This should prove to be a great online session for attendees to learn how to build cloud-based applications using Windows Azure.  An added treat is that the session will be delivered by three of Microsoft’s foremost technology experts, Scott Guthrie, Dave Campbell, and Mark Russinovich.  Having heard each of these gentlemen speak during my tenure at Microsoft, you won’t be disappointed.

Register now for this great event.  Oh yeah, the event is FREE!

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• Deployment Planning
• Starting with well-configured infrastructure
• Security and access management
• Search database optimization
• Monitoring Latency
• Testing of crawling and querying subsystems
• Antivirus

Definitely worth a read.  Check it out!

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Let’s round out this series with a word on complexity of the respective cloud offerings from Google and Microsoft and provide a different perspective on who’s truly positioned to capitalize on the cloud.

It’s no secret why Microsoft wants to win with Office 365.  Protection of the platform is a key component to its growth and market leadership.  However, is that not what Google is trying to do?  If Google can protect the web platform, what will that widespread acceptance allow it to do?  While Microsoft has the perceived “monopoly” on the desktop, what’s Google’s advantage?

Let’s be frank here, the introduction of Google Apps is NOT to provide users with robust online collaboration and information sharing tools that it plans to build the next generation of its business with, but rather to get Microsoft to divert its energies away from the ultimate prize, the INTERNET.  How does Google make money? The INTERNET, and more specifically, search and advertising.  With more users opting for internet-based tools, the more of a surface Google has to inject its keen business sense on capitalizing on this tremendous market.

As a matter of fact, Google Apps have started learning some lessons from Office 365, and is moving at a feverish pace to improve the offline experience. Why? Because if momentum shifts back to the “desktop”, then that impacts Google’s bottom line.  Can’t sell advertising on the desktop.  Search is free, however, it’s a vehicle to the several hundred billion dollar advertising industry.  Why do you think Bing exists?

All-in-all, both platforms have their pluses and minuses, with both vendors constantly lobbying their product as the better solution.  Microsoft has been in this game for quite a while and Google, even with its massive success, is *still*, relatively speaking, a new kid on the block.  Microsoft’s effectiveness is not the result of it’s ability to innovate, as there is no question that Microsoft can be innovative when it wants to be.  And Google’s effectiveness will not be the result of its ability to roll out new features quickly (and buggy ).

What’s going to truly win this battle is who will be the first to achieve the “holy grail” of interoperability. The true “visionary” will be the one who can tear down the walls that are beginning to get created within the cloud and allow the industry to truly realize what the original intent of the cloud is and how it can make our digital lives a lot easier.

Support for open standards as it relates to data protocols for information exchange, standardization of authentication/authorization methods for user access, security protocols for ensuring that communication from the PC/Mobile Device/Browser to the cloud and inter-cloud platform communication is as secure as Fort Knox, and a clear execution of these standards within the respective offering is what’s truly going to establish the market leader, IMHO.

So, dear reader, while you can certainly be entertained by all of us technology wonks about what does/doesn’t make for the better platform, at the end of the day, you have the power of choice. Choose wisely.

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Here we cover collaboration capabilities within the respective cloud offerings from Google and Microsoft.  Collaboration is defined as working together to achieve a common goal.  Document sharing is part of collaboration activities, but it in itself is not collaboration. Mr. Nauges article suggests that Google Apps has better collaboration capabilities.  So I suppose that capabilities such as:

• Integration between Office Web Applications and Office desktop productivity suite (supporting rich documents, offline editing, and document co-authoring)
• Simple setup experience
• Instant Messaging, Presence Awareness
• Voice/Video/Web Conferencing (including multi-party online meeting and video conferencing capabilities)
• E-mail/Voicemail
• E-mail Archival/Retention

don’t really make Microsoft a viable competitor here This is not to bash Google Apps, because for many organizations that need a quick collaboration solution with a basic set of capabilities in order to conduct day-to-day business tasks, Google Apps could certainly be a viable choice.  However, the point here is while it is your choice, based on what your needs are, don’t be misinformed. Get the facts. By the way, how long was Google Apps in “Beta”?

The cost comparison cited in Mr. Nagues article doesn’t quite cover ALL of the costs associated with the respective solutions.  Here’s some additional information, with respect to the costs of the solutions that you, dear reader, may want to take into consideration, as it’s always wise to look before you leap.

Stay tuned to the next (and last) post in this series around platform complexity and round out with my final synopsis.

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Now,  let’s cover the area of mobility features for the respective cloud offerings from Google and Microsoft and dive a bit deeper into the author’s claims that Google Apps provides better mobile device support in comparison to the capabilities provided by Office 365.

