Users, analysts: No rush to adopt Exchange 2007
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InfoWorld - Windows Vista&#160;isn&#39;t the only recently released Microsoft software that will give users headaches when they upgrade their systems. Corporate users, partners, and analysts said upgrading to Exchange Server 2007 from previous versions also may be a lengthy and painful process for companies, which may want to take a wait-and-see approach to the new software.
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The Hiveminds Magazine has pointed out a new effort that's been kicked off today to try to get the PHP community (and providers) to finally make the leap and drop PHP4 support all together:   The idea is to make a unified, concentrated effort to drop PHP4 support and drive PHP5 adoption in the year 2008. Think of it. All CMS, forum and framework projects going completely over to PHP5 on a set date! This would be like a bomb dropping on the web hosting world and cause ripples throughout the open source world.   They point out some of the projects that are leaning either way from ezPublish hanging on to PHP4 and apps like Drupal that have embraced PHP5. In fact, it's the Drupal group that's written up the proposal on how it would all go down - the "Go PHP5 Effort".   It is a dangerous cycle, and one that needs to be broken. The open source PHP developer community has decided that it is indeed now time to move forward, together. Therefore, the listed open source PHP projects have all agreed that effective 5 February 2008, any new feature release will have a minimum  required PHP version no older than PHP 5.2.0.   There's tons of comments to the proposal in both parties (and some in between noting that there are already several PHP4 applications that run quite happily on PHP5).
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There is a fascinating article on Groklaw called Searching for Openness in Microsoft's OOXML and Finding Contradictions. One of the most relevant comments in the article is "So, they plan to be the only one in the Linux world that can actually interoperate with Microsoft. How do you think they will achieve that? By sharing? On the contrary, they already market themselves as uniquely interoperable, which means they get to interoperate and you don't, unless you are their paying customer."  There is also the Novell comment, "Only Novell has Microsoftâs endorsement as its partner to drive Linux-Windows interoperability."
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Intuit tweaks personal finance tool's usability, but update isn't essential if you're running a recent version.
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(Source: Network Appliance)  Microsoft Exchange Server has evolved into a critical application for many companies. Legacy storage infrastructures based on traditional direct-attached storage (DAS) are insufficient for meeting service level requirements associated with data availability, recoverability, manageability, and scalability.  Leveraging an iSCSI-based storage network, Snapshot&trade; technology-based recovery mechanisms, and storage virtualization technologies provides an appropriate infrastructure for meeting the increasingly demanding requirements of Exchange - at a cost structure appropriate for Microsoft Windows&reg; environments.
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Although Microsoft won't announce the release date of the next version of its Exchange Server until next year, users can expect more management tools for existing versions in the meantime.
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Attendees at the Microsoft 2008 Office System Developer Conference this week are leveraging development capabilities in Office System, but cite issues such as getting used to the new ribbon-based Fluent UI in the 2007 Office release.A sampling of attendees at the San Jose, Calif. event revealed mostly satisfaction with Office System. Most were Microsoft business partners developing applications for Microsoft's SharePoint platform for collaboration and business processes."I bought into it. I'm drinking the KoolAid," said Jeff Modzel, technical architect for SunGard Higher Education."Our customers are colleges and universities and their constituents, which are students. Kids very much want collaborative environments for their classes. SharePoint's an easy solution to that problem," Modzel said.He described Office System as an "excellent" development platform, although he noted difficulties in writing an Excel 2007 add-in prior to getting the newly released Visual Studio 2008 platform.The new ribbon-based Fluent UI in the Office package takes some getting used to, Modzel said. "The first handful of times I used it, I did not like it and the more I used it the more I liked it," he said.Consultants at developer OTB Solutions also mentioned issues with the ribbon. The people who hate it the most are the people who are very familiar with the old Office platform, said Dick Federle, consultant at OTB.? But he still likes the feature. "The neat thing about the ribbon is since it?s context-sensitive, you're only seeing what's important for what you're looking at, at the time, said Federle.Another consultant at OTB gave the ribbon a thumbs-up. "It's become familiar. You can use it and extend it," said OTB consultant Jen Glass.OTB has been using SharePoint as an application development platform. "We saw with the new SharePoint platform that it was actually ready for enterprise applications," Federle said. For example, OTB has developed a health insurance claims auditing system that processes more than 1.5 million transactions a month, he said.Developers, though, must adapt to using configuration capabilities in SharePoint rather than resort to coding, Federle said. "There are a lot of capabilities and a lot of problems you can solve with SharePoint through configuration without having to write any code," he said.At FirstBank, the company is currently running Office XP and is looking to migrate to Visual Studio Tools for Office and Office 2007, said Greg Mestas, distributed applications manager at the company.While features such as the ribbon UI in Office 2007 may make things easier for developers, Mestas is not so sure what the benefit is for end users."Most of our people use Word and Excel, and Word and Excel are still Word and Excel," Mestas said. "They've had a lot of the same features release over release. So the biggest benefit for us [in migrating] is staying on a supported platform, to put it bluntly," he said.The bank is starting a pilot project on SharePoint for office automation. "We're trying to get rid of all that paper and all that manual process and create some workflows and InfoPath forms as a replacement," Mestas said.An official at SharePoint applications developer Consejo applauded Microsoft's Open XML document initiative as a benefit for Office application development."Their whole Open XML is proving to be very comforting to most developers because in the old days, when it was binary, that not necessarily ideal," said Virgil Pate, development manager at Consejo.Also, the ribbon UI makes it simpler to modify the user interface, he said. But Microsoft could have done a better job in migrating users to the ribbon, Pate stressed.Recalling his company's experience with SharePoint, Pate said it is easy to get started developing extensions, but support has been slow, he said.Pate expressed caution about the Office Live platform, in which Microsoft offers online versions of software. While calling Office Live a great idea, Pate wondered about its security and reliability. "If they ever start to go down or start to have lag time, it's going to hurt them," he said.Another developer, Marcin Geborik, of developer Computer Plus of Krakow, Poland, cited good experiences in developing for SharePoint but found difficulty in working with Microsoft Office Project Server."As a matter of fact, Project Server's API is just not good," Geborik said.Meanwhile, Microsoft with version 2 of Office Live Small Business this week restructured the offering, providing users with a free domain for the first year as well as a free Web site. After the first year, the domain costs $14.95.?Subscribers get 100 free e-mail accounts each with 2-2.5GB of storage, as well as services such as contact management.Also, Microsoft with its Unified Communications platform plans to bulk it up with instant messaging capabilities that can find persons linked in a workflow chain.
