Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog

Microsoft Introduces Unified Communications Tools for Developers

Blogger: Mike Gotta

What's the significance of this announcement?

There was some signaling at the recent UC launch event in October that Microsoft’s next move would occur in the development area re: building UC-enable business and productivity applications. The announcement is significant in the sense that often times applications help build the business case for infrastructure upgrades and deployment. In this case, if IT organizations can see how to build UC-specific applications, or augment existing applications through UC-related services, then the business case for adopting/migrating/deploying products like Office Communications Server (OCS) becomes more comprehensive. By delivering an application scenario around its UC platform, Microsoft alleviates some of the delays that occur when infrastructure upgrades lack an identifiable business solution. That said, there are a lot of different combinations of API's in this announcement – to some extent this reflects some lack of maturity and cohesiveness around the development model for Microsoft’s UC platform. In some ways, the API’s reflect a mashup of sorts due to multiple products being packaged together into a “platform” that is not entirely normalized. While there are a lot of API's here (arguably, an abundance of riches), application developers are not system engineers and simplification wins out over complexity. There will likely be some initial confusion on the various different approaches and techniques programmers can adopt to deliver UC-based systems. I would expect Microsoft over time to raise the abstraction layer up a notch and be more consistent with the different ways applications can be built with the various toolkits.

What does it bring to developers? See above – plus – this leverages the experience (e.g., .NET) developers already have with Microsoft tools (e.g., leverage UC plug-ins for Visual Studio).

How credible is Microsoft's position in the unified communications space?

Very credible but it has different areas of competency that are at different levels of maturity. Microsoft’s core strengths are in the real-time collaboration re: IM, presence, web conferencing. They are rapidly moving into the area traditionally dominated by communication vendors – VoIP/IP Telephony, audio/video conferencing. But right now, I believe most organizations are going to deploy OCS and “get stable” around the real-time collaboration capabilities, then move to VoIP and integration with existing communication vendors as driven by business requirements. I don’t see anyone ripping out their existing IP-PBX infrastructure in the short run. I do expect more rapid adoption of Round Table however given its price point, form factor and integration with Live Meeting. But make no mistake, Microsoft is in the UC game for the long run and fully intends to dominate it from a platform perspective - that includes mobile and speech as a standard application interaction model.

Who is the typical "developer" they're targeting for this stuff?

Different segments – Microsoft wants to make it easy for the average developer to UC-enable productivity applications, deliver deeper, more complex UC-centric systems and extend the modality of applications with speech interfaces – so I really think it is across the board – from the historical “VB”-like developer to the IT Pro who might be developing at a core infrastructure level.

Microsoft Introduces Unified Communications Tools for Developers

Q&A: Kirt Debique, general manager for Microsoft’s Office Communications Platform & Solutions Group, discusses how a new Unified Communications Developer Portal will provide enterprise developers with secure and reliable tools for building applications.

Related Links

MSDN Unified Communications Developer Portal

Developer Tools News

Unified Communications Virtual Pressroom

Redmond, Wash., Nov. 30, 2007 – In October, Microsoft launched the next generation of its unified communications products, including Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS 2007) and Office Communicator 2007. To further support the company’s software-based approach to business communications, the company today unveiled the Unified Communications Developer Portal on the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN). The portal includes a number of resources, including new software developer kits (SDKs) and application programming interfaces (APIs), to help developers build compelling applications on Microsoft’s unified communications platform.

PressPass spoke to Kirt Debique, general manager for the Office Communications Platform & Solutions Group, about how these resources will help enterprise developers build applications on Microsoft’s unified communications platform.

PressPass: Why is Microsoft making these tools available to developers?

Debique: We’re a platform company, and that philosophy is an especially powerful differentiator in the unified communications space. For example, Exchange Server 2007 is a foundational component in our unified communications solution, and the Exchange Server Developer Center has proven to us how important it is to have one place to go to for developers to create a vibrant community. Following the launch of OCS 2007, we want to provide developers with the tools to build communications solutions on our OCS platform. We strongly believe that it will be developers that will ignite the next generation of innovation for our customers.