“Anywhere, anytime, and on any device”.  I find it amazing that the industry now embraces a vision pioneered by Microsoft, called Software + Services, whose 3 screens vision has made its way into the technology roadmaps of leading competitors! Now I make no excuses about Microsoft dropping the ball on Mobile, far beyond the scope of this article, but in the industry at large. Windows Phone 7, Windows-based multi-touch devices, and innovative technologies like Kinect will reshape how we interact with the world in the years to come, but it is very apparent that in today’s market, it has a long way to go. With the rapid advancement of mobile technology, it grows increasingly difficult to keep up with the change and both Google Apps and Office 365 are learning from this.

Today’s IT organizations, in the wake of security breaches and other malicious threats as it relates to the protection of their intellectual property, are looking for solutions that not only provide users mobile access to data, but do so in a secure manner and provide the necessary controls in order to manage that security. E-mail is perhaps the most dominant mobile app for business users, aside from the growing popularity of Angry Birds, and will continue to be an area where Office 365 hands down has the more superior solution.

Rather than spend time in this post trying to list mobility support features in Office 365, Microsoft kindly put this information in a document that’s available for download. Rather than go with my opinion (or that of the author of the article I’m critiquing), get the facts for yourself.

With all the knocks the author seems to levy around the lack of mobile support within Office 365 and the need to have Windows-based devices to unlock capabilities within the platform, not once has he covered the challenges of accessing Google Apps with non-Google mobile devices, like… say… Windows Phone. You have to rely on an assortment of 3rd party add-ons to get the most basic of functionality. Things like document editing/authoring, calendar synchronization and other capabilities beg for an integrated phone app experience versus just accessing the pure web-based applications provided by Google. Office Mobile integrated with Office 365 provides a superior productivity experience. While it’s true that mobile support outside of Windows-based mobile devices are lacking, the same could be said for Google Apps as well, can it not? Again, it’s your choice, but don’t be misinformed.

In the next post I’ll talk about collaboration support with respect to the two cloud offerings.

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So, let’s cover the area of technology platform for the respective cloud offerings from Google and Microsoft and dive a bit deeper into the author’s claims that Google Apps provides a better cloud platform in the following areas:

• Browser support and the author’s claim that with Google Apps, you’re not restricted to using a “fat client” to do “serious work”
• Multitenancy

Browser vs. Fat Client

Both Office 365 and Google Apps provide browser accessible capabilities through their respective offerings that allow information workers to create, share, and collaborate on documents. Mr. Nauges made a comment about users who wanted to do “serious work” having to invest in the Office client version as if to say that was a bad thing. What if I’m in an occasionally connected environment or an environment with no connectivity at all and need to have ability to author or review documents and capture the results of those activities? With Google Apps, I’d need a fairly stable, “always on”, internet connection.

Through Office 365, I have the ability to work offline and then resynchronize my changes when I’m in a location that has an adequate internet connection. Sure, one would argue that with the pervasiveness of the internet and the various connectivity options, that connectivity is a thing of the past. Well, tell that to the thousands of organizations who to this day are frantically trying to increase their infrastructure budget to address network connectivity challenges for their business users or consumers who’ve invested in various internet services providers and run into sporadic spurts of internet connectivity due to oversaturation of the provider’s respective networks, resulting in downtime (and hence, lost productivity) of the consumer trying to access his/her online collaboration and information sharing environment.

Office 365 wins in this category, as it provides the power of choice. You can choose the browser, the phone, or you can choose the Office client installed on the PC, based on what option better suits your business scenario. And contrary to all the hoopla about the speed of internet services, there is NOTHING faster than accessing locally on your computer.

For those unfortunate CIOs who, as cited in the Mr. Nauges article, were “tricked into deploying Microsoft BPOS, the precursor of Office 365″, has anyone bothered to ask them why they chose BPOS over Google Apps to begin with? You’d be surprised at the answers you get, and they wouldn’t necessarily contain the negative impressions that he would like you to believe.

One thing Mr. Nauges failed to mention were the growing number of unfortunate CIOs who were tricked into deploying Google Apps, only to realize that it has nowhere near the number and level of features and capabilities of its competitor and introduce “hidden costs” that they didn’t anticipate in their budget. Just ask Capgemini, Serena Software (who used to be a Google Apps Sweetheart), and the State of California (isn’t that where Google is located? ), who made the switch to Google Apps, only to come back to BPOS/Office 365. It’s all about the power of choice and finding the right tool for the job at a predictable price point.