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Server virtualization may be enterprise computing's latest technology, but a recent survey of corporate IT buyers shows that near-term adoption may not match the hype.
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This organization uses standard hardware and software builds throughout the enterprise, so everything that works during testing should work fine for users -- shouldn't it?
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(InfoWorld) - After five years and numerous delays, customers can now get their hands on the final version of the Windows Vista operating system. Well, business customers can at least. Though Microsoft celebrated theÂ launch of VistaÂ -- as well as Office 2007 and Exchange 2007 -- at events across the globe Thursday, both Vista and Office 2007 won't be generally available through retail in the U.S. until Jan. 30, 2007. Thursday marked the day business customers could purchase those products through Microsoft's volume licensing program. And though business customers can begin ordering Exchange 2007 Thursday, the new version of Microsoft's messaging server software won't be released to manufacturing until the end of December. Not only was Thursday's launch party for all three products a bit premature and anticlimactic after so long a wait for Vista, it could also be the last of its kind, according to industry watchers. With more software being pushed out to customers over the Web as services, launch parties for packaged software products may soon be a thing of the past, they said. "This is a big launch for them but for everyone else it's ho-hum," said James McQuivey, a professor for Boston University's College of Communication who specializes in marketing research and business management. "It's the biggest wait-and-see event of the week. Customers are going to wait and see when they need [Vista] and if they need it." These concerns aside, Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer was on hand with his usual enthusiasm at the New York launch event to promote what is arguably the industry'sÂ most highly anticipated product launchÂ of the year. "It's an exciting thing to finally be here," Ballmer said. "That's all I'll say about the past." He had previously promised that Microsoft will never again have another lengthy gap between the major releases of its client operating system. The vendor debuted Windows XP, the previous version of its client OS, in October 2001. "This is the biggest launch in our company's history," Ballmer said. "These are frankly the most significant releases of these two products [Vista and Office] we've ever done." Vista was the big star of Thursday's event, though Microsoft teamed the OS launch with Office 2007 and Exchange 2007 for several reasons. One is that the company is trying to promote the technology links between the products to show how they can bring better worker productivity and cost savings to business customers in the hopes companies will purchase and deploy all three at once. Another reason for the triple product launch is that Vista has been so long coming, Microsoft felt it had to give customers a little extra incentive to be excited about it, said Sunil Misra, vice president of Getronics. The provider of managed services and consulting has been helping business customers prepare for Vista deployment. "It's the love campaign," Misra said, referring to the launch of all three products together. "People have been waiting a long time for Vista." The last time Microsoft released Windows and Office together was with Windows 95. But during that time in the heyday of Windows, customers would have flocked to the new OS release even without its tie to Office. "It's not nearly as exciting as it used to be in the old days," said McQuivey. "With Windows 95 and 98, you actually had people waiting in line at [retail store] Best Buy" to purchase the OS. This certainly isn't the case now, as consumers can't purchase Vista until January. And it may not even be the case then, as consumers in addition to business customers have said they may hold off on purchasing Vista until they need a new PC. Many of those new PCs are bought during the busy holiday shopping season that is currently in progress, but since Vista is not available yet in retail outlets, it can't benefit from that rush. In lieu of that, Microsoft's hardware partners such as Hewlett-Packard and DellÂ are offering discount coupons for the OS if customers buy PCs that are capable of running it this holiday season. On the business side, customers will likely continue their Vista planning process throughout the end of the year and most of 2007, Misra said. Indeed, most analysts think the bulk of Vista business deployments won't happen until 2008. (China Martens in Boston contributed to this story.)
