(Cross posted from CloudAve)

Microsoft announced today its rollout plans for the 3rd wave of Windows Live services.

The goal of this latest release wave, according to company officials, is to simplify the use of the offered services and unify the user’s entire online experience into the Windows Live interface.
Microsoft is planning to rollout the new services, currently in beta, to the public within the 1-2 months timeframe.

Windows Live Goes Social

One of Microsoft’s main emphasis with the current wave of services is on social networking between users using its services.

Microsoft finally figured out that its Live Messenger with about 268 million users worldwide, is by far the most popular instant messaging software in the world, is actually a social networks. With the new release, your Live Messenger contacts are now your Friends and you can see aggregated information about their activities on the net.

Very much like Plaxo, FriendFeed etc. Microsoft allows users to bring into their profile content they create in all sorts of services on the web (Live Services, Flickr, LinkedIn, blogs and RSS feeds, …) and share it with their friends and colleagues.
When users add photos, write reviews, and update their profiles directly on Live.com, that content will be put into their activity stream as well.
This activity stream is exposed in all sort of ways throughout Microsoft’s services interface.

For example, Microsoft’s new Live Home portal shows the latest events in your social network. When emailing a friend or chatting on Messenger you’re also able to interact with that friend’s activity stream and more…

Not just for private consumers…

I’ve been told that all these new service updates will not skip Windows Live Domains used by universities and organizations to create a personalized version of Microsoft’s services.
If that really the case, having all these new social capabilities as part of its domain offering can be amazing for collaboration and communication inside the organization.
While Google doesn’t seem to care about its Google Applications for Your Domains customers its good to see that Microsoft is going forward with Live Domains.
This latest update may just be the final straw I need to make the switch to Live Domains…

Where’s Live Mesh?!

It will be really interested to see where Live Mesh comes into the picture in regards to all of these Live services.
Live Mesh should be the glue bridging between Microsoft’s online services and its offline applications and devices (S+S) allowing users to sync all their content- contacts, photos, events, favorites, etc. - across devices and services.
Unfortunately, there’s no clear answer for that…

During the launch we’ve only heard about Live Sync allowing users to sync photos across computers. Some sources say its an incarnation of FolderShare and in any case it doesn’t seem to be based on Live Mesh technology.
With Live Mesh being one of Microsoft’s core platform offering its really hard to understand why we need to have Live Sync too…

Other notes…

• All the services are released simultaneously in all countries and in 48 (!) languages.
• Windows Live Skydrive size limit has changed from 5GB to 25GB
• Windows Live Hotmail looks and feels a lot better to use.
• I’ve uploaded all the screenshots of the new services to my SkyDrive:
  

Tags: Google, Live Mesh, Microsoft, SkyDrive, social networks, Windows Live

(Originally posted at Cloud Avenue)

This year’s Microsoft Profesional Developers Conference is full of announcements and surprises. The next big announcement besides Windows Azure (and Windows 7?) is the new “Office Web Applications” live service. The Office team will be delivering the five most popular Office applications as light weight browser based versions that include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.

Here are some of the demo screenshots available:

The applications will be offered in both a simple HTML/AJAX version and a rich-client Silverlight version.
Office Web Applications are not planned to replace Microsoft’s traditional desktop offering but rather complete it, together with Mobile Office for mobile devices, allowing users to seamlessly work on their documents across all environments.

Providing such a reach collaboration environment isn’t a simple task as you can see in the following interview of Antoine Leblond, Senior VP of Office Productivity Apps and Chris Bryant, General Program Manager:

Although its not meant to replace its Desktop Office offering, one of Microsoft’s biggest cash cows, one has got to wonder about the risk these new services to cannibalize their big desktop brother’s profits. Windows and Office, which are Microsoft’s core business, are likely to stay its core moneymakers for at least the next 2-3 years, maybe even longer.
This move clearly shows that Microsoft is starting to think beyond that and along with its other platform announcements (Azure, Live Mesh…) we can clearly see a trend away from desktop software to rich clients installed from the web….

