDN fell flat on it’s face.  I mean come on what did MS expect to happen, everyone form an orderly queue.  After the beta SNAFU they should have got this sorted.  On the plus side “hell’s teeth this is seriously popular, and it’s just the techies, what is going to happen on the 5th”.

Still mild rant over, MSDN is back up and I’m 2.5Gig in and 1.8G remaining.

Rebuild laptop tonight, get a life, rebuild laptop tonight, get a life, rebuild………….

My D620 has been doing odd things over the past month or so (screen going blank), but it was always fixed with a reboot.  However last week the screen went blank and would not recover.  On boot up the power light would start, the hard disk light would flash and a second later it would stop, no POST screen, no graphics nothing.

Long story short there is a known problem with one of the Nvidia GPUs that has been used in a number of laptops including Dell.  After I finally worked this out I contacted Dell and an engineer was with me replacing the motherboard within 24 hrs (VERY impressed with Dell service).

Anyway given that I had to “know what the answer was” before I could Google with the “right question”!!! I thought I would put up the various relevant links I found.  Who knows someone may find there way to this blog (ha ha !!) and after finding this useful, read some other entries……

• The announcement from Nvidia of a problem, see the second bullet http://www.nvidia.com/object/io_1215037160521.html
• First in a series of 4 blog/forum entries by Lionel Menchaca (Chief Blogger) on the Direct2Dell web site.  This blog outlines the basic symptoms and lists the affected Dell laptops http://en.community.dell.com/blogs/direct2dell/archive/2008/07/25/nvidia-gpu-update-for-dell-laptop-owners.aspx
• Blog post 2 with an update and how to contact support http://en.community.dell.com/blogs/direct2dell/archive/2008/08/08/latest-on-the-nvidia-gpu-issue-for-dell-laptop-customers.aspx
• Blog post 3 with announcement of a “limited warranty enhancement” from Dell http://en.community.dell.com/blogs/direct2dell/archive/2008/08/18/nvidia-gpu-update-dell-to-offer-warranty-enhancement-to-all-affected-customers-worldwide.aspx
• Blog post 4 with details of the “limited warranty enhancement” http://en.community.dell.com/blogs/direct2dell/archive/2008/09/12/nvidia-gpu-update-limited-warranty-enhancement-details.aspx
• There is also an article on the main Dell support web site that links to a troubleshooting wizard, this may be helpful in checking that you haven’t got some other unrelated issue.  Follow the link below and at the bottom of the page you will find another link to a “Wizard ID: 295203” http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/dsn/document?c=us&l=en&s=gen&docid=1A20452C30C95D02E0401E0A55173F09&journalid=67FD14E84CD72612E040AE0AB5E1591C&Query=Tm8rUE9TVA==&SystemID=LATITUDE+PRECISION+M90&ServiceTag=&contenttype=28792~7~262224&os=-1&component=-1&lang=-1&doclang=en&toggle=false

Good luck if you have this issue, and if you found this useful then leave me a message and then have a look at some of the other entries about the “Cloud” in my blog

Last July I put up a short blog entry stating that despite all the efforts of the IT industry to differentiate by trying to define increasingly focused language (SaaS, PaaS, DaaS etc) it would, as always, be the customers who would decide.

And they would pick something that would be simple and to many in the world of IT, so generic that it would be meaningless.  Which is why (IMHO) “Cloud” is sticking.

We can all get excited about trying to provide a detailed and exacting definition of “Cloud” however for the end user it works for the simple reason that they can understand it as “software that comes from over the internet and is looked after by somebody else, like Facebook”.  The fact that the IT experts then want to ask about geo-redundancy, data ownership in diverse geo-political deployments etc etc is irrelevant.

We do not have to go too far back in time to find a similarly meaningless term that resonated with users – Desktop Computing.  For the user it was simple: We used to have mainframes in the data centre and now I have a computer on my desk, so it must be Desktop Computing.  The experts would of course clarify this by asking what was the OS, was it connected to a network, how big was the hard disk etc etc.  But for the user non of this mattered, they knew what they had and could just get on with their job.

