Yes!
Service
Pack 1 has given us here at RCPU an opportunity to revive one of our favorite
activities: bashing Vista! Microsoft's ne'er-do-well operating system finally
got the update that Redmond hoped would push it into the enterprise, and guess
what? SP1 is deeply flawed -- so much so that Microsoft is
offering
free support to all Vista users, no matter
how
they ended up with the OS.
Or, at least, that's what the trade press has been saying. And maybe it's true.
Or -- and to be fair, the InformationWeek
story linked in this entry mentions this -- maybe service packs are always
a bit of a bear to roll out, and maybe they've caused problems in the past,
too. Actually, there shouldn't be a "maybe" on either of those last
two statements, as they're just true. All kinds of service packs have caused
problems before; this is, after all, complicated stuff to manage.
And, if you go back and take a look at the comments in the InformationWeek
story, you'll find at least a few users who had no trouble running the first
Vista service pack -- and even a few who seem to actually like Vista.
Yeah,
Vista's still a dog for the most part, and it still hasn't really cracked the
enterprise in a serious way (although we still maintain that it
will...eventually). But, in RCPU's view, most of the dire SP1 news has had
more to do with a slow-ish news time surrounding a holiday weekend than with
the demise of Vista and/or Microsoft.
Still, it's kind of fun to be Vista-bashing again, even if we aren't quite
so serious this time.
Have you had a traumatic experience with Vista SP1? Or a good one? Or none
at all because you wouldn't install Vista even if your life depended on it?
Open up at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/25/2008 at 1:21 PM13 comments
Dynamics AX is one of John Elmer's favorite things. Elmer is vice president
of IS and controller for the
Rodgers
& Hammerstein Organization, which, believe it or not, is an outfit that
owns the intellectual property created by, well,
Rodgers
and Hammerstein, the famous Broadway songwriters.
Prior to implementing AX 3 in 2005, R&H was trapped in a web of proprietary
ERP-like applications, which were expensive to develop and maintain. Then, along
came Dave Weiner (like, perhaps, a wind sweeping down the plain), at the time
the practice manager for Cole Systems,
a New York-based Dynamics partner. (Weiner is now transitioning into a position
with Dynamics consultancy Kineticsware.) By now, you know the end of the story:
Cole and Dynamics AX stole the show at R&H. But it wasn't a sure thing from
the outset.
R&H, a privately held -- still owned, in fact, by the families of the composers
-- company based in (where else?) NYC, has an unusual business model. It owns
intellectual property, not actual property. So while organizations that want
to perform, say, Carousel, will buy the rights to it well in advance
of a performance, the sale doesn't really "happen" until the lights
come on.
"We've got some odd metrics in our business," Elmer told RCPU. "We'll
book business today, and it's actual booked business, but the recognition isn't
tied to the order, it's tied to a specific set of criteria around dates, the
actual dates of performances people put on."
Weiner and Cole Systems, in a story probably more Hollywood than Broadway,
entered the R&H derby as an underdog to mighty SAP in 2004. But when SAP
wanted to explode R&H's budget, Weiner stepped in with AX and a note of
simplicity -- music, incidentally, to Microsoft's ears.
"We did a simple analysis of the business," Weiner said at Convergence.
"We spent a couple of hours onsite. John said a canned application is not
going to do what [R&H] needed to do. We crunched through it and piled on
a little bit of code and showed them the business working on the system."
"They pulled an all-nighter," Elmer recalled. "After two meetings
with our user groups, they threw together a working model of our process. AX
out of the box -- it was just amazing. It blew everybody away."
Probably not unlike Debbie Reynolds on Broadway in Oklahoma! (Um, right?
OK, now's the time to confess that we don't really know much about musicals
here at RCPU. It's too bad R&H couldn't have owned the rights to, say, '70s
and '80s sitcoms -- then we could've dropped in some serious references. As
it is, your editor sort of remembers seeing The Sound of Music on TV
as a kid, but that's about it. It had something to do with Germans, or possibly
Austrians, or both. Anyway, we digress.)
After a five-month implementation, AX was up and running. Elmer liked it so
much that he signed up to roll out the forthcoming AX 2009 (due by the end of
June) early as part of the Technology Adoption Program (or TAP, which also seems
fitting for Broadway). He's a fan of 2009, too -- especially the BI capabilities
("Executives are not good at working too hard to get to anything; we can
show them the pretty charts and graphs," he said) and the Office 2007-based
AX 2009 interface. The latter took a bit of getting used to, but Elmer says
that he and the R&H staff -- it's a company of about 50 people -- have embraced
it.