Microsoft Introduces Unified Communications Tools for Developers

Other Links:

Microsoft Unified Communications: How Developers Can Blend Messaging, Voice and Conferencing with Next-Generation Applications

UNC301: Unified Communications for Developers: Building Communications Into Your Applications

Brainstorming and Innovation

Blogger: Craig Roth

I had an interesting discussion this morning with my colleague Mike Gotta about brainstorming and innovation.  After sharing what each term meant to us, it became clear that each has its place and they are complementary concepts.  I'm not always a fan of the Wikipedia articles on concepts that IT folk deal with, but the articles on innovation and brainstorming are actually quite good at the moment and are worth a read for some background.

Like all great research areas, innovation represents a process rather than a technology, fuzzy concept, market, or discrete project. It involves tracking and sorting through all the innovation proposals, ensuring the best ideas rise to the top, and continues to manage the process through implementation.  Innovation can also be built into research processes. Pharmaceutical consumer packaged good companies, for example, devote an incredible amount of energy into innovation as a repeatable process with replicable practices.  A good research discipline can systematically create proposals that can lead to something innovative.

But where do the ideas come from in the first place?  That's where brainstorming comes in. While creative spark is often seen as as something that comes out of the blue, research and experience has shown that it can be created on demand as well.  A brainstorming process acts as a spark plug to generate that creative spark.  It consists of an environment where ideas can be thrown around without immediate judgement, different angles can be recommended by participants to help generate ideas, and others can build on ideas to see where they go.

I don't think I'd go so far as to isolate innovation to a pure execution process, but it does seem that brainstorming is think-heavy and innovation is do-heavy (this is the fun of blogging: without peer review and editing cycles I get to make up new words!).  Ideally, there would be integration between the brainstorming process and the innovation process so that once a good set of new ideas is generated they can be passed on to the innovation process to be prioritized and, if deemed worthy, implemented.

Both brainstorming and innovation can leverage communication, collaboration, and community.  They involve a wide array of people, in different roles, from different locations, inside and outside the organization, and with different points of view. This requires good communication technology to enable concepts to be bandied about.  Collaboration can help the participants to work together within a persistent workspace where a record of the exchange of ideas can be kept.  Subscriptions and notifications allow participants to be actively or passively aware of the discussion as desired. 

Innovation is the hotter topic at the moment with 127 million hits on Google (compared to a measly 16 million for brainstorming and 69 million for creativity), but both have their place in an enterprise.  After all, for an enterprise, there are few things more sad than a good idea not implemented.

ODF * 2 and Open XML

Blogger: Peter O'Kelly

A timely reality check from Mary Jo Foley -- OpenDocument Foundation folds. Will Microsoft benefit?  Excerpt:

The OpenDocument Foundation — a group whose name and charter would lead one to believe that it was backing the OpenDocument Format (ODF), but which ended up backing a different document format instead — has closed its doors.

Sam Hiser, a systems consultant who was Vice President & Director Business Affairs at the OpenDocument Foundation, confirmed that ODF is closing its doors in a blog post on November 13. Hiser and a number of the other OpenDocument Foundation backers earlier this year decided to throw their weight behind a Worldwide Web Consortium document standard, the Compound DOcument Format (CDF), and back away from ODF.

Read Mary Jo Foley's full article for more details.

Coincidentally, I'm currently working on a Burton Group document on OpenDocument Format, Open XML, and related topics.  Some of my impressions:

1.  "OpenDocument Foundation" was an unfortunate name choice, due to the namespace collision (ODF = OpenDocument Foundation and OpenDocument Format; the latter is the name of the OASIS and ISO document format standard; the former is the name of a now-defunct group originally sponsored by OASIS that was chartered to help advance the use of OpenDocument Format).

2.  ODF (the OASIS-sponsored and subsequently abandoned group) went cold on ODF (the document format) after the standards group shepherding the model declined to incorporate some extensions recommended by the group -- extensions which would have, among other things, made it possible for OpenDocument-formatted documents to round-trip with Microsoft Office users in workflows without losing Office document metadata.

