Receive bacon
Ahhh... as simple as a hand drier eh?
Personally think OCS needs to take a look at how IBM Sametime 7.5 was like, which had a lot more features, but admittedly less integration.
Half a hero biscuit for Microsoft
Neat as it is, Office Communications Server (OCS) is complicated. It has grown beyond being one application server into a collection of interlinked but separate application servers, each with their own requirements. There is a front-end server component, Web Conferencing, A/V Conferencing, Application Sharing, Communicator Web …
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Thursday 26th August 2010 10:32 GMT cob999
BPOS?
"But it fits a classic Microsoft pattern: fantastic if you are large enough to devote an administrator to it. Like so many products that Microsoft makes, there isn’t a “dumbed down” version available for the SME"
It sounds like the solution to the problems you describe is BPOS? This includes a basic version of OCS as well as SharePoint and Exchange. Not quite as powerful as the onsite versions yet, but the essential features are there and more will be added at a rapid pace.
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Thursday 26th August 2010 12:15 GMT Trevor_Pott
BPOS
BPOS is a good beginning. Five years from now, after a whole bunch of other companies have walked over that minefield and Microsoft was pulled a Google with the data of the wrong people, I might consider it. Until they have been caught with their hand in the personal information cookie jar and slapped back down though, I am a littler nervous. IF you think I'm paranoid about allowing critical corporate data to be hosted by an external provider, you should meet my CTO. He is not a fan.
Beyond those concerns, which many companies wouldn’t care about, there’s the fact that this is Microsoft we’re talking about. On the Internet. When I look at BPOS, (and I’ve tried it,) there is no real advantage to Google’s offerings beyond a little bit a polish. Two years from now Google’s Gtalk/Gmail/GVoice etc. will be integrated into a package that would eat fewer resources, be far more stable and have a better web client than anything Microsoft could possibly field.
Don’t get me wrong, OWA and CWA are not bad…they are just plinking enormous. They take forever to load, are significantly more fragile than Google’s web offerings and just seem to be that few steps behind the desktop clients. (Whereas Google’s web clients are nearly indistinguishable from their non-web ones.)
Plus: BPOS is /expensive/. Three months of use at 75 users and I could have bought the software and CALs to sun the thing in-house and been done with it. Admittedly, I’d practically need my own admin to run it, but at least my data would be my own. The trust is, for the cost, I don’t see the advantage. You are going to pay for the extra wetware to administer the thing either way. Why would I go the BPOS route and pay some administrator who isn’t local to my company? I could take that same money and put it into the salary of someone who lived in the same city as my company and might even buy my company’s products from time to time.
Unless the TCO of “cloud” services are significantly cheaper than deploying the local versions, there are no advantages, and a heck of a lot of disadvantages to the concept. Hell, the only practical advantage to using Microsoft nowadays is that they AREN’T GOOGLE. Microsoft offer local servers that you can control, Google don’t. Why would I ruin it by putting all that data into the cloud and then paying over the odds for the privilege?
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Thursday 26th August 2010 13:27 GMT cob999
BPOS
"Two years from now Google’s Gtalk/Gmail/GVoice etc. will be integrated into a package that would eat fewer resources, be far more stable and have a better web client than anything Microsoft could possibly field."
Wow! That's quite a sweeping statement based on little evidence. IMO web clients are the poor cousins of their rich client versions, e.g. OWA & GMail are both pigs in comparison to the full Outlook client. Google are betting that everything can be done best through HTML5 and their own browser, we'll have to see how that plays out, I don't buy it though.
Anyway you've written an entire article complaining about one of the problems that BPOS solves, but your CTO is paranoid about cloud computing. Fair enough, but your company going to pay through the nose for the privilege of owning the data. There's no way BPOS licenses for 75 users could compare to the costs of running the equivalent servers in house. You'd have to have 2 or 3 times the users at least before it comes remotely close.
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Friday 27th August 2010 04:16 GMT Trevor_Pott
Clouds
He may be paranoid...but I am not yet convinced he's wrong. You have to go a long way before you convince me that putting your data in someone else's care is a good idea. It boils down to trust, and I have very little of it for soulless Megacorporate entities.
Entirely apart from the data governance issues, hosted services leave you with noone to flog when it goes boom. SLAs are worthless, and don't actually cover the costs of downtime to your business. What's more, you have no control over if/when your hosted provider will pull a Zune on you and withdraw or radically change the service. What is someone in my situation going to do? Sue Microsoft? Please. The legal fees alone would be ruinous.
No, cloud anything is an absolute last resort for any business critical function, unless you are dealing with a provider that lives and dies by their service levels. A corporation like Microsoft has no incentive to do anything other than tell you how it's going to be, and expect you to like it.
Even if you could argue that Microsoft had some minor incentive to do well by it’s customers, it has proven time and again that it doesn’t care about any organisation below a certain size. Do you honestly thing this suddenly changes because it’s a hosted service? Balderdash. Unless the tco over an expected application lifetime of 4 years was SIGNIFICANTLY lower, the risks outweigh the rewards. Oh, and “but the keep you on the latest version” isn’t a pro, either. I want to deploy a server fleet and have it function with no major changes – or user retraining – required for at least 4 years at a time. I don’t upgrade every iteration of anything unless there is a DAMN good reason.
