2011? I was just getting used to saying twenty-ten. Here's what you need to know about Microsoft Lync, Office 365, Internet Explorer 9, and Windows Phone.
Lync’s Time Has Come
Microsoft Lync 2010 Standard and Enterprise will be available by the time you read this, and Lync Online is coming soon as part of Office 365 (see below). This hybrid approach to mainstream Microsoft servers is going to be quite common going forward, with the software giant offering both on-premises and hosted versions of its servers, giving customers a choice of where to put their infrastructure.
More specifically, Lync is the next-generation version of what used to be called Office Communications Server (OCS). It provides enterprise-class presence, instant messaging (IM), audio- and video-conferencing, and more, in a package that naturally integrates with other Microsoft products, especially Exchange, SharePoint, and Outlook. There's a client application that's part of the Office suites and new PBX-like capabilities that will let us finally step out from the shadow of the ancient phone systems on which many businesses still rely.
OCS was, perhaps, a bit ahead of its time. But I recommend evaluating Lync. This is an enterprise service whose time has come.
Office 365
Last month, I wrote about Office 365, and about my belief that this new offering is all about putting Microsoft's most popular productivity servers and applications on a subscription payment plan. Now that I've spent some time using a beta version of the service, I feel that this is still the case.
But that doesn't mean Office 365 doesn't make sense for Microsoft's customers as well. In fact, I think it makes plenty of sense.
Office 365 is being made available in a wide range of product versions, but Microsoft neatly divides them into two main categories, Office 365 for Small Businesses and Office 365 for Enterprises. The small business version is aimed at businesses of one to 50, though most businesses will want to consider the upper-level enterprise-oriented options after they exceed 25 employees or so.
For those small businesses, Office 365 is pretty compelling. I'm talking
- hosted Exchange 2010 with 25GB of storage space for each mailbox
- self-service team collaboration websites via hosted SharePoint 2010
- IM, presence, and online meetings with audio- and video-conferencing through Lync Online 2010
- private versions of the Office Web Apps (web versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote) as well as Outlook Web App for email, calendar, tasks, and contacts management (and if employees have desktop versions of Office 2010, they're free to use those applications as well)
- a simple, central web portal, with no IT required
- a 99.9 percent uptime SLA
The cost for this service? $6 per user per month. Think about that for a second. Google's small business offering is a bit less expensive, about $4.20 per month, though you must pay for a year at a time. But Office 365 provides you with real Exchange, real SharePoint, and Lync-based conferencing capabilities that Google can't touch. There's no comparison.
Office 365 for Enterprises is actually several different product versions, and businesses are free to mix and match, providing different employees with different levels of service, functionality, and, of course, pricing. The basics are the same as the small business offering, but enterprise customers also get 24 x 7 phone support, single sign-on (SSO—and, optionally, federation) with on-premises Active Directory (AD), and the current (2010) version of Office Professional Plus, which includes desktop-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook with Business Contact Manager, OneNote, Publisher, Access, InfoPath, SharePoint Workspace, and Lync (client).
This version costs $24 per month per user, but there are many other enterprise offerings, including a kiosk offering (for light email and SharePoint usage). The prices vary accordingly, with some coming in even below the Small Business version: The kiosk offering is just $2 per user per month.
The more I use Office 365, the more I become convinced that this is the future of Microsoft all tied up in one neat little product bundle. The only thing missing is an Application Virtualization (App-V)-style remote application deployment model for the local Office applications, though one has to wonder if that isn't in the plans for version two.
But even in its current form, Office 365 is proof positive that Microsoft's plan to move to the cloud isn't just viable—it’s a good one.
Internet Explorer 9 Performance
When Microsoft introduced IE 9 at PDC 2009, it promised to better adhere to web standards and offer its best-performing web browser ever. Now, if you understand the company's history, you know that neither of these goals are particularly high bars. But IE 9, as it turns out, is quite impressive.
One of the weird side issues with web standards is that the various technologies—HTML 5, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), JavaScript/ECMAScript, and so on—are in a constant state of flux. Various browser makers make claims about HTML 5 compliance, for example, despite the fact that the spec is in ongoing development, and is changing, and will be for a few more years at least.
The W3C web standards body hasn't really shown up with too many industry-standard HTML 5 tests, but when they finally did so in late 2010, surprise, surprise, Microsoft won. And by a long shot.
Of course, the anti-Microsoft crowd doesn't rely on the W3C to prove which products are superior. They've created non-standardized tests, like the SunSpider JavaScript rendering suite—which doesn't measure real-world browser performance—and the ACID3 HTML 5 test, which doesn't measure HTML 5 standards compliance but other things, including some HTML 5 features that are already known to be changing. IE has never performed well in either test.
Until IE 9, that is. IE 9 will never achieve a perfect score in ACID3, because Microsoft refuses to support features in its browser that will be changing.
But it does score a very respectable 95 out of 100, on those HTML 5 features that aren't guaranteed to change. IE 9 also scored the highest-ever rating on the SunSpider test, which must have been a shock to Google and Apple, given their incessant touting of their own products' superiority in JavaScript execution.
What I appreciate about all this is that Microsoft recognizes the futility of it all. These tests mean nothing in the real world, but they are always held against IE.
So the company is doing well on the tests that matter—even though they don't really matter, if you get my meaning—and focusing too on real-world performance. Here, the rating is a bit more subjective. I find IE 9 to be on par with browsers like Chrome or Firefox from a performance perspective, using websites that are currently popular or typical.
Where IE 9 should really pull ahead, however, is in the coming generation of content- and feature-rich websites. That's because IE 9 offers something that no other browser will ever offer on Windows: Complete hardware acceleration.
Yes, Chrome, Firefox, and even Safari will offer some forms of hardware acceleration, usually for certain content types only. But only IE 9 will be accelerated across the board. It's a huge advantage, one that makes websites run like native Windows apps, and one that points to the future, if you will, of hybrid web apps on Windows.
But I suspect we'll need to wait for Windows 8 before that vision is realized.