Peter's Technology Trumpet : Office Live

"We're Doomed!...

SmallCountry — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 11:10:18 GMT

...as Private Frazer was prone to shout whenever Captain Mainwaring's home guard faced a crisis.

Likewise I have long bored colleagues with prophecies of doom for those failing to embrace new business models enabled by "cloud computing".

"Doom" might be overstating it, as the Microsoft's partners making a living from installation and service of customers' PC server, collaboration and application infrastructure continue to do rather well - so much was obvious in the Aberdeen Microsoft Partner group last night who heard about Microsoft Virtualisation and Management strategy from Matt McSpirit. Business is good in Aberdeen right now, as the Oil/Gas industry continues to stoke customers IT budgets in the Northern boom town, whilst Financial Services dependant partners in the central belt are increasingly dismayed by the glbal financial outlook.

However, the arrival of Internet Services such as BPOS potentially make a customer less reliant on a friendly IT partner based round the corner. Consider a partner providing Exchange email for a customer- cross-border cattle-rustlers could offer this service through BPOS undercutting or undermining the partners installation and maintenance revenue.

BPOS won't suit all customers, but the smart partners are learning how they can blend it into their existing services - so that they can continue to offer a "value-added" relationship to their customer base, which includes Software Services offerings like BPOS as and where appropriate.

The BPOS juggernaut is on its way and will reach our shores in Spring 2009. I encourage partners to look at the trial and sign up.

In the meantime, Steve Ballmer was moved to describe online services as "a platform for the next technology revolution" in his Exec Email yesterday following Bob Muglia and Ray Ozzie's announcements of Microsoft Azure Services, formerly known as RedDog, at the Professional Developers Conference yesterday. In his words

"Azure will enable developers to build applications that extend from the cloud to the enterprise datacenter and span the PC, the Web, and the mobile phone".

The new cloud services operating system runs in Microsoft Datacenters and is a platform for applications - as opposed to a "finished" application like Exchange Online or Live Meeting.

This gives enterprises and developers a new option to host apps and services in the cloud - providing on demand computing and storage to enable applications without up-front investment in infrastructure.

A pay as you go hosted platform for any app, taking full advantage of developer's skills in .NET, and the like, will likely be an attractive means for an organisation to move processing off-premise or for an ISV to build and distribute its app without the hassle of deploying servers. By taking advantage of other web services such as SQL, Sharepoint online and CRM Live, and leveraging consumers's data synchronised across his Mesh of devices, powerful applications can be composed with low initial costs. Whats's more they could scale up readily to meet demand, and potentially allow organisations to reduce capital investment and move costs to ongoing operational expenditure.

At the core of Azure is .NET Services (the artist formerly known as Biztalk, providing the backbone to compose, sequence and orchestrate processes up in the cloud) and SQL Data Services (a hierarchical data store in the cloud built on SQL Server). As ever, David Chappell has reduced a tricky concept to the level of a Ladybird Book in his newly published white paper.

As if that was not enough, the PDC this year also annouced Office Web Applications, lightweight browser delivered versions of the Office apps which will be added to Office Live when Office 14 is released.

Don't Panic Mr Mainwaring!

DIY or DIFM?

SmallCountry — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:39:50 GMT

Followers of the Trumpet know of my missionary zeal for Office Live. This at-a-stroke solution to web site and business applications for small businesses on blog and has won a strong following amongst Scotland's SME's with around 3500 sign-ups as of January.

My interest was initially driven by the vested interest of getting Mrs. Ferry's property business Kurekodu online. At the cost of a few hours effort I banged up a reasonable looking website to drive a healthy supply of web sales leads and a extranet to drive customer billing more efficiently. I quickly realised that the proposition is unbeatable - a free domain, company email and a simpleton website editor giving smart looking site within hours all for nowt.

The proposition has further improved since February's rename to Office Live Small Business.

As well as an easing of the signup process (punters can now sign up without having to enter a credit card or decide on a domain name) this heralded a significant rework of the Office Live Web designer. The upgrade makes the web design process more flexible for the partner (who can switch on the advanced web design features which might be scary for the small biz punter) but keeps things simple for the non-technical user with an Office-style user interface.

Integrated advertising, email marketing and comprehensive analytics make it possible for the Office Live platform to be a serious web channel for the on-line business. Take-up of OLSB by small companies needing a professional looking website is accelerating, look at www.justwinches.co.uk and as well as web phenomenon www.kurekodu.co.uk .

