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Microsoft Office 2010, Dissected
CWmike notes a review by Preston Gralla of the soon-to-be-released Microsoft Office 2010. "I review plenty of software packages throughout the course of a year, and it's rare that I come across one that I believe will truly make a difference in the way that I work or use my computer. With Office 2010, which recently hit RTM status, it is one of those times. The main attraction, as far as I'm concerned, is the Outlook makeover that makes it far easier to cut through e-mail overload and keep up with your ever-expanding group of contacts on social networking sites. There's also an improved Ribbon that now works across all Office applications, and some very useful new PowerPoint tools for giving Internet-based presentations and handling video. Question is: Is Office 2010 good enough to stop the defection to Google Apps? Some large enterprises are seriously considering jumping from Exchange to Gmail, or already have, reports Robert Mitchell. The final version of Microsoft Office Web Apps, the Web-based version of Office, isn't yet available but is expected before summer."
yes but is it dead yet... Otherwise that would be too cruel, even considering it's only a MS product and not some sentient GNU software
"There's also an improved Ribbon that now works across all Office applications"
I don't care, unless there's a "classic" menu mode I'll stay with OpenOffice or older MS Office versions. I know some people like the ribbon, but I really, really hate it.
...I can simply relate what things I believe and the things I hear from other CTO/CIOs regarding Google Apps and using Google Mail in a corporate environment. Everyone I know is adamantly against the idea. It isn't because there are technical shortcomings, it's simply because of liability and privacy. That's it, plain and simple.
The idea that our company would place our mail and documents, and the mail and documents of people communicating with us into the hands of another company who are not tightly bound by laws regarding retention and usage? Makes my skin crawl.
I wonder who the first company to be bought by Google will be using Google mail and apps while negotiations are ongoing? ;)
Thanks, but I'd rather only have to worry about the ISP, not the ISP and the Cloud. It's unfortunate because I have no interest in running mail servers, exchange servers, file servers, I just want to make software.
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Does Excel still have the WTF-like window management? (2 items show on the taskbar, 1 main window)
I guess you have not used OWA on Exchange 2007 then. It works just peachy on Chrome and Firefox. Gives all the context menus and looks the same.
>some large enterprises are seriously considering jumping from Exchange to Gmail, or already have
We use Google Apps and we are thinking about moving away from it. First off, their customer service sucks, two you get occasional outages and extremely poor performance quite often and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.
Google Apps (spreadsheets, documents, etc) are usable only for non-professional things. Like documents shared within a work groups. Don't even think of using them for professional needs that will be used outside the company.
The contacts / calendar is nice. Especially if you have a Android phone where it syncs directly to it without having to hooking it up to your computer. (providing you aren't also trying to sync a normal (read personal) Gmail account. Gmail doesn't let you connect both a normal Gmail account and a Google Apps domain account at the same time (which REALLY SUCKS)
I've used Exchange and if managed properly, you can minimize your pain. Though we've also been looking into OpenXchange. It seems to have many pluses and some minuses also. (clunky interface)
I've been using the beta for awhile and I can say without a doubt that it's far better than Office 2003. The ribbon menus, in Word especially, are actually easier to use than the menus of 2003. And some of the other features, like auto-print preview, automatically showing what new formatting will look like, and the navigation sidebar, are actually useful. There are still some bugs, and the interface in Excel isn't as easy to get used to, but in general I'd say 2010 looks like it will be worth the price of the upgrade. I say this as someone who never got used to or liked 2007.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
FTA: "The File button, by the way, replaces the Office orb button from Office 2007, which Microsoft says thoroughly confused people -- many thought it was a piece of branding eye candy rather than a functional button."
Indeed. Now how much do their UI people get paid?
"As a CTO?" I am curious. If you don't mind me prying, what company's CTO selects a Slashdot username of "Assmasher"?
Actually, now that I think of in a broader sense of what internet industry you may belong to, I withdraw my question.
My work here is dung.
I don't know what you're talking about... people have been sitting in cubes manipulating data in spreadsheets for decades now.
-Riskable
"Those who choose proprietary software will pay for their decision!"
as long as Outlook continues to encourage top-posting and HTML formatted content, and discourage quoted reply trimming, it will still suck.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Of course not.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
It's a reference to D&D, apparently. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1592034&cid=31595704
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Here's hoping they've also fixed some of the inconsistencies in the ribbon as well - it's incredibly frustrating that you can adjust some formatting in one application but not in another - you'd think they share the same codebase. Are they just trying to protect us from having too much control over our documents?!
Until we can use Google Apps on an Airplane, we'll be sticking with Office for Mac for the foreseeable future. There are things I like about Google Apps, especially when you need to share a document for editing during a conference call. But the privacy problem renders that to anything you don't mind your competitors seeing. And with the advent of better screen sharing tools, it renders those needs fulfilled for us.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I work in the IT group of a Fortune 100 company, and to be honest, I see little difference between using Gmail and other third-party companies. For example, we use Symantec as our mail filtering/virus scanning company. Every e-mail that comes to and goes from our company goes through servers located physically on their premises, and as far as we're concerned, it's a "black box" of a scanner--we don't know all the nitty-gritty details of what all they do when they're scanning our mail, we just know the end result. And it's a lot of mail--just the other day, our gateway crashed for a couple of hours, and they held over 14,000 e-mails for us while we worked on getting it back up.