And it is exactly the same today.  People want to get on with their jobs and not have to become IT experts to understand how to do this.  Cloud will stick because it has meaning to the users and if that means that the IT expert has to interpret this “meaning” well that is what we get paid for. 

Last week I attended Cloudforce in London and was left with a couple of major takeaways:

1. The Poster Child of the “SaaS revolution” talked only about Cloud with SaaS and even PaaS being conspicuous by their absence
2. My perception of Salesforce was significantly enhanced as I left Cloudforce

Everything in the Salesforce marketing and branding is “cloud”

• The event title “Cloudforce”
• Sales Cloud
• Service Cloud
• Your Cloud
• Icons, posters even the lollypops used to direct the “exec guests” were clouds

So the (SaaS) King is dead, long life the (Cloud) King.

Following my earlier post about BPOS and the lack of forwarding capability I carried out some further research and contacted the BPOS help team (who I have to say were very responsive once I worked out they were working to US timezone hours – the time zone issue will have to be addressed when the International roll out goes live).

Anyway conclusions were:

1. Although email forwarding and redirect rules are available in both the OWA and Outlook client rules wizard the server side functionality is turned off and hence this capability is not currently available in BPOS.  From BPOS support “The Outlook rule does not work because we do not allow email forwarding at all”
2. The BPOS team are aware of the desire for this capability and it is being “considered” for a future release.  From BPOS support “..this is a huge ask by many of our customers and is already visible as a top call driver”
3. There is a workaround (see below) however the support team have provided the following caution – “…the work around you are using should be used at your own risk, we have provided that work around for awhile however we have discovered it does not work for many customers”.  I don’t know if this is a real concern or a FUD comment to limit uptake, or if this is a loop hole that will soon be turned off, but so far in my testing it appears to work n.b. full disclaimer if it doesn’t work for you !!

Setting up distribution lists

Although as noted above there may be issues with some users with this approach it has worked for me.  The basic idea is:

• Create an email account inside BPOS that is like the one you want to be seen externally e.g. if the external address is fred@bedrock.com create one called i-fred@bedrock.com
• Add your external email address that should receive a copy of all emails sent to fred into the contacts list e.g. fred.flintstone@maincompany.com
• Now create a distribution list within BPOS called fred@bedrock.com and add then add the two emails to the distribution list i.e. i-fred@bedrock.com and fred.flintstone@maincompany.com (from the contacts list)

I have been following BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) for some time since presentations in Redmond back in 2007.  This is Microsoft’s move into the direct provisioning of hosted versions of Exchange, Sharepoint and Live Meeting (Office Communications also on the list but not generally available).  And after a North America only launch in 2008 the first phase of the international roll-out is due in April 2009.

Microsoft have been laying on a variety of partner events linked to this International launch and last week I was at an “Implementing BPOS” hands on session.  After this full day of “hands on admin” and a few days to experimenting with the trial service I thought I would share a few thoughts:

The Good

• For organisations with basic requirements especially for the email side of the service it is an easy way to enter the world of enterprise quality communications
• Pricing is aggressive, especially the suite bundle (USD15/GBP10 per user per month)
• It is easy to sign up (although see caveat below)
• The admin and user web sites are easy to navigate (accepting the functionality limitations noted below)

The Not So Good

• The “Partner” is not involved at the outset (*).  This maybe seen as positive by customers who do not wish to be beholden to a 3rd party (the partner)!! 
• Even though not complex for IT savvy people it may still be a challenge for many SMBs (*)
• The services are based on a mass standard platform, one for all and all for one, which is clearly understandable, however this does limit the chances to customise in any sophisticated way
• A number of features that are standard in the on-premise implementations of the products have been disabled.  Whilst one can make a reasonable argument for some of these due to the needs of a standard multi-tenant platform and the current limitations of the products (big changes with wave 14) there are some odd exceptions:
  • Email forwarding and redirect rules are not allowed
  • There is no anonymous access with sharepoint

(*) one of the key pieces of feedback to the BPOS team from partners was the desire for an “on behalf of” portal.  This would allow the partner to carry out the administrative and day to day management activities for the customer (as they probably do today for the on-premise s/w).  This is due to launch as part of the International roll out although the functionality was not available as part of the training course - watch this space.