3.  ODF (the group) selected the W3C Compound Document Formats as its path forward, and announced it was no longer advocating ODF (the standard).

4.  A bunch of press channels picked up the "ODF abandons ODF" story and apparently didn't do sufficiently detailed homework on the charter/status/etc. of ODF the group.

There's a lot more to this topic -- stay tuned...

BI Is Now Infrastructure

Blogger: Guy Creese

With IBM's planned purchase of Cognos announced yesterday, business intelligence has become part of infrastructure. At this point, only SAS (privately held) of the large BI players remains independent. Oracle bought Hyperion, SAP bought Business Objects, Cognos bought Applix, and IBM has now bought Cognos.

This is interesting in that the infrastructure players are going after search as well, so no matter what form your data takes -- whether it's structured or unstructured -- companies such as IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle plan to search it and report on it with in-house solutions.

Lions and Tigers and Androids, Oh My!

Blogger: Karen Hobert

I'm being pulled into the Google phone debate internally at my office. Here are my initial impressions:

1. The pre-announcement hype whipped up such speculation that when the actual announcement came out on November 5, 2007, the reality was far from the expectation (a la the iPhone) of a new device called the "Gphone." I'm sure many in the industry had to make calls to their chiropractor to work out the whiplash that they now suffer.

2. The announcement actually brings to the public a project that has been in the making for sometime. Google purchased a Silicon Valley start-up, Android, in July of 2005 as a way to start addressing the mobile market and how Google could get onto more mobile handsets - a problem Google has been suffering over for sometime now. So Google took the DIY approach and decided to buy/create its own, new, open source application platform for mobile devices.

3. Google's "self-sacrificing" decision to make Android open source is a quasi-socialist way - in the form of the Open Handset Alliance (OHA) - of making sure that Google interfaces (read advertising) can make to as many mobile devices as possible. Faced with all the motherhood and apple pie that open source offers, who needs to pay attention to the man behind the curtain? It's the man behind the curtain that concerns me. Like Java, which is controlled by Sun, Android is controlled by Google, a vendor that has very specific business designs in mind. I can guarantee you it's not for altruistic reasons. "Gee Eric, we've made so much money here, let's give something away for the benefit of the consumer."

4. "Co-optition" approach to the market. Google has already collected some hefty mobile players to join the OHA, including Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, LG, Samsung, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile, and others. Nokia, who owns 48% of the Symbian operating system, is considering joining. Notably missing are the two largest US providers AT&T and Verizon/Vodaphone. The AT&T/Apple alliance is an obvious reason to steer clear of OHA, but what might not be obvious is despite past forays into Java mobile platforms, Verizon seems to be tight with Windows Mobile at the moment. I still think this is all a bunch of kumbaya lip-service. Face it the cellphone market is controlled by the providers (especially in the US) and they aren't going to give up that control anytime soon. Joining the OHA is one thing, ceding control of the handset to Google is quite another. See my colleague, Richard Monson-Haefel's, recent post on what he thinks Android means to the cellphone provider business model.

5. Is it business grade? Business applications typically come with more requirements for security, heavy data lifting, governance, policy-based control, records management, business application integration, and other requirements. Google is a consumer vendor first and foremost. It remains to be seen if a Google driven application platform can support business-grade mobile applications. My colleague Guy Creese offers some interesting commentary in his report Google Apps in the Enterprise: a Promotion-Enhancing or Career-Limiting move for Enterprise Architects? on Google's consumer colored glasses and its Google Apps.

Still I believe that Google's approach will have an impact on the mobile market:

• It adds yet another application platform to an already overly confusing market. Mobile operating systems aside, we now have proprietary mobile app platforms (e.g., BlackBerry, Palm, and Symbian), Java-based platforms (including Android and Eclipse.org based extensions such as IBM Lotus Expeditor), Microsoft's .NET platform on Windows Mobile, and closed interfaces such as the iPhone. So it's reasonable to expect more market confusion as things are "duked out" in this space.
• It polarizes a huge issue within mobile application space; too many operating systems with no standards or common APIs. How can enterprises expect to build mobile applications when there are so many platforms to support? Limiting the devices that users work with is getting harder to do. The iPhone in the US proved how a consumer device can turn the mobile strategies of an enterprise on its ear when users demand the freedom to pick their own mobile device.

