The Future of productivity - Office 365 walktrough and more

Since the official worldwide launch of the Microsoft productivity suite Office 365 by Kurt DelBene last October, there has been an enormous amound of information published on the web. Most of us saw some glimps of the product and its promising functionality, few of us had the privilige to experience its real power yet. Since Office 365 is not global available and only a 'few' countries are picked to do some beta for us.
Microsoft has published a paper with an overview of the functionality of the Office365 BETA.

So what things are changed since the predecessor BPOS and what does it mean for us?

That was yesterday
Office 365 is the succesor of BPOS. BPOS was the first released business productivity suite in the Online SKU. The suite included mail functionality with Exchange, a platform for storing and collaborating on information with SharePoint and communication with the OCS platform as most important components.
In Office 365 these functionalities are still there and are now based on the 2010 suites from the On-Premise SKU. This means that functionality is based on SharePoint Server 2010 and OCS is now called Lync Server.

High Fidelity of the Future of Productivity
Business Productivity is not only about storing, sharing and discussing about information, it is also about creating information with the usual means and in a familiar way. Leverage the skills already available and support optimizing these skills to produce information for the organization as a whole.
By adding Office Professional Plus to the online suite Microsoft lowered the differences in the user experience working Online or On-Premise.

So there you are. Four main functional online services for the end user, supporting Business Productivity.

The limitation of success
BPOS for me was a rather unexpected success due to the limitations of the suite. Well there are a lot of arguments to use the suite to support Business Productivity. The suite does deliver a competitive package of services in my opinion. Till now however the limitations will block the possibility to extend beyond the standard. So what did Microsoft to diminish these limitations and to seduce partners to use the suite more in the future?

Role based access and permissions
New to Office 365 is that this suite now realy is one suite of functionalities working together instead of a knotted together package of offerings. Access to Office 365 is now role based. Just one portal to all users and permissions based on the role. So an administrator has the functions available to manage the environment and a user can access his mail and accept a call or a task assigned to him.

Signing in
Office 365 has the abillity to use ADFS. This service provides a single signon access to the environment. No hassle with other user credentials and a lot better fit supporting business integration and security requirements.

Can I have one for my self?
Yes you can since Office365 is supporting the mysite which will give you a personal page. This page however is very more than just a personal siloed site to store some information. To support and encourage you to share, the user activity and the interests you indicate by rank a article or a document for instance, is collected and 'published' to your contacts. This means you will be helped with smart and fast access to the knowledge of the organization while looking for information based on your social distance and the relevance calculated through ranking, search results and so on. MySite will fullfill this information hub functionality.

Adding value
BPOS had this limitation which partner where quit disappointed with. The possibility to deliver their stuff on top of the Microsoft platform was not possible. You can extend BPOS but it is very limited. This has changed with Office 365. Why is this so important for the Microsoft Partner Network community and Microsoft too? The model Microsoft has chosen a long time ago is delivering functionality through partners. They add a huge amount of knowledge to the basic platforms and will be able to do so based on the On-Premise SKU as well as on the Online SKU.
Focus will be a requirement for the partners too. It will be difficult if not impossible to maintain a mixed business model in the long future.

From selling licences to providing business productivity services
Microsoft is aiming no longer on selling licences in the future. This change of business model is closely related to the move to the cloud. Claiming to be All In means also adjusting your supporting business model. Selling licences does not match with Cloud services. Cloud is NOT about technology or products at all, in my opinion. Providing services is another ball game and Microsoft is changing their relation with partner ànd consumer. Now today Microsoft is changing this partner and distribution model. Future focus will be on delivering these business productivity services in all aspects.


The Power to Think Big and Be Small, to Be Big and Act Fast
The standard edition of BPOS was limited to 30.000 users (I never had the pleasure to close a deal on that much users in a standard BPOS environment). This limitation is dropped. There is no max limit on the users. Being BIG is one thing, to be able to serve even the smallest organizations with the same top notch technology available for the big enterprise is something else. The minimal amount of users is dropped too! This means that everyone starting a business can use the functionality.
So are you going to have a webconference with your self? Well no, but are you doing business with your self?