Granted, I don't know what legal agreements we have in place with Symantec, but if you want to be paranoid, you could imagine all sorts of evil things they could be doing with all of that e-mail, and there are no telling what kind of sensitive information is being misclassified by the users and sent completely free and clear through their system.
At some point, though, unless you want to literally do everything in-house and never take advantage of the value-added services that third parties can provide, you have to suck it up and trust them not to screw you over. If nothing else, Google should know that all it would take is one major data loss or one gross breach of corporate privacy, and their Gmail service would pretty much be dead. Just as if we find out that Symantec has done something evil with our e-mail--even something that is legally allowed in the contracts--that their business would suffer a nasty hit.
At some point, the benefits of using a service like Gmail outweigh the risks that Google, a company with an excellent reputation, suddenly turns evil. As a CTO, your job isn't to sit around and dream up reasons why you'll never trust a third party; it is to assess those risks, reasonably compare them with the benefits, and decide whether it's worth it or not.
As a side note, I'm actually part of a large team of people who were recently outsourced by my former employer to a third-party IT services provider to handle all of the IT services for that former employer. So now, I'm on the direct opposite side of the coin that you're mentioning here. It's pretty well understood that if we do something to screw over my former employer--now our client--that it would not only cost us our careers, but likely cost all of our friends and coworkers their careers, too. We still have and require root access to almost every server and network device across the world. If you start dreaming up things that could happen in that situation without considering what you're getting in exchange for that risk, it seems on the surface a pretty stupid thing to do, but it's actually working really well.
And when you really think about it, just about anything you could dream up a third-party provider doing to you, I could dream up much, much worse your own internal people, with even less motivation, doing to you.
Some large enterprises are seriously considering jumping from Exchange to Gmail, or already have, reports Robert Mitchell.
The last place I moved off Exchange to Gmail would probably not want to go back. You can still keep Outlook, if you think the email organizing tools are worth it, but most people just used the Gmail interface.
The real question is if the Office 2010 upgrade is compelling enough and cost effective enough to keep current users from jumping ship? My experience suggests it would have to be a near software miracle to make that happen. The cost savings of switching to Gmail are pretty significant.
Unfortunately MS doesn't have to worry about much of a threat from OpenOffice. I find their product gets more difficult to use with time instead of better. GoogleDocs is good enough for a lot of things but formatting options are limited. If OO was a home run product, then Office 2010 would be yesterday's news.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
LOL. Sorry, I'm CTO, Software Architect, and the lead developer for a company of less than 50 people. No rounds at Pebble Beach for me, I like beer (Warsteiner or Sam Adams Honey Wheat lately) and I drive a car that cost less than $30,000. CTO is my position because I was hired and report directly to the board, not the President, although I work with him closely. I get the work of both worlds, and the pay of only one ;).
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"rare that I come across one that I believe will truly make a difference in the way that I work or use my computer."
Yeah, that was said about 2007 and it DID make a difference. It made a number of people i know finally dump MS and move to OO.
What are two words that cannot be used together?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
When I need a feature I'm still pecking around for it. The ribbon is supposed to identify features that I need and categorize it in a sane manner, but it just isn't the case. Just try in outlook: importing or exporting mail, adding additional exchange account views, finding actual email headers - you're in for a shock. Instead of a ribbon, why not a contextual search for features? Isn't that more in line with the new windows concept?
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
As a former CIO, I disagree with your diagnosis of the issues. Many companies, both large and small, outsource services to companies with access to all manner of sensitive materials (e.g., documentation destruction, electronic reading rooms, business continuity services, AR, etc). The difference is how those services are implemented and the trust in the organizations, not so much the laws that specifically regulate their offerings or even the ability to sue them.
In my opinion, the problem with Google Apps is that they:
1) don't make many important explicit commitments (e.g., availability, security, retention policies, restoration times, etc)
2) provide very little visibility into their implementation
3) their low cost service model provides little room for day-to-day customer service (e.g., mailbox restore) and the confidence to know that you can rapidly escalate a problem should one arise (not to mention offline backup)
I say this because this implies the issue is not inherent to outsourcing email in principle. The outsource service model is the future for generally commoditized services like email. There are several offerings today that I believe are generally superior to in-house for most SMBs that want Exchange functionality and need good availability. I have recommended Rackspace's Hosted Exchange to a $60M (revenues) client of mine and a few others. I am generally quite pleased with it, though there are a few shortcomings that will prevent others from adopting it today (especially larger organizations).
The biggest issues with the various Hosted Exchange offerings (those I'm familiar with at least):
#1: Authentication cannot be readily shared with other services, i.e., the employees need to juggle yet one more set of credentials.
#2: Limited ability to use 3rd party software (e.g., VM, Fax, two-factor authentication systems, etc) unless it exclusively uses exposed interfaces (RPC/HTTP, IMAP, etc).
