Does your organization employ a virtual machine (VM) infrastructure for server and/or desktop systems? Are you considering migrating some or all of these VMs to a cloud-based hosting infrastructure?

VM cloud pricing details

The research that is involved in this process is pretty staggering, to be sure. SolarWinds, has addressed this situation in an elegant and cost-effective (free!) manner: SolarWinds VM-to-Cloud Calculator.

This free Windows utility enables us to automatically inventory our VMware-based virtualization infrastructure and perform cost comparisons among three leading cloud hosting providers:

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
• Rackspace
• Microsoft Windows Azure

Let’s have a closer look at what this tool can do for you.

Creating a VM inventory

You can download the VM-to-Cloud Calculator tool simply by registering a new SolarWinds account.

After you’ve downloaded and installed the VM-to-Cloud Calculator (the .MSI installation package weighs in at less than 5 MB), start the app and enter your host credentials. These credentials consist of the following:

• IP address or hostname of your VM server
• Username
• Password

This screen is shown in the following screenshot.

Entering your VMware credentials

It is very important to note that the previously mentioned “VM server” must be an instance of one of the following virtualization server technologies:

• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware ESX/ESXi

Therefore, at least as of this writing in November 2011, the VM-to-Cloud Calculator is not compatible with virtualization servers such as Microsoft Hyper-V Server or Citrix XenServer.

Once you verify connectivity to your target VMware server, go ahead and let the application run the inventory for you. Sample results from a VM inventory scan are shown in the following image:

VM inventory report with cost information

NOTE: In order to show you appreciable real-world data with this tool, some of the screenshots in this piece are borrowed from SolarWinds product documentation.

The VM inventorying piece alone justifies the VM-to-Cloud Calculator’s utility, in my opinion. The report, which is exportable to various file formats including Excel, Adobe PDF, and CSV, can definitely save you quite a bit of time in undertaking manual analysis.

Performing Price Comparisons

The centerpiece of the SolarWinds VM-to-Cloud Calculator is its automatically generated cloud hosting price comparison matrix. A sample report is shown in the following image:

VM cloud pricing details

As you can see, the VM Cloud Pricing Details report gives you at-a-glance price comparisons among the Amazon EC2, Windows Azure, and Rackspace hosts on a VM-by-VM basis. And yes, you can export this report data as well.

You might be wondering how current the calculator’s pricing data is, and how it applies to a person depending upon where he or she lives in the world.

We can click the Settings tab to configure calculation/pricing metadata, such as:

• Your preferred currency units
• Disk size threshold to differentiate “true” VMs from storage instances
• The data refresh (“calculation”) period
• Data polling during application runtime

The Settings dialog is shown in the following screen image.

VM-to-Cloud Calculator Settings page

Conclusion

The SolarWinds VM-to-Cloud Calculator is a valuable tool for Windows systems administrators who currently leverage locally hosted VMware virtual machines and want to increase their availability by migrating them to a cloud service provider. I will leave you with a tip: SolarWinds offers an enterprise virtualization solution called SolarWinds Virtualization Manager; this software won the Best of VMworld 2011 Gold Award in Virtualization Management (a high honor, indeed). You can download a trial version if you’d like.

• Decaf – Amazon EC2 client for Android (0)
• Office 365 review – Part 8: SharePoint Online and conclusion (0)
• Office 365 review – Part 7: Lync Online (0)
• Office 365 review – Part 6: Exchange Online Hybrid, Archiving and IRM (2)
• Office 365 review – Part 5: Migrating to Exchange Online (0)

There is no doubt about it, Amazon has become the leading provider of public cloud services. No other cloud provider adds new features at a comparable pace. A clear sign for Amazon’s dominance is that the ecosystem around Amazon Web Services (AWS) is growing quickly. Clients that allow you to manage AWS and, in particular, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) frontends are especially popular. I do believe that even though Linux is predominant on EC2, it makes a lot of sense for Windows shops to run Windows servers in Amazon’s cloud.

Amazon EC2 client – Decaf

The Decaf EC2 client for Android makes no different between Windows and Linux instances (virtual machines) because you can only manage EC2 functionality, and not the guest operating systems. You can administer EC2 instances, AMIs (Amazon images), EBS (Elastic Block Storage), EBS Snapshots, Elastic IPs (IP addresses), Security Groups (firewall settings), and Key Pairs (crypto keys for accessing instances).

Decaf does not have the same functionality as the AWS Management Console; however, it is impressive how much can be done without much hassle on a mobile phone. I have what is probably the smallest Android phone (Xperia Mini), which only has a 2.55″ display, but I am at least as fast with Decaf as with Amazon’s web interface on a PC.

By the way, this is another good example that demonstrates that web apps are about to lose ground. Even if you have a bigger display, using the AWS Management Console on a smartphone is quite cumbersome. The Decaf user interface is optimized for touch, and using it is really fun.

The EC2 client also comes with a simple monitoring tool (Decaf Watch) that can check availability of Internet services by probing their TCP ports. Decaf can play a sound, vibrate, or blink the LED if a server stops responding. It is comforting to know that you can then reboot a server within seconds wherever you are.

Amazon EC2 client – Decaf Monitoring

Don’t confuse this monitoring feature with Amazon CloudWatch. Decaf supports this too. That is, you can also monitor CPU, disk, and networking states with the EC2 client. However, Decaf can only display the total of all your instances, not single machines.

Decaf costs €9.99. I definitely think that the EC2 client is worth the money. Ah, I almost forgot. If you still use an iPhone, you can also run Decaf on phones with the oversized, intrusive Apple logo. And Windows Phone 7? Sorry, no.

Decaf

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• Office 365 review – Part 8: SharePoint Online and conclusion (0)
• Office 365 review – Part 7: Lync Online (0)
• Office 365 review – Part 6: Exchange Online Hybrid, Archiving and IRM (2)
• Office 365 review – Part 5: Migrating to Exchange Online (0)

SharePoint (SP) is a versatile application, a bit like a Swiss army knife and that probably accounts for its amazing popularity in businesses all around the world. In SP 2010, and thus SP online the aim is to cover the entire spectrum from personal sites (blogs and Mysite), team and project collaboration sites to intranet / internet publishing sites.

Introduction to SharePoint in Office 365

If you need to share your SP sites with the world you have two choices, either you can share externally with selected users who are invited and who have to login with a Live ID. Alternatively you can create a public facing website with anonymous access.

An excellent feature in SP is support for taxonomies, terms and words that can be used to tag content for better structure. Custom taxonomies, adapted to the businesses or department, can be created at the tenant level and also at the site collection level. For better document management you can attach a document ID to a particular document, this number will always follow this particular document throughout its lifecycle, no matter where in SP it’s moved to.

Each user subscription adds 0.5 GB to the overall storage pool for SP Online, so a company with 500 users will have 250 GB of storage and you can buy more if needed. Overall maximum storage for a tenant is 1 TB, and files larger than 250 MB can’t be stored in SP Online.

Tagging content will really help in organising large numbers of documents.

What’s in and what’s not in SharePoint Online

One often mentioned search system in SP 2010 is FAST, this is not available in Office 365, nor is Business Intelligence (BI) functionality in the feature known as Performance Point. There’s also no Business Connectivity Services (BCS, which connects SP to SAP and other ERP systems). You can’t deploy software solutions that require full trust code, nor can you run custom code at the farm level.

