It's hard to envision what Microsoft intends to do with Skype for corporate IT. So what can users expect to get out of Microsoft's $8.5 billion investment?
The people who paid $2.5 billion for Skype two years ago are starting to look very astute.
A week or two ago that wasn't the case. Skype's IPO had been delayed. Google and Facebook were sniffing around Skype, but a buyout didn't seem likely -- too many samolies for Facebook to muster, and all sorts of potential problems for Google, including an antitrust hurdle of Brobdingnagian proportions.
But this morning comes the announcement that Microsoft will purchase Skype for $8.5 billion. As a defensive move, Microsoft buying Skype has some merit: a Google Voice-and-Skype combination would prove a formidable challenge to Windows Live Messenger and Lync, both in the consumer market and in the enterprise. The Skype international telephone number inventory -- and Skype's long experience with local telcos all over the world -- would provide an instant presence that Google Voice is still struggling to establish.
But $8.5 billion?
It's hard to envision what Microsoft intends to do with Skype for corporate IT. Skype is widely regarded by network admins as anathema. Five years ago, at the BlackHat conference in Europe, Philippe Biodi and Fabrice Desclaux described Skype's obfuscated code, saying it "looks like /dev/random" and it hasn't gotten any better. Like any P2P program, Skype basically runs a backdoor, with random pings and relays going out even when there's nobody using the phone. Security people love software like that.
So if the software's no good in the corporate environment, what can enterprise IT expect to get out of Microsoft's $8.5 billion investment?
Not much, as far as I can tell. Speculation that Skype will integrate into the Lync or Exchange environment seem completely far-fetched: The architectures are completely different, and the software isn't reusable. Surely, Microsoft isn't expecting to keep many key Skype developers around, even with fat paychecks. Those international phone numbers and telco connections could help extend Lync, at least in theory. Skype has a good-sized user base, with 120 million active users every month, but that's small potatoes compared to Live Messenger.
Some analysts speculate that Microsoft will meld the Kinect (currently Xbox-only, but coming soon to a Windows 8 near you) with Skype, but that doesn't make a very compelling argument. Offering a $100 Kinect as a replacement for a $2.95 webcam makes about as much sense as ... as ... as buying Skype for $8.5 billion, eh?
The only positive note for IT, as best I can tell, is possible integration of P2P VoIP technology with Windows Phone. Microsoft may be playing a long game, with a Skype client for Windows Phone 8. Presumably the client wouldn't send chillls down the spine of Exchange and Lync admins. Having Skype available for free corporate calls worldwide certainly has a nice ring to it.
But $8.5 billion?
Read the views of online Certification Experts, which provide the real questions and correct answer and explanation for the students / professionals who are seeking or enhancing their level of expertise. more at certkingdom.com
May 9, 2011
Dirty IT jobs: Partners in slime
Dirty Job No. 2: The shadow
You probably don't want to know where your coworkers are going on the Web. But sometimes you have no choice. Nancy Hand knows this, well, firsthand.
Until three years ago, Hand was a network engineer for a large public utility in the Southwest. When any of that site's 3,000 employees got a malware infection, Hand received an alert via the utility's McAfee software. She was then called in to investigate by remotely combing through the employee's browser cache, looking for the source of the attack.
[ Get a $50 American Express gift cheque if we publish your anonymous experiences from tech's front lines. Send your story of a lesson learned, of dealing with frustrating coworkers/end-users/managers, or a humorous happening to offtherecord@infoworld.com. ]
Along the way, Hand got to see where these employees had been surfing while they were allegedly working. Most of the time what she found was benign -- a lot of sites devoted to cooking, fashion, cars, and day trading. Inevitably, though, she'd encounter the darker side.
Like the employee who swore it was a spam email that caused his browser to visit that members-only bondage site, though how that email also managed to create a member profile for him was less clear. (Hand says the head of IT security jokingly awarded her the "Golden Garter Belt" for uncovering that one.)
Or the company vice president whom Hand discovered had been spending work time visiting TeenageVirginSluts.com. Naturally, he was the VP of IT.
"He was my boss's boss's boss," she says. "After I found this I contacted my manager and said, 'We have a zero-tolerance policy for this kind of thing, so I am officially notifying you of what I found.' To my knowledge nothing was ever done. About a year later that VP got fired for another sexually related infraction."
Some employees ended up being escorted from the facility by armed guards, though Hand never knew whether it was due to something she had found.
