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Microsoft to iOS and Android Users: “Never Mind.”

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Are we really surprised?  In the flurry of Microsoft’s marketing blitz for Office 2013, Microsoft promised that the “new office” would be available across every platform.  That Mac, iOS, and Android users would not be left behind.

Fast forward a few months and Microsoft  delaying MS Office for the iOS and Android platforms by a year.  Already facing erosion from Google Apps as companies are moving into the cloud, Microsoft is neglecting one of the fastest growing user markets in the “post-pc” era.

Meanwhile, Google is offering Quickoffice to Google Apps customers at no charge and Quickoffice PRO is available to iOS and Android users for $19.99.  MS Office users can now more easily integrate their legacy applications with mobility with Google products than those from Microsoft.

As noted in ZDnet, iOS and Android users — and Google — have the most to gain.

Microsoft: Pay More for the Same Old CALs

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Back in July, we blogged about how Microsoft’s new server pricing model, combined with the end of the Small Business Server package, would result in significant cost increases for many small businesses (see SBS End of Life: Microsoft Punishes Small Businesses).

Starting December 1, 2012, Microsoft is increasing the pricing for User CALs (client access licenses) across most of its product lines.   The higher CAL pricing does NOT include any new or additional functionality — just a higher price.

As most readers are aware, Microsoft offers two types of client access licenses.  Device CALs allow unlimited users to connect from a single physical device.  User CALs allow a single user to access servers and services from an unlimited number of devices.  According to Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet, “Microsoft has positioned User CALs as being the optimal choice if company employees need to have roaming access to the corporate network using multiple devices …”.  As such, most companies purchase User CALs.

Without adding any new features or capabilities, Microsoft is increasing the price of User CALs across all of the following products (in alphabetical order):

  • Bing Maps Server CAL
  • Core CAL Suite
  • Enterprise CAL Suite
  • Exchange Server Standard and Enterprise CALs
  • Lync Server Standard and Enterprise CALs
  • Project Server CAL
  • SharePoint Server Standard and Enterprise CALs
  • System Center 2012 Client Management Suite
  • System Center Configuration Manager
  • System Center Endpoint Protection
  • Visual Studio TFS CAL
  • Windows Multipoint Server CAL
  • Windows Server CAL
  • Windows Server RDS, RMS, Terminal Services CAL

When asked about these changes, Microsoft tells ZDNet, “These CAL changes include a user-based option that offers more value in support across unlimited devices …”

What Microsoft fails to mention, however, is that “These CAL changes” are not real changes at all — user CALs have always supported unlimited devices. The only “change” is the higher price.

For companies with Enterprise Agreements, Software Assurance, or other volume licensing agreements, the higher prices kick in at the end of your licensing term.  For everyone else, December 1st marks the day companies will need to pay more for the same old CALs.

Office 2013 – Much Ado About Nothing New

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Microsoft recently announced and started providing demonstrations of Office 2013.  And as discussed in this Vanity Fair article, it is clear that Microsoft continues to suffer from lack of innovation.  The number of new features is limited, many of the new features are playing “catch up”, and Office 2013 will lock you into a closed ecosystem.

Here is some of what is “new” in Office 2013:

  • Office 2013 will work with touch and stylus devices like tablets and smart-phones.  You will be able to navigate and annotate documents using touch, much like you can today with a mouse in Powerpoint.  (Not really a new feature, but you can use a touch screen instead of a mouse)
  • Excel 2013 has a few new advanced analytic features that will be useful to hedge fund managers and the like.

Here is some of what is in Office 2013 that is new to Office, but catching up with the competition:

  • In Outlook, you can reply in-line (just like Gmail’s conversation view)
  • In Outlook calendar, you can put an address in the location of a meeting and have a link to pull up a map on Bing (just like Google Calendar)
  • You can save a file on your PC and access it on other devices nearly immediately via cloud storage (just like Google Drive and Docs has allowed for years, as have Box, Dropbox, and others)
  • You can have real-time video chat (just like Google Talk), but only if you install a thick client

Here is what you will NOT see with Office 2013:

  • Real-Time Collaboration:  Users are limited to co-authoring — serial editing by one user at a time
  • Office 2013 running on much of your existing equipment:  Office 2013 will only run on Windows 8.  Get ready to pay to upgrade your operating system and your desktops and laptops in order to install Windows 8 and Office 2013
  • Good Support for Macs.  Macs are second class when it comes to MS Office in general, and with the “Windows 8” only message from Microsoft, it is unclear if a full version of Office 2013 will even make it to the Mac platform
  • Smartphone / Tablet Integration:  Granted, you will be able to run Office 2013 (and connect via Office 365) from MS Surface tables and Windows 8 phones — but who is buying those?  Microsoft is hedging on support for iOS (iPhone/iPad) support and has said nothing about Android-based devices.  If you want to run Office 2013 anywhere, be prepared to change your mobile device strategy.