What you can do is run Office Web Apps; they’re integrated into SP online whereas they have to be installed on premise and you can search across site collections (which you couldn’t in BPOS), you can also search for people and their expertise and it supports phonetic search (picking up similar spelt words). Silverlight based interfaces are fully supported as is sandboxed custom software solutions.

Customisation of SP can be done through the free SharePoint Designer but the administrator has to turn this access on, if you’re creating workflows these can be laid out in Visio and then exported directly as a SP workflow. A detail to note is that the More web parts button is in a different location than it is in SP 2010 on premise.

If you have a lot of content in SP on premise today a good deal of planning is required to decide how to proceed. There are no built in tools for migrating SP sites to Office 365 although several third party solutions are available. Also be aware that you can’t store .exe, .vbs, .chm or .com files in SP online.

Customising a SP site for a team is quick and easy.

Conclusion

A major consideration with any cloud deployment is the impact on internet bandwidth, moving say a 1000 user’s mailboxes, SharePoint document and VOIP traffic to outside the LAN is going to cause a significant increase in internet data traffic. And if there’s one thing users today don’t like it’s having a “slow network”. The Microsoft Online Deployment Guide (see Resources) gives detailed guidance on bandwidth usage. For troubleshooting client issues don’t forget the Microsoft Online Services Diagnostics and Logging tool (see Resources).

Without going into details on how Office 365 compares to Google’s offering it’s clear to me that O365 is miles ahead in usability and integration, especially since the environments where people interface with O365 (Outlook, OWA, SharePoint and Office itself) are familiar territory for most information workers requiring very little change in to use. The last bastion where Google was ahead was in concurrent editing of a document by several users, this feature was recently added to Word Web App.

Overall there’s no doubt that Office 365 is a great cloud service, offering easy to use and powerful services for email, collaboration and communications with excellent support for integration with existing on premise systems. Many small businesses will drink the O365 Kool-Aid, and there will undoubtedly be many large businesses that will look to see if savings and efficiencies are to be had as well. There will be interesting times ahead in the cloud world.

Resources

Office 365 Deployment Guide for Enterprises

Service Descriptions for each part of O365 

MOSDAL (Microsoft Online Services Diagnostics and Logging) Support Toolkit 

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• Access Services in SharePoint Server 2010 (8)
• Decaf – Amazon EC2 client for Android (0)
• Office 365 review – Part 7: Lync Online (0)
• Office 365 review – Part 6: Exchange Online Hybrid, Archiving and IRM (2)

Lync 2010 is Microsoft’s enterprise voice solution and on premise it offers IM, presence, video conferencing, VOIP as well as phone integration and even the ability to completely replace internal PABX systems. In 0365 Lync Online offers most of this functionality with the ability to connect phones and calling ordinary phones sadly missing. Presence information for co-workers is displayed in Outlook, Office, SharePoint and OWA and there’s “click to call” integration.

Lync client applications & IM federation

Today there’s no Lync client for your smartphone but an app for iPhone, Android and Windows Phone 7 is coming before the end of the year. Just like most other IM clients you simply search the directory to add buddies and their presence is displayed. Unlike Live Messenger and Facebook this presence information is gathered from your Outlook calendar as well as when you manually set it. The Lync client is a separate installation to Office Pro Plus and you need to run the Desktop Setup tool after its installation to configure settings. There’s also a Lync Web App (LWA) that is supported in IE, Firefox and Safari which requires Silverlight. LWA offers IM and desktop sharing but there’s no audio and video support.

Lync Online lets you IM outside the organisation, the administrator can either enable federation with all other O365 tenants with the option to blacklist certain companies or only enable federation with selected companies. There’s also an option to enable IM federation with the Live Messenger network as well as Lync and Office Communications Server 2007 /2007 R2 implementations on premise.

Setting up IM federation in Office 365 is easy but we’re waiting for integration with more IM networks.

Web conferencing

Another popular feature is web conferencing or one to many presentations, these can be scheduled or ad hoc and the maximum amount of attendees is 250. Meeting invitations include the link to the Lync 2010 attendee client for Windows, other platforms can use the web based interface, there’s a Mac client coming “very soon after launch”. If you need to use phone dial in audio support for public webcasts several third party services are available that support Lync Online.

Network configuration for Lync Online

Your corporate firewall needs to have outbound port 443 (for the STUN/TCP and PSOM/TLS protocols), 3478 (STUN/UDP) and 50000-59999 (RTP/UDP) open, as well as allow outbound connectivity to the *.microsoftonline.com, *.lync.com and *.outlook.com domains. Further if your firewall blocks access to public SRV DNS records the Lync client will fail to connect. There are two ways to fix this; one is to create a public global DNS Cname record that points to the 0365 Lync service, this will work for both internal and external clients. The other alternative is to create an internal SRV record.

Administration and phone integration of Lync Online

Administration is done through the Lync Online Control Panel. You can control access to audio, video and IM file sharing on a per user basis. The limitation when Lync online doesn’t offer audio/video capabilities due to local laws in some countries is based on each users location, not the tenant location.

For those businesses that would like outbound calling to phones from Lync third party services are available that integrate with Lync Online. There’s no archiving of IM in Lync Online, this is available in Lync on premise and could be a deal breaker for some businesses that require it for compliance regulations.

Management of Lync Online is a simple affair, mostly because compared to Exchange and SharePoint, Lync doesn’t have the same feature parity with its on premise brother.

In the next and final part of this series we’ll look at SharePoint Online, what’s different compared to SharePoint on premise as well as a concluding look at Office 365 compared to Google Docs and cloud services in general.

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• Access Services in SharePoint Server 2010 (8)
• Decaf – Amazon EC2 client for Android (0)
• Office 365 review – Part 8: SharePoint Online and conclusion (0)
• Office 365 review – Part 6: Exchange Online Hybrid, Archiving and IRM (2)

Hybrid email in Office 365

The integration in an O365 hybrid environment is remarkable, the following features work across mailboxes in the cloud and on premise: Free / Busy information is checked in real time for meeting scheduling, message tracking, multi mailbox searches and MailTips and Out of Office messages work. If you have delegates for a mailbox they need to be on the same side as the mailbox. If your in-house environment is Exchange 2003 you need to add the mailbox role to the on-premise Exchange 2010 server so that it can house the public folders that is used for Free/Busy calendar scheduling. In your planning for a hybrid environment take special care to determine the different namespaces that you need to setup and read through the instructions for setting up Exchange Federation and the organisation relationship with the Microsoft Federation gateway.

Mailbox moves to the cloud are initiated from on premise but O365 actually pulls the data from on premise to the cloud, this means the Mailbox Replication Service has to be running. When you go through the wizard to setup a move of a number of mailboxes you can pause it on the last screen and then start the data transfer at night, there’s also the option to use PowerShell to schedule mailbox moves. Mailbox moves in Exchange 2010 are online; meaning your Outlook can be connected to your mailbox while it’s being moved and you can keep using it, at the end of the move all you have to do is follow the prompt to restart Outlook.