Conclusion

For organisations with basic requirements the service it is an easy way to enter the world of enterprise quality communications at an aggressive price point.  However the service will have to mature at a rapid pace so organisations do not grow into the limitations.

This appears to have been doing the rounds for a while (seen one forum entry from 2006) and once Digg picks up on it I’m sure it will go straight to the top 10.  I have tried to track down which paper originally printed it but no joy so apologies to whoever…..

However the reason I’m bothering to blog on it is that for me it shows the positive side of the British media and by reflection the British humour.  All too often the media in the UK goes over the top, taking a trivial item and crafting it into something that looks akin to the end of the world.  Here however they have created a short article that starts off appearing to be the normal “over the top” and then reveals itself as clearly self deprecating and despite the potential for offending some, shows that at the end of the day we shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously. (p.s. and even if this is a spoof article I don’t care as the point remains valid :-)) Enjoy

With any new idea there is need to establish an identity separate to the existing market and to do this we maximise the separation between established and new.  The hype around this new idea is  focussed on this separation, upon the clear differences.  This is normal and understandable practice, however the reality is that once the new idea has survived long enough to be accepted as credible there is then a period where the hype dies down and the real effort of integrating the new idea into the existing world begins.  This does not mean that the “new idea” is lost, it may well be that it becomes the dominant model, however due to the huge existing investments it will need to co-exist for some time.

Think about it, despite all the changes we still have mainframes, local PCs and servers.  What we have done is keep adding the new ideas into the network glue.  The vast majority of software development companies are running successful businesses selling local licensed software.  While it is imperative that they have a “position about SaaS”, it is not realistic that they will all be out of business within the next few years, replaced by SaaS startups, unless they redevelop everything into a SaaS model.

The hybrid model, or as Microsoft refer to it, the Software plus Services model, is both architecturally and commercially the only realistic way forward.

I have been using TweetDeck for a while and have nothing against AIR per se, however it is another piece of software that is relatively immature and could bloat my machine.  So on the basis that “like it or lump it I have WPF on my machine already as part of .NET” it would be better to use a WPF client.  I hunted around for a bit over the past few weeks without any joy and sort of gave up looking.

As always, the moment of giving up was the time when not one but two get pointed out to me.

1. Whilst at a meeting in Paris with Microsoft’s EMEA Comms team I was shown Witty by Pascal Walschots.  I have been using it for a few days now and it seems pretty good.  One thing I like is the way it does Outlook style pop up notifications when new tweets arrive
   
2. The other was via Steve Clayton and his geek in disguise blog, where he mentioned Chirp, I cannot comment to this, but Steve seemed to rate it so….
   

Interesting few days in Paris this week.  Microsoft’s EMEA Comms team have pulled together a group of specialists in the area of Software plus Services who can provide support to Microsoft Hosting partners in the transition to the wider S+S/SaaS/Cloud/etc agenda.  This is innovatively called the “Business Partner Support Group” :-) but mustn’t mock as I was pleased to be invited to join.

As we are under NDA I have to be careful but the main takeaways were:

1. MS are not seeing a slowdown in hosting and in fact the credit crunch may in fact be positive for this space
2. The key is to increase the yield (profit!) as well as the breadth (volume)
3. The awareness of marketing (especially niche, persona, online) within the average hoster could be significantly improved
4. There is a lot of rethinking going on around CRM Online and BPOS
5. BPOS will be launching internationally V soon – this will be a phase 1 launch focusing on the large established markets outside North America

I recently posted the problem at the bottom of this blog, while trying to get my HTC TYTN to work with Windows 7 either via USB or bluetooth.  Well good news I found a solution.

1. From WinMob menu select Settings, then click the connections tab
2. Now click USB to PC
3. Make sure the “Enable advanced network functionality” check box is EMPTY

Now when you connect your WinMo device it will install other drivers and everything, including Bluetooth works (well at least it did for me)

RNDIS problem with Windows 7

There is only one unresolved problem and that is when trying to connect my mobile phone to the laptop.  Whether by bluetooth or USB cable Windows 7 detects that something has been connected and tries to install drivers but then reports an error with the RNDIS drivers.  Anybody help?

