Office Web Apps, LinkedIn and Facebook all become one happy family

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Microsoft has rolled out numerous updates to its web services (see below for the news-links).

 

1.

Office Web Apps is updated with new features such as embedding public documents in blogs and websites. You can expect automatic updates across the web of these publications, when the original file gets updated.

Think about this, I update my original document(s) and all of its ‘clones’, everywhere on the internet are updated automatically.

Example:

 

2.

Windows Live announced an integration with LinkedIn, the social networking site for business profiles and connections. Contacts in Windows Live can be integrated with contacts in LinkedIn and properties of the contacts can be merged to create a “more complete” profile of your contacts. Also status updates will propagate into Live Messenger. Full federation will be rolled out over the next weeks.

Think about this; from a cultural point of view, all your business partners now will become your buddies, with instant updates on their status.

3.

Facebook chatting will be integrated with Live Messenger. Not only for the desktop software (that was already a big success: Windows Live Messenger already ranks fourth in daily active users who connect to Facebook worldwide (source)),  but now also for the web version of Live Messenger.

Think about this; Live Messenger is the worlds largest chat network and Facebook is the worlds largest social networking site.

My observations:

  1. Will the internet be resilient enough to support all this integration overhead, after all it was not build to act as an enterprise service bus (aaah, you SOA lovers, think about that for a while….).
  2. Anybody that now discards the importance of cloud orchestration, really has no clue about what is going on (more on this later).

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Hooray, another new cloud: Oracle announces Exalogic

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At the yearly Oracle Openworld, Larry Ellison announced that Oracle will deliver a (private) cloud solution called Exalogic:

Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud is the world’s first and only integrated middleware machine—a combined hardware and software offering designed to revolutionize data center consolidation. Enterprises can bring together tens, hundreds, or even thousands of disparate, mission-critical, performance-sensitive workloads on Oracle Exalogic with maximum reliability, availability, and security. Oracle Exalogic’s unique high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnect fabric means that complex, distributed applications can run with a responsiveness simply not achievable with typical servers used in data centers today.” (source)

Well you read it correctly. It is a machine and it sounds like IBM trying to sell you a mainframe. I think this is what we typically call “cloud washing”. You take a product, put “cloud-“ before it and presto, you have joined the hype.

Apart from that it is an impressive machine capable of running applications faster and utilizing the very awesome Exadata technology. Too bad it is running Oracle’s own version of Linux with a Oracle dedicated kernel, a true open source OS would have shown Oracle’s embrace of the community much more.

But elastic or scalable? This remains unclear to me, I expect only in one direction; “buy more, not less”.

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Ahold goes Google: International food retailer moves 55,000 employees to Google Apps

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There were discussions with Microsoft about purchasing the cloud service BPOS. "We then had a session of two hours with Ahold’s management here in our office. This has changed a lot" says the Dutch Google Country Manager Erik de Muinck Keizer.

Source here (in Dutch).

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6 categories with 43 BPOS resources – it is all you need to start, migrate and administrate

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On the Microsoft TechNet blogs, a blog posting by Oscar Maqueda gives a good and complete overview of all available BPOS resources. Oscar’s blog is in Spanish so most non-Spanish people will probably not normally end up there. For your convenience I have copied the English part of his list here. It is an impressive list of all the resources in one place. Enjoy.

=== start Quote ===

Category 1: according to Oscar this is “Must read and keep on a USB key”.

In other words, this is core content that you cannot be without. You will constantly refer back to it and it needs to be refreshed every month.

Service Descriptions and white papers:

The absolute best resource is the Deployment Site . There will find a link to the holy grail of BPOS-S technical information related to migration: The BPOS Deployment Guide.

Useful detail can be found in a more summary form in the Service Descriptions:

Category 2: according to Oscar this is “Must read, subscribe and check when updated”.
Category 3: Online Training

A) Public

B) For Partners

Start here:

Then:

Then:

  • Migration and Onboarding Deep Dive :
    The Deployment Guide (above) should be used the most current reference. This deep dive is still solid though and contains detailed content  on migration and pre-sales discovery. Level 200-400.

Then:

  • See Depth Guidance references
Category 4: Online References
Category 5: Depth Guidance
  • Infrastructure Planning Guides – very good for walking through evaluating on-premise to online migrations.

SharePoint Online

Exchange Online

  • Developers Guides: what you can and can’t do with web services and BPOS.

Exchange Online

SharePoint Online

Partners:

Category 6: Tools

=== end Quote ===