Archiving & Journaling

The E set of plans includes a feature called an archive mailbox. In E3 and E4 this archive is unlimited in storage size and allows organisations to once and for all get rid of all those personal storage files (PST) files that litter many users hard drives. They’re the bane of many Exchange administrators and a nightmare for legal discovery and compliance reasons. You can only have one archive mailbox per user mailbox; administrators can configure policies to move items automatically after a set time.

O365 also offers single item recovery which allows administrators to recover emails or other objects up to 14 days after they’ve been deleted out of the mailbox deleted items folder. There’s an option to increase this to a longer time to provide a slightly different approach to being able to recover and track emails (as an alternative to legal hold), no longer than one year is recommended.

For those business that need to have a record of all communications between particular departments or individuals O365 offers intelligent journaling; this means that multiple emails with the same content are only stored once in the journaling store.

The bell should be tolling for those PST files now that Office 365 offers an unlimited online archive.

Information Rights Management

One feature that’s gaining traction in the enterprise is Information Rights Management (IRM) which allows the protection of Office and other documents while they’re “in flight”. Users can control whether emails can be forwarded or printed etc. as well as set expiration of documents after a certain amount of time. Exchange 2010 on premise offers the ability to use transport rules to apply IRM policies automatically, before this users had to apply IRM settings manually. O365 does NOT offer IRM policies in the cloud but will respect IRM encrypted communications. If you need the ability to apply normal transport rules and journal IRM messages there’s an option to upload your IRM encryption keys to O365.

In the next post we’ll examine Lync Online, which features it brings to the Office 365 experience as well as how IM, VOIP and web conferencing works along with necessary network configuration and how it’s administered.

• FREE: SolarWinds VM-to-Cloud Calculator – Compare VM hosting costs (0)
• Access Services in SharePoint Server 2010 (8)
• Decaf – Amazon EC2 client for Android (0)
• Office 365 review – Part 8: SharePoint Online and conclusion (0)
• Office 365 review – Part 7: Lync Online (0)

If a business has an on premise Exchange infrastructure today and they want to move to O365 there are a few ways to go about it. The easiest one, suitable for smaller (up to 50 or so) environments is a simple cut over. On Friday its in-house mail, on Monday it’s all been migrated to the cloud. This requires changing the MX record for your email domain to point to O365.

Email migration overview

The next option is a staged (known as simple co-existence in early O365 documentation) migration which offers a unified Global Address List (GAL) but without sharing Free/Busy calendar information. The third option is a hybrid (formerly known as rich co-existence) deployment with sharing of all information between on premise and the cloud. This is also the only model that allows off boarding (moving a mailbox from the cloud back to on premise), all of them of course involve on boarding. Both hybrid and staged leave the MX record for your email domain pointing to your on premises Exchange server. In a hybrid environment you need an Exchange 2010 SP1 server on premise (running the Client Access Server and Hub transport server roles); the license for this is part of the O365 subscription.

Let the Office 365 deployment wizard help out with your email migration planning.

Considerations for Exchange Migrations

In both staged and hybrid Outlook Anywhere (formerly known as Outlook over HTTPS) needs to be enabled before the migration starts and a service account that has full access to everyone’s mailbox needs to be configured.

Migrating can be a fairly complex and involved operation and O365 helps by providing an online wizard that asks a series of questions and then produces a customized, step by step migration plan. Dynamic Distribution lists aren’t migrated to the cloud. One major factor that might impact your internet bandwidth is the fact that Offline Storage files (OST) for everyone’s Outlook has to be resynchronised once their mailbox has been moved to the cloud. Each mailbox is moved to the cloud during the migration so to save internet pipe make sure everyone cleans out old stuff and empties their deleted items before moving them to the cloud. Client side Outlook rules have to be exported and imported manually after the mailbox has been moved to the cloud.

Another thing to inventory in large environments is in-house applications that need outgoing SMTP functionality; for these you either need to leave an SMTP server on site or point these applications to FOPE for outgoing relay. This will work for a small number of apps but if there are a lot of them the manual work of configuring FOPE is going to outweigh the benefits and it’ll be better to maintain an SMTP server in-house.

Not only does the Deployment wizard ask the right questions, the resulting deployment plan is interactive and allows you to track your migration progress.

In the next part of this series we’ll look closer at the hybrid email co-existence scenario as well as how Exchange Online archiving works and what options there are for Information Rights Management.

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• Access Services in SharePoint Server 2010 (8)
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• Office 365 review – Part 8: SharePoint Online and conclusion (0)
• Office 365 review – Part 7: Lync Online (0)

Introduction

The email service behind Office 365 is built on Exchange Server 2010 which brings all the power of this messaging and collaboration powerhouse to users without requiring complex in-house infrastructure. As part of the service you get anti-spam and anti-malware courtesy of Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE); you can still continue to use an existing email filtering solution if you want to. Most features of Exchange 2010 that are available on-premise such as multi mailbox search and transport rules are also available in Office 365. Remote PowerShell can also be used but since Office 365 is a multi-tenant environment cmdlets that work forest wide aren’t available. Role Based Access Control (RBAC) is a very powerful feature for configuring what people can do in the environment based on their job role and it’s fully implemented in O365.

What’s in and what’s not in Exchange Online

Some differences between Exchange 2010 on premise and O365 are that the private or public computer choice in Outlook Web App (OWA) isn’t available. If you’re using the full Outlook client it has to be either 2007 or 2010, Outlook 2003 isn’t supported. You can’t segment your Global Address List (GAL) and there is no public folder support in O365 at all, there’s also no S/MIME support.

If you have a compliance server or appliance for checking outgoing mail you can configure O365 to direct all outgoing mail back through your on premise device before delivery. The support for smartphones is on par with on-premise installations including configuration of policies, the E plans also include Blackberry Enterprise server.

Email and calendar access on smartphones is a requirement for today’s Information Workers and the support in Office 365 is as thorough as it is in Exchange 2010.

Exchange Online Administration

Administration is done through the Exchange Control Panel (ECP), the Exchange Management Console (EMC, if you have an on premise Exchange 2010 server), or the Exchange Management Shell (EMS, PowerShell) with some tasks available in the Microsoft Online Service portal. Unlike BPOS you don’t need to have a mailbox account to be able to manage Exchange in O365.

Unless you’re familiar with Exchange 2010 the new ECP web based console is probably going to be a bit of a learning curve. A lot of O365 email features such as journaling, transport rules, distribution lists, user roles and auditing are configured here. ECP will only show O365 users that have mailboxes and you can tell the difference between Dirsynced accounts and native O365 accounts in their different icons. As anyone who’s ever used the Exchange 2010 console knows there’s a node to manage Exchange Online as well as on premise.

You can also reach the FOPE console from the ECP. If particular users are being investigated legally you can enable legal hold for their mailboxes and just like in Exchange 2010 on premise this means that no items can be deleted. The user won’t see any difference in using their mailbox, they can delete emails but in the background they’re not actually deleted; it’s optional to inform the user that their mailbox is under legal hold.

The Exchange Control panel is a great addition to Exchange 2010 and really makes managing communications in Office 365 easy.

Unified Messaging

Unified Messaging (UM) is an Exchange 2007/2010 feature that delivers incoming voicemail as a message in your inbox; if you want to use this in O365 it requires a Session Border Controller (SBC). This is the device that connects your on premise phone system to O365. There are some countries where local laws prevents Microsoft from offering the UM feature, notably India.