Doing some very interesting (not!) but paying work and listening to music.  Waterboys starts playing and we come round the a track called Spirit.  Such an uplifting sentiment that I felt the need to stop, listen again, write this and also shout it out to Twitter land.  Here are the lyrics and you can listen on YouTube:

Man gets tired, Spirit don’t
Man surrenders, Spirit won’t
Man crawls, Spirit flies
Spirit lives, When man dies
Man seems, Spirit is
Man dreams, The spirit lives
Man is tethered, Spirit free
What spirit is, man can be

Basically its been a pleasant experience so far.

I haven’t experienced any of the “installer bug” problems reported on M-J F’s site and anything that has occurred has been pretty minor (touch wood, make required sacrifices to the beta gods, fingers crossed etc.)  And so with things going so well my feedback is limited, but here it is anyway:

Dell Dimension 5000, 1.5G RAM, 2 x 160G disks, 32 bit install.

So far so good.  The experiences from previous blog have carried on being positive.  The only issue I have encountered is that I cannot get the “hibernate” option to appear in the “shutdown” menu (see below for x64 hibernate issue – looks like this area maybe more generic).  The hiberfil.sys file exists and everything appears to be turned on but…… Basically it feels quicker, looks better and as many people have said is what I hoped Vista would have been.

Dell Latitude D620, 4G RAM, 100G disk, 64 bit install

After a week or so of good vibes from the desktop I decided to try out the laptop and “in for a penny in for a pound” I went for an x64 install.  Initially everything seemed to be fine.  The clean installation went well and 30 mins I was at a working desktop.  I took an image using Windows Home Server and then started building out the machine with the various (minimum) set of apps.  Although it went well in general a few minor issues started to surface:

1. Hibernate was showing up in the menu, and although the machine would shut down it would then come out of hibernation automatically after a few seconds, and looks like I’m not the only one
2. The print drivers for my Canon MP800R just would not work (I had got them working on the 32 bit desktop) – but to be honest I have had issues with the drivers for this printer since Vista, even though Canon say it’s supposed to be supported (so Canon issue).
3. Gotomeeting reported that “To Start the Meeting Use a Supported Operating System” (see below about how I got around this)

So after a day and a bit I concluded that as this was my main laptop (I know, don’t tell me I am mad, but actually pretty much everything on my laptop is a sync’d copy from WHS) I would rebuild with Win 7 32 bit and see if these minor but growing list of niggles would go away.

Dell Latitude D620, 4G RAM, 100G disk, 32 bit install

After the quick, flatten and reinstall of base OS things went well:

• The Canon printer (with a little patience!) started to work
• The hibernate issue was resolved and
• Office including Office Accounting (which installs SQLExpress 2005) all worked fine

Gotomeeting fix for Windows 7

The Gotomeeting problem still existed, however by using an old WinXP machine I managed to get a download of the installed file and this happily installed and allowed me to do everything required from the desktop, but still cannot start meetings from the web site

RNDIS problem with Windows 7

There is only one unresolved problem and that is when trying to connect my mobile phone to the laptop.  Whether by bluetooth or USB cable Windows 7 detects that something has been connected and tries to install drivers but then reports an error with the RNDIS drivers.  Anybody help?

Comparative install times:

To help with the boredom of installations I kept a log of times at various stages and as I had done both x86 and x64 on the same machine I can share the following:

So in this unscientific test x64 is a little but longer (3 mins/10%) but nothing really in it, which is to be expected I suppose.

Conclusion

Aside from Gotomeeting (poor coding for their platform checking) and hang over problems from Vista with driver support and the problem with RNDIS support when connecting my mobile device, it’s a great experience so far.

Now don’t go getting all cross, you were the one that clicked on the link :-)

Another in my series of experiments about what catches the average tweeters eye…  If you are here then it was you that followed the link :-)  but now you are here why not check out the rest of the blog.

I have been happily creating articles for this blog over the past year and have been more interested in the content than the traffic i.e. if I found it interesting then that was good enough.  However at some point it would be good to see at least some traffic to the site.  So I am trying various approaches to see what draws people to click on a link.  I guess we will see if the old favourite works!