Category Archives: Workplace

Jan 3 2018

The Modern Workplace

A significant change is happening about how workplaces are managed and used in the future. Software vendors like Microsoft refer to this as The Modern Workplace.

For the past 20 years enterprises followed the paradigm of a strictly controlled workplace. Workplaces should stick to a company standard. Deviations to this standard were unwanted and considered to lead to higher management costs. The goal was to have a golden (single) image of the base installation and only accept small changes to settings and software. To achieve this goal, users were restricted to a minimum of rights without any self service capabilities.

This model worked well for years, but todays requirements on productivity and the increasing complexity of usecases must lead to rethink this approach. All major software and hardware vendors (Microsoft, Apple) seem to have understood these new challenges and created their own vision on how a modern workplace will look like in the future:

Enable the end user to perform certain tasks by himself, easily supported by an self service engine that drives these user initiated tasks in a controlled way. Starting at the deployment by providing an out of the box experience to the end user, continuing for software distribution via an AppStore including the ability to install software updates when it fits the user’s work schedule. With such tools, the end user can tailor his workplace to optimize his own productivity.

Support highly mobile usecases where workstations could easily be out of the company network for weeks. Control must not end at the company’s network perimeter but instead must handle devices which mainly live on the Internet as well as those in the internal network.

A closer look on the current market reveals that most vendors have solutions to support this new workplace concept:

Mobile Device Management Software is used for the basic management of the devices instead of heavy tools like ADS-GPOs and SCCM. Most MDM vendors support the traditional computing operating systems (Windows, macOS) nowadays as good as the mobile platforms and keep focusing on them.

Deployment methods which leverage the hardware vendor’s preload instead of reimaging the device are upcoming and supported by zero touch technologies like DEP (Apple) or Autopilot (Windows).

Internet Directories like AzureAD are more and more replacing traditional identity providers like ADS.

MDM systems are usually provided as a cloud service and accessible from the Internet or when installed on premise reachable from the Internet to provide services and control to Internet living devices.

The biggest obstacle for moving towards the modern workplace in a traditional enterprise is the cultural change that comes with it. While Startups have already adapted to the new paradigm, most users of traditional enterprises consider self service more as a burden than an opportunity. Not to mention the security department which likes strict control much better than loose, lightweight management.

However, as vendors move fast in this direction and are stopping support for some traditional methods (Apple will very likely discontinue imaging technologies with the next macOS version) and Millennials are demanding a certain degree of freedom for their productivity, also enterprises should consider the modern workplace at least as an option.

Jun 10 2015

Reducing Windows OS migration costs

Upgrading Windows operating systems in an enterprise context can be a very expensive task. Not because the development of a new OS base install image is so complex, but the integration of all application packages in the image and the testing of those on the new platform are the main cost drivers.

Typically, the costs are split as follows:

  • 33% developing the actual OS image
  • 33% testing the applications on the new OS platform
  • 17% project management and admin
  • 17% actual roll out

To minimize Windows OS upgrade costs, but also to reduce costs for the running operation of a Windows based workplace, applications must be decoupled from the underlying operating system layer. When applications are decoupled (meaning, they are not directly installed on the Windows OS), the Windows base image is less complex (and therefore more easy to develop), and the integration testing of the all the applications on the new platform can be saved.

Now, decoupling is easy said, but hard achieved. New ways of how applications are provided to the user need to be explored. The most obvious way would be to drive applications to become HTML-5 based. Although this might be possible for applications which are newly introduced in the environment, we also need a solution for existing legacy programs. I see two main technologies which could be of use here:

  • Application virtualization
  • Application publishing

Application virtualization provides a sandbox around the application, so a new Windows platform does not interfere with the application context and the virtualized application in the sandbox can be deployed on the new OS without intensive testing. Further advantage of this technology is the possibility to manage the application from a central point and control application updates without the requirement to send out software update packages to thousends of clients.

Application publishing lets the software run on a terminal server. So again, the application context is independent from the workstation OS and can be upgraded centrally on the terminal server.

The more applications are provided with either option, the slimmer the OS base image can become and upgrades to new OS versions will be getting cheaper. This might be the first step to a new model of the client workplace where the actual client OS is not important any more, but just provides a runtime for required access software (like a browser or the Citrix receiver software).