In the next part of this series we’ll look at how migration to Exchange Online is done and what needs to be considered in the planning for email co-existence.

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• Access Services in SharePoint Server 2010 (8)
• Decaf – Amazon EC2 client for Android (0)
• Office 365 review – Part 8: SharePoint Online and conclusion (0)
• Office 365 review – Part 7: Lync Online (0)

There are three flavours of user authentication in O365: Microsoft Online credentials separate to on premise accounts, Directory Synced (Dirsync) accounts which requires Active Directory (AD) but which still keeps separate password policies or Rich Coexistence which needs AD; Dirsync and AD Federation Services 2.0 (ADFS).

Authentication and user accounts

The first flavour is eminently suited to small businesses; there’s no correlation between the on premises login and the login for cloud services. Note that the BPOS sign in client isn’t available for O365 so users simply enter their password in the individual applications that connect to O365 (Outlook, Lync etc.). This will also work very well for really small businesses that don’t have on premises AD as they’ll only need to maintain the O365 user accounts.

When you add a new user you can send them an email with their temporary password and other information.

Directory Synchronisation

As can probably be guessed the other two flavours are best suited for medium to large organisations. Dirsync requires one server onsite; its job is to copy the onsite AD user and group accounts to O365. There’s still no actual co-existence as such, it’s still two separate environments but one is a copy of the other. In this setup all account management has to be done on premise.

There are some limits to keep in mind, user accounts have to be entered in User Principal Name (UPN) format, i.e. name@domain.something and it can’t have a “.” just before the @ sign. Today there’s no support for multi forest federation (account forests and resource forests) but this will be addressed in the future. All subdomains in the forest are automatically federated. If your domain is in 2008 R2 mode you can’t use the AD recycle bin feature and the Dirsync application today is 32 bit only (a 64 bit version is coming). Dirsync also requires schema extensions for AD, something that wasn’t necessary in BPOS; it’s also a long term commitment as you can’t turn off Dirsync (although that’s also coming in the future). Dirsync comes with SQL Server Express (10 GB database size limit); if you have more than 50,000 users it’s recommended to implement full SQL server.

Dirsync uploads are limited to 10,000 objects, if you have more users and groups than that you have to open a support request to increase the limit. All synchronisations after the first one are incremental; there can be up to three hours delay in account changes on premise being reflected in O365. Hence, if there’s a time sensitive operation such as someone being fired and their account needs to be disabled you can initiate a sync manually. There’s an O365 pre migration tool that checks your AD for issues that can affect a synchronisation. In BPOS there was a filter file available that allowed you to control which parts of your directory was synced to the cloud, in O365 this capability has been removed as it was found to cause too many problems. Another operational issue to be aware of is that if a user is deleted in AD their Exchange online mailbox remains disconnected in the cloud for 30 days so it can be retrieved if necessary.

Single Sign On

It’s recommended that if you’re going through the work of setting up Dirsync you also take the next step and implement AD FS for true single sign on. This is best implemented with a Highly Available ADFS implementation requiring two ADFS servers in the backend as well as two ADFS proxy servers at the perimeter along with a Dirsync server. Trust is established between the directories; O365 relies on Microsoft’s Identity Lifecycle Manager (ILM) which will be upgraded to support Forefront Identity Manager (FIM) in the future. With ADFS you get true single sign on (SSO), users login to their computers and are automatically authenticated to Office 365 with little changes to your current enterprise account management processes.

Planning for how you’re going to manage authentication for Office 365 is critical and the Office 365 deployment planning wizard helps out.

In the next part of the series we’ll look at Exchange in Office 365, which features from Exchange on premise that are included and which are not as well as how Exchange Online is administered and how Unified Messaging can be integrated.

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• Access Services in SharePoint Server 2010 (8)
• Decaf – Amazon EC2 client for Android (0)
• Office 365 review – Part 8: SharePoint Online and conclusion (0)
• Office 365 review – Part 7: Lync Online (0)

Please also read part 1 one which covers Office 365  pricing.

System Requirements

The requirement for client machines to use Office 365 are; Windows XP SP3, Vista SP2 or Windows 7; Mac OS is supported in the 10.4, 10.5 and 10.6 versions. If you’re using an existing version of Microsoft Office to interact with O365 it needs to be Office 2007 or 2010 on Windows, with Office for Mac version 2008 or 2011 supported. If you’re using Office for Mac 2008 make sure you have deployed the web services version of Entourage. There’s no included Office for Mac subscription.

Office Professional Plus

The included (in the E3 & E4 plan) Office Professional Plus subscription is managed on a per user basis; there are no activation keys to keep track of. When you assign a user a license their Office Professional Plus will check every 30 days that the license is still assigned to that user. Each user can install Office Professional Plus on up to five computers, making it easy to have Office 2010 on a work computer and a home computer. If a user’s license is unassigned Office will enter warning mode after the next check and continue to function as normal for 60 days after which it will revert to reduced functionality mode (effectively read only) until the license can be verified again.

Office Pro Plus can’t run as an App-V application, nor can you run it on a Terminal Server / Remote Desktop Server and it doesn’t include downgrade rights to earlier versions of Office. As this is a subscription service you should receive an automatic upgrade to the next version of Office (2013?) when it’s released. If you’ve got many client machines it’s recommended to use a network share or System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) to deploy the 750 MB installation.

Office 365 keeps track of the type of license assigned to each user and their service entitlements.

Desktop Setup Tool

Another tool that’ll be part of your O365 deployment is the Desktop Setup Tool, which is downloaded from the O365 web portal and which checks the local OS for missing updates and service pack level as well as configures Outlook, Lync and local Office installations. In small environments just run this on every client machine that’s going to be using O365; be aware that on a Windows XP and Office 2007 the download can be up to 450 MB (depending on how up to date it is), whereas on a current Windows 7 machine with Office 2010 the download is about 45 MB. The portal also lists all the required updates and configuration changes so that you can implement these across large numbers of client machines using SCCM or a third party patch and configuration tool. The Desktop Setup Tool requires local admin permissions and can’t connect through a proxy server that requires authentication.

Make sure you understand what changes the Desktop Setup Tool makes in your environment.

PowerShell

Whilst BPOS offers some PowerShell management capabilities O365 takes this to the next level and lets you manage users, license allocation, email / SharePoint internet domain management as well as administration role management. Currently you need to run PowerShell on Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 (Vista and XP support coming later) to manage O365 and you need to install the O365 snap-in. Currently only the core O365 features and Exchange Online can be managed via PowerShell; Lync and SharePoint support is coming. The PowerShell environment (just like the web portal) respects role based administration so that if you’re a license administrator you can only run license related cmdlets. There’s full support in O365 for the concept of “administering on behalf of” in both PowerShell and the web portal for cases where a partner manages O365 for clients, something that’s not quite as smooth in BPOS.

Administration of Office 365 is more granular than in BPOS.

In the next part of this series we’ll look at how authentication works in Office 365, how integration with Active Directory is achieved as well as the true nirvana of cloud services – Single Sign On.