Multi-tenant vs. Multi-Instance

Multi-tenancy isn’t exactly THE deciding factor as to what defines a cloud solution. Characteristics of a cloud computing solution, as defined by the National Institute for Standards & Technology (NIST) include:

• On-demand self-service: A consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each service’s provider.
• Broad network access: Capabilities are available over the network and accessed through standard mechanisms that promote use by heterogeneous think or thick client platforms (e.g. mobile phones, laptops, and PDAs)
• Resource pooling: The providers’ computing resources are pooled to server multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned according to customer demand.
• Rapid elasticity: Capabilities can be rapidly and elastically provisioned, in some cases automatically, to quickly scale out, and rapidly released to quickly sale in.
• Measured Service: Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource use by leveraging a metering capability at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service (e.g. storage, processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts)

So by the very definition of cloud computing, one could argue that neither Google Apps nor Office 365 are *true* cloud computing solutions. Office 365 isn’t multi-tenant today, but Google hasn’t come out and definitively said they provide an environment that supports rapid elasticity? And if it doesn’t, does it make it less of a cloud computing solution than Office 365? Do consumers care as long as their data is protected and made available via secure controls that they can control? Again, you, the consumer have the right to choose. It’s all about the power of choice and finding the right tool for the job at a predictable price point.

In the next post in this series, I’ll discuss mobile device support with respect to the two cloud offerings from Google and Microsoft.

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We all live in a world of choice. The power of choice is a freedom that we hold dear. But with that power, comes great responsibility. Choosing the right cloud computing strategy is no small undertaking. The proverbial “acronym soup” (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS) coupled with the tremendous of amount of technical jargon and promises by cloud computing platform providers have “clouded” (no pun intended) the true vision and intent of cloud computing and the benefits it can bring to consumers and organizations.

It’s no secret that the promise of the cloud has fundamentally shaped our industry. We’re now starting to see “the cloud” making its way into mainstream media, with commercials now airing on television talking about the power of the cloud and how it was enabled someone to access their photos or recover their documents. Leading cloud vendors have begun to capitalize on the cloud computing wave and are all fighting for dominance in what will be one of, if not the biggest technical innovation since the creation of the personal computer when it’s benefits are truly realized that maturity of cloud computing offerings reach a stage of maturity where they are viewed as the “default” technology decision rather than just being an “option”.

I also find it interesting how industry analysts, technology “purists”, and general instigators view this phenomenon and jump at the opportunity to inject their opinions to stir the cloud pot and spark a new age of thinking with regards to the cloud and how consumers and organizations alike should view it. The marketing attacks and guerilla sales tactics that get launched against cloud solution vendors and providers with the intent of bolstering the capabilities of one platform over another is growing at a feverish pace, and it is this type of activity that has masked the true potential of the cloud and how we all can take advantage of the new capabilities it brings, new markets it helps spark, and new modes of innovating thinking it fosters.

Take for example business collaboration and information sharing. It is apparent, having recently read Google Apps vs. Office 365: your choice, that the two leading cloud-based information worker productivity platform offerings from Google and Microsoft (Google Apps and Office 365 respectively) are making tremendous waves within the tech industry.

What I find intriguing though is that you never seem to get an unbiased view of the technology offerings. Louis Nauges, chief cloud evangelist of a Google Apps integrator, provides us with an insightful blog post of the pros and cons of the respective platform offerings. However, after reading the post, one would think that it’s more of the pros of Google Apps and the cons of Office 365 versus a down the middle, unbiased comparison of the two platform offerings.

At the end of the day, CIOs, CFOs, and your average consumer are looking for the right tool for the job that provides the most cost effective, cost savings per feature perspective of the solution offerings and not just get what one product can deliver over another without any sound reasoning as to why that’s good or bad. Exploring Mr. Nauges article a bit further, I’d like to break down each one of this points in future posts in this multi-part blog series and offer a different perspective and reiterate the charge in both the title of Mr. Nauges article, and mine, that the “choice” is truly yours, dear reader, and not influenced by one of the solution providers that were surprisingly depicted as organizations who wanted to make a quick buck (which is ironic considering the original article was written by a Google Apps solution provider, but I digress )

Enjoy!

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I worked closely with the Microsoft Gold partner responsible for the implementation, Synteractive Coporation, and basically was able to do something unprecendented as it relates to deploying highly trafficked internet websites on the SharePoint platform.  Synteractive has a team of some incredibly talented folks and it was definitely a pleasure working with them to deliver this fantastic website.