Although the near-term confusion will make for colorful media commentary and raucous saber rattling, this is ultimately good for the customer. Maybe not immediately but in the future - when the dust settles - and we end up with open and common application platforms for mobile devices. With, or without Android.

E-mail Is Not the Only Communication Tool

Blogger: Craig Roth

I just got back from speaking yesterday at the Shared Insights (now IIR) conference on Portals, Collaboration & Content about how to pick the right tool for the job when trying to communicate, collaborate, or post content. As soon as I got home I saw an article in the Wall St. Journal by Lee Gomes (11/7/07, page B1) called "Email Is Letter-Size In a Big-Parcel World, But Help Is Coming" (available online here). In it he attempts to tackle the problem of users trying to email large files by recommending solutions that enable sending of large files.   As he puts it "A number of companies, with all manner of business plans and technology models, are in the business of being for email what UPS is for regular mail."

But why is the assumption being made that email is the right way to be exchanging these large files?  And that if email isn't working, one should look for a tweak that is very similar that gets around the problem? What is needed isn't equivalent to "what UPS is to regular mail."  Maybe what's needed is what a storage locker with multiple keys is to mail.  Or what an a passenger airline is to mail.  Or what a bulletin board is to mail.  Or a newspaper ...

Mr. Gomes says that Will Kennedy, general manager for the Outlook team, promises new versions of Outlook and Exchange will make this easier.  But why not talk to Derek Burney over in the SharePoint group who could easily describe how to create a space to post up files of any size for public or private use.  And you could actually collaborate back and forth on the document, maintain versions, and store discussions about it too while you're there.

One of the biggest problems with e-mail is that users are so comfortable with it that even when dozens of other tools exist to do better handle what they want to do (such as document libraries, portals, RSS feeds, web content management, instant messaging, blogs, wikis, discussion forums, the telephone, face-to-face interaction, etc.) they try to shoehorn everything into e-mail. 

Specialized solutions exist as well depending on your specific need and industry.  For example, I'm currently researching globalization and translation issues for content management.  A common problem is how to exchange large amounts of content with translators.  A specialized software category has emerged called Globalization Management Systems that get all of the file transfers and communications out of email and into a specialized forum that is purpose-built.  Since these files can be quite large (such as a helicopter service manual) no amount of tweaking to an e-mail system would work very well even though one may be tempted to try.

In January we published a document by Karen Hobert entitled "Enterprise Messaging: E-mail’s Evolving Role in Optimizing Communication and Coordination" (client access only).  In this document, Karen said it best:

Enterprise messaging does not have to be a bad experience for users or enterprises. E-mail can be purpose-focused, coordinated communication that plays a pivotal role in the broader communication/collaboration landscape. This can be accomplished as long as organizations stop trying to use e-mail for activities that it is not designed to do and provide users with complementary communication and collaboration solutions that support the activities that they turn to e-mail to complete.

Microsoft's Free Enterprise Search: Game Change in Progress

Blogger: Guy Creese

Today Microsoft announced two new search servers: Microsoft Search Server 2008 and Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express.  The interesting one is the Express version, since it's free. (A download is available -- warning: it's beta software, although Microsoft says it's close to final -- at http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/.) Furthermore, the only difference between it and Search Server is that Search Server can be run on multiple servers for load balancing.

This announcement is a game-changer, in terms of Microsoft's relation to its arch competitor, Google, as well as the market in general. In several calls I had with reporters, I was asked, "Is this Microsoft playing catch up to the Google Search Appliance?" Yes, but with a twist -- while Microsoft is not offering a search appliance itself, it certainly expects its partners to do so. However, the Microsoft offering is a bit more nuanced than the Google Search Appliance. The Google appliance pretty much comes in any color you want, as long as it's black. The static nature of the appliance often becomes an issue over time -- at least according to the clients I talk to -- because as they get more sophisticated about search they want to have greater control over the search results. Google has recognized this issue and continues to roll out more tunable knobs as a way to counteract this problem. However, the reality is you have to take the appliance the way Google has configured it.