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• Access Services in SharePoint Server 2010 (8)
• Decaf – Amazon EC2 client for Android (0)
• Office 365 review – Part 8: SharePoint Online and conclusion (0)
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There’s been a lot of noise around the beta and subsequent launch of Microsoft’s Office 365 recently. Touted by some as late coming competition to Google Docs and by others as the best productivity cloud service on the planet there’s no doubt that O365 (as I’ll call it in this article) is a great improvement over the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS ).

In this eight part article we’ll look at what O365 is; the different plans that are available and then we’ll dive into the technical details of deployment, interoperability and capabilities. Further we’ll examine the different services that are part of O365; Exchange Online, Lync Online and SharePoint Online.

The Microsoft Online Services portal combines the MS Online Administration Center and the MS Online Services Company Portal from BPOS into one web portal

Office 365 pricing

Let’s get the boring stuff out of the way first; Office 365 pricing, licensing and plans. O365 comes in three flavours: Small Business (the P or Professional plan), Enterprise (E plans, numbered 1 to 4) and Kiosk (K1 and K2). There’s also a plan for schools; Education (called K-12).

Let’s start with the Enterprise plans; these are all designed for Information Workers in medium to large corporations: E1 gives you Instant Messaging / Presence and Conferencing (Lync Online), Collaboration (SharePoint Online) and Email (Exchange Online) for $10 per month (all prices in USD). E2 adds Office Web Apps access at $16 per month. E3 gives you Excel, Access and Visio services in SharePoint, Voicemail and archiving of email as well as a subscription license to Office Pro Plus (Office 2010, running on the client machine) at $24 a month with E4 adding voice capabilities at $27 per month. All E plans give you a 25 GB mailbox.

Don’t be confused by Microsoft using the term “Office” for both the service and installed software. Office 365 is the service you pay for per month, per user, and Office Pro Plus is a version of Office 2010 that you install on end users machines that can save documents to SharePoint online.

For “kiosk” users, those who do non computer tasks in their jobs and only need occasional access to email and documents on shared computers there is K1 which gives web based access to Exchange email and SharePoint (read only) at $4 per month and then K2 which adds Office Web apps for document editing at $10 per month. Both K plans give you a 500 MB mailbox.

The P plan for small business (up to 50 users) gives you Instant Messaging / Presence and Conferencing (Lync Online), Collaboration (SharePoint Online as well as Office Web Apps) and Email (Exchange Online) for $6 per month along with a public facing simple website and a 25 GB mailbox.

Benefits of Office 365

The premise for O365 is simple: small, medium and large businesses spend a big proportion of their IT budget running Exchange (the world’s most popular email system) and SharePoint (the world’s most popular collaboration platform) on premise today. Whilst email and collaboration services are essential to many businesses today there’s a lot of work involved; hardware has to be maintained, software patched, and upgrades planned and executed. Many corporations are on older versions due to the cost and complexity involved in upgrading. By moving to a cloud based service all the maintenance of the infrastructure goes away and the business simply pays a monthly fee for the service, provided by Microsoft with a financially backed Service Level Agreement (SLA).

O365 is based on Microsoft’s latest releases which were all developed with multi-tenant, hosted environments in mind; Exchange 2010, SharePoint 2010 and Lync 2010. And this is the greatest strength of O365, it’s not new software, it’s mature, tried and tested production systems, used today by hundreds of millions of users around the world, just offered in a different format: as a pay as you go service in the cloud.

Office 365 is available in 21 languages and in 40 markets around the world

In the next part of this series we’ll look at how Office 365 is deployed, system requirements, what needs to be installed on the client, what Office Pro Plus is and how the Desktop Setup Tool is used as well as PowerShell integration.

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In this final part of this series on Windows Intune we’ll look at the Intune client experience and then wrap up by comparing Intune to other similar products as well as look at the cost and the future of Intune.

Windows Intune Client

The easiest way to install the client agent on a PC is to download the 14 MB zip file from the console; save it in a network share or on a USB stick and then install it manually. The executable contains both the 32 and 64 bit version and will run the appropriate one automatically; supported client operating systems are Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. Server operating systems are not supported. The installation is really just a two click affair with no questions asked. Notice that the zip file also contains a WindowsIntune.accountcert file that has to be kept in the installation folder as it’s used by the agent to identify which account to connect to in the cloud.

The client shows up in the console a few minutes after the agent is installed (provided it has internet connectivity of course) but it can take up to 30 minutes for all the agents to report their status.

If you want to distribute the agent to multiple computers using an automated method the 32 and 64 bit MSI files can be extracted from the installation file and then distributed using Group Policy software distribution or any other installation method of your choice.

The agent puts a short cut on the desktop and has a very simple interface with links to Updates, Endpoint Protection and Remote Assistance which operates through Easy Assist; the system tray also has an icon for Endpoint Protection. The benefits of the cloud become apparent here as your users can ask for help wherever they are (as long as they’re connected to the internet) without being connected to the corporate network.

The Windows Intune client shouldn’t be hard for the average end user to figure out

Windows Intune and the competition

Windows Intune is a great offering for small businesses that don’t have a server today, giving them the ability to manage, monitor and maintain their computers in a way that they probably haven’t been able to do before. For small sites with a server today (most likely Small Business Server 2003/2008 or even 2011) the value proposition is less clear although the included Windows 7 Enterprise subscription will be a great boon to businesses that have so far held off updating from Windows XP. For larger businesses there’s some validity to Microsoft’s idea that unmanaged non-domain joined clients, mostly home computers, could be well served by Windows Intune.

Windows Intune also fits in well with the movement of consumerization of IT with more users bringing in their own devices and computers to work, this is an ideal way of having some control over these non-company IT assets.

Intune isn’t cheap, at $ 11 USD per PC per month, but if you take into account the inclusion of Windows 7 Enterprise the maths might add up. For another $1 a month you add Microsoft Desktop Optimisation Pack (MDOP) which adds multiple (enterprise level) tools; such as App-V for application virtualization, MED-V for desktop virtualization, Advanced Group Policy Management (AGMP), System Center Desktop Error Monitoring (DEM) and Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (DaRT). For most small businesses only the latter will be a natural fit.

For many small businesses that are on Windows XP today a major benefit will be the inclusion of Windows 7 Enterprise as that’s the only version (apart from Ultimate) that includes such goodies as Bitlocker (very useful for those executive laptops) and Bitlocker to Go (even more useful for everyone’s USB sticks) along with other great enterprise features.

A question many small business IT providers will be asking is how does Intune stack up against Managed Service Provider platforms such as Kaseya, Hound Dog and N-Able; at this stage the functionality is a bit limited compared to those more mature offerings but on the other hand it’s a true cloud based solution.

There’s a distinct version 1 feeling about Intune but I don’t mean that in a negative way, it’s certainly very capable and what it does, it does well. Missing from this first version is OS and software deployment, remote performance monitoring, remote control (Remote Assistance is always user initiated from the client machine) along with richer policy control for general client machine lock down. The Intune team is unusually candid about what they’re planning to include in future releases and their stated goal long term is to have “smart parity” with System Center Configuration Manager which means the same use scenarios should be covered but in a simpler fashion than in SCCM. Microsoft recommends Intune for up to 20,000 accounts but I suspect the major uptake will be in the SMB space.

Overall Intune is easy to work with and I can see a good fit for at least one of my SMB clients who don’t have a server today and is 1500 km away from my location.