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Free migration tools and improved feature sets have led more than 300 firms representing 2.8 million employees to make the switch from Lotus Notes and Domino to Outlook, exchange and Sharepoint, Microsoft said Monday at the start of the Lotusphere conference.
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(Source: Symantec) Microsoft Exchange Server has quickly risen to mission-critical status in many companies; therefore, keeping it available and protecting its data is not an option.  Read this white paper to find out how Backup Exec 11d eliminates the traditional tradeoffs of database versus individual mailbox, folders, or message backups.
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(Source: Symantec) This paper describes the specific challenges of maintaining availability for Microsoft Exchange, both Exchange 2000 and 2003 environments, and then describes how Veritas Storage Foundation HA for Windows addresses these risks.
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OS, Office and Exchange hit corporates today Microsoft finally launches Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange today. Sort of.â¦
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The Story: With three of the largest competitors in the field taken over by software giants, you?d think that the best days of the business intelligence market were over. You?d be wrong.[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]                                                    Far from heralding the death of BI, the loss of Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion to SAP, IBM and Oracle may well signal ?a golden age for business intelligence,? says AMR Research analyst John Hagerty.Sure, that?s a brave statement. But the BI market has never been as narrow as many people assumed. There are significant players left, including SAS, SPSS, MicroStrategy, Actuate, and dozens of smaller, often specialized, vendors. ?Go beyond the core tools of reporting and analysis and you?ll see lots of data-mining and statistical tool vendors, as well as industry-specific developers,? says IDC analyst Dan Vesset.The acquisitions of the big guys now creates space for those other companies to flourish, says Rob Tholemeier, a former industry analyst turned private investor. The same thing happened to the database market, he notes: ?There are more database companies around now than when Informix was purchased.? BI, Tholemeier says, is likely to follow the same course. ?Innovation will come from the outside [companies] as the big guys expand their scale and scope,? concurs AMR?s Hagerty. Pricing, of course, is a major concern as markets consolidate. But because the supply of BI software is still ample, given the large number of independents, buyers still have significant leverage, says Vesset ? though that could change further out, he adds. Moreover, it will take the platform vendors some time to integrate their acquisitions, both in terms of code and business process. And while that process plays out, prices aren?t likely to spike.The Bottom Line: As investor Tholmeier puts it, ?Clearing out the old-timers leaves a huge vacuum for the dozens of innovative players ready to strut their stuff. The business intelligence industry is dead. Long live BI.? That change presents both a challenge for IT to understand the new BI, and the opportunity to drive BI?s benefits to a greater portion of the company.Complete list of 2007 underreported stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
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Opinion Long live the trading grid
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The Story: What?s in a name? Back in the days of the Gingrich revolution, the nastiest label you could pin on a politician was ?liberal.? And now that open source has become an essential technology, the quickest way to get a rise out of an open source executive (and to get flamed on dozens of blogs) is to say his or her company is ?commercial.?[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]                                                    No matter what you call them, open source companies have been steadily integrating parts of the hated commercial software subscription model into their business. First it was support, and now it is software access. Say it ain?t so, Linus.MySQL, for example, will charge users of its enterprise edition to use the code, not just for support as has been the traditional open source business model. ?We are looking for ways to extend our offerings in a way that can be monetized,? bluntly says Kaj Arno, the company?s VP for community.Chander Kant, founder of the open source storage software company Zmanda, is likewise frank about the need to drive revenue. Speaking of the open source community as a whole, he says, ?We are not a charity. We need to monetize.?Recognizing that charging to use open source software flies in the face of the original open source premise of freely sharable code open to everyone, Arno is quick to note that the paid version of Workbench has code and features not found in the free version ? and that the free version ?is not crippled.? Arno calls the move an experiment, and acknowledges that MySQL needs to move carefully to avoid upsetting the often quick-tempered open source community.Is this a trend? Red Monk analyst Stephen O?Grady says it is: ?Ultimately when you look at a high-profile firm like MySQL embracing it, it?s difficult to conclude anything else.?InfoWorld blogger (and IBM employee) Savio Rodrigues notes another example. In a recent blog post, he looked at changes to JBoss since it was purchased by Red Hat Software and concluded: ?The Fedora/JBoss subscription is just like the software subscription business model that commercial software vendors have been using for decades.?Does that mean a company that adopts the usage-based pricing model isn?t really open-source? That?s an interesting point, since as Zmanda?s Kant acknowledges, ?the litmus test of open source is control of the code.? Open source software delivered through appliances keeps the access ? and thus control ? away from users, he notes. But code binaries distributed as software remain open to their users ? for now, at least.The Bottom Line: Have MySQL and Red Hat run away from the principles of open source? Who cares. The real point is that the open source business model is evolving away from the ?free? model and toward an alternative development approach for commercial software. If you adopted open source due to its cost, you may not save as much as you thought. If you adopted open source for the access to source code or the community-supported development approach that is supposed to result in better software, it?s not yet clear if the greater commercialization will enhance those aspects or drive away the true believers and make open source no different than the old-fashioned commercial offerings.Complete list of 2007 underreported stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers