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Microsoft Renovates Office Suite as a Web Service
foobsr writes "According to an article in EcommerceTimes, Microsoft is trying to migrate Office from a product to an online service with a focus on automating collaborative work. Quote: 'Making collaboration faster, easier and more efficient will be the next revolution in worker productivity, and we want to be in the forefront,' said Peter Rinearson, vice president for new business development in Microsoft's information worker group"."
Many programs need to work on operating in a collaborative environment. If you've ever coded in such a setup you can really understand how this will be a good thing for office software.
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
I think Microsoft is on the right course here. I pass around docs all the time and use the ever problematic "track changes in word". A wikipedia style approach would be nice, as long as it's usuable and handles images well.
I'm sure they will Call this INOVATION when we all know its just the same old stuff with a web brower on it.
How lame of Microsoft.
And we want you to give Microsoft a copy of all of your important business documents. Who could think that was not a good idea?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I seem to recall there are already web-based office suites available - Hyperoffice comes to mind as one...
...since according to the article:
"Because the next version of Windows, called Longhorn, may not ship until 2007, analysts say, the Office overhaul is needed in the meantime to deliver more Web services technology to the desktop. The new capabilities in the Office system are also needed to lure software developers to create more applications that run on Microsoft products."
If they can't reinvent Office, and their next version of Windows won't be out until 2007, their income streams will dry up and they'll need to tap into their cash reserves, which I'm sure is the last thing they want to do.
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Making collaboration faster, easier and more efficient will be the next revolution in worker productivity
...And they should get rid of that fucking talking paperclip while they're at it.
Aren't they kind of putting the wagon before the horse? Shouldn't they work on making the product just work correctly when you're by yourself?
Trying to work in Microsoft Word is like trying to build a house of cards during a fucking earthquake.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Microsoft will either perpetuate their poor programming practices to a platform that will allow viruses to become even more virulent and worms to spread even faster. Wonderful. Or they'll take this opportunity to build apps that will run cross platform. Alot of potential good here. Mixed with alot of potential bad. Increasing the need for the Windows Server platform if they don't create Office as a cross-platform collaborative environment. Will be interesting to see how this one plays out.
Scientia et Potentia
Since people would probably stop buying newer versions of Office because they won't offer much productivity increase, I think this is a way to force people to keep paying money for Office.
which makes OO and even more appealing option...
How many times have Microsoft internet based services been down for extended periods? How many billions would such an outage cost, in worker productivity, if office was provided a a web service? The implications are downright scary.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
This is not new. I was at a conference over two years ago and heard a talk about .net from some MS developer. Every other word out of his mouth was "software as a service".
What I took home from this was the notion that MS wanted to migrate everything they do to web services... why?
They claim it's because all updates will happen automatically and be transparant to the user.
My theory is that it's really because it gives them total control over what you can do. You will never own anything. Just rent the service. You will always be trapped in the "pay your MS tax or you can't even open your own documents" nightmare. What a terrible plan for the users.
Microsoft needs to realise that Office is firmly fixed in the minds of 99 percent of its user base as an word processor/spreadsheet/presentation graphics/database/email client suite. It wouldn't matter if they bolted a space shuttle onto it, as far as the overwhelming majority of people would be concerned, it would still be all about Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and Outlook.
Trying to leverage Office into other roles is not going to work. Yes, some people will make use of a web service feature but it will go virtually ignored by all but that tiny fraction that tries out everything new Office paradigm because Microsoft tells them that it's the best thing since sliced bread.
Office users get what they want out of Office right now. They're happy sharing documents by email and other means. So why would they and their organisations throw all that away and take the time, effort and money to implement a web services-orientated approach? Who wants to explain to the CEO that he's got to stop asking people to email him documents and start asking them to publish them, and that he's got to do the same with his own output too? Who wants to retrain all their end-users to this new way of thinking?
Microsoft has a real problem right now with its Office suite and it knows it. It's not that Office doesn't work, it's that it works too damn well: what virtually every Office user wants to do document-wise has been possible for quite some time now.
There's very little that Microsoft can do to the individual applications to improve them by delivering new features with tangible benefits, and certainly the applications in Office XP weren't significantly better than those in Office 2000, so it's obsessed with "improving" Office by trying to manage how people work. This kind of improvement might deliver results in Microsoft's labs but in the real world, where people are resistant to change and have a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude, it's doomed to failure.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
subscription based services. This is a step in that direction. Microsoft is scrambling for a way to get people to 'subscribe' to office because they ran out of features worth upgrading for with office 97 (well, for probably 80% of thier users anyway, and that 20% isn't gonna sustain the growth shareholders have come to expect).
:).
I don't see the benefit to this for anyone but Microsoft. I don't think the Internet could handle 250 million people 'streaming' office. Which means something's gonna get installed, and it's gonna be just as much a pain to fix when it breaks as the current office. Oh well, maybe crap like this will encourage openoffice.
Off topic, but I've notice a funny trend in office suites. I'm seeing more and more people running openoffice because their computer got laid waste by a virus, and they didn't get any CDs from thier OEM (or lost em). Buying office without buying a computer isn't an option for most people, so they're driven to oo.org
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Adding a full-blown language with OS hooks into Word, responsible for an entire generation of viruses, wasn't enough, let's make Word even more "powerful".
They seem to keep ignoring that these programs (and whatever they may spawn) have the same privileges as the employee, so if the employee "could tap into all the corporate information" then so can Word and Excel and so will the next macro virus using the new "technology".
Besides not liking to pay for software as a service, there was another huge problem that still is a problem. WAN reliability. I have been amazed at all the people that don't really understand how *unreliable* the wide area connection is.
I had a case where a business was going to ditch their business management system (for an insurance sales co) for a 'web based' system. this was just *after* his dsl had been down for a week. I tried to explain that if he was using the web based system and his dsl went down he would not have *any* information available. And he didn't understand/believe me.
And then their are DOS attacks and other problems on the internet that may prevent you from getting to the MS Office web server.... sheesh.
I expect this to crash and burn again.
eric
I think that's a wonderful move for them really. That's exactly what people have been begging for. It's important that business increases its dependance on the internet as a means of doing business. I think the idea is very sound. By the way, did they ever fix that problem with ActiveX being a huge security risk?
MS Office over the internet will succeed where the Java Web Start failed.
Microsoft has already totally compromised the security of Windows by uintegrating the desktop with the Internet, now you think integrating the office suite with the Internet is a step forward?
A definition of insanity is doing the same thing over again when you know it doesn't work.
You may not realize this? But you hit on another benefit of a web based app. Controlling piracy.
Add in guarenteed revenue stream. Also if MS does this and it succeeds (bad idea or not), then you'll see a rush of other web-based apps.
Throw in the DRM MS has ben working on, and...
Are pirate's days numbered?
Office and SharePoint 2003 have begun this move. It is not turning into a web service as the summary suggests, but instead utilizing web services for collaboration.
The company I work for has been using SharePoint for Issue tracking in our software applications for nearly a year. It was way easier to setup and use than bugzilla and several other free alternatives. And the issue tracker is a very secondary feature of SharePoint!
It allows the creation of document libraries that can associate arbitrary metadata with documents. When you save a document from an Office application is can actually be saved directly to the SharePoint document library (you can browse to the web page in the save as dialog and it shows a little html based page right in the mini-explorer and you can save there like a normal file). After clicking save, if the document library has been extended with metadata (by any non-tech-savvy user) you are prompted to enter that data.
You can also create document workspaces which are document libraries that have an associated message board, contacts list, task list and other odds and ends. All of that information appears in a sidebar in any office application which lets you instant message, email, or assign a task to a contact related to the document you are working on. Documents in any type of document library allow for versioning and check-in/out functionality.
InfoPath is probably the coolest Office application when it comes to collaboration. If you fill out an InfoPath form, the xml output can be funneled into a SharePoint document library which can calculate statistics from the documents and sort/organize them for you.
Its only the first version of the Office System that uses this functionality, and we all know it takes Microsoft 3 tries to get anything just right. Luckily, the system works well on the first try, I can't wait for the third attempt!
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It's also quite possible for others to extend Office functionality to integrate with a document management system. We do it, as I'm sure many, many others do.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
The first thing to realize is that a web service no longer indicates internet anymore. It's a shift in paradigm. It's time for a lot of you guys to throw out your blue polyester shirts and suspenders. Web simply means it's delivered from a central location and typically works through a browser or derivative of a browser. This doesn't mean 2 billion users will be streaming office from microsoft.com. It doesn't mean that when MS's servers go down that the entire world will be without Office.
.NET reaches full maturity and is available for other platforms. Realistically, Linux might be running MS office in the near future.
This is simply the realization of the thin client paradigm. As corporate environments go, it's about time.
And before anyone panics about all those stand alone machines out there (like us developers are all so fond of), there are a bunch of appies out there that are essentially written this way already. VS.NET is web driven. That front end is all xml/html driven. We see it with the MS management console and MSC snappins for it too. This is the sort of thing we're looking at with the future of office.
The front end will be web based. The back end will likely have a few different options and standalone on the local machine I would wager will still be one of them. But at the same time, the back end could be centralized greatly simplifying mangement. I wouldn't be suprised if the next incarnation of Visual Studio can be set up to compile on a central server.
This should in theory simplify development of the Office software and reduce all versions of Office to a single codebase once
Was going to moderate this one, but I would just like to say, if there wasnt a windows, odds are there wouldnt be a Linux (just take a good honest look at the gui, the coding behind it non-withstanding). And if there was a linux, all the cute little sypware and bonzi-buddies of the world would have been written for the prodomatly linux world. Its easy to sit back and bash MS, but if they wernt around, it would be someone else. Its just smart to code crap for the prodomant OS, especially if your purpose is malware.
I am that much more enlightened and proportionally disillusioned
That must have been around 2000-2001, when Microsoft was calling the new version of every product .NET. That was annoying as hell, as most people couldn't even figure out exactly what .net was supposed to be. That's what happens when you let the marketing department get out of control.
I still use Office '97. None of the newer versions, 2000, 2002, 2003, XP, whatever, offer men anything more that I would actually use. '97 has less bloat and plenty good enough for most peoples needs. Sheesh, how many upgrade to each version but get little difference, except for Outlook I guess.
Actually, the clinical definition of insanity resembles this (I'm paraphrasing):
The repetition of previous actions for which there is a known outcome with the expectation of a differing outcome.
You may want to commit that to memory.
When people don't want to worry about the security of their data moving across the 'net (I don't know why, seeing as how Microsoft products are so... ahem... secure... NOT!), or not being able to work when the network is congested or down, they will use something else. Open Office is one alternative (with the added benefit of being free, as in beer)... and for those who want to pay, Word Perfect is still out there...
So Microsoft, knock yourself out. There are other choices. Who knows, maybe after a taste of open source software, people will start using Linux more? ;-)
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
I'm sure this will be another blow to alternate browsers. More than likely they will end up having this Web Office as an ActiveX control and people with Linux/Mozilla/Opera/etc will be unable to use it. If this is purely aimed at business why don't they just intergrate it into the next "Windows Server" so that business's can still use applications. It really doesn't make sense to me having to work through your browser.
Ah, thanks.
:)
So it's collaborative, but not concurrent - I guess that solves a good portion of these problems, but may hamper workflow. I guess it's a decent trade-off, at least from the software developer's perspective.
Microsoft has nasty habit they have of creating so-called "websites" that don't follow standards and won't run on anything but Windows, where they use the same entry points and callbacks that cause security problems for the native code. If I still have to use a Microsoft "browser", it does nothing for collaboration. In fact it makes the situations worse as you won't be able to use anything like Crossover anymore.
If I want a collaborative online environment, I use a webserver and CSS. Why would I want to go anywhere near a proprietary lock-in format just to share content? Why not WebDAV? ssh-ftp with a file manager hook ala Gnome? CVS?
My third concern is standalone operation. Just how in the world am I to do editing at a cabin, while travelling, or otherwise unable to connect at any kind of useful speed?
Not that it really matters, I guess, as I use Open Office for pretty much everything except Excel. They did do a nice job on the spreadsheet, and too many sheets have to use non-portable macros.
Eventually maybe Microsoft will clue in that "service model" does not mean the same thing as the old mainframe style "software rental." It's not a cash cow to keep sucking people's wallets, it's a way of providing flexible updates and maintenance as ongoing services instead of oft-delayed "service packs" or patches.
Besides, what makes Microsoft think I'd even think about letting their servers manage my document data? That stays right here in my managed environment where I know it's backed up and safe, thank-you-very-much!
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
"Consider this, if people subscribed to Office instead of the way it's done now, there'd be no more backward/forward compatibility problems. If MS updates the software, everybody's quickly up to date."
Also, if MS updates the software, everyone could be instantaneously file-incompatible with OpenOffice or whatever other competitor MS is worried about. If this beast really gets under way, MS could make it impossible for companies to *ever* get their data back and shift to other software.
That's fine for the enterprise license holders which ( might ) be allowed to run the services on their network.
Problem is home users wont get that luxury, and will have to start renting their office suite, if they are going to stick with a Microsoft based suite.
But we all knew this day was coming so its no surprise. They will also move their OS to that same model, if they can find a way.
---- Booth was a patriot ----