Tag Archives: microsoft

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.

Oct 5 2012

Active Directory on a managed IaaS

In a hybrid cloud environment, parts of the infrastructure are located in a public or shared cloud environment whereas other parts are in a different environment, either on a private cloud or on a traditional infrastructure. As long as this is all managed by one service provider, there is not much of a problem. But usually that’s not the case.

While servers located in the traditional infrastructure are often managed by the client himself, the servers that are hosted in a managed shared-cloud environment are operated by the service provider of that cloud. As long as we are talking about a managed infrastructure as a service (IaaS), that is up to the operating system level. Everything beyond the operating system is normally in the responsibility of the client himself because he knows the combination of middleware and application best.

This setup leads to all sorts of challenges. For all servers in the cloud we have a strict responsibility boundary, however, the layers above the OS are highly dependent on the OS settings and it is indeed very hard to isolate impacts of changes done in one layer to the other layer. The situation gets even more challenging when we talk about services which span not only the responsibility boundaries of a single host, but also over different environments (public/shared cloud and private cloud/traditional IT).

Microsoft Active Directory currently gives clients and service providers some headaches.

Lets briefly scan the interests of the different parties:

The service provider wants to maintain exclusive administrative rights on OS level for the servers in his responsibility. Otherwise it would be impossible to guarantee any service level agreements (SLAs) and/or a certain contracted level of security.

The client requires servers belonging to him in a single, or at least in a consistent environment. This starts with a certain server naming convention, but also includes dns suffixes and namespaces.

On first sight, these requirements sound reasonable, but in respect of Microsoft Active Directory, they are somehow conflicting.

When we talk about exclusive administrative rights on OS level in an MS ADS environment, we need to separate the environments based on responsibility in different ADS forests. Otherwise, the owner of the root domain of the forest automatically holds the Enterprise Admin rights and can create domain and server admin user ids in all subdomains of the forest at will.

ADS trust relationship

ADS trust relationship

However, if we would split the servers in two different ADS forests, they would also live in different name spaces. Furthermore, we would need to find a solution on how users and services of one forest can access resources on the other forest. Well, this can be handled by trusts, but this would introduce a lot of complexity and would be a perfect source for all kind of problems.

And, there is another limitation about the two forest solution: There could be no domain controllers of the forest the client owns hosted in the cloud environment. And that is a real problem, especially when we consider that most clients would like to move most of their easy Windows workloads (like domain controllers) in the cloud.

There are no easy answers on that.

Another solution could be to reduce complexity by moving all Windows servers in the cloud and let the cloud provider manage not only the pure server OS but also the Active Directory Service. However, this would require the service provider to offer ADS management as a service, including all tasks that come along with that (like OUs, user ids, certificates, public keys).

Another possibility could be if one party does not insist on its exclusive administrative rights and accepts this as a risk. If ownership of the domains is with the service provider, the client can have the rights to operate his ADS settings and probably local server admin ids for the servers not in the cloud.

ADS single domain

ADS single domain

Summary

There is currently not a single solution for that problem. The client’s requirements and the service providers’ capabilities need to be considered when designing the future environment. In any case, this needs to be done carefully and well in advance to limit later surprises!

Jun 29 2012

Secure boot – how dependent on Microsoft can Linux afford to be?

The new hardware generation that comes along, together with Windows 8, features UEFI Secure Boot. This boot feature was originally designed to make sure that no harmful code infects the system in its most vulnerable phase during boot where no anti-malware tool is active.

However, which looks good on the first thought turned out to be a real problem for all of us using open software like Linux.

UEFI Secure Boot will only boot operating systems which bootloader are signed with a trusted key. Those keys need to be stored in the hardware (BIOS) to ensure its integrity during boot. For security reasons, this hardware key storage is read only to omit harmful code of compromising the stored keys. This means that, all the keys need to be stored there during hardware production.

As it looks today, the only key which will be present in the hardware of the future will be the one of Microsoft.

To be able to still boot a Linux system, the Linux bootloader needs to be signed by that Microsoft key. Microsoft offers a signing service for less than $100,- – so some of the major Linux distributions consider using this signing service to get their boot loaders accepted by newer hardware.

But is this really the right way to go?

Of course, this is the most pragmatic solution to the problem. But I see two heavy drawbacks that could hit the distributors and users in the future:

Using the Microsoft signing service puts the whole Linux community in a situation where they are highly dependent on Microsoft. That can’t be a comfortable situation for any Linux distributor.

The second problem I see is with self compiled kernels. A main benefit of open source software is the ability to modify and change it to someone’s requirements. If we can only use MS signed kernels and bootloaders any more, we are not able to compile our own kernels.

In my point of view, the big Linux distributors should better work to get their keys into the hardware as well and should provide a decent and easy to use signing service for self compiled kernels. Or, UEFI Secure Boot should be optional at all to let the user decide the risk he is willing to take to run the software of his choice!

Apr 16 2012

Microsoft versus OpenOffice: Not the battle of the future!

Anyone remember Super Audio CD (SACD)? Or Audio DVD (ADVD)? Those formats once had a battle about which would succeed the Audio CD as the primary media for audio content. However, after the invention of MP3 and its wide distribution, disc formats became obsolete.

When Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD had a similar battle about who would be the next primary video media, experts already talked about a war where there was nothing to win for anybody. It was predicted that the Internet would become that primary media and that hard media such as discs or tapes would no longer be of any importance. Well, Blu-ray Discs did gain some market share, but only temporarily, as we look back today. Download portals, and also IPTV and video-on-demand offerings are slowly coming and will, for sure, get their pieces of the cake.

LibreOffice 3.5.1 came out recently, and Apache OpenOffice with the help of IBM will release a new version (4.0) approximately at the end of the year. These two alternative office suites run another attack on Microsoft’s dominance of the office software sector. But is this really a battle that is worth fighting for?

First of all, this battle is almost impossible to win. Not only that Microsoft’s dominant market share is equal to a de-facto industry standard, the office documents are mainly based on Microsoft’s proprietary document formats, which are often non-disclosed and therefore hard for non-Microsoft applications to interpret correctly. I think that any success of alternative office suites raise and fall with their ability to import and export Microsoft formats properly.

But, is this really the battlefield of the future? I don’t think so.

The actual battlefield about the future of software is in the cloud!

As Andreas Groth (@andreasgroth) and I mentioned in several earlier blog posts, the final goal of software evolution is to be web-based. There are several reasons for that: Web-based applications are easy to access (from any device), they are cheap to maintain and they support our new requirements in terms of collaboration and content sharing more easily as any local installed app does.

In regards to office software, all vendors had to start their development almost from zero again, which makes this race so interesting. Regardless, if we look at Microsoft’s Office 365, IBM Docs (formally known as LotusLive Symphony) or Google Docs, they all have in common that they were more or less developed from scratch. But beside the big three, there is a high momentum in that area to make applications accessible from a simple browser. Several examples are VMware AppBlast, Guacamole, and LibreOffice, which all use technology based on HTML-5.

But what will be the criteria to succeed in the cloud?

There is no doubt, that any office software needs to fulfil the productivity basics. I don’t think that cloud-based software must implement all fancy features of Office 2010, but it must enable the user to fulfil day-to-day tasks, including the capability to import and export office documents, display them properly, and run macros.

In terms of collaboration, cloud-based software needs to provide added value to any desktop- based application. It should be easily possible to share and exchange documents with coworkers.

But the most important factor will be its integration capabilities. Desktop and office workloads will not be moved into the cloud from one day to the other. There will be a certain time frame where the use of cloud-based applications start to grow, but the majority of people is still using locally installed applications. Being well integrated, both with the local installed software and also with server- based collaboration tools, will be the key factor for success. This is why I see Microsoft in a far better position than Google, although Google Docs has been around for quite some time and has started to become interesting, feature-wise.

IBM seems to be on the correct track. Its integration of IBM Docs into IBM Connections and IBM SmartCloud for Social Business (formally known as LotusLive), which can be tested in the IBM Greenhouse, looks very promising.

Summary

The new battlefield will be in the cloud, and although Microsoft did its homework, the productivity software market is changing. There are more significant solutions and vendors available than in the years before. If they play their cards right and provide good integration together with an attractive license model and collaboration features, they could get their share of (Microsoft’s) cake.

Jan 15 2012

Windows 8 – the last one?

Will Windows 8 be the last client operating system out of Redmond? Probably not, but we need to ask ourselves which value a new client operating system (OS) version can bring to the desktop.

Up to today, functionality was required on the desktop, because the desktop was the platform for all the various applications. Each new operating system version brought new features and enabled us, the users, to do things we couldn’t do with an older version.

But, things have changed.

Now, more and more applications are moving away from the desktop. We still use a desktop to access applications by using a web browser and using web applications instead of locally installed ones (Gmail, for example, taught us that a local email client is no longer required). So, the desktop itself becomes more and more a platform for our preferred Internet browser. And in this role, the functionality of the operating system gets more and more unimportant.

But if additional operating system features are of no value any more, what motivation do users have to upgrade to the next OS version? We see this problem already on the enterprise level today. The main reason for most companies to migrate from Windows XP to Windows 7 is the simple fact that support for Windows XP will end in 2014 – and not all the new features of Windows 7.

So, how will the future look? Well, Google does give us an outlook with Chrome OS, an operating system, not based on Windows, that has a main task of running a web browser with the best possible performance. By moving functionality to the web, the capabilities of the web become more important. No wonder that HTML 5 addresses a lot of these new requirements. HTML 5 not only enables a new kind of user experience for web applications, it also provides a foundation for new technologies like AppBlast to bring traditional desktop applications to the web.

OK, but what will Redmond do?

Well, they are reaching out in other areas. It seems that Microsoft understood very well the challenge. Microsoft’s focus moves away from the traditional PC toward new devices such as tablets and smartphones. Windows 8 is designed more for tablets than it is for PCs; and Windows Phone 7 is a pure smartphone OS.

Coming back to our original question — will Windows 8 be that last operating system from Microsoft? Definitely not, but whether it is the last one for PCs, I don’t know…