Obvious football reference aside, it seems that Microsoft is in hurry-up mode. The introduction of webapps to Office is a welcome development, but certainly not unexpected.
What does this shift in Office architecture suggest? In the enterprise, this adds up to lower deployment costs, but it likely won’t provide any relief in licensing costs as volume licensing agreements will surely compensate. It means lighter, role-specific apps and lots of built-in features.
So Microsoft will provide lighter web-based apps and the question on everyone’s mind will be what kind of adoption will we see. After all, once Microsoft arrives to the game, it legitimizes the rest of the field and all the wanna-be offerings out there. Microsoft will leverage their familiar application and integration experience to get adoption quickly.
Oh and back to the two-minute offense, the goal is in sight, exploit your strengths, everyone do what is expected according to the plan and we will win the game. And Execute Execute Execute.
Microsoft is in it to win it.
I have been mulling over an interesting idea since the first Windows Azure announcement at Microsoft PDC: AD Federation to the cloud. This is the holy grail of cloud computing! The biggest problem I’ve seen in enterprise cloud computing adoption is the ability to seamlessly integrate enterprise on-premise applications and cloud apps. No one wants to maintain two sets of credentials, two sets of everything really just to work internally and in the cloud. Microsoft’s announcement that they will let users federate their enterprise AD with the Azure platform is HUGE. IMO, it’s the biggest cloud-related announcement coming out of the conference.
So, why Live? Well, currently Microsoft Azure and Windows Live seem to be separate and disparate platforms. However, there’s a lot of synergy (yeah, I hate that word too but it’s appropriate) there. Some of the functionality in Azure is exactly what Windows Live needs to be a compelling competitive advantage in the business market. Microsoft Online services currently has hosted/managed Exchange 2007, Sharepoint 2007 and now Office solutions. Office Communications Server, OCS, has been promised in the future. The operational difficulty of managing two sets of infrastructure (Authentication, Auditing, help desk OpEx, etc) has been a huge barrier. However, the ability to mesh a company’s internal AD infrastructure with a cloud solution makes Microsoft a compelling solution over Google and others. Currently no one else can offer this functionality and my guess is it’s possible MSFT won’t be willing to share. Although some have argued Microsoft was late to the cloud party, this development immediately moves them to the front.
Yes, I also mentioned the upcoming cloud based OCS offering. When I first heard about this I wondered how they were going to pull this off? How do you integrate a cloud IM/UM/etc offering with an onsite PBX and onsite AD. The federation functionality is the key. There may need to be some schema extensions added to AD but it’s certainly within the realm of possibilities to make this integration happen. I’m really interested to see exactly how this all will work, but I see the vision. And I like what I see.
P.S. I apologize for the disappearing act in not posting for a while. I’ve been down with a killer sinus infection and needing to sleep 12+ hours a day just to function semi-normally for 8. I’ve also been working on a lot of really exciting but NDA-only projects with a few vendors so most of what is exciting to me right now I can’t share.