If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it. “Because it’s newer” is never a good enough reason for ANYTHING. So what the benefit of hosted services? Where are those advantages or TCO price delays over a four year application life that make it worth it?
At 75 users, I just don’t see it.
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Friday 27th August 2010 10:11 GMT cob999
TCO
"Where are those advantages or TCO price delays over a four year application life that make it worth it?"
How many full time staff does it take to provide 365/24/7 support, patching and 99.9% uptime for an email server alone? On that is secure and accessible for mobile employees? You could outsource the staffing a bit, but then these same people could walk out of your building with a hard drive full of data. You can be paranoid about cloud computing all you want but unless your company has bulletproof (and therefore extremely expensive) physical and technical security then the idea that your data is safe because it is onsite is only a comfort blanket. That's where the TCO comes from.
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Friday 27th August 2010 23:14 GMT Trevor_Pott
@cob999
So your argument pro cloud computing is "because it's in the cloud, they'll do a better job than you of keeping it running." I don't buy it. There is little incentive on their part to expend the resources necessary for that. You also assume that the transport layer is infallible, something that goes against my experience. So at the very least, I need to pat the cost of the cloud service, and two transport links from different providers. For this I get the pleasure of accepting whatever service level I am provided, with zero practicable recourse should the cloud provider go titsup.com.
You will bet you business on this? The livelihoods of you and you coworkers? In the SME space, the difference between profit and loss can be a few tens of thousands of dollars, business costs that can be incurred with only a little bit of downtime at the wrong moment, or the wrong customer upset. Most SMEs can’t tank too many years of loss. While an extreme illustration of the risks, it is possible that a sufficiently lengthy or inconvenient cloud (or transport) outage could cost an SME so much they are forced to fold.
How can any SME afford to take that risk? Especially when the benefits, despite your assertions, have NOT been proven? I could not recommend cloud anything for any critical service to anyone. I’m sorry, but business communications are the single most important service there is. If you can’t talk to you customers or your staff you are dead.
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Thursday 26th August 2010 11:19 GMT Trevor_Pott
Anonymous Coward
I still maintain it should be considered. I also believe that if you are even marginally overstretched staff-wise, as many SME shops towards the smaller end of the scale are, OCS will push your resources over the edge. It is BLOODY AWESOME. It's also really complicated, and kind of fragile.
There are subtleties and layers of opinion about this product I find a little hard to compress into three 500-ish word articles.
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Thursday 26th August 2010 10:42 GMT Phil Lewis
Use openfire
"For a really small shop looking for corporate instant messaging, the advice is easy: don’t bother with OCS. Slap a jabber server together in 15 minutes and go have a cup of tea."
I've had much success with the very-simple-to-install openfire jabber server (java/open source). It integrates nicely with AD and 'just works'. Had loads of users on it and it didn't ever need as much as a service restart in the 2 years the (RHEL4 Linux) server didn't get rebooted.
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Thursday 26th August 2010 13:02 GMT Trevor_Pott
dz-015
Point taken. I do use Redhat a lot, and VMWare…a few others. I will make a point to yak about them some more. I am sorry that it’s been so Microsoft all the time recently…but we just replaced our whole Microsoft domain.
4 cities, 5 sites, 5 DCs, Exchange server, WSUS, OCS, a half dozen SQL servers, and the list goes on. Two sysadmins and a bench tech. 250 VMs and about 100 physical machines. 2.5 days; with as little interruption of service as possible, and no…we didn’t have enough hardware to run both networks in parallel for the changeover.
All of it had to be done without disrupting the Linux side of the network for more than a few minutes at a time. Total sysadmin uptime: over 100 hours per wetware unit over the course of the 3 days of changeover and two days of post-doomsday tech support.
Oh, and they are letting me blog about it!
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Thursday 26th August 2010 13:02 GMT darren 16
Confirms my view of sysadmins
What a load of rubbish. We have OCS 2008 R2 in and have to say it has been one of our most successful projects over the last few years. We certainly don't have a full time OCS admin.....we got Dell in for a few days to set the whole infrastructure up (and our domain setup is complicated and that's what took their time) and even that didn't cost much, it's already paid for itself in reduced call costs and the feedback from all levels within our company is very positive.
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Friday 27th August 2010 04:18 GMT Trevor_Pott
@darren 16
Nowhere did I say it wasn't an excellent application. I said it was a pain to install and maintain. As for your impression of sysadmins, I can't help you there. I am sorry to report that we are human beings and as such we tend to prefer applications and products that make our lives easier. I don't think we are any different from anyone else in that regard. I should also point out that despite OCS bieng a pig to work with, I did deploy it. I did so because it would benefit my users more than alternatives that were easier on me.
None of that changes my desire for it to be easier to administer.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