However, there is evidence that most would rather have a web artist do if for them - so its Do It For Me rather than DIY. Several web design companies have launched services targeting Office Live website design, including fixed price web design and support packages including Coderight (with a bunch of custom templates, and ChooBoo Live who build the whole thing for you and charge ongoing support for changes and other value adds.

In Scotland business startups increased 5.3% last year. Many are the smallest sole trader/small businesses not VAT or PAYE registered for whom this kind of web-in-a-box service is most relevant. There are estimated to be 277,000 of these in Scotland so 3500 Scottish subscribers is significant for this technology-shy sector.

Office Live Small Business includes a number of useful business applications. These have been enhanced in v2, with the simple Contact Manager perhaps the most useful - to share contacts amongst employees. As the small business builds its clientele, these contacts can be used to drive the closed loop email marketing feature. Leads can enter their details through the public website using an integrated "Contact me" form. This example of web front end/business app back end integration showcases the Forms Designer/List Publisher aspect of Office Live Small Business - its simple to publish forms on the website which drive business applications at the back end - likewise its easy to publish data to the public website. Previously such web site functionality would require custom development which is out of the reach of most small businesses.

Writing powerful business applications which take advantage of the Office Live public website and back office SharePoint platform is the larger opportunity for partners. This is "cloud computing" for the small business. Crafty web developers can build powerful applications by mashing Sharepoint's data with their own and 3rd party web services.

Many Microsoft partners are making a very good living building on the SharePoint platform. Office Live Small business is an opportunity to package those skills and offer them at scale to small businesses. In response to demand from partners, the Office Live team have included a solution packager in v2 - this allows a partner to package up all solution elements including public website templates, business applications (including data schema in the form of SharePoint lists, business logic in SharePoint workflow, etc) and provision these to a new customer's office live subscription.

For the full lowdown on Office Live v2 a good resource is the reviewers guide - further insight from Chris's Unofficial Office Live page and from Darren Johnston, Solution Canvas ace developer of Justia who promises he will start blogging about Office Live again just as soon as he is a bit less busy.

Office Live or Die...

SmallCountry — Thu, 10 May 2007 12:43:41 GMT

Regular readers of this column will be aware of Mrs. Ferry's limited grasp of technology, so she of course immediately turned to her in-house IT provider. However, as a busy executive at the cutting edge of high-tech, I am of course too busy cutting million dollar deals and mixing with captains of industry to do anything as mundane as set up a website or register an email domain. As for backing up files in case the kids knock a glass of milk over the laptop - completely out of the question.

It has therefore been interesting to help Mrs. Ferry start a new business over the past year or so. The Kurekodu property business, like most microbusinesses, needed

a website to attract and inform potential clients, and give the feel of a well-run and professional outfit
a "corporate sounding" URL and email address....(e.g. CHiefExecutive@WeAreABigReputableCompany.COM style)
somewhere safe to store all the invoices, marketing and financial business documents being generated

So Office Live was a means to obtain a professional result with the minimum of time invested. Office Live lets one-man-bands and microbusiness get online in a matter of minutes, with a minimum of IT savvy required. It's going live on May 23rd, although already there are around 1800 Scottish businesses online with Office Live websites. (Including the highly informative and successful Just Winches site - if you find yourself in need of a winch, that's the place to go)

This "quick and easy" appeal has been borne out by the Kurekodu experience. After registering for the Office Live Premium service, the Kurekodu website was up and running within 2 hours, built using the Office Live Web Designer. This is a simple, elegant AJAX browser based application, which lets business owners define a simple theme and navigation for their site, and create a basic set of professional looking pages. That is a real boon for the small business owner, whom without the luxury of an IT department, would normally have to pay for a web designer to do this, and understand the more arcane aspects of registering domain names etc.

Even the non-techno-savvy Mrs. Ferry regularly uses this application to modify the property for sale web page when Kurekodu offers a new property for sale or rent. The Web Designer also let her quickly "sex up" the website, with animated picture galleries and simple web forms which send an alert email when a customer makes a web enquiry.

She was also delighted to purchase further domains (making the site available over kurekodu.co.uk, kurekodu.com and houseinestonia.com) addresses to make the site easier to find, and having registered on Google and Windows Live Search engines, is building up the site to make it top of the pops for likely internet searches.