Office Web Applications will be released to a limited set of partners and customers at the end of this year. The release date will closely align with Office 14 and Windows 7 which will be sometime in late 2009 or early 2010.
Microsoft plans to make Office Web Applications available as a service through its Live platform supporting both an ad-funded and a paid-subscription models.
Business users that require an on-premise will be able to do so through Sharepoint via its traditional volume licensing program.

Tags: Cloud Avenue, Desktop Office, Microsoft, Microsoft Office, Mobile Office, Office, Office 14, Office Live, Office Productivity Apps, Office Suites, Office Web Applications, PDC 2008, Web Applications, Windows, Windows 7

(Originally posted at Cloud Avenue)

Windows Live™Microsoft’s Windows Live ID team just announced their support for OpenID calling it a “de facto standard Web protocol for user authentication.”

Beginning today, Windows Live™ ID is publicly committing to support the OpenID digital identity framework with the announcement of the public availability of a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Windows Live ID OpenID Provider.

You will soon be able to use your Windows Live ID account to sign in to any OpenID Web site!

What does it means for users?

OpenID allows users to maintain their identity information (Name, E-Mail, address, etc.) on a single provider and use that information to register and login to any website that supports OpenID. This relieves the user from having to fill out registration form and maintaining multiple different user names and passwords and profiles on different sites add provides a simplified online experience while increasing security.

Over 400 million LiveID users will soon be able to use their LiveID to do just that – login and provide identity information to any site supporting OpenID without the hassles of filling out registration forms and saving user\password information and with the user experience common to all OpenId sites (or, maybe even common to their familiar LiveID user interface?)

The wide adoption of OpenID led by Yahoo and Microsoft provides the required push for site owners to support OpenID providing the same simple and familiar login interface everywhere…

What does it mean for web developers?

With a simple integration effort that shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes, site owners can relieve themselves from taking care of authentication and registration process while providing their users with a simple familiar interface for signing up and using their services.
OpenID provides an easy and secure mechanism for authenticating and registering users, and with additional online services (like JanRain’s RPX) site owners can handover the entire care of handling their user information to the cloud – cheaper, faster, more secure.

For now, the LiveID team is testing their system’s OpenID Provider which is at a CTP (Community Technology Preview) stage. Widespread support is planned for “sometime in 2009″.

[Update: Screencast Overview]

Tags: Cloud Avenue, Federated Identity, LiveID, Microsoft, OpenID, Security, Windows Live, Yahoo

Reading Mary Jo Foley’s Microsoft 2.0 it suddenly struck me: Could Microsoft’s next killer OS be SharePoint?

Instead of being quite so blatant, Microsoft has taken a quieter back route to achieving the same ends via two related technologies:

1. Baking SharePoint reliance into more and more of its products
2. Requiring users to buy pricey client-access licenses (CALs) in order to use Microsoft’s servers

Microsoft has been basing a growing number of its products on SharePoint technologies to provide basic common services like storage, pub/sub, identity/security infrastructure, communications and collaboration functionalities.

With SharePoint’s BDC catalog and search server it is apparent that Microsoft is targeting SharePoint to serve as an integration layer on top of services and LOB applications in the organization.

…

Read the complete post at Cloud Avenue.
(Oh, and while at it, you may want to grab the CloudAve feed. Thank you.)

Tags: Cloud Avenue, Microsoft, MOSS, SharePoint, SharePoint technologies, Windows Cloud OS

(Originally posted on Cloud Avenue)

Jeff Barr from Amazon Web Service reports that Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) is now storing more than 29 billion, an increase of 7 billion from the previous quarter:

As one of the S3 engineers told me last week, that’s over 4 objects for every person now on Earth!

Our customers are keeping S3 pretty busy too. To give you an example of what this means in practice, the peak S3 usage for October 1st was over 70,000 storage, retrieval, and deletion requests per second.