Resources

Features of the new Windows Intune beta

Windows Intune Trial Guide document

Windows Intune Homepage

Windows Intune Team Blog

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The last post of this series covered the Windows Intune workspaces System Overview, Computers, Updates, End Point Protection, and Alerts. Let’s have a look at the other workspaces.

Software

Here you’ll be provided with a collated list of all software packages installed across all managed PCs, this list can be sorted by how many installations you have, publisher, name or category. There’s also an option to drill down to see what’s installed on individual computers, it’ll even tell you if a package is installed as an App-V program. Third party applications are inventoried and categorised as well.

Licenses

This workspace is unlikely to excite small business but larger environments with volume licensing agreements for Office or Windows can upload license agreement numbers here and manually compare to installed numbers. There’s no enforcement of licensing, only a list of licenses versus install count. Currently it only covers Microsoft’s volume licensing but the Intune team says third party licensing tracking is coming in a future update.

Policy

Be warned – if you’re a Group Policy buff you’ll find the policy control available in Intune rather limiting but for many small businesses these might cover the bare necessities. Policies are created for one of three areas, Windows Intune Agent Settings, Windows Intune Center Settings and Windows Firewall Settings. Policies are applied on a computer group basis. The policy agent is based on “lantern” which is the same engine that’s used in Desired Configuration Management (DCM) in Systems Center Configuration Manager. Once policies are applied the Intune agent runs Gpupdate so if there are any conflicts between Group Policy and Intune policies the GP policies will win. Microsoft doesn’t recommend mixing Intune and Group Policy policies on the same computers.

The policy control in Intune is meagre compared to Group Policy but adequate for small business environments

Reports

In this workspace you’ll find pre-made reports for updates, installed software and licenses. These are generated on demand and can be viewed directly or exported to HTML or CSV. The latter can be useful if you have a lot of information and want to take advantage of power pivot in Excel for instance.

Comprehensive reporting is just a click away, like this list of installed software with drill down options for individual PCs

Administration

Here you can administer Intune, including configure update settings, customise alert and notification settings as well as manage administrator accounts. The Live ID account used to sign up for Intune becomes the Tenant Administrator for the account; you can then add further Service Administrators who each require their own Live ID.

One issue many people have with the concept of cloud services is the lack of control; Windows Intune comes with a 99.9% SLA which is financially backed but that won’t make you feel any better when the service is down. Microsoft offers a service status page (at http://status.manage.microsoft.com/Statuspage/servicedashboard.aspx) with a 30 day service availability history. If you use the link available in the Administration workspace the status page is customised and tells you which geographical area your subscription is hosted in.

At least if there’s a problem with your cloud service you can get some status updates easily//

There’s also a link to download the client software as well as links to documentation on how to automate the distribution of the Intune agent via Group Policy or Systems Center Configuration Manager.

In the fourth and final part we’ll look at the Intune client experience and we’ll compare Intune to other management solutions, both from Microsoft and others as well as look at where it’s going in the future.

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The fist part of this series introduced Windows Intune. In this second part of this Windows Intune review we’ll explore the Intune user interface and discover how the different components make the solution tick.

System Overview

This workspace gives a quick look at the overall health of all monitored computers; broken down into issues with Endpoint Protection (Anti-malware), agent health, other alerts, update status as well as letting you create computer groups and view reports.

Agents that haven’t communicated for a while are flagged, to avoid that false sense of security that green ticks can give; just because there hasn’t been any information communicated back to the cloud.

Computers

Computers can be collated into groups, a computer account can belong to more than one group and you can have nested groups. The main use of groups is to target policies as well as structuring large number of accounts; whatever method makes sense can be used. For instance you could group computers based on geographical location, in my setup I divided accounts into domain and non-domain joined clients.

When a new agent is installed that computer is placed in the built in Unassigned Computers group and you can manually move it into the appropriate group (s). For each PC the OS, name and group membership is listed along with security, update and alert status. If you drill down into a particular computer account a full hardware and software inventory list is presented as well as detailed update and alert status along with any malware infections. For a particular application you can click its name to see a list of which other computers have that same program installed.

Updates

Windows Intune is your Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) server in the cloud and in this workspace you can approve or reject updates and select which products and classifications (security, critical, definition etc.) to cover. Here you’ll also find a list of all updates that are waiting to be installed as well as any problem with updates. In comparison to the non-interactive Updates report (see part 3) this view is more powerful as it allows you to drill down to whatever level of detail you require. Just as in WSUS you can create auto-approval rules to push out security updates for instance as soon as they’re released. Another common practise is to create a separate computer group with a few “guinea pig” PCs; push updates to those computers automatically and then approve the updates for the rest of the machines if no issues are discovered.

Control your Windows and Microsoft application patches as easy as in WSUS

Endpoint Protection

The Windows Intune Endpoint Protection is based on Forefront Endpoint Protection (FEP) which in my experience is a good anti-malware solution. The default policy will only install Endpoint Protection if the computer doesn’t have suitable anti malware already installed but you can change this policy and force installation which will disable the current solution.

Malware and computers with security issues are listed in two separate areas and past malware infections are kept in a list with links to information about each infection.

Remote Assistance is a very handy tool to have when your users are in a tight spot

Alerts

There are 380 alerts built into Intune although a large proportion is disabled by default. You can view all Alerts or filter the view based on the source such as Monitoring, Policy, System and Updates as well as other categories. Just in case you don’t spend your entire life staring at the Intune console you can set up Alert Notifications; currently only via email. A remote assistance request from a client computer will also raise an alert, make sure you add an email notification for that because if a user is asking for help, they generally want it NOW. You can’t change the built in alerts, nor can you add your own and they currently only cover Microsoft technologies (and hardware issues).

The list of available alerts is long indeed, I just wish I could build my own alerts

In the third instalment of this series we’ll finish the exploration of the Intune console and the different workspaces.

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Applications for Chromebooks not only have an old-fashioned user interface; they are also significantly more expensive than Windows netbooks.

8. Costs

I like Google’s leasing model. I really do! I generally don’t like buying heavy things such as houses, cars, or furniture. So I also like the idea of not owning my computer. I find renting much more convenient and flexible. But one thing is for sure: Renting is usually more expensive than buying. If you have a closer look at Google’s pricing model for Chromebooks, you will realize that this also applies to this “new kind of computer.”

The cheapest Chromebook costs $28 USD per month for enterprises. As with leased PCs, you can just return the machine if the hardware causes trouble. You also don’t have to worry about the software because a Chromebook is only a hardware-based web browser anyway.

Google claims that this hardware + software pricing model is new, which of course is not true. Many PC vendors offer similar services. You can buy or lease a PC that comes with pre-installed Windows plus all the software you need, including Active Directory domain integration. All you have to do is provide an OS image to your vendor and they will bring a network-ready PC to your user’s desk. And if the PC causes problems, they replace it with a new one. No local admin has to be involved. You can also outsource the OS image creation if you want.

Of course, this service costs because technicians who manage computers have to pay their bills regardless of whether they work for your organization or for a service provider. The only questions are whether Google’s technicians earn more or less than the ones in your company, and how much money Google needs to earn to raise their stock prices.