However, apart from the ease of establishing an effective internet shop front, the most dramatically useful aspects of Office Live have been its business applications.

Office Live gives businesses not only a public-facing website, but also supports secure workspaces for documents, contacts, lists, photos - indeed any kind of business information. Kurekodu's MD (the technophobe Mrs. Ferry) and her associates in Estonia use this to collaboratively create particulars for properties for sale, and to build invoices for the companies' services. These are all secured using Windows Live ID (formerly passport) and kept up on the Kurekodu private site where they are safe, backed up, without the version confusion caused by email tennis.

What's more, these important business documents can be shared securely with customers (indeed anybody signed up for a Windows Live ID), so they can track service charges for their investments under Kurekodu's management. That's a secure extranet collaboration solution delivered at a miniscule IT cost.

But Office Live Business Applications are the really exciting area for small businesses. These make available powerful business tools to the small business previously available only to companies with £10,000s a year to spend on IT. Kurekodu runs a simple Accounting application on Office Live, to maintain profit/loss account for each property investment, or client property under management. Its by no means a complex application, but is customised to the company's business niche, is an online, hosted application and hence available to all staff regardless of where they are based, and works offline through its integration with Access 2007. Currently Kurekodu's hard working IT Director (yours truly) is building a Reporting application so that the MD can be kept properly informed of the profitability of each customer and property investment.

As Office Live is built on the Windows Sharepoint Services 2007 platform, these powerful business application capabilities will come as no surprise to any of Microsoft's Business Partners. Many are already building Office Live solutions to take their applications downstream and target smaller business customers, such as Solution Canvas with Justia , whom I blogged about a while back. Such industry-focused applications used to automate business processes without having any nasty servers or difficult software applications to install, made available by subscription, are very attractive to small businesses with no time or funds to invest in an overly complex IT strategy.

Clearly for any Small business IT company Office Live and services like it cannot be ignored. Despite its limitations today, for many small businesses this is enough to support business functions with the minimum of fuss. Clearly its a case of Office Live or Die...

SharePoint Sleeper

SmallCountry — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 10:53:24 GMT

I was interested to see this article in the Wall St. Journal confirming the established position of Microsoft's greatest stealth technology - SharePoint 2007.

Several of the Scottish Microsoft Partners I work with closely have invested huge time and effort in preparing for the latest iteration of SharePoint technologies which became broadly available earlier this year. Charteris, Avanade Scotland and Company Net are all working on Sharepoint 2007 solutions for customers which to be delivered imminently.

Chelford SFM have built a fantastic "Sharepoint Test Drive" which allows customers to quickly get to grips with how they can use SharePoint to

"create a single interface to a common environment within which documents and files can be managed, information and data collected and presented, users can collaborate and communicate in virtual spaces and global document searches are carried out with relative ease" - David Gardiner, Director, Chelford Solutions for Microsoft

Through Machiavellian Microsoft software licensing agreements, many companies find that their employees are entitled to use the Standard version of SharePoint 2007. Jeff Teper, the VP of Microsoft's SharePoint product group who has been most helpful to Microsoft Scottish customers as the SharePoint technologies have evolved throughout the current decade, claims 85 million SharePoint licenses across 17,000 companies are in circulation.

Microsoft's customers and partners have a great opportunity to make better use of the new capabilities they have inherited in Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007. These capabilities are very wide in scope and potential business impact.

More specifically SharePoint is a modular toolset covering the popular enterprise information management categories of Collaboration, Portal, Business Intelligence, and Content management. To this it adds Search, Business Forms and Workflow capabilities, and architectural support for Intranet, Internet and Extranet deployment. The icing on the cake is that this wide-ranging information management platform works closely with the Office desktop, meaning that end-users can very quickly be productive with new applications built on Sharepoint.

As such, not only can SharePoint be used to address the "usual" content management and information access problems that exist in any organisation, it can also be used as a common platform to build business process solutions which rely on workflow, forms and structured data. The application templates on TechNet, and the huge volume of Microsoft Partner value added SharePoint solutions on the Office Solution directory are testament to this.

The sheer scale of these capabilities can be disconcerting for those considering SharePoint technologies as a solution to business issues. To those I would recommend attending one of Chelford's test drive events in Glasgow or Edinburgh, or if you prefer to DIY sign up for a hosted Office Live site.

Link to Microsoft Embeds Sleeper in Business Software - WSJ.com

Technorati tags: SharePoint, Office Live, Collaboration

Incapacitated or Entrepreneurial?

