Move your business or move to the cloud

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Moving physical information - the old days
In the old days moving to an other location was a hell of a job. The basement contained more than ten kilometers archive. Stored there for years to come. Most files are kept because of legislation. Although some files are kept to be sure instead of sorry.

Moving physical information - put it in the datacenter
In the last say ten years things changed. Is it possible to digitize these paper files? Can we store the data on disk to avoid the enormous growth of storage room needed? Indeed we can to a certain amount. Still legislations was a boundary or is it just us not wanting to change?

Another mind shift caused change. Why not (re)use the data? Make it available in a more profitable way to the organization? Technologie provided us with a portal, search engines to make data available. We even managed to interpreted the data and turned it into information and nowadays we taking steps to knowledge be reusing and recombining the retrieved information.

Still we suffer from cold feet. Security and access rights trow a spanner in the works. In order to satisfy our sense of security we want to keep the data closeby and keep information hidden for the organization.

I know it is not easy and can feel uncomfortable to embrace change, but you know, we have to in order to move forward. Consider the following story and decide for your self if this is what we wish to keep doing. Is this where we want to put our money?

Move your business - physically

The city of Den Bosch in the south of the Netherlands is building a new hospital. It is located near the new constructed center called 'Paleiskwartier'. In the end three hospitals will move from 6 locations to one new modern hospital in the center of the city.

Jeroen Bosch Hospital is moving to a new location

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It will be close to the railstation and a lot of facilities you expect near to a modern hospital.
In order to manage information effective and efficiënt the hospital has there information about their patient digital available. The physician and the nursing staff have the needed information at hand immediatly when needed.

Down in the cellar their are no paper files left. All data is stored digitaly, even information is available to the organization. More than a year ago the hospital decided to move to this new location. A huge opperation with a big impact

Moving the archive (probably a more than 30km paper equivalent) which is digitized is a complete other kind of operation. The equipment where these files are stored have to be deinstalled from the original datacenter, shiped to the new location and installed in the new datacenter. This is far beyond normal operation.

System managers are used to fade out old equipement, moving data to new hardware and keeping systems operational. But once the equipement is litteraly going offline and is loaded in a truck other professionals are moved in.

Risks of moving

Moving this kind of delicate equipment, still mounted in their origional 19 inch racks with this huge amount of information installed, needs years of preperation. When the operation is started it has to be finished as sceduled till all equipment is installed, tested and proved operational in the new datacenter.

Taking out 'hibernating' information out of the safity of the datacenter is a risk for security, will interupt normal availability and continuity and therefore all aspects of risk are breached.

Moving the equipment physically will impact even more to the risk of loss. Ofcourse the data itself is backed up and the restore procedures are tested and proved. But these measures are invented in case of problems and these has to prevented in the first place. So the route from the old to the new location is analysed. Obstacles are removed, meaning litteraly removing bumps so the truck will move as smooth as possible.

The adjustments to the route made this operation complex and very costly. This made me courious. There is another way to move information from one location to the other, we use it every day. Why not removing every obstacle that is causing all these risks in the first place? The fact that the information is stored on these physical assets causes these complexity in the operation.

Moving your Business or moving to the cloud

If the retrieval of information, the collaboration services and the dossiers of the patients where located in a cloud, the operation described would take about a second. True, moving to a cloud based infrastructure is not a walk in the park. It is a big challenge and a lot of chief officers responsible for all aspects of secure and high quality information have second thoughts about moving to the cloud. But when you start planning and preparing to move your business, you might considering moving to the cloud.

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)

Social Media can be powerfull - even for Social Media

A rumour started a chain reaction. Yahoo! will shutdown the social bookmark service Delicious. The tag #Delicious ended up as a worldwide trending tag. (however a lot of the tags are just about Delicious). The twitter account @delicious must have noticed, as they are claiming in their profile: The official Twitter account for Delicious from Yahoo!. We listen to people talking about Delicious, and we respond. Yay.

So Yahoo! discovered that their early introduced services is appreciated and responded by placing a blog post : Whats next for delicious. So it looks like this early public folksonomy service will survive.

Still wondering what will hapen to Yahoo! as a company. Early 2007 their was a serious rumour about a take over from Microsoft. In the same period Microsoft took over the highend search technology from FAST. The takeover did not succeed. However mid 2009 Microsoft and Yahoo! ended up with an agreement - Microsoft will power Yahoo! Search.

Now December 17th an article describes how the employees of Yahoo! are reacting on these socialmedia attention.

Is Yahoo! preparing to sell just a little bit more than 'just' their folksonomy service?