While I knew that the Synteractive team equally enjoyed working with me, little did I know that they were eager to get me to join their team!   For anyone who knows me, they know that without a shadow of doubt, I’m probably one of the biggest advocates of Microsoft products and technologies and have had a long standing career in delivering Microsoft solutions, so much so, that I spent the past almost 6 years employed at Microsoft helping customers define new solution architectures that exploit best-in-breed Microsoft technologies.  Well, apparently, Evan Burfield, CEO of Synteractive, and members of the Synteractive team, knew this as well and wanted those skillsets within the walls of Synteractive.

So, all of this being said, my “big” announcement is that I accepted a position with Synteractive as their Public Sector Chief Technology Officer (been there since mid-October 2010)responsible for driving technology strategy and architecture within their Public Sector business, which constitutes a signifcant portion of the company’s business.  Synteractive has some tremendous opportunities to reshape how technology innovation can be infused with business strategy to deliver compelling solutions to some of the toughest business challenges and our vision and approach to tackling these challenges will be game changing.  While it was a difficult decision in leaving Microsoft, this opportunity still allows me to ensure we do our part to secure the success of the Microsoft platform and continue upon Synteractive’s mission of solving the really big problems in the world involving social and technological innovation.

Although my employment status has changed, the focus of this blog hasn’t.  As a matter of fact, we got so many hot opportunities going on at Synteractive, I can’t wait to start talking about them! So stay tuned!

Oh yeah, did I mention we’re STILL HIRING!

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I was recently asked to comment on a blog post written by independent blogger, Ken Graetz, who is the eLearning Officer and Director of the Winona State University in MN, who pointed out some key distinctions between SharePoint Produdcts & Technologies and the popular social networking platform, Ning.  In Mr. Graetz post, he calls out the following distinctions between Ning and SharePoint:

• Ning sites offer many more social networking than SharePoint sites. In other words, when you enter a default Ning site, it looks and feels like it should be used for social networking. When you enter a default SharePoint site, it looks and feels like it should be used for file sharing.
• Customizing a SharePoint site to support social networking is not as easy as tweaking a pre-configured Ning site. Although I love SharePoint’s complexity, I am also a major geek and most team site members won’t share this love. That means we will either need to modify their sites for them, create great templates that can be used without major modification, or train selected members to be site designers/owners. WSU eLearning is working on a set of video tutorials and we have created, using SharePoint, a virtual community of practice around, “Working Together Differently,” that includes a SharePoint special interest group.
• The average SharePoint ”contributor” can’t create the equivalent of a Ning Group. There is no “Create a group” button.
• Sharepoint’s People and Groups lists contain personal profile information and pictures of members, but it’s not easy to expose that information on the main page (e.g., similar to Ning’s Featured Members component). This contributes to the overall impression that a SharePoint team site is not a very social place.
• SharePoint’s equivalent to Ning’s My Page is called My Site, which exists independent of any team site and is presented in two views: public and private. The private view is very useful. Essentially, all users have their own personal workspace that they can modify as needed. Among other things, the Colleague Tracker Web part lets users access their colleagues’ My Sites quickly and easily. Unfortunately, most of what’s displayed in the public view cannot be changed by the user. The value of fixed parts like Memberships, Sites, and Organizational Hierarchy are apparent only if that information is managed well centrally. If it’s not, the public site can be a very confusing place for visitors.

In response to Mr. Graetz’ comments, I’ll say that I have to agree and disagree in many respects.  To clarify, I’ll address his points individually:

• Ning sites offer many more social networking than SharePoint sites.
  • I disagree.  Let’s put into perspective the fact that SharePoint was not originally designed with social networking in mind and has had to play a bit of catch-up as it relates to adding social networking capabilities. I believe this comment was largely targeted at capabilities, or the lack thereof, within versions of SharePoint pre-2010.  In many respects it depends on which context you’re referring to when you say social networking.  Like Ning, SharePoint has support for:
    • Unique member profiles
    • Moderation and privacy
    • Invite and Share
    • RSS
    • Support for Photos and Videos
    • Discussion Forums
    • Blogs, Wikis
    • Etc.
  There’s been a large misconception when defining social networking in the context of SharePoint, which is an ENTERPRISE collaboration platform.  To that end, capabilities like knowledge/people networks, expertise finders, My Sites/Personal Sites, team sites for groups (which can be “templatized”), and the broad community support with 3rd party and open source add-ins for other capabilities make it a platform that’s capable of addressing many social networking needs.
• Customizing a SharePoint site to support social networking is not as easy as tweaking a pre-configured Ning site.
  • I agree.  Ning provides a number of tools out-of-the-box to easily configure a social networking-based website.  However, we should also keep in mind that this was built into Ning’s design from the start.  SharePoint requires some customization and doesn’t provide out-of-box templates that provide social networking support (e.g. you don’t have a team site pre-configured with web parts that provide immediate connectivity with Twitter and Facebook for example), however that’s not to say that you can’t tailor a SharePoint solution to provide these capabilities.  In future versions of SharePoint, there are plans to address this and make the product “socially smart” out-of-the-box.  But again, this has been response to customer requests versus woven into the original design of the platform.
• The average SharePoint ”contributor” can’t create the equivalent of a Ning Group.
  • Group creation in SharePoint (from the perspective of comparing it to Ning) is based around the provisioning of team sites or document workspaces where as you provision one of these sites, you can choose who you want to be a part of that “group” within the context of the site.  So, per that point, I agree with Mr. Graetz here.  However, when creating a community, ideally you’d want some landing space where they can collaborate in discussions, share content, etc., and SharePoint does provide that capability out-of-the-box.  If we liken the concept of Groups to establishing “Communities of Interest” you can certainly do that in SharePoint and then the added bonus is that within SharePoint you can actually target content to a particular group, thereby allowing you to customize the user experience of a given site.  For example, let’s say I provision a team site and invite 50 people.  Obviously, at that point, I’ve given 50 people the ability to access that one site.  Well, if I then create 5 “communities of interest” within that site and add 10 people to each group, then I now have the ability to tag content within lists or the list itself to only display for certain communities of interest.  In SharePoint, this is called audience targeting.  Something to my knowledge Ning can’t do.
     
• SharePoint’s People and Groups lists contain personal profile information and pictures of members, but it’s not easy to expose that information on the main page
  • I agree from the perspective of providing users with the ability to expose this information in an out-of-the-box user experience.  But again, when SharePoint views a user’s personal profile information, it is secure by default and will only expose information if told to do so.  SharePoint follows a more enterprise-oriented process as it relates to users, profiles, etc.  However, because of the integration facilities it has, it can certainly act as an “aggregator” of profile information and pictures from a number of internal/external sources and can be customized to surface this information on the main page, albeit with more effort than Ning.
     
• SharePoint’s equivalent to Ning’s My Page is called My Site, which exists independent of any team site and is presented in two views: public and private
  • Nothing to agree or disagree with here.  He’s correct that the SharePoint My Site is equivalent to Ning’s My Page and of his synopsis regarding the user’s ability to customize the Public View.  However, I disagree with his last statement if he’s talking about it in the context of SharePoint alone.  This is a challenge for ANY application that exhibits these types of capabilities. The success of a SharePoint deployment or any website is driven by sound information architecture.  Also keep in mind the context in which the My Site was originally introduced.  As I mentioned in a previous bullet, SharePoint was originally designed to provide ENTERPRISE capabilities, and as such, the intent of the My Site was to provide a central point to create a “personal” space in an intranet setting for a user and has evolved to encompass what we now know as Knowledge/People Networks and define “identity” within an organization.  It currently lacks the social element of integrating with more public social media vehicles like Twitter or Facebook, but again, that wasn’t is original intent.  However, as stated earlier, newer versions of the platform will be more socially aware and recognize these public social vehicles as first class citizens within the “day in the life” of an information/knowledge worker.  We’re already seeing some of that capability surface in products like Outlook 2010 that now sports social connectors for Facebook and LinkedIn and will evolve to encompass micro-blogging via Twitter.

So while Mr. Graetz makes valid points, I would classify his overall assessment to comparing apples and oranges.  Moving forward, SharePoint will morph into a platform where what are deemed as “strengths” within platforms like Ning will be become a commodity feature that’s “just there” the moment you deploy your SharePoint server.

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Yesterday during our Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) being held in Washington, DC, Bob Muglia, President of our Server and Tools Division at Microsoft, announced the limited availability of our Windows Azure Platform Appliance.

Windows Azure™ Platform Appliance is a turnkey cloud platform that customers can deploy in their own datacenter, across hundreds to thousands of servers. The Windows Azure platform appliance consists of Windows Azure, SQL Azure and a Microsoft-specified configuration of network, storage and server hardware. This hardware will be delivered by a variety of partners.

The appliance is designed for service providers, large enterprises and governments and provides a proven cloud platform that delivers breakthrough datacenter efficiency through innovative power, cooling and automation technologies.

To learn more about what the appliance has to offer to your organization, head over to the Windows Azure Portal.

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