You have to lease a Chromebook for a minimum of three years, which means that a Chromebook costs you at least $1008 USD. That is a lot for a tiny netbook that can only run a web browser. Note that this price is just for the hardware with Linux plus a web browser. Web apps, online storage, and so on cost extra.

The interesting question is, what will happen after those three years? Of course, you can renew the contract. Or, to be more precise, most likely you will be forced to renew the contract if you don’t want your users to be without a web browser. There is no way of skipping an OS version to save costs.

Google claims that many organizations don’t upgrade their Windows XP machines because they fear the expenses. This might be true. However, this is an advantage of Windows, not a disadvantage. Businesses can choose to upgrade or to stick with old software because it does all they need. With Chrome OS, you are always forced to upgrade; this is one reason why Chromebooks are more expensive for many organizations.

The management costs for Chromebooks are unclear because no data exist yet. Google says there is a management console, which shows that Chromebooks also have to be managed by on-premises admins. Even if the web apps run in the cloud, your users need accounts, the web app has to be evaluated, you have to point users to the right applications, you need help desk staff, you need tech staff to contact cloud providers if problems come up, and so on.

It is possible that management costs are lower for Chromebooks than with Windows netbooks because you don’t have to deploy applications. However, as noted above, for this you have to pay cloud providers who offer lease-based pricing models. These leases are usually expensive because you are forced to pay for every update year after year.

But the biggest cost-driving factor of Chromebooks is that you will still need Windows. Even Google admits that you can’t do everything with a Chromebook that you can usually do with a Windows machine. This means that you have to support another machine type, which raises the complexity of your network. Higher complexity always means significantly higher costs.

I think, the best way to understand how expensive a Chromebook really is, is to compare its price with the price of a Windows netbook with the same capabilities. If you really think it is a good idea that your users should not run Windows applications on their netbooks, you can install Chrome on a Windows netbook and make sure that this is the only application they can launch, which is technically no big deal. You can configure Windows to download and install updates in the background without user or admin intervention. And if you think that backups are only torturing users and admins, then just don’t do it.

If you buy a Windows netbook for $250 USD, you can probably use it longer than three years. Even if the netbook has a hardware defect after the warranty expired in a year or two (depending on the country you live in), it will be much cheaper than a Chromebook. For $1008, you can buy four Windows-based Chrome netbooks for every user. If one was infected by a virus, the user can just trash it and take the next netbook from the drawer.

Conclusion

While I watched the Chromebook keynote, I was instantly reminded of something I did quite a long time ago. The proprietary OPACs (Online Public Access Catalog) in the University library I was working for had to be replaced with a web-based OPAC running on Windows NT. A service provider for libraries offered us a somewhat expensive solution that would prevent library users from starting Windows applications or surfing the web on computers that were only intended for ordering books.

While I was watching their demo, I realized that they only offered a modified Internet Explorer. It didn’t take me long to figure out how they did it. With the Internet Explorer Administration Kit, the NT System Policies (predecessor for Group Policy), and a little registry hack, I was able to create a Windows NT machine that started the Internet Explorer right after the computer booted up. There was no way for users to start Windows applications, close the browser, or access any web page other than the web OPAC. Internet Explorer was running in full-screen mode, so users didn’t even notice that they were using a web browser.

Just like Google did in this keynote, this service provider was trying to sell, as the next big thing, this relatively simple software that did nothing other than ensure that only Internet Explorer could be started. Finally, libraries would be able to reduce costs by using cheap PCs instead of proprietary OPAC hardware, except with low management costs because users could not mess with the underlying Windows.

Well, many libraries bought their expensive solution simply because they wanted a hassle-free solution and did not want to think about managing Windows PCs. It is interesting to note that the price model of this software was subscription-based, just like the one for Chromebooks, which added up over the years. Every one of those libraries could have paid quite a few admins with this money.

However, one admin (me) only needed an afternoon to build what you could call an IEbook. This must have been around 1998, the year when Google incorporated. Now I am asking you: Is a Chromebook a new kind of computer?

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There is no doubt about it. The lack of control over automatic updates and no support of data backups are severe disadvantages of Chromebooks for businesses. However, more important for the success of Chromebooks will be their usability and their abilities regarding cloud computing.

6. User interface

Just like Microsoft, Google was obviously caught napping by the success of the iPad. Chrome OS was already in the making, and there was no way to adapt the OS in a reasonable time for tablets. The only difference is that Microsoft is working feverishly to improve Windows’s touch capabilities, whereas Google has no plans for tablet support.

The fact that Google was reluctant at first to offer Android for tablets indicates that the company is quite aware of the fact that the rise of these “other new kind of computers” jeopardizes the success of the Chromebooks. Why should you buy a Chromebook if you can get a cool Android tablet for the same price, with all the features of a Chromebook plus myriad Android apps and a nice touch interface? Steve Ballmer is constantly mocking Google that their strategy with two operating systems is flawed, and he is right.

It would have made much more sense to just dump Chrome OS and offer an enhanced version of Android for netbooks and notebooks. By nature, it will be difficult to adapt Chrome OS for tablets simply because web apps are not made for touch. Thus Chrome OS faces exactly the same problem as Windows: Google’s new kind of computer has a hopelessly outdated user interface. Even if a new version offers support for touch, it will take too long until the whole ecosystem adopts the changes. Since Microsoft has much more control over Windows than Google has over the Open Web, it will be easier for Redmond to convince partners to introduce touch capabilities in their applications.

7. Cloud support

The funny thing is that Google announced “a new kind of computer” a few days ago, whereas Apple has already demonstrated for more than a year how the new kind of computer really looks like. The truth is that web apps stand for an outdated technology that will be replaced by what I would call cloud apps—that is, locally running applications with a rich and modern user interfaces with back ends in the cloud for data storage, collaboration, and other typical server functions.

Many people talking about the cloud mistakenly equate the cloud with web applications and web services. However, cloud technology is not dependent on the web. You can have web apps without cloud technology, and you can use cloud technology without using web technology.

There is really nothing about the web that makes it the preferable platform for the cloud. Modern operating systems such as iOS or Android demonstrate this very well. In most cases, it makes much more sense for a cloud provider to create a special locally running app as a front end for their cloud service than to use an old-fashioned web interface that only works on machines with certain screen sizes. If the underlying operating system provides cloud APIs, you can create much more powerful cloud apps than with an ugly and sluggish web interface.

The best way to understand the difference between web and cloud apps is to compare Google Apps with Office 365. The difference regarding the capabilities between these two cloud-based applications couldn’t be bigger. Just like any other cloud app, Office 365 can be accessed anytime, anywhere. You have powerful collaboration features that are only possible with a rich Windows-based user interface of Office 2010.

There is no doubt that the future belongs to cloud apps. The only question is who will be faster to adopt this new kind of computer technology, and a crucial issue in this race is touch. Google is losing valuable time by focusing on outdated web technology with an old-fashioned user interface instead of positioning Android against the upcoming Windows 8, which will not only offer better support for touch but will also be a better cloud OS than Chrome OS.

In my next and last post of this series, I will compare the costs of Chromebooks for businesses with those of Windows netbooks.

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Last week, I outlined why I believe that Chromebooks are no match for Windows netbooks when it comes to accessibility and the ability of their applications. Today, I will address two topics that Google explicitly names as two advantages of Chromebooks—that is, the fact that you need not worry about backups or updates.