Elmer's also pleased to know that Microsoft -- which has started publishing
information on forthcoming versions of Dynamics suites 18 to 24 months in advance
of their release -- is keeping him updated on what's happening next with AX.
"You know that down the road there's something coming," he said.
"We won't have to sit here waiting."
What that says, of course, is that Microsoft is following the first rule of
show business (whether it knows it or not): Always leave them wanting more.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/20/2008 at 1:21 PM1 comments
What? Something's coming out of Redmond not just on time, but early?
Apparently
so.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/20/2008 at 1:21 PM0 comments
It'll be held in
San
Diego in May. Mmm...San Diego. In May. RCPU approves.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/20/2008 at 1:21 PM0 comments
The word
"ecosystem"
might have a distinctly flora-and-fauna feel about it, but in the software game
it means something entirely different. For Microsoft, as for most big vendors,
the ecosystem is a universe of partners, customers and other friendly entities
that facilitate sales and implementation of applications. Or something like
that.
This week, Microsoft has been growing its ecosystem -- feeding a plant here,
breeding some animals there, if it were in the natural world -- for unified
communications. Following on the heels of UC deals with Polycom and Tandberg
is this week's announcement with Aspect
Software, which makes technology for contact centers (otherwise known, as
far as we can tell, as call centers).
Aspect will build its unified IP application for contact centers -- already
built on the .NET platform -- to integrate with Microsoft's UC offerings. Microsoft,
in turn, made an "equity
investment" in Aspect. While Aspect won't stop working with other vendors,
it will lead with Microsoft UC apps in selling an integrated package with its
Unified IP offering.
"When it comes to UC platforms, our lead will be Microsoft," Mike
Sheridan, Aspect's senior vice president of strategy and marketing, told RCPU.
"We'll only be reactive with other UC platforms customers might ask for."
For Microsoft, the idea is to be ubiquitous (hey, it's worked for Redmond before),
working with a variety of partners to become everybody's UC software platform,
no matter what or whose application is sitting on top of it or is integrated
with it. Apparently, the folks in Redmond have found their competitors in the
UC space (think Cisco and IBM, for starters) to be a little inflexible on that
front and think that they can cash in.
"We're changing the number of options that customers have traditionally
been able to work from when it comes to telecommunications investments,"
said Zig Serafin, general manager of Microsoft unified communications, in a
phone chat with RCPU today.
At the heart of Microsoft's UC offering is Office Communications Server, which
the company says is now deployed in 35 percent of the Fortune 500 (that's "about"
174 companies, according to Serafin, who didn't offer a more precise number).
But, really, the key to UC for Microsoft is partnerships and having established
UC partners whose own partners will sell Microsoft's UC platform into their
client bases. It's pretty classic Redmond strategy, and Serafin's pretty sure
that it'll work.
"Microsoft's offering in the voice space will be in the top three voice
providers within the next few years," Serafin said.
In the meantime, though, this week presented another opportunity to add a new
beast -- in this case, Aspect -- to the Redmond UC ecosystem.
Are you interested in partnering with Microsoft for UC? What do you see as
the potential for unified communications? Give us a shout at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/19/2008 at 1:21 PM0 comments
Hey, Aspire Technologies, we don't mean to alarm you or anything, but you seem
to have misspelled the last half of your product's name. Next time, do a spell
check before going live. Anyway, info on updated QuoteWerks is
here
(PDF).
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/19/2008 at 1:21 PM0 comments
So, here it is. Vista SP1.
Available
now. Anybody interested? Anybody? Bueller? Remember when everybody anticipated
Vista's arrival with bated breath? Yeah, that does seem like a long time ago.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/18/2008 at 1:21 PM3 comments
Kidaro is the latest company to be
subsumed
into Redmond.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/18/2008 at 1:21 PM0 comments
Microsoft
loses
another court battle as the big honchos, the Supreme Court, allow Novell
to go ahead with an old antitrust lawsuit. It's interesting to note that the
chief justice of the Supreme Court is a Microsoft shareholder, though.
Posted by Becky Nagel on 03/18/2008 at 1:21 PM0 comments