SmallCountry — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 11:53:24 GMT

I found myself incapacitated this week when the dreaded lurgy swept through Chateux Ferry. For 3 whole days I could not drag myself into work, and languished in bed with a serious case of man-flu.

But being blessed with a guilt-driven protestant work ethic, I can't remain idle for long and soon found myself bored and thinking up new money-making schemes to fund the 3 cost centres growing demands for life's essentials i.e. tennis club fees, expensive foreign holidays, fast moving consumer goods, and hats.

This work ethic is clearly something which is not shared by a significant fraction of the population of Scotland. An enlightening example of this is that 1 in 6 of working age adults in Glasgow are currently claiming Incapacity Benefits. This is compared to a national average of about 1 in 14.

Now, clearly the majority of people claiming IB are unfortunate enough to be limited in what work they can do, and are fully entitled and deserving of these benefits. But one could easily extrapolate from these figures that the concentration of work-dodging benefits cheats is especially high within Greater Glasgow area.

So it was with some trepidation that I agreed to some missionary work in Glasgow's Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre to speak at the New Start Scotland event about starting a new business and taking it online.

However, I was very pleased to experience real entrepreneurial spirit amongst the audience of people who had recently started, or planning to start a new enterprise. They in turn were very pleased to learn that building an online web presence with Office Live is FREE. Even a subscription to Office Live Premium, with full access to the Applications any small business needs to function, at £22.95 a month makes a small impact in the Incapacity Benefit giro.

So what is Office Live, I hear you ask?

You may have heard of Live services from Microsoft (Interesting online services for the consumer, like Live Mail, Live Favourites, Live Local mapping services, etc). In the consumer world, we use online services for and expect them to be really easy and to pay nothing.

Office Live extends the concept to startup and small businesses, and lets that business put up a professional-looking website within 2 hours, using a mycompany.com domain name for the website and email addresses. Gratis!

I've experienced small business startup at 1st hand. Entrepreneurs starting a business need a simple way to address the technology issues of building a web presence, getting it noticed by the search engines and keeping it interesting and up to date.

Often IT is a most confusing, expensive and unsatisfactory aspect to business startup. These IT decisions and issues occur just when the business owner should be focused on key factors of business planning, funding, recruitment, etc.

Office Live offers all the services a new company needs in a single place, at low or no cost, and can expand as the business needs grow. You can see a successful Office Live site at www.houseinestonia.com which has generated 800 unique visitors per month since it was created in 2 hours 3 months ago.

Office Live is a compelling offering which saves time, hassle and money for small business, but also presents an opportunity for Microsoft's business partners. This opportunity comes through Business Applications.

Starting a business is hard work - it demands commitment, hard work and long hours to manage costs and achieve forecast revenues in the crucial 1st months of operation. Business applications support activities such as customer contact managment, timekeeping and expenses, sales and billing and are key in providing an environment of order, co-ordination and automation which any business needs to flourish and expand.

Office Live cheaply provides a basic set of Business Applications (hosted and accessed online, rather than purchased, planned and installed on-premise), and helps make the business more productive by opening the doors to automating business process and collaboration (like sharing proposals with business partners). Anyone familiar with the Windows Sharepoint Services platform, upon which Office Live is built, will be familiar with its information management and workflow capabilities.

The partner opportunity is that Microsoft are building a marketplace of value-added solutions for Office Live which address specific needs of different industries. For example, Solution Canvas a Glasgow-based Gold Certified Partner have built Justia. Justia extends Office to meet the exacting time management requirements of those professional services industries such as Solicitors.

Solution Canvas solution is built on Office Live, and is offered to small professional services business for a monthly subscription fee. Any customer can come along and try before they buy. As its a hosted solution accessed over t'internet, they typically need no help from expensive IT professionals to procure, install and commission the software. If they like what they see, they can sign up.

This has made it possible for Solution Canvas to open up a whole new potential market for their application and industry expertise. Whereas before these smaller companies would have bought a software package and each needed assistance with set up, install, and support, now these customers have a much smoother and less expensive path to meet their needs - and Solution Canvas have a model which allows them to serve small business IT business application requirements and generate recurring subscription revenue.

If any reader has an idea for a business application, and would like to understand how to deliver it on Office Live, I suggest you take a look at my chums Christian Longstaff and Tim Kimber chatting about Office Live.

Technorati tags: Office Live