Microsoft Office 2010, Dissected 291
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."
Re:Outlook Web (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I'm neither for or against Microsoft, but as a (Score:3, Informative)
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 ;).
Word, Excel & Outlook 2010 (Score:1, Informative)
That covers 99% of what anyone will ever use.
Have to say, Office 2010 does what it says on the tin, not perfectly, but better than anything else, with certain provisos...
Open Office is great, it does everything, until you start regularly exchanging data with companies that are based on MS Office.
Where MS Office has always excelled is in the actual office environment, multiples users working on the same files in collaboration, think lawyers offices, that sort of thing.
Outlook 2010 wins the prize for "best e-mail client on windows" by default, Outlook kept evolving, and while 3 year old versions of Eudora or Pegasus are again fine for the single / home user, as soon as you get anywhere near that real world office environment, Outlook 2010 kills everything else stone dead.
Outlook 2010 is Mail / Calendar / Contacts / Tasks, all integrated, someone send you a Word.doc attachment, dude, previewed live and correctly within the Outlook application, all seamless productivity.
Took me all of 15 second to configure it to send text only emails and all the other usual conventions.
ABC Amber also do an excellent little app to export just about any mail or data format that you can imagine to Outlook format, well worth the 19 bucks to migrate a decades worth of Eudora mail archives in 30 minutes, complete with folder structures etc.
Summary.
MS Office 2010 is strictly optional if you're a home user.
MS Office 2010 is the only game in town in a commercial office environment, or for regular communication with one, such as you are going to get a divorce and spend lots of time sending stuff back and forth to your lawyer.
HTH etc
I don't quite agree (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Other stuff they forgot to mention (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Are you smarter than Google? (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:Well... (Score:5, Informative)
Google can host my corporate email (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:I'm neither for or against Microsoft, but as a (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Microsoft Office 2010, Dissected (Score:5, Informative)
The improvements in the core (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote) Office 2010 applications over their Office 2007 counterparts are very minor. The most notable change is a customizable "Ribbon," so you can move buttons around on the user interface. Also, the OneNote application is significantly improved with the addition of a "recycle bin" for recently deleted notes, enhanced notebook sharing, and a host of smaller improvements that really add up to a totally new experience. The rest of the improvements are incremental and unimaginative. Word has a new navigation and find/replace interface. Excel has slightly fancier charts. PowerPoint lets you edit videos. Outlook finally catches up to Gmail with "conversation view."
The other headline change in Office 2010 is the addition of the browser-based applications. But these web applications aren't even really ready for primetime yet, and you can get access to a browser-based Office without buying 2010.
These changes are all well and good, but does any of this seriously and significantly improve the daily workflow of an Office 2007 user? Probably not, unless you really need one of the new features. If you're looking for a "general upgrade," Office 2010 is way too expensive to justify. Wait for the next version.
Re:Microsoft Office 2010, Dissected (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Well... (Score:4, Informative)
>as long as Outlook continues to encourage top-posting and HTML formatted content
1996 called. Its looking for its outrage.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Informative)
Uh. No they didn't.
File -> Options -> Mail -> Replies and Forwards
Turn on "Preface comments with..." and then just toss 'inline' at the top of the email, and edit whereever you want. (Note, this is in Office 2010, i don't have 2007 handy, don't remember where they put it, but it's a similar option.)
Then you can insert a comment, and it'll have your tag, be a different colour and will easily stand out.
It just gets a bit messy after this happens a few times in a back and forth-exchange, and can be tricky to catch up on the history of a thread if you come in half-way.
Re:Microsoft Office 2010, Dissected (Score:3, Informative)
Well, you'll enjoy it even more in Office 2010 - the splash screens are now animated, and even feature the Close button!
(no, seriously)
Re:With Apologies to Bill Hicks (Score:3, Informative)
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. :-)
Re:Microsoft Office 2010, Dissected (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Is there a classic mode? (Score:2, Informative)
Personally I like the ribbon. If one takes the time to get used to it, the ribbon makes many common operations more efficient because of how the buttons are grouped together. Some buttons/operations take time to hunt down, but they're usually not the frequently-used ones. There is a learning curve if you're comming from office 2000 to 2007, but it's not much compared to office vs LaTeX.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Informative)
as long as Outlook continues to encourage top-posting and HTML formatted content, and discourage quoted reply trimming, it will still suck.
Jesus Christ. 10 years later, and we're still having this argument?
Give it up, dude. Usenet is dead, top-posting is the norm, and everything supports HTML. Only a select few chose to trim their bottom-posts, which usually just meant lots of scrolling.
(In any event, threaded conversations a la GMail are clearly the way forward)
Obviously you are not on too many mailing lists. Most F/OSS oriented mailing lists (e.g. gentoo users, PHP users, samba uses, etc) forbid HTML mail, and discourage top and bottom posting. They also highly encourage trimming the message to just what you are replying to - as the rest, you know, is in the message archives. Outlook has always been a problem for mailing lists, but again - it's not impossible to do inline replies, just a bit harder to get it setup that way. Even Yahoo! Mail broke that for a while, and recently fixed it, somewhat - it's still kinda broken, but not nearly as bad.