Microsoft, by depending on partners, can offer an infinitely variable set of appliances: tweaking this knob and adding these connectors before delivering an appliance to a customer. In my view, it will not be long before the market sees a search appliance for law firms or a search appliance for manufacturers, all based on Microsoft Search Server Express. Furthermore, the appliance will be supported by a local partner with a hand you can shake. In my view, this combination of customization and high touch will allow Microsoft to get broader penetration than Google has been able to get with a static appliance and low touch (which, to be fair, is still thousands of installations).

In terms of the market at large, this is Microsoft commoditizing the market, something it has done before. Back in 1998, Microsoft entered the BI market with products such as SQL Server 7 and OLAP Services (now called Analysis Services), going against best-of-breed vendors such as Business Objects and Cognos. While the best-of-breed vendors remain (although Business Objects was just bought by SAP), Microsoft has carved out a good chunk of this market. In 2006, the BI portion of Microsoft's business generated revenue of $480 million and was growing at 28%.

A decade later, Microsoft is doing the same thing with search, offering Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express at the entry level product, as well as a migration path (Microsoft Search Server 2008 for load balancing, and SharePoint Search for SharePoint installations).

This set of products will be a boon to Microsoft partners and SMBs, and be an alternative to enterprises who thought the Google Search Appliance was the only low cost enterprise search solution offered by a major vendor. While even Microsoft admits it will be a long slog getting enterprise search into most businesses, it has taken its first step -- and based on past history, figures slow and steady will win the race.

Moving Globalization and Localization Concerns from Afterthought to Forethought

Blogger: Craig Roth

Below is an excerpt from an article in today's Wall St. Journal (11/1/07 page B3).  The article is called "How Netlog Leaps Language Barriers". It describes how much easier it was for Netlog to translate its web site into multiple languages than it was for MySpace because of proper forethought to the translation process:

Compare that with what MySpace had to do when it wanted to launch in non-Western languages like Japanese and Russian. The site had to rewrite the code of its entire Web site, a Herculean task that took MySpace's 40 developers six months. "It was pretty controversial internally," said Travis Katz, MySpace's managing director for international. "But we thought this was the right thing to do; international growth is the key to our future."

Turkey is an example of how quickly Netlog can move. In July, Mr. Bogaert decided to launch a Turkish version after noticing that Turkish immigrants living in Germany were congregating on the German site. He found two Turkish exchange students to translate the site. Four months later, the site has 2.5 million users. Mr. Bogaert estimates that it cost about €1,000 to launch.

The article describes the capability Netlog used as "a novel tool the software developers came up with to make the site easy to translate."  It's not really novel.  It's called code internationalization.  As described by Wikipedia "The current prevailing practice is for applications to place text in resource strings which are loaded during program execution as needed. These strings, stored in resource files, are relatively easy to translate. Programs are often built to reference resource libraries depending on the selected locale data."  This is precisely the method used by Netlog. 

I see two take-aways here: 

• First is the value of moving localization concerns to the beginning of the planning process from the end.  By building the content with translation in mind (more specifically, focusing on code internationalization), costs were reduced from 240 man months to 8 and reaction time was improved from 6 months to 4.   
• Second is the importance of the business treating globalization as a first-order imperative.  Interestingly, both companies seem to treat globalization as critical to their growth (the quote from Mr. Katz is a great example), but only one has pushed that message down to the people doing the work so it can have an actual effect.

This example was related to code internationalization, but it applies just as well to static websites and non-web content.  Moving globalization and localization to the beginning of the planning process rather than the end and recognizing globalization as a first-order business imperative are essential for organizations that seek growth outside their home markets.

Note: This is a cross-posting from Mr. Roth's KnowledgeForward blog