Category Archives: Musings

Amazon has a new feature with which they do various kinds of analysis on (many of) the books in their catalog. One of these analyses is the “statistically improbably phrase” test; this shows phrases for a given book that appear much more often in one book than in the whole corpus of books in their Search Inside program. For my book, here are the SIPs Amazon found:

relaying configuration, antivirus product vendors, relaying settings, archive sink, htr files, perimeter scanner, constrained delegation, check pox, default response rule, mailbox database, key archival, attachment access, perimeter network, message tracking, mailbox administrators, messaging security, retention categories, smart card enrollment station, machine certificates, delegate access, dialog hox, segmentation value, privilege escalation, inbound mail, event sink

Note “check pox” and “dialog hox”; those are probably my favorites. I can’t wait to see what the list for the Cookbook looks like!

There’s a fascinating thread of comments over at Ed Brill’s blog on this post. Ed and Alan Lepofsky, along with various other luminaries in the Notes communities, have been having a generally professional discussion with Cliff Reeves of Microsoft. David Madison of Microsoft may have gotten the last word, though, as Ed has promised to turn off comments on the post. It’s his blog, and so of course it’s his right to do so, but I’m sorry to see it, since I think the exchange has been very illuminating– particularly since Ed has (quite fairly) criticized Microsoft in the past for not taking part in strategy debates at various public conferences.

If Cliff, David, or any of the other participants in the thread who don’t have their own blogs want to carry this on, I’ll be happy to guest-post their comments here.

Another week, another event! This time, I was in DC, where I had a great group of attendees. The highlight was probably during my demo of Microsoft Office Communicator, when I accidentally called Devin. I’d forgotten that the SIP-to-PSTN gateway was active, and I right-clicked his name and used the “Call” context menu to show that his contact information was there, prefilled from my personal Contacts folder. I was quite surprised when Devin’s phone started ringing in my computer speakers (and so was he), but we had a short call and the crowd loved it. It’s always great to surprise people like that– I think I may work it into my demo script as a permanent item. Live Communications Server 2005’s voice and telephony integration is pretty compelling, and I’m glad that came out in the demo.

Microsoft has established a good pattern: they’ve been taking tools that they use internally, polishing them up, and releasing them as free tools through their web release (WR) program. This flow most recently brought us ExBPA 2.0, and now a new tool joins the family: the Exchange User Monitor, or ExMon. The cool thing (as Chris points out on the Exchange team blog) is that ExMon can both aggregate data and show you user-specific performance data. If you have a user or two who consistently complain about performance, ExMon gives you a quantitative tool to ID and fix the underlying problem. Check it out.

Wow, that’s gotta hurt. This article, by Daniel Lyons, effectively claims that the air is going out of the Notes balloon, citing market share and revenue data from Gartner, IDC, Ferris, Meta, Radicati, and ITRG. It’ll be interesting to see how IBM/Lotus respond to the article; with their 2004 numbers not yet released, the public data to refute some of Lyons’ arguments may not be available yet.

So, yesterday I was in Manhattan, again. This time it was to attend IBM’s “Microsoft Exchange Alternatives” seminar, held at IBM’s building on Madison Avenue. I had to get up at 0400 to drive to Detroit and catch the first flight in to LGA; despite that, the flight was delayed. (That gave me time to finish a paper I’ve been working on, which I emailed from the back of the taxi on the way to IBM. Good news: I can send email from taxicabs. Bad news: sometimes I have to.) As Ed said, the seminar was well-attended, with about 20 folks in the room from a variety of customers.

There were four presenters: Ed did his overview of IBM’s collab strategy; Jennifer Meade from ThroughBox IT did a somewhat lackluster review of three customer case studies, Henry Bestritsky from Binary Tree talked about their Common Migration Tool (CMT) and how it can be used to move from Exchange to Notes, and Brendan Crotty wrapped the morning up with a solid demo of the Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook (DAMO) tool.

Overall, I thought it was a good first effort. As I pointed out to Ed when I met him afterwards, there wasn’t any convincing discussion about quantified business value. Interestingly, IBM had several Linux sales folks in the audience, and a common theme underlying Ed and Brendan’s presentations was that IBM is promoting server OS choice. I’ll save my analysis of that meme for another day 🙂 I don’t think the seminar content accurately reflected Microsoft’s current collab strategy and why IBM thinks theirs is better. In fairness, that’s not what this event was intended to cover. IBM did a good job of positively conveying their message, though, and I think mixing in the partners was a good touch.