As noted in this analysis of Microsoft’s 2012 10-K filing on ZDnet. Microsoft is clearly using Office 2013 and Windows 8 to create a vertically integrated ecosystem designed to block out other technologies.  The question is, do you want to lock your business into an ecosystem and a company that has failed, and continues to struggle, to innovate?

Live@edu Migrations Will Create Problems for Many Schools

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Earlier this month, Microsoft announced the availability of Office 365 for Education and the end of the Live@edu service.   While Redmond Channel Partner reported that schools will have 12 to 18 months to migrate, the migration will pose problems for many schools.

From One Account to Two

According to Microsoft, after the migration, students, faculty, and staff will have two accounts.  SkyDrive and Instant Messenger services will require a personal Windows Live Account, meaning that these services (and others) will be outside of the security and management domain of the Office 365 account.

Loss of Features

The most significant loss of features in the move is the loss of supervision policies. Supervision policies are the rules used to filter “Bad Words” and to manage “Closed Campus” policies.  These feature, critical to how schools manage student accounts and adhere to school policies and regulations, can be recreated manually in Office 365 using PowerShell scripting and a range of admin console settings.

Rebuilding Features

Several features and settings will need to be completely rebuilt as part of the migration process, including:

  • Mailbox Plans, which are limited by license type in Office 365
  • Role Assignment Policies, which cannot be managed at the mailbox level in Office 365, requiring changes to global end user roles and policies that must them be assigned to specific mailboxes

Migration Process

The migration process itself will be problematic for many schools.  Microsoft’s best practice documentation recommends going through the upgrade process from Live@edu to Office 365 before fully configuring the Office 365 service.  The sequence of actions will result in downtime as well as the loss of existing custom URL addresses.

Additionally, individual end users have “before upgrade” tasks to complete that, if not done properly, will require IT staff to touch every machine as a local administrator.

Finally, Microsoft’s own FAQ site mentions that users and administrators may lose the ability to access certain on-page links, the Exchange Control Panel, and many Exchange Control Panel features “for a few days” after the migration.  This could leave users and administrators unable to move forward.

Conclusion

While not as bad as the (almost non-existent) upgrade process from BPOS to Office 365, the migration from Live@edu to Office 365 is demanding technically and with respect to planning, administration, and communication.    The effort to migrate is still comparable to moving from Live@edu to cloud solutions from other vendors, such as Google Apps for Education.

SBS End of Life: Microsoft Punishes Small Businesses

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Don’t get me wrong.  Companies retire products all the time; New product road maps are a necessary and valuable part of the technology ecosystem.  How a vendor decides to retire a product, however, can be very telling with respect to how they view and treat their customers.  Let’s talk about Microsoft.

Last week, Microsoft announced it’s server options for MS Windows Server 2012, due out sometime later this year.  The announcement included three major components that, while they seem to be unrelated, both impact small and mid-size businesses.  With Windows Server 2012, Microsoft is:

  • Switching from per server to per CPU licensing.
  • Eliminating Small Business Server
  • Restricting which Server licenses can run on virtualized hardware.

In press interviews and its announcements, Microsoft is very clear that businesses running SBS must either now purchase separate Exchange and Sharepoint licenses or must move to the cloud (hopefully Office 365).   The impact, however,  is actually much greater for businesses with fewer than 75 users.

  • Companies with 25 or fewer users can get the new “Essentials” edition of Server 2012.  This version cannot, however, run in a virtual environment.  Small businesses cannot, therefore, buy one server and run Windows, Exchange, and Sharepoint servers virtually without licensing the more expensive Server 2012 Standard Edition.
  • The move to processor-based licensing will also push cost increases on small businesses.  Many SMBs have purchased quad processor boxes to deliver performance and support virtualization.  With a 2 processor limit on Server 2012 Standard Edition, many customers will need to double the number of paid Windows Server licenses.

Microsoft has made it clear that they expect SMBs to switch from SBS to a file server and run Exchange and Sharepoint in the cloud.  This option, too, will represent significant cost increases for SMBs given Microsoft’s pricing model for Office 365 and the need to upgrade specific Office 2010 versions for full functionality.