#3: Won't scale well with large companies (with multiple subsidiaries/operating companies) that need/want to use more advanced AD features.
That said, these companies will figure most of this stuff out gradually until all but the most conservative big companies concede that they are better off outsourcing it, i.e., that an outside company has the scale and expertise to do a better job at less cost and in a more capital friendly way. When real customization is required then in-house makes sense, but the reality is that many of these issues are fairly widely felt and can be addressed with more generalized solutions.
1. 32 and 64-bit versions of the software. Apparently this addresses various performance issues, but also means there is incompatibility with 32-bit versions of other office apps (and perhaps visual studio) on 64-bit OS.
2. MAK and KMS replace the use-anywhere, no activation open license key. Heh.
3. There are fewer editions of office this time around, missing Enterprise. I guess that is a good decision, but there should be fewer. Nevertheless Microsoft believes strongly in market segmentation.
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
At the same time, there's nothing technologically speaking stopping them from storing all of our e-mails for whatever nefarious purpose they have in mind.
First of all, I'm pretty sure Gmail has much more robust datacenters, with multiple levels of redundancy and backups, than 99.9% of all companies out there. The odds of Gmail crashing and burning are orders of magnitude less than the odds of your own mail servers crashing and burning and losing all of your e-mail. That's kind of the point of having stuff "in the cloud" to begin with.
Second of all, what's to say that Symantec might not have some kind of bug in their software that, for example, randomly loses some small percentage of e-mails? Unless it was either a large number or a replicable issue, we'd probably be none the wiser, and if just the right e-mail got lost, it could have a major business impact. The point is, as I said before, any unlikely scenario you can dream up, I can dream up a counterexample that works in Gmail's favor.
So what do you use instead? If you use an ISP's POP account, your problem is no different. If you host your own mail server so that the mail is never stored on the Internet, then by definition that server has to have presence on the Internet, and again, the risk is still there. The only difference is that it's your personal responsibility for ensuring that the server is secure instead of Google's. Now, I'm not doubting your technical prowess, but even giving you the benefit of a doubt that you are personally smarter than the hundreds of PhDs working at Google that do nothing but this for a living, the vast majority of people and companies aren't. In other words, I'd trust Google to prevent people from hacking into my account more than I'd trust myself.
Oh and by the way, for corporate accounts, Google doesn't use those silly security questions to let you reset your password. If you lose it, you'll have to get one of the managers of your corporate Gmail accounts to reset it for you. The specific vector of attack you mentioned is a non-issue.
Do you also run your own ISP, with complete control over the communication chain once a packet hits the country in which you live? Because if you don't, then even if you run your own mail server, you are still at pretty high risk of your e-mail being intercepted and read. And even if you do, then I have to point out that even if you run your own mail server, you are storing your mails on servers in a country which government has a total lack of respect for privacy. Who do you think is in a better position to protect your privacy if the police go busting down doors, a HUGE multinational company protecting its reputation and with significant pull in the international political community, or you, Joe Schmo, little more than a meat shield between that oppressive government and your precious e-mail server?
I'll say it yet again, because it bears repeating. Any evil thing you can dream up that Google may do with your e-mail, I can dream up something else that someone else in the chain can do with your e-mail. As long as we're thinking up unlikely scenarios such as Google giving access to your e-mail to the government without any kind of due process or your knowledge and consent, what's to stop government spies from simply breaking into you house whil
when they pry it from my cold dead hands.
Regardless of anything else, I just have never seen any reason to keep secure, mission critical data in another companies data center. Especially email with all of its legal implications.
SaaS (or cloud or whatever buzzword you want to use) has its place. Spam filtering is a great example. Economies of scale, easy setup, reduced internal overhead. The data that flows through is not stored in any meaningful fashion.
But as soon as you are talking about storing data, you lose me. So many issues, so little time.
have you tried working with tables, for example
Yup, daily. Drives me mad...for extra insanity points of course, you can always try pasting a table from Excel/Access, (for most 'Office' users the logical place to store tabular data, especially numeric), into Word or PPT.
it's incredibly frustrating that you can adjust some formatting in one application
Indeed. Want to highlight some text in PPT, like you can do very easily in Word? SOL...
Of course, you can do it in 'presentation' mode, (F5) using the pen : (Ctrl+P then select highlighter). But that's not persistent, unless you save your annotations...which is 'all or nothing')
No, the rack-mount server is only for in-house search. If you want the email, docs and spreadsheet - that's in Google's data centre.
It stands for "Release to Manufacturing". Code is "gold" and in the hands of duplicator buereau for creation of shiny discs.
GOOGLE? GMAIL? Don't make me laugh. This is "campus mail" and a piss-poor corporate solution for any of the scenarios for collaboration and application integration scenarios, now commonplace in medium and big enterprise.
The applications a legal depatment, or a corporate marketing division would need are able to integrate with Outlook or a Notes client. GMail is a joke. How do you tie in a company's VOIP system, and unite it with scheduling/calendaring? How do you, in fact, do any integration between Google "application" and on-premise or third-party hosted services?
Suckage. Take your Google and come back later - when you have an acceptable SLA. :-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."