How does this compare to our “Optimizing Collaboration and Communications” event? We have more demos, including an extended “day in the life” demo that lets me show how I actually use Microsoft’s tools to get my daily work done. We also have a lot more quantitative information about the business benefits of extending Notes/Domino infrastructures with MS’ tools. We’ll see what Ed thinks when he attends our Chicago event.

Unlike Ed, I made it out of LGA before the weather turned bad 🙂

Getting on the bus well after it’s left the station, Symbian announced today that they’re licensing the Exchange ActiveSync protocol. With more than 25 million Symbian OS devices worldwide, this is a big announcement for both sides, although no firm timeline was disclosed. Symbian’s already got a good mobile connectivity story; this makes it better while simultaneously highlighting Exchange 2003’s advantages as a wireless messaging platform.

After seeing Ed Brill mention IBM’s “Microsoft Alternatives” session in Manhattan next week, I decided to sign up for it.. or at least to attempt to. There’s no online registration, so I sent mail to the listed address asking to register. No response. So, I tried again just now, and added a voicemail for good measure. Hopefully that will do the trick; it sounds like an interesting seminar.

Update: got the call yesterday; I’m confirmed, and looking forward to it. I don’t know much about BinaryTree and their migration tools, so this should be a good learning opportunity.

This week I’m on the road in Boston and New York City, presenting the second and third iterations of the Microsoft “Optimizing Collaborations and Communications” roadshow that I wrote about last week. Yesterday’s event was well attended, and the attendees asked some tough questions about Microsoft’s C&C strategy. However, the session evaluation results indicate that they liked the answers they were hearing. MS’ message– that you can augment Notes/Domino installations by adding technologies that drive better business value– seems to be resonating with these folks. Today, I go to Manhattan via the Acela (which I’ll blog about later, or maybe during), then tomorrow it’s St Paddy’s Day in the Big Apple. I didn’t bring anything green, so I need to do some shopping lest I face the wrath of the Irish.

The AP is reporting that Microsoft is buying Groove, which I think is great news. Groove adds some critical capacity to Office System and SharePoint. Lots of other folks will be analyzing this in more detail. The most interesting detail to me is that the AP’s report says that Ray Ozzie is going to be the new Microsoft chief technology officer. That certainly raises some very interesting possibilities.

I’m supposed to be working on something else, but I couldn’t resist the urge to answer Ed’s post on the Microsoft Office Communicator launch, which in turn is in response to this Microsoft Monitor piece (which, by the way, contains a couple of errors).

First, let’s consider public IM connectivity. Right now, if you want to interoperate with (say) AOL, you have to install AIM or an AIM-compatible client on your desktops… at which point you lose the security and compliance capabilities that Live Communications Server and Sametime/Workplace both offer. On the other hand, if you have a genuine business need for public IM connectivity, you can use the PIC feature of Live Communications Server to interoperate (selectively) with MSN Messenger, AIM, and Yahoo! Messenger users and still maintain both security and compliance. It’s true that PIC is currently priced as a subscription. Ask yourself this: why did AOL suddenly decide to allow a competitor to interoperate? Normally their MO is to break interoperating clients as soon as they can get away with it. Are they getting a cut of the revenue? I don’t know, but it certainly wouldn’t surprise me.

Next, let’s take Ed’s point that the Microsoft collaboration platform has more than one piece (he actually uses the phrase “jigsaw puzzle”). Back in the day, Microsoft’s claim was simple: Exchange does it all. They have since repented of that, instead delivering a broad suite of collaboration and communication tools that you can mix and match. You can deploy them together or separately. If you don’t need, e.g., SharePoint Portal Server, fine– don’t buy it. There’s significant stand-alone value in each of the components. In fact, I’m seeing a groundswell of interest in Live Meeting and Live Communication Server deployment among customers that aren’t currently using Exchange. Why? Neither of those products require Exchange, and both add measurable business value.

Now, it’s also true that the more pieces of the MS platform you deploy, the more capability you get. This is no different from Workplace, except that many of Microsoft’s platform components are more mature than their Workplace equivalents. It’s a little disingenuous of Microsoft Monitor to claim that you have to buy all of the features; that’s like saying that I have to buy the Hemi when I buy a Dodge Magnum (well, OK, I would have to buy the Hemi, but that’s another blog post).

About those Microsoft Monitor article mistakes: I count two simple typos (“Instanbul” and the confusion between SharePoint Portal and Windows SharePoint Services) and a misunderstanding of the Outlook/LCS connection. You can deploy Outlook 2003 without Exchange 2003 (in fact, you can even use Outlook 2003 against Notes/Domino servers, using either MS’ or IBM’s connectors). Every Exchange 2003 CAL includes an Outlook license, but Outlook is also licensable separately.