If this move seems coercive, it just may be.  As reported in PC World, Office 365 has not been the smash hit Microsoft predicted.  The company is not releasing sales or usage numbers.  As a Microsoft spokewoman quoted in the article stated:

“We’re not breaking out customer, user, or revenue numbers at this time”

And according to IDC Analyst Melissa Webster, “They’ll give metrics when the metrics are meaningful, demonstrating scale and depth.”

So with lackluster performance, Microsoft releases a licensing and pricing model that “encourages” SMBs to move into the cloud or pay a heavy hardware and licensing penalty for upgrading in-house systems.

Fortunately, small and mid-size businesses have alternatives.  Google Apps for Business and other services offer more cost effective solutions for email, communication, and collaboration than Office 365. Beyond moving the Exchange and Sharepoint components of SBS to Google Apps, businesses can deploy secure cloud-based file services with full drive letter mapping and network place integration; access from PCs, MACs, and mobile devices; and integrated security and backup/recovery services.

Friday Thought: All Outages are Not Equal

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Last week Google Docs experienced an outage lasting about 30 minutes.  Almost immediately, the “reconsider the cloud” articles and blogs began to appear.   Articles like this one on Ars Technica, immediately lump the Google Docs outage with other cloud outages, including Amazon’s outage earlier this year and the on-going problems with Microsoft’s BPOS and Office365 services.

And well no outages are good, they are not all the same.  In most cases, the nature of the outages and their impact reflect the nature of the architecture and the service provider.

  • The Google Docs outage was caused by a memory error and was exposed by an update.  Google acknowledged the error and resolved the issue in under 45 minutes.
  • Amazon’s outage was a network failure that took an entire data center off-line.  Customer that signed up for redundancy were not impacted.
  • Microsoft’s flurry of outages, including a 6 hour outage that took Microsoft almost 90 minutes to fully acknowledge, appear to be related to DNS, load, and other operational issues.

Why is it important to understand the cause and nature of the outage?  With this understanding, you can provide rational comparisons between cloud and in-house systems and between vendors.

Every piece of software has bugs and some bugs are more serious than others.  Google’s architecture enables Google to roll forward and roll back changes rapidly across their entire infrastructure.  The fact that a problem was identified and corrected in under an hour is evidence of the effectiveness of their operations and architecture.

To compare Google to in-house systems, Microsoft releases bug fixes and updates monthly which generally require server reboots.  Depending on the size and use of each server (file/print, Exchange, etc), multiple reboots may be necessary and reboots can run well over an hour.  In the last two years, over 50% of all “patch Tuesday” releases have been followed up with updates, emergency patches, or hot-fixes with the recommendation of immediate action.  Fixing a bug in one of Microsoft’s releases can take from hours to days.  Comparatively, under an hour is not so shabby.

When looking across cloud vendors, the nature of the outage is also important.  Amazon customers that chose not to pay extra for redundancy knowingly assumed a small risk that their systems could become unavailable due to a large error or event.  Just like any IT decision, each business must make a cost/benefit analysis.

Customers should understand the level of redundancy provided with their service and the extra costs involved to ensure better availability.

The most troubling of the cloud outages are Microsoft’s.  Why?  Because the causes appear to relate to an inability to manage a high-volume, multi-tenant infrastructure.  Just like you cannot watch TV without electricity, you cannot run online services (or much of anything on a computer) without DNS.  That Microsoft continues to struggle with DNS, routing, and other operational issues leads me to believe that their infrastructure lacks the architecture and operating procedures to prove reliable.

Should cloud outages make us wary? Yes and no.  Yes to the extent that customers should understand what they are buying with a cloud solution — not just features and functions, but ecosystem.  No, to the extent that when put in perspective, cloud solutions are still generally proving more reliable and available than in-house systems.

 

 

Friday Thought: Is Microsoft Afraid of a Fair Fight?

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I do not condemn Microsoft for promoting its cloud services.  Nor do I think they are wrong to compare their services to others, including those from Google.  Watching their marketing efforts, I do wonder if Microsoft is afraid of a fair fight.  Here is why …

In an effort to create viral support for Office365, Microsoft has produced several videos on YouTube.  These videos, attempt a humorous comparison of Office365 to other services.  This video, as an example, is making the rounds on IT discussion forums as it claims to compare Office365 and Google Apps.

Using Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (or “FUD”) is a time honored sales technique, which can be quite effective.  This video, however, is intentionally deceptive, comparing Office365 as a paid service against free versions of Gmail and Google Apps.  Microsoft’s claims about ads are false when looking at Google Apps for Business, for Education, and for Government, and Microsoft knows this.

Why would Microsoft blur a comparison between Office365 and Google Apps?

Why would Microsoft shy away from a fair comparison?