"Sometimes it was a little unsettling to be on the machine of someone I'd met in another part of my job who seemed like a very toe-the-line type of person, only to discover it wasn't true," she said. "People aren't as innocent as they seem. And the next time they complained about catching a virus, I'm thinking 'Well, you sort of did this to yourself.'"
Dirty jobs survival tip: Be prepared to go it alone.
"Management didn't seem to take any of it very seriously, even after we got hit with a denial-of-service attack that put us out of business for almost an entire day," she says. "It all becomes political, even though you think it shouldn't be. The VP is given a pass, but the secretary gets fired."
You probably don't want to know where your coworkers are going on the Web. But sometimes you have no choice. Nancy Hand knows this, well, firsthand.
Until three years ago, Hand was a network engineer for a large public utility in the Southwest. When any of that site's 3,000 employees got a malware infection, Hand received an alert via the utility's McAfee software. She was then called in to investigate by remotely combing through the employee's browser cache, looking for the source of the attack.
[ Get a $50 American Express gift cheque if we publish your anonymous experiences from tech's front lines. Send your story of a lesson learned, of dealing with frustrating coworkers/end-users/managers, or a humorous happening to offtherecord@infoworld.com. ]
Along the way, Hand got to see where these employees had been surfing while they were allegedly working. Most of the time what she found was benign -- a lot of sites devoted to cooking, fashion, cars, and day trading. Inevitably, though, she'd encounter the darker side.
Like the employee who swore it was a spam email that caused his browser to visit that members-only bondage site, though how that email also managed to create a member profile for him was less clear. (Hand says the head of IT security jokingly awarded her the "Golden Garter Belt" for uncovering that one.)
Or the company vice president whom Hand discovered had been spending work time visiting TeenageVirginSluts.com. Naturally, he was the VP of IT.
"He was my boss's boss's boss," she says. "After I found this I contacted my manager and said, 'We have a zero-tolerance policy for this kind of thing, so I am officially notifying you of what I found.' To my knowledge nothing was ever done. About a year later that VP got fired for another sexually related infraction."
Some employees ended up being escorted from the facility by armed guards, though Hand never knew whether it was due to something she had found.
"Sometimes it was a little unsettling to be on the machine of someone I'd met in another part of my job who seemed like a very toe-the-line type of person, only to discover it wasn't true," she said. "People aren't as innocent as they seem. And the next time they complained about catching a virus, I'm thinking 'Well, you sort of did this to yourself.'"
Dirty jobs survival tip: Be prepared to go it alone.
"Management didn't seem to take any of it very seriously, even after we got hit with a denial-of-service attack that put us out of business for almost an entire day," she says. "It all becomes political, even though you think it shouldn't be. The VP is given a pass, but the secretary gets fired."
May 8, 2011
Microsoft Office 2010 takes on all comers
Microsoft Office 2010 takes on all comers: IBM Lotus Symphony 3.0
Don't let the name fool you. IBM's Lotus Symphony suite has almost nothing to do with the earlier incarnations of the Lotus Symphony suite -- it's now a rebranded spin-off of OpenOffice.org, with a heavily reworked interface courtesy of IBM's programmers. It also features only three applications from the OpenOffice.org suite, but they're the ones that matter: word processor, spreadsheet, and presentations.
Launch Symphony and you'd scarcely know you were dealing with anything derived from OpenOffice.org at all. The look of the program is markedly different and, in my opinion, substantially more attractive. Open a word processing document, for instance, and you'll see a familiar toolbar along the top, but also a set of slide-out panels to the right of the text area: text properties, a document explorer/organizer, clip art, text styles, and a Widgets window. Also, multiple documents opened within Symphony are now organized as tabs within a single window by default, although you can undock them into their own window by right-clicking the relevant tab and selecting "Open in new window."
The Widgets panel lets you add various Internet-based services -- Google Gadgets or other Web pages -- into that window for reference or access to online applications. The usefulness of this feature is a little unclear, but it seems like it's being positioned as an open-ended version of the reference panel that's used in Word for translations, word definitions, and more.
One omission that would have been handy is support for the enhanced right-click context menu available through the Windows 7 Taskbar and Start menu. This typically provides access to recently used documents or common program functions. OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice don't have this either, but IBM could have easily added this extra bit of system integration while it was redesigning the rest of the program's look.