I've embedded an video from the 2010 TechEd Europe session Office 365 walkthrough of David Anderson. You could watch and listen to this recording to get more insight than I cover in this Blog. (It is a recording from TechEd, so expect some Tech talk about administration and security and so on. Productivity in the eyes of David is the productivity of the IT Pro in first place)

The future of productivity - changing the game with Office 365

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Microsoft Office 365 brings together cloud versions of our most trusted communications and collaboration products with the latest version of our desktop suite for businesses of all sizes.

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A new name of the (same) game
After Microsoft unveiled the new name of their online suit during a webcast Oct 19th, formerly known as BPOS (and later codename UNION), they launched their dedicated site about Office 365. Bringing together cloud versions of our most trusted communication and collaboration products, so what is available in this box?

Introduction of a revolution?
Betsy Frost Webb - who hosted the webcast where the new suite was unveiled, calls the introduction of Office 365 a game changer for all kinds of businesses all over the world.

I intend to believe it will shape the future of productivity. All functionality in this box is available today, but it is the way it is delivered that will make the difference. In an earlier blog about the future of productivity in small and medium businesses I mentioned that the only concern of the entrepreneur is spotting opportunities and turn them into succesfull business. The way most ICT is delivered to these businesses have proved themselfs to be quit complex to implement. These efforts are killing for productivity (a measure of output from a production process, per unit of input). Functionality from flagship products like SharePoint 2010 and Exchange 2010 are way too big because of this complexity for the small businesses.
If you can manage to take away the complexity of implementation and provide the right fit functionality right away, business can be productive from the start. That's exacly what Office 365 promises.

Technique without the technology
Organisations are looking for an 'easy' way to use technology to get more insight in their business. If you sell cookies, you want to know how much sugar and weat is needed for your next production batch. Selling cookies is not about technique, but a lot about technology to make it possible. It is not about backing a lot of cookies, but the right cookies considering production resources, market and taste.

You will be interessted in the developments of the prices of sugar and weat, the influences of the weather and European laws. To discusse this you want to be able to capture this information and to discusse these with your team, your suppliers and transform that information, share that knowledge within your organisation. In the end your success depends on the right information to make the right choices based on real knowledge.

If your business is helping other organisations to succeed, you do not need a productionline. You do have the need to capture the knowledge in your organisation, even if the organisation is just you. You do have the need to have insight in your business, who are my customers? What is happening in the marketplace? How can I get in contact, provide my customer with the right information, create a platform to share information with a partner and so on and so on.
Likely you are an expert in your field, more likely you are not an IT professional, do not know and do not want to know about networks, servers, mailprotocolls and security settings. The technology though is essential to your business.

"Office 365 is more than a new brand. It’s a progressive approach to cloud applications,” said Kurt DelBene (succesor of Stephen Elop), president of the Microsoft Office Division. “We designed Office 365 to work for a business of one – or a business of one million and one.”

"To date, only the largest businesses have been able to take advantage of modern, enterprise-caliber IT solutions. Office 365 changes that."
 
The Cloud? Are you serious?
If you question the intentions of Microsoft in getting this right check out my earlier blog on Cloud. Chris Caposella describes it as follows:
 
“Chapter one in Microsoft’s history was about putting a PC on every desktop. Chapter two was dedicated to transforming the enterprise data center. Chapter three is, without a question, devoted to bringing the power of the cloud to our customers and partners."
 