Amazon is also lowering the prices on S3 storage, with a new four-tier pricing plan that takes effect on Nov. 1st.  Customers storing more than 500 terabytes will get a rate of 12 cents per gigabyte.

With such a huge amount of data, low prices, and abundance of success stories, it really seems like Amazon has got a revolutionary service on its hands…

Tags: Amazon, AWS, S3, Simple Storage Service

Cloud Computing is the latest, hottest new buzzword in today’s information technology world. However, and much like other buzzwords such as Web x.0, it seems to be losing whatever meaning it once had as an increasing number of companies, not wanting to miss out on the latest hype, are starting to use it for their product’s PR campaigns….

Read the complete post at Cloud Avenue.

Tags: Amazon, Cloud Avenue, Cloud Computing, Oracle

We’re living in an age of technological revolution in the computer and information industry – the age of utility computing. Connected to the internet’s global computing grid, massive information-processing plants are pumping software code and data to our homes and businesses.

Armed with new business models and technologies that take advantage of the internet cloud, new competitors like Google, SalesForce.com and Amazon are threatening traditional software giants like Microsoft, SAP and Dell by changing the way software is built, sold, delivered and maintained.

On the way to making computing an efficient, cheap global commodity we’re facing new difficult business and technological (and some might even add political) challenges. There’s a lot of exciting innovation ahead…

Certainly, such a technology tidal wave deserve its fair share of coverage, which now comes in the form of the recently launched Cloud Avenue – A new blog, edited by Zoli Erdos and Ben Kepes, that will focus on cloud computing topics.

Cloud Avenue where, working with a few like-minded bloggers we’ll focus on the intersection of Cloud Computing, especially SaaS and Business, ranging from small business to enterprise.

… We also have our CloudLab - for product / service reviews.  Yes, we will report on products, but do not strive to be a mini-TechCrunch: we have no intention to report about everything new.  We’re not a news-blog.  We’d rather sit back, analyze a market, find key players, then produce a series of reviews / comparative analysis.  Quality before quantity or urgency.

Launched a little over a week ago, it has been pretty active with over 20 posts already. Below are just some of my personal highlights from the first week:

• What would I do if I was Steve Ballmer?
  I must say I have to disagree with most of what’s there. Still worth a read…
• Oracle Open World’08 Key Note - Cloudy Announcements!!
• Anti-Virus in the Cloud
• Cloud Computing: The myths, realities and everything else – Part 1 & Part 2
• Cloud Computing Making Forensics Easier

So join me in welcoming Cloud Avenue to the blogsphere

Oh, and one more thing…
I’ve been invited by Zoli to join the CloudAve writing team and I’m definitely going to make some writing effort there. Should be interesting…

Tags: Cloud Computing, SaaS, Technology, Utility Computing

About half a year ago, just before my lengthy travels to Bangalore and Seattle I came to the conclusion that its about time to take my emails online so that they’ll be accessible from anywhere, not just the Outlook client on my personal machine.

Google Applications for your Domains seemed like exactly what I needed:

• I could keep my ekampf.com email address
• 5GB of online storage - no need to take care of backups etc.
• GMail’s spam filter
• GMail’s web interface which is a lot better than the interface my domain host had to offer
• Online Calendar and Address Book

Included Services:

• Email (obviously)
• Calendar
• Start Page

“The personalized start page is a syndicated version of iGoogle, allowing you to set up dynamic homepages for your users that bring together your content, Google services, and the best of the web.”

• Chat - GTalk integrated with the Email service
• Web Pages - Allows you to create web pages for your domain using the Google Page Creator.
• Sites

“Google Sites is an online application that makes creating a team web site as easy as editing a document. With Google Sites, people can quickly gather a variety of information in one place - including videos, calendars, presentations, attachments, and text - and easily share it for viewing or editing with a small group, an entire organization, or the world.”

So, how do Google Apps stand up to the expectations?

The Good

Setup

Setting up my Google Apps for Domains account and configuring my domain was quick, smooth and simple.

Migration from Another Online Service via POP

GMail supports getting mail from other accounts via POP3. Simply go to your Google Apps mailbox, click Settings|Accounts and you can add a POP3 account for Google to fetch information from. I fetched all the information from my old email account without any problems.

When I wanted to import the mail items from my gmail.com account I got a message saying that GMail for Apps can’t import from a Gmail mailbox via POP.
You have to use Outlook\Thu8nderbird as an alternative…

Migration from Outlook

Since I was using Outlook as my main email client before switching I had lots of emails on a local PST file (and several backup PST).
In order to move all these emails to Google I used Google’s IMAP support in Outlook and drag-and-dropped all my items from the PST into Google’s IMAP folder.

Note #1: that the Outlook 2007 support for IMAP sucks. It simply hangs when trying to move a large amount of items, so you have to perform this operation on small item batches….

Note #2: You can use this method to migrate mail items from any online service that Outlook can connect to. I used it to migrate my gmail.com account too…

Mobile Support

Google’s mobile HTML interface for GMail works great. They’ve also got a GMail Mobile application that I’ve installed on my E65.
Now I can really access my mailbox from anywhere…

The Bad

Migration from GMail accounts

As noted in the previous section, Google Apps do not support fetching items via POP from Gmail mailboxes. I’d expect Google to make migration from GMail to Google Apps smoother, allowing me to merge my accounts.
This leads us to the second point which I find most annoying…

Severity: Bad.

Google Accounts CHAOS - Google Apps Accounts ARE NOT Google Accounts

So far, that’s the most annoying issue with Google Apps.
I expected Google to support identity federation but they don’t. My Google Apps account can only be used for logging into my Google Apps (mail, calendar, docs, etc.). In order to access any other services Google has to offer (Google Reader, Google Code, Analytics, Adsense…) I have to keep a gmail.com account (which means another mailbox etc.).

I can’t tell you how annoying it is that in order to use the new friends feature of Google Reader I have to add all my contacts to the gmail.com address book and GTalk. I have to maintain two identities to be able to work with Google…

Severity: Awful.

Different Codebase Than Regular Google Services

It seems that the Google Apps codebase branched out of the main Google development code.
This is most noticeable when looking at iGoogle vs. Google Apps Homepage.
Google Apps users do not get the latest features and Google is in communication blackout as to its plans for Google Apps.
There’s no Google Apps Blog, no roadmap describing Google’s plan for this service and I haven’t noticed any enhancement in the service so far.

Seems like Google just came up with an initial beta for a bunch of services, branched out from its main codebase and just left the project hanging in mid-air.

Severity: Awful.

Google APIs are not Compatible with Google Apps

I’m using Plaxo to sync my Address Book and Calendar between all my devices, computers and online accounts.
From all the services out there, only Google’s calendar sync was buggy until not long ago (seems to work fine now) and Address Book sync doesn’t work at all (it supposed to work one way only according to Plaxo but I was never actually able to get that work at all).

There seems to be all sorts of compatibility issues between Google services APIs and Google Apps.

Seems like I’m not the only one suffering here as Zoli posted about his Google Apps troubles too…

Severity: Bad.

Google Start Page

Simply doesn’t measure up to its iGoogle brother and the other competitors. It looks bad and there enough good content available to make it usable…

Severity: Bad.

The Summary - Google Apps Chaos

For the simple use of online email, Google Apps deliver what is expected of it.
However, it seems like Google is in chaos with its services strategy:

• You have to maintain several identities to use different Google services.
• No clear roadmap for Google Apps. As a customer, I hate the uncertainty…
• Google Apps are branched out from Google. Again no word from Google on feature parity or integration efforts…

Google Apps could have been a great service for individuals and small businesses, but (as usual) Google seems to be missing it and yet again
providing us with a functionality impaired “beta” and no vision…

Maybe its time to look for alternatives. Microsoft Live seem to handle most of the mentioned issues so its worth to take a look…

Tags: Cloud Computing, gmail, GOOG, Google, Google Apps, productivity