Google Apps for Business costs less than comparable Office365 capabilities

Google Apps integrates with Office 2003/2007/2010 for added features

  • Office365 requires Office 2010 licenses for full feature access

Google Apps has 1 pricing plan for each type of customer (business, government, education, non-profit)

  • Office365 has 11 pricing plans spread over 2 types of licenses; you cannot switch license types once you start using the service

Google Apps customers always receive the latest updates and versions, with incremental, scheduled releases every few weeks

  • Companies using Microsoft BPOS (based on Exchange & Sharepoint 2007) have no upgrade path to Office365 (based on Exchange & Sharepoint 2010), without starting over and a full data migration project

Google Apps is designed for 100% availability – 24 x 7 x 365 – and Achieved 99.984% Availability in 2010 (see here for more)

  • Office365 still requires scheduled and emergency maintenance windows that interrupt service to users
  • Less than 6 weeks after launch, Office365 had an Exchange outage effecting most users in North America for between 3 and 5 hours
  • In August 2010, Microsoft’s BPOS service in North America had more than 40 hours of scheduled and unscheduled down time

Google Apps was designed from the ground up to be a secure, reliable, multi-tenant, service in which all users have access to the latest features.

  • Office365 is a modified version of Microsoft’s “2010” generation of Exchange, Sharepoint, and other services
  • The technology dates back more than 3 years in development and was originally designed for use as in-house, single-tenant, servers
  • New features arrive months apart and only with service packs and upgrades

Looking at the current differences between Google Apps and Office365, I understand Microsoft’s marketing strategy.  Do you?

Tuesday Take-Away: The True Role of the SLA

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As you look towards cloud solutions for more cost effective applications, infrastructure, or services, you are going to hear (and learn) a lot about Service Level Agreements, or SLAs.  Much of what you will hear is a big debate about the value of SLAs and what SLAs offer you, the customer.

Unfortunately, the some vendors are framing the value of their SLAs based on the compensation customers receive when the vendor fails to meet their service level commitments.  The best example of this attitude is Microsoft’s comparison of its cash payouts to Google’s SLA that provides free days of service.  Microsoft touts its cash refunds as a better response to failure.  Why any company would send out a marketing message that begins with “When we fail …” is beyond me.  But, that is a subject for another post someday.

That said, Microsoft and its customers that are comforted by the compensation, are totally missing the point of the SLA in the first place.  Any compensation for excessive downtime is irrelevant with respect to the actual cost and impact on your business.  And unless a vendor is failing miserably and often, the compensation itself is not going to change the vendor’s track record.

The true rule of the SLA is to communicate the vendor’s commitment to providing you with service that meets defined expectations for Performance, Availability, and Reliability (PAR).  The SLA should also communicate how the vendor defines and sets priorities for problems and how they will respond based on those priorities.  A good SLA will set expectations and define the method of measuring if those expectations are met.

Continuing with the Microsoft and Google example.  Microsoft sets an expectation that you will have downtime.  While the downtime is normally scheduled in advance, it may not be.  Google, in contrast, sets an expectation that you should have no downtime, ever.   The details follow.

Microsoft’s SLA is typical in that it excludes maintenance windows, periods of time the system will be unavailable for scheduled or emergency maintenance.  While Microsoft does not schedule these windows at a regular weekly or monthly time frame, they do promise to give you reasonable notice for maintenance windows.  The SLA, however, allows Microsoft to declare emergency maintenance windows with little or no maintenance.

In August 2010, Microsoft’s BPOS service had 6 emergency maintenance windows, totaling more than 10 hours, in response to customers losing connectivity to the service, along with 30 hours of scheduled maintenance windows.  In line with Microsoft’s SLA, customers experienced more than 40 hours of downtime that month, which is within the boundaries of the SLA and its expectations.  On August 17, 2011, Microsoft experienced a data center failure that resulted in loss of Exchange access for its Office365 customers in North America for as long a five hours.  The system was down for 90 minutes before Microsoft acknowledged this as an outage.

Google’s SLA sets and expectation for system availability 24x7x365, with no scheduled downtime for maintenance and no emergency maintenance windows.

The difference in SLAs sets a very different expectation and makes a statement about how each vendor builds, manages, and provides the services you pay for.

When comparing SLAs, understand the role of maintenance windows and other “exceptions” that give the vendor an out.  Also, look at the following.

  • Definitions for critical, important, normal, and low priority issues
  • Initial response times for issues based on priority level
  • Target time to repair for issues based on priority level
  • Methods of communicating system status and health
  • Methods of informing customers of issues and actions/results

Remember, if you need to use the compensation clause, your vendor has already failed.