So what is in the box?
Key benefits for Office 365:
 
• Access to e-mail, documents, contacts, and calendars on nearly any device
• Simple and secure collaboration with colleagues and business partners
• Works seamlessly with Microsoft Office and the other programs people use today
• Business-class features including IT-level phone support, financially-backed 99.9% uptime, geo-redundancy, disaster recovery, and robust security and privacy controls and standards
• Comprehensive solutions including desktop productivity applications, portals, extranets, external Web site, instant messaging, voice and video conferencing, Web conferencing, e-mail, voice mail and unified messaging
• Pay-as-you-go pricing options which provide predictability and flexibility for all or part of an organization

Basic 'backbone' functionalities are mainly deliverd by three core platforms working together:

• Exchange Online
• Cloud-based e-mail, calendar and contacts with the most current antivirus and anti-spam solutions.  Includes the ability to get e-mail on virtually any mobile phone and options for voice mail, unified messaging and archiving
• SharePoint Online
• Cloud-based service for creating sites to connect colleagues, partners and customers.  Includes enterprise social networking and customization options.
• Lync* Online
•  Cloud-based instant messaging, presence, and online meeting experiences with screen sharing and voice and video conferencing

Besides these well known components Microsoft Office itself is a major addition to the functionality.

• The world’s leading productivity tool on the desktop (Office Professional Plus) and on the Web (Office Web Apps) now seamlessly connected and delivered with cloud services – for the best productivity experience across the PC, Phone and Browser.

(*NOTE: Lync is the Unified Communications (UC) platform, formely known as Office Communication Server (OCS) and the Live communications functionality)
 
All these platforms are build to work together seamslessly. Functions are made available to almost every device from the cloud (three screens and a cloud).
On the technology part a lot more has changed. Partners are given the opportunity to add value to the platforms as they are when implementing on the customers location. Developing value add customer components will enrich the platform functionality dramatically.
 
Changing the game not only the name
Microsoft promisses these developments will change the game. Delivering the technology through services to all businesses realy is a change. To date implementing a enterprise business productivity platform was not a walk in the park for even big organisations. Now the infrastructure itself can be made available as simple as 1,2,3.
Business productivity is NOT about technology as I mentioned before. Having the right information and documents available to be able to make the right descision is more about information strategy. The larger your organisation, the more difficult the implementation or change of this strategy will be. This is why I am possitive about the changes in this game.
Smaller organisations will have the opportunity to setup needed infrastructure and are more flexible to use the power available instantly. The larger organisations will be able to choose for more business focus deminishing the burden of technology, knowing exactly what it will cost the organisation.

The Future of Productivity - the sweetspot of eReaders and Business Solutions #li #il #yam

The worlThis post was published before july 2010. The information in this post was asked to take offline until now to make sure that Ricoh Innovations had room to wrap up the release of their first production version.

This year Microsoft World Partner Conference me and my collegue had the opportunity to meet Ron Barr of Ricoh Innovations. Our goal was to get to know each other since we are collegues in the Ricoh family and share some developments and ideas. Ron had this prototype with him of a Ricoh eReader. The device has a WIFI and 3G connection, the surface is based on the kindle technology on top of that a pen interface is implemented. Writing on the surface realy feels like wrinting on paper. Not to smooth, and a lot like writing with ink on paper.
Ron informed us that this was the first time he was able to show a prototype of Ricoh so upfront and I´m really glad we experienced the tablet. Some things are changing. As Steve Balmer announced several times now, The Cloud demands smarter devices and Microsoft COO Kevin Turner mentioned a sweet spot in their ´three screens and a cloud´ vision on the future of productivity during his WPCDC speech. An open space between the consumer focused space of the apple iPad and the fat desktop devices on the other end. Actualy he positioned the Kindle on the the far right end of the spectrum, but that is the kindle static ´read only´ interface. Well this Ricoh device rocks, it is able to go beyond the crisp display of books and is able to deliver support to business processes. The layer on top of the Kindle infterface is able to capture writen input and will integrate that interaction with business processess.
There will be a SDK available. We think it should be free of charge. The community will take care of the huge opportunity. We discussed the need in logistic processes and other paper and information appended processes. The possibilities are infinited. How should we price the product itself. Well in our opinion the added value of the product is not the issue, it´s the huge added value of the process behind that. Maybe free of charge is not the way to go, but look at the US eReader forecast and the prediction the prices of a stripped down device will drop to less than $50.

The device will launch in the US april 2011. We in the front line of Europe will try to support the device as soon as possible.

The future of productivity - Roadmap announcements BPOS

Wave 14 to The Cloud

This year Microsoft is releasing the last new versions of their Wave 14 program. Lot's of their major server and client products have been updated with new functionality. More important ALL of them have been redesigned and developed with The Cloud in mind.

With the launch of Exchange, SharePoint and Office 2010 earlier this year, Microsoft began to work to update BPOS* with the new capabilities that these products deliver. Microsoft started with their biggest customers. They have dedicated cloud deployments and now are fully deployed on the 2010 wave products.

In the next update, Microsoft will bring decades of on-premise innovation to the cloud for the multitennant SKU as well. Functionalality will get very close to parity with our server solutions.

WPC10 announcements

During the last Microsoft World Partner Conference in Washington DC a few announcements were made about the Online Roadmap. Microsoft did not provide exact dates for these releases. Buzz is that a preview of the new BPOS offering before the end of this calendar year. I wonder if that will happen...
More accurate and a bit more likely is the estimated timeframe of the delivery of the updates to each of the managed services and new online platform capabilities within this fisical year (Jul '10 - Jun '11).

Microsofts call for action to partners and cutomers is to get ready for this wave and the 'online tranistion', to focus on Business Model transformation and getting customers ready and deployed.

What functionality to expect?

A Lot of sessions at the WPC covered cloud services and next wave BPOS (codename 'Union'). These slides from the slidedeck of session 'CLD09 The Future of BPOS: Next Generation of Microsoft Online Services' provide insight in the updates to come.

SharePoint Online
The functionalities in this slide give insight in what to expect, check the original deck for the detail slide or drop me a note.

Office Communications Server '14' Online
OCS on-premise will be released this fall. Most functionality will move to the online services during 2011. Do not expect to be released in the first update.

Exchange Online

These are three of the most important server products that will add a lot of functionality to the Microsoft Online offering and great opportunities to extend the business solutions that support productivity. Mind that all this functionality is delivered in a total productivity suite and combined with the office 2010 client software provide a great experience in a familiar environment for the end user. Office 2010 (Web Apps) is also part of the Online offering.

* BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services) or Microsoft Online Services is a proposition of Microsoft; Enterprise class software delivered via subscription services hosted by Microsoft and sold with partners

Enterprise Search as part of Business Productivity

Tomorrow - June 3th - I'll attend the Enterprise Search Seminar organised by Amplexor in the Pullman Diegem (B). High expectations given the program. I hope they manage to meet my expectation. The first session planned will set the stage. The approach of this session helping businesses to succeed by aiming on a realistic goal is interesting.

The second session however has my biggest attention. Search as part of the Microsoft vision in the field of Business Productivity supported by a single search platform. If they manage to show some cases to support the scenario they will meet my expectation.

Why my interest? Well Business Productivity is key for businesses. In the competence cluster needed to establish the functionality in an organisation that will be able to optimize the productivity, the development of Search will play a very important roll.

The technological developments due to investments are enormous. Microsoft made a big leap forward with the acquisition of FAST in 2008. I remember the session of Zia Zaman (VP Global marketing FAST back then, now CTO LG) at the soldout SharePoint conference in Seattle (2008) where he showed the FAST product that now is incorporated in the SharePoint 2010 platform.

In that session he explained how the market was devided. Google as the biggest one on the internet (the other approach in the Microsoft vision) but more important the field of enterprise search dominated by Microsoft and FAST.

I loved the longtail slide in his presentation back then. I have to look it up and will add it later.

June 3th:

Oké found it. This picture tells us how the market is (March 2008) devided between the big three and the rest. On the left the Big three devide 30% of the information access market. Most of these search query's are based on internet search scenario's. On the right most of the 70% of the search query's are about Enterprise search data access (ESP). This part is dominated by FAST. Now two years later Microsoft has adopted and integrated a lot af the FAST search capability's in there SharePoint 2010 platform. Picture the total of the Microsoft market and the ESP market (the business productivity part) in the long tail together. That's a very big chunk of the total, but more important: the money is on the right side.