- Public folders for Exchange are here to stay (a while)
- Microsoft PerformancePoint: BI or BS?
- FAST -- Buy a Search Engine!
- Microsoft's march of commoditization continues
- Microsoft's Free Search Server Express Reduces Search Competitor's Air Supply
- Microsoft Virtual Virtualization Announcements Virtually Important.
April 22, 2008
Public folders for Exchange are here to stay (a while)
With the release of Exchange 2007, the Microsoft Exchange team posted a statement in its blog that caused some panic: "We are 'de-emphasizing' public folders -- which means that public folders may not be in our next major release after E12."
That created a frenzy among some IT Exchange admins as they fretted over what they would do without those familiar, useful public folders. Further fueling those fears: Outlook 2007, unlike its predecessors, does not require public folders. This came off as another hint that Microsoft might be looking to force admins toward a new technology, SharePoint, before they're ready for it. Some people have interpreted Microsoft's message as,"Public folders are dead! Move to SharePoint now!"
Fear not! In a more recent post , the Exchange team offered some clarification that should come as a relief to IT admins that are looking for a break from all the changes: You don't need to worry about today is lack of public folder support. They'll be supported in the next release of Exchange and on for some ten years. Who knows what new options will be available by then for enterprise admins to use? So, the move is not essential now.
That being said, there may be situations where you might want to use SharePoint as opposed to public folders. For example, if you are establishing a new environment with Outlook 2007 clients and an Exchange 2007 infrastructure, you might consider Windows SharePoint Server (WSS), which I discussed last week. To its credit, WSS is free, plus it offers superior document-sharing capabilities compared to public folders. You also might look at Microsoft Office SharePoint Services (MOSS), which has a few extra hooks to work with your Outlook environment, as you can read here.
However, if you do decide to make the move from your existing public folder environment to SharePoint, you have some heavy issues to worry about. One of the largest among them is content migration. Several third-party tools are available to assist (for a fee); there's also a free tool that Kimmo Forss has given to the community that you can locate here.
While making the move from public folders now can prepare you for the future, there's certainly no harm in letting the dust settle a bit from all the new releases in the Windows enterprise space. In fact, I recommend sticking with what you know is working for you and your environment. Too much change all at once will wreak havoc on your users. However, on the side, you might want to start getting more familiar with SharePoint services and the concept of tools that mimic or support SharePoint.
Posted by J. Peter Bruzzese on April 22, 2008 03:00 AM
March 05, 2008
Microsoft PerformancePoint: BI or BS?
Inconceivable as it may seem, Microsoft has nearly built from the ground up a BI (business intelligence) application called PerformancePoint Server 2007 (drawing on technologies acquired from Proclarity). Although some will argue that the solution is a "set of BI tools" rather than a performance-monitoring application, PerformancePoint Server has nevertheless garnered positive feedback as a powerful system at a reasonable price.
Now some call this server the Dilbert Server (mocking the pointy-haired boss character who pretends to work but doesn't); others have called it the Magic-8-Ball Server (because when you put your data in, shake it up and ask if your company will succeed, the response usually is, "Fuzzy, check back later"). So I needed to get a bit more information from an expert on this.
I spoke to Ron Barrett, co-author of his and my latest book on administrating Office servers (including PerformancePoint 2007) and asked for his opinion on the server. Barrett has been a technology professional for 10 years, working at major financial companies in Manhattan, and has hands-on experience with PerformancePoint installation and administration for clients. "What I thought was real cool is that I always imagined that business intelligence tools were for finance people, and that metrics were nothing more than a justification for some high-salaried managers to look busy. But really, I was able to create a simple but effective plan for measuring metrics based on non-financial data; in other words, on things that would matter to an IT person," Barrett said of the server.
He went on to describe how in his test environment, he was "able to create a useful business model that I could use in my organization, all this with having no more than about a week's worth of practical experience with the product."
Barrett also had high praise for the ease of getting the server up and running. "As an IT professional, I have been called on many times to implement applications to make end-users and managers more productive. Of course, this calls for some real mental contortion sometimes," he said. "But that was not the case for PerformancePoint Server. Both on the server and client side, the setup and configuration were pretty easy to learn. For the first time in a long time I was not deploying an app that had me attached to a phone line with tech support for three days. Or worse, scrubbing the Google search pages until the wee hours, trying to figure out that one error that is stopping everything from running."
Notably, Barrett acknowledged that he has not worked with any other performance-monitoring solutions prior to testing out PerformancePoint Server 2007. Moreover, he noted that some critics have dinged it because "it lacks some of the advanced analytics they would like to see and it is missing some features available in Excel such as double X-axis graphs."
However, the fact that it integrates so nicely with Excel allows even non-power users to build reports from their existing Excel knowledge.
The bottom line is, PerformancePoint Server 2007 is a solid effort. The fact that Microsoft took a near-ground-up approach really calls for people's attention: The company clearly plans to make a splash in the BI market.
My readers tend to always have another opinion, so let's hear it: Are you using PerformancePoint? Do you love it? Hate it? Have another suggestion? We want to know.
On a side topic, I want to ensure that all readers interested in attending the Microsoft Dynamics CRM have the opportunity to sign up. So, visit Microsoft's site to see event locations and enroll.
Posted by J. Peter Bruzzese on March 5, 2008 03:00 AM
January 09, 2008
Two months after making its own search technology a commodity, Microsoft raised the ante today in the enterprise search space by going out and buying Fast Search & Transfer, an Oslo, Norway-based search software company for $1.2 billion.
FAST gives Microsoft a search reach that extends beyond its own platform and application stores, and certainly makes it more competitive with Google in larger enterprises. FAST also competes with Google for site-specific Web searches, including large commercial sites like CareerBuilder. According to a Gartner research report last spring, FAST was neck-and-neck with competitor Autonomy for market leadership in the enterprise.
FAST has a number of advantages over Google in the enterprise. It has a variety of customized solutions, and its engine can be tweaked and tuned specifically to customer needs. It's also a favorite of consulting firms. And Mark Bennett (the vice president of enterprise search consulting company New Idea Engineering), ironically compared FAST to Windows when describing how it was different from Autonomy (which he compared to OS X).
So, with a single purchase, Microsoft has moved ahead of Google in the high end of enterprise search technology, while it has already made the low end of the search market free. And FAST could conceivably help Microsoft's own Web search efforts considerably as well. While it won't stop Google in its tracks, it certainly does make the search market a bit more interesting.
Posted by Sean Gallagher on January 9, 2008 03:50 PM
November 21, 2007
Microsoft's march of commoditization continues
A little over a week ago, Microsoft offered up the release candidate of Search Server 2008 Express as a free download. The only difference between Express and the full-bore version of Search Server 2008 is the ability to run it across multiple servers for load balancing.
In fact, there's not a significant amount of difference in functionality between Search Server Express and Google's midrange search appliances, other than cost. So, as the Burton Group's Guy Creese writes, Microsoft's search server is a "game changer."
He also notes, "The Google appliance pretty much comes in any color you want, as long as it's black...Microsoft, by depending on partners, can offer an infinitely variable set of appliances." Using Express, partners can move in and build SMB and midmarket solutions for customers.
It looks like Microsoft is taking the same route with virtualization as well. The Windows Server 2008 virtualization component, in beta right now, will be available for most corporate customers for just $28 more than the server license without it. I've been playing with the preview a bit, and aside from some hardware support bugs I've encountered -- it is a preview, after all -- I've been impressed at how simple it is to use. Again, for $28 a server, Microsoft is offering something that might not be the same as, say, the top-of-the-line offering from VMware, but covers substantially enough of the functionality that it's going to have an impact on the market.
All of this is great news for Microsoft partners, who'll be able to piece together solutions for a variety of customers, and for Windows sys admins who are comfortable with Microsoft's server management environment and want to be able to manage virtualization and search from within it. The technology has already been a bit commoditized by open source versions of the technologies, but Microsoft's packaging of them into cohesive, easy-to-install platforms at essentially no cost makes that commoditization even more of an atmosphere-reducing move for competitors.
Posted by Sean Gallagher on November 21, 2007 03:00 AM
November 09, 2007
Microsoft's Free Search Server Express Reduces Search Competitor's Air Supply
It looks like Microsoft is trying to do its best to cut off the air supply of its enterprise search competitors, at least within the Windows realm. Take a look at this review of Microsoft's free Search Server 2008 Express. For those who've committed to SharePoint and Exchange as part of their corporate collaboration platform--or even if you're using Notes--this free search platform meets a significant subset of corporate search needs without any acquisition cost.
Posted by Sean Gallagher on November 9, 2007 07:47 PM
September 12, 2007
Microsoft Virtual Virtualization Announcements Virtually Important.
VMware's very own conference, VMworld, is being held this week in San Francisco. And the company has some big news, including an announcement that its VMware ESX Server 3i virtualization software will be embedded in servers from Dell, HP, IBM, NEC, Fujitsu, and other hardware vendors.
But Microsoft is never happy letting someone else get all the attention, so the company has created some news of its own, announcing that it will be previewing its own virtualization technology later this month, when it pushes the first release candidate for Windows Server 2008 out the door.
The Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the virtualization technology, code-named Veridian, is a trimmed-down version of Microsoft's attempt at keeping up with the VMwares. And it won't be a real product until at least six months after Windows Server 2008 ships -- which, if Microsoft sticks to its latest roadmap, will be in February.
But wait, not enough? Microsoft also announced that the next version of its virtual machine management software, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, will play nice with VMware and Xen--when it is released sometime next year. The first beta will be released sometime in the first quarter of 2008.
So, really, there's not much news there. But it's the promise of news, and enough to at least momentarily distract some from all the VMware hype in the wake of the company's IPO.
Posted by Sean Gallagher on September 12, 2007 06:21 PM
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