A customer asked me the other day if Microsoft was ever going to build batch-conversion facilities to take old format files that live on a network fileshare, and convert them to the newer XML-based formats - his reasoning was the sometimes considerable reduction in size when saving as .DOCX or .XLSX compared to the binary .DOC and .XLS formats.

<wistful memories>

I remember writing a tool to do exactly this with Word docs, going from Word 2.0 to Word 6.0, using Visual Basic to automatically pump the necessary keystrokes into a Word 6.0 application, using the SendKeys() function... crude and somewhat clumsy, but for a one-off process, it worked fairly well :)

</wistful memories>

Coming back to the present, I was pleasantly susprised to discover the release last month of the Office Migration Planning Manager - a collection of tools which allows for scanning of networked files to report on any potential conversion issues, and batch conversion of those documents (either by creating an Open XML format document alongside the old binary one, or by replacing the original with the OOXML format file).

Remember of course that you can consume these formats in older versions of Office, using the Compatibility Pack. There's a growing movement to adopt OpenXML as an industry standard - ECMA has already given the format its blessing, and the ISO is reportedly amenable to ratifying the format as a standard also. The momnentum is growing for 3rd parties who are building support for OpenXML - even OpenOffice now has a way of consuming and creating OpenXML documents.

UPDATE: Conincidentally, perhaps, Geek in Disguise, Steve Clayton posted last night about an online petition to the ISO to support the Open XML proposals- if you really value open-ness, even if Microsoft is the instigator of the efforts, go ahead and sign the petition...

I've been musing over some medium term IT trends lately and one idea that keeps coming back into frame is the seemingly inevitable trend towards hosting of applications. Take Exchange, as just one example...

Hosted Exchange* has been available for years, from lots of different providers all around the world. The basic concept is that instead of buying the software, you just buy the service from a hosting company much like you buy line rental on your phone, or internet access from your ISP. Why not just have your company's email sitting somewhere else, and save yourself the hassle of managing it?

*Hosted Exchange is not to be confused with the somewhat confusingly named Exchange Hosted Services, which is all about hosting the route to get mail into and out of your own email environment. EHS was formed by the procurement of Frontbridge, who had established a good name in hosted filtering... ie the MX record of your domain actually delivers mail to their datacentre, they scan it for spam and viruses, and the remaining "hygienic" mail is delivered down to you.

So what's stopped everyone from adopting Hosted Exchange before? I suppose the cost is one thing - if you had 500 users and it cost, say, £10 a month to provide each of them with a mailbox, you'd be seeing £5k going out the door every month, and might think "surely I can provide the same service, in house, for less than £60k a year?", and you might well be right. But start to dig into the detail, and it could be a lot closer... Think about buying:

• the hardware (maybe £10k worth of servers, and any amount of money could be spent on storage, but let's assume £15k),
• the software (at full price, this could work out at something in the order of £30k for that kind of user population)
• additional software, like anti-virus, anti-spam (if you didn't want to just use what's in the box in the shape of the IMF etc), backup software, archiving systems etc etc

... and then add in the time and expertise required to set it up and keep it healthy long-term, then maybe it is less expensive to do it all in house. But by hosting the application, you could free the time to do other stuff, or just have one less thing to worry about... especially in times when security threats can sap administrator time, and compliance requirements could mean lots more red tape and requirements for recoverability, let alone high availability.

I've seen various analyst reports which reckon that 70% of an average IT budget is spent just maintaining the status quo and keeping existing systems running.

As connectivity gets better and better, it seems almost inevitable that a "normal" Exchange deployment in a few years will actually be hosted by someone else. Of course, there are several models which could be adopted:

• Hosting company just operates your own servers/software for you. I've seen this lots of times already, in the shape of IT outsourcing where the "hoster" is just a drop in replacement for an in house IT operation, and maybe even takes servers that were previously operated in house and moves them to their own datacentre for ongoing management
• Hosting company provides your servers for you. This is a little less common, but growing - namely, the hoster has their own kit but they dedicate a given server/bank of servers just to you.
• Hosting company just provides "service". In other words, you get a mailbox of a given size, but don't need to care how it's provisioned. This is going to be more appealing to smaller businesses, maybe.

So what else? Sharepoint? Yep, you can do that too, as part of the snappily-titled Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging & Collaboration v4.0.

And what about after that? I could see the day when some companies want IT as a turnkey service just like they look at other utilities - you buy the bit of cable and down that comes whatever services you're subscribed to, and you can add and remove services at will, just like you can with satellite or cable TV.

Want your phone system to be hosted and connected to by the same bunch of ethernet cables? No problem. Intranet applications and portals? Sure... I wonder where it'll all end? Hosted desktops?

Like probably millions of other people, I get the daily ZDNet Tech Update Today (since long before RSS brought news feeds to the masses...) and was floored a little by David Berlind's column today. I think David's a good commentator - normally sails between the points of sycophancy and fundamentalism that some of the other ZDNet columnists sometimes exhibit.

The column today is about the release of beta 3 of Office Communications Server and Office Communicator 2007, which has now gone live. David's comment on the whole thing:

If there will be an amazingly compelling reason to go all-Microsoft for your office suite ... your document sharing infrastructure ... your e-mail and scheduling system ... your data/voice conferencing ... and your instant messaging, then Office Communicator is it.

So deeply and contextually can Office Communicator's DNA be integrated into the rest of Microsoft's solutions that there is probably no other glue in all of Microsoft's portfolio that so elegantly demonstrates the company's strategic vision for making knowledge workers more productive at what they do.

Wow. I think he likes it!

I've been running the "dogfood" version of Windows Live Mail Desktop (WLMD) for a while now, and found it to be really stable and usable. It's basically a superset of the built-in Windows Mail application from Windows Vista, which supercedes Outlook Express.

WLMD is now available for beta testing (on Windows XP as well as Vista) from http://ideas.live.com and it works against MSN/Hotmail (including the mail from Office Live, so if you sign up for your own free domain name you can pick up the mail without being in a browser), POP/IMAP accounts and other providers' mail services, such as Yahoo!, AOL and GMail. It seems it's been available for some time, in fact :)

I was prompted about this when Steve Clayton was being interviewed today on TalkSport Radio, and a caller had asked why Vista no longer gave him access to Hotmail... I guess he was meaning that since Outlook Express isn't the box any more, he was trying to use the supplied Windows Mail program, which doesn't offer the ability to connect to Hotmail... so the solution is to either stay with browser-based mail or to use WLMD.

A semi little-known fact... as of the 1st January 2007, the rules for UK companies regarding business stationery changed. Just like every registered company is bound to include certain information (the registered office, the geography of registration (eg England & Wales) and its company registration number) on all its official letters & order forms, electronic communications now fall under this rule.

As Companies House says:

Whenever an email is used where its paper equivalent would be caught by the stationery requirements then that email is also subject to the requirements.

I can honestly only think of one case where a company includes all this stuff in their email, along with a long-winded disclaimer. I suppose the rules are now in place and people are waiting to see how they're interpreted... might be worth thinking about including your details on your own e-mail .sig...

There's quite a good discussion of the whole area on legal eagles Pinsent Masons site, here.

Oh, and did you know that Exchange 2007 now has the ability to include standard disclaimers on all mail that passes through it? For a step-by-step illustration, have a look over on msexchange.org.