May 11 2015

Strategies for replacing Microsoft Office

In my previous blogpost I discussed why Microsoft is still so dominant in the productivity software space and why it is hard to move to alternative office products. However, if you are still considering to replace MS Office, here is how to do it:

Commitment

The most important point is management commitment. Don’t be naive, it will be a hard process and without the full support from the management up to the CEO, this project will fail. IBM, my former employer tried to save MS Office licenses in favour for IBM’s own product Symphony and later for Apache OpenOffice. When thinking of 400.000 IBMers, internal communication could have easily been moved to the Open Document Format, however, this effort never had the buy in of the upper management. Although Office licenses were restricted strongly and you were required to run a complex exception process to get one, most management still produced PowerPoints and Excel files. Internal tools were still developed as Excel macros and it sooner or later became a real pain if you would not have Microsoft Office installed. My personal opinion is that the missing commitment from management was the main reason why they gave up on this mid 2014 and purchased Office licenses again.

Introduce an internal file format standard

Establish ODF as the one and only accepted internal standard for editable files. For non-editable files, PDF should be the way to go. Also for sharing files with externals, as long as they don’t need to be edited, use PDF. Provide your corporate templates in the new format.

Stop developing Excel macros

Get your developer on board and provide education how to start developing in your new productivity tool suite. Regardless if it is Apache OpenOffice or LibreOffice (or any other alternative), they all come with a more or less powerful scripting language to fulfill most requirements. If it is worth migrating existing Excel macros to the new platform depends on how many and how complex they are. Maybe they can still live in Excel until they are sunset anyway.

Provide education to your users

In the very end it is all about user acceptance. The better they get educated, the higher chances are they accept the new platform. Don’t underestimate this point, from a cost perspective this might be the biggest portion of the project!

Consider web based solutions

Give your end users new functionality by moving towards the web. There are alternatives out on the market (Google, IBM Docs, Zoho, ….). Maybe these new possibilities attract your users.

I am sure, there are a lot more points to consider, but without the ones mentioned above, I am pretty sure such a project will fail. Please feel free to join the conversation on Twitter via @emarcusnet!

Apr 17 2015

Why is Microsoft Office still so dominant?

If you think about productivity tools, Microsoft Office is the product it is all about. Even the term Office is used as a synonyme for productivity tools and competitive products use it in their name (LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Softmaker Office, etc…).

At least there are competitive products available, and there always were. Actually the grounds of productivity tools was once prepared by Lotus with its 1-2-3 spreadsheet calculation tool accompanied by AmiPro and Freelance to form the Lotus SmartSuite. But Microsoft soon took over this market with Word, Excel and Powerpoint and kept it tight since then. Allthough Microsoft Office is rich on functions, the alternative players can provide what 99% of users require, so

why is Microsoft Office still so predominant?

In the recent years I saw a number of projects with the goal to replace Microsoft Office. But none of them declared victory over Redmond’s cashcow. Here are some reasons why:

Compatibility

None of the competitive tools achieved a decent file format compatibility. Meaning, when exchanging documents with Microsoft Office users, the layout, tables, etc… often get misplaced making the document look differently then the original. Allthough import/export filters for the older binary based Microsoft formats (like .doc, .xls and .ppt) made progress over the years, the new XML based formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) are again quite a hurdle.

I would see this as the main reason for failing user acceptance.

Excel macros

Don’t underestimate the number of application like Excel macros which are out in the world and sometimes vital to companies. I saw enterprises running critical reports based on Excel macros. Those macros can be complex, reading input data from various sources etc… To migrate them to another platform is a project of its own and even if possible ruins every serious cost case.

Integration

A lot of 3rd party tools provide connectors to Microsoft Office. This could be an Outlook plugin or the possibility to produce an Excel sheet as the result of a query, etc. For alternative office tools such integrations are often missing.

User acceptance

Finally, the employees are used to the Microsoft products from home / school / previous jobs -make them use an alternative usually costs high education and motivation efforts.

In my next blopost I will talk about strategies that could be considered when attempting to move away from Microsoft Office to an alternative product.