While Symphony may look different, most of its features (apart from obviously new things like the Widgets panel) and their behavior are almost identical to the OpenOffice.org counterparts. Anyone who has cut his or her teeth on the former program shouldn't have trouble figuring out how Symphony works. Most of the menus sport the same option sets, and utilities like the Template Organizer behave the same way.
Many of the new features that have come to Symphony 3.0 are courtesy of the new OpenOffice.org code base -- such as support for Microsoft Office VBA macros, or the Detective (dependency and debug tracer) for spreadsheet equations. Symphony can open most Office 2007 documents -- although you get a warning that some documents may not render with total fidelity. A number of files I tried, like the mortgage calculator spreadsheet I tested with OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice, opened but had the same issues as with those two programs. Password-protected Word and Excel files can also be opened, but only if they're saved in the Office 97-2003 binary format; password-protected Office 2007 XML-format files can't be opened.
The relatively stripped-down focus of Symphony means some features found in OpenOffice.org proper aren't found here. WordPerfect users looking to open their documents in Symphony are likely to be let down; support for WordPerfect documents is not included and is not available through the plug-in directory either. Format conversion also doesn't seem as well-supported in Symphony as it does in OpenOffice.org. When I couldn't open an .html document, I looked for a plug-in to allow that. The closest I could find was an output filter that saves ODF as a .html document and a plug-in that converts .html files to ODF spreadsheets (not text documents), but no import filter. To that end, those already using ODF as their standard document format will find Symphony a lot more accommodating.
Don't let the name fool you. IBM's Lotus Symphony suite has almost nothing to do with the earlier incarnations of the Lotus Symphony suite -- it's now a rebranded spin-off of OpenOffice.org, with a heavily reworked interface courtesy of IBM's programmers. It also features only three applications from the OpenOffice.org suite, but they're the ones that matter: word processor, spreadsheet, and presentations.
Launch Symphony and you'd scarcely know you were dealing with anything derived from OpenOffice.org at all. The look of the program is markedly different and, in my opinion, substantially more attractive. Open a word processing document, for instance, and you'll see a familiar toolbar along the top, but also a set of slide-out panels to the right of the text area: text properties, a document explorer/organizer, clip art, text styles, and a Widgets window. Also, multiple documents opened within Symphony are now organized as tabs within a single window by default, although you can undock them into their own window by right-clicking the relevant tab and selecting "Open in new window."
The Widgets panel lets you add various Internet-based services -- Google Gadgets or other Web pages -- into that window for reference or access to online applications. The usefulness of this feature is a little unclear, but it seems like it's being positioned as an open-ended version of the reference panel that's used in Word for translations, word definitions, and more.
One omission that would have been handy is support for the enhanced right-click context menu available through the Windows 7 Taskbar and Start menu. This typically provides access to recently used documents or common program functions. OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice don't have this either, but IBM could have easily added this extra bit of system integration while it was redesigning the rest of the program's look.
While Symphony may look different, most of its features (apart from obviously new things like the Widgets panel) and their behavior are almost identical to the OpenOffice.org counterparts. Anyone who has cut his or her teeth on the former program shouldn't have trouble figuring out how Symphony works. Most of the menus sport the same option sets, and utilities like the Template Organizer behave the same way.
Many of the new features that have come to Symphony 3.0 are courtesy of the new OpenOffice.org code base -- such as support for Microsoft Office VBA macros, or the Detective (dependency and debug tracer) for spreadsheet equations. Symphony can open most Office 2007 documents -- although you get a warning that some documents may not render with total fidelity. A number of files I tried, like the mortgage calculator spreadsheet I tested with OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice, opened but had the same issues as with those two programs. Password-protected Word and Excel files can also be opened, but only if they're saved in the Office 97-2003 binary format; password-protected Office 2007 XML-format files can't be opened.
The relatively stripped-down focus of Symphony means some features found in OpenOffice.org proper aren't found here. WordPerfect users looking to open their documents in Symphony are likely to be let down; support for WordPerfect documents is not included and is not available through the plug-in directory either. Format conversion also doesn't seem as well-supported in Symphony as it does in OpenOffice.org. When I couldn't open an .html document, I looked for a plug-in to allow that. The closest I could find was an output filter that saves ODF as a .html document and a plug-in that converts .html files to ODF spreadsheets (not text documents), but no import filter. To that end, those already using ODF as their standard document format will find Symphony a lot more accommodating.
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