4. Backups

That you don’t need to take care of backups if you store all your data in the cloud is a claim often put forward. Of course, this is supposed to also be one of the alleged advantages of Chromebooks. From my point of view, it is one of the major disadvantages.

First of all, you really need a lot of confidence in a cloud provider if you assume that the provider will ensure that none of your data ever gets lost. You’ve probably heard that some data recently disappeared in Amazon’s cloud. Amazon customers who didn’t back up their cloud data have learned their lesson.

Cloud technology is very new and very complex. Even though all big cloud providers have sophisticated backup solutions, this doesn’t guarantee that data won’t get lost simply because cloud admins underestimated the complexity of their systems. The main question is whether you completely want to rely on a third-party organization to secure all your data.

The recent outage of Blogger shows that Google is not immune to cloud crashes. Thus, if you don’t have on-premises backups, not only will you be unable to access your data when the cloud is down or you have no Internet connection, but you might also lose important data.

I really, wonder, how you can back up your Chromebook data if you can’t even install backup software or backup agents. And what about the data that users of your organization store in the cloud, perhaps at different cloud providers? No standard exists that allows you to download all data to your datacenter from different cloud providers. And even if there were such a standard, it would cost a lot of bandwidth and additional workload for your organization’s admins.

However, the main reason why data backups are necessary is not data loss because of technical issues. Most restores in businesses occur because users accidentally deleted data or simply need an older version of their data. If the application itself doesn’t have a rollback feature, you need a backup of third-party backup software.

The lack of professional backup solutions for the cloud is one of the major reasons why businesses should avoid moving important data to the cloud. As long as Google doesn’t offer professional backup software for Chrome OS, businesses should think twice before taking the risk and allowing their employees to use Chromebooks. The fact that Google stresses that the lack of backup software is an advantage of their “new kind of computer” doesn’t sound promising.

5. Automatic updates

Sometimes it appears to me that Google’s engineers are so excited about web technologies that everything you can’t do easily with HTML, CSS, or JavaScript is something that only tortures users and has to be abolished and advertised as an advancement in computer technology. Backups in the cloud are a problem, so it is an advantage that you don’t need it for Chromebooks. A professional patch management solution needs more than a little JavaScript code, so it is an advantage that Chrome OS doesn’t have one.

Of course, Linux and Chrome code contains bugs and security holes just like Windows does , so it has to be patched and updated as any other software. The fact that users and admins have no control over the update process is not a feature; it is a serious disadvantage of Chromebooks.

There is certainly a reason why organizations test software updates before they distribute them in their network. Updates can cause compatibility issues. This is certainly also true for web applications. No responsible admin would deploy a new browser version before testing it thoroughly with all of the organization’s web apps. Imagine Google deploys a new Chrome version overnight without your knowledge to make the web interface of your main business app produce only HTML salad.

A similar problem exists for automatic updates in the cloud. Google tries to sell it as an advantage that users and organizations don’t have to bother about updating their software because the cloud provider takes care of this. Did you ever log on to a web app to quickly get some important work done, only to realize that everything has changed overnight but not really for the better? Now imagine what your inbox looks like if hundreds of your users have this experience Monday morning.

The fact that on-premises solutions allow organizations to decide when and what to update is a major advantage, not a disadvantage as Google claims. If you don’t like a new version of an application, you can simply skip it. If you have to prepare your users first for a new user interface, you can decide when they are ready. And if you first need to ensure that no compatibility issues exist, you can determine the pace of testing and deployment of the new version.

With the “new kind of computer,” Google gave up all these advantages of modern operating systems. To sell the lack of functionality as a feature is what dubious marketers are always trying. I just hope you won’t buy it.

In the next part of this series about Chromebooks, I will talk a little about usability and support for the cloud.

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In the last post in this series about Google’s Chromebooks, I outlined why I believe that “this new kind of computer” won’t improve security in your organization. Today, I want to address two topics that also play an important role in the current discussion about Chromebooks: accessibility and ability.

2. Accessibility

Google touts the anytime and anywhere accessibility of web apps as one of the major advantages of Chromebooks. Honestly, this is simply wrong. Watching the keynote was a nice case in point of the limited accessibility of web apps. I was trying to watch the video in Boracay in the Philippines (by the way, one of the world’s best beaches). Even though Internet speed in the Philippines is definitely above average compared to other locations in Asia, I wasn’t able to watch the video continuously even though I used the lowest available resolution.

I certainly would have preferred a download link so I could watch the video offline, without interruption, anywhere and anytime. You might argue that this doesn’t bother you because you have a high-speed Internet connection anyway. But tell this to a business traveler who really needs access to his data and applications when no internet connection is available. The point is that, with a Windows notebook, you can indeed guarantee that your data is accessible anytime and anywhere at maximum speed, but you certainly cannot guarantee this with a Chromebook.

Yes, there are web apps that also work offline. But offline web apps are an exception, not the rule. Thus Google’s “anytime, anywhere” claim is highly questionable. Also note that this is not just an issue for business travelers. The limited accessibility of web apps will make Chromebooks a non-seller in large emerging markets like China, India, and Brazil, while Windows sales will be growing rapidly in these countries.

3. Ability

At one point in the keynote speech, my head stopped shaking ‘coz I was laughing out loud. That was when Sundar Pichai admitted that, for him, the availability of the game Angry Birds as a web app is the culmination point in Chrome’s history. I never played this game, but the demo instantly reminded me of my Commodore 64 phase about 30 years ago when I was still wasting my time with computer games. For sure, Angry Birds would run without problems on a C64. So is this what you can do now with web apps, which was not possible a year ago? Playing a computer game that would also run on a 30-year-old, 8-bit machine? Come on, there must be more convincing examples of web apps out there.

None of the web apps that were presented at this keynote were really a match for modern Windows applications. This is no surprise, because JavaScript is still only a simple scripting language with capabilities that are ages behind modern programming languages.

HTML5 is certainly a major improvement. However, to be a game changer, web apps have to offer more and not less than Windows applications. There is nothing you can’t do with a Windows application that you can do with a web app. Windows applications can store the data in the cloud and make it accessible anywhere and anytime, just like web apps. Office 2010 plus Office 365 is a good example of this.

However, there are still myriad things that even the smartest JavaScript programmer can’t program but that pose no problem for a newbie Windows application developer. By the way, one of the best cloud apps for businesses—that is, Office 365—won’t be available for Chromebooks.

So why would you want to buy a Chromebook if you can run all available web apps in the Chrome browser on a Windows netbook, along with the infinitely large number of Windows applications? What can a Chromebook offer that a Windows netbook can’t? Will the marketing slogan “a new kind of computer” be sufficient to fool people into buying a simple Linux netbook that cannot even run OpenOffice? I seriously doubt it.

By the way, did you notice that Google used Windows 7 for all the demos at the keynote? Why not use Chrome OS? Are presentations one of those myriad situations where you need a real operating system and not just an HTML viewer?

My next post will cover the discussion about operating system and application updates and data backups.

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A few days ago, Google announced Chromebooks, “a new kind of computer,” as the Google Chrome blog was titled. I watched the Day 2 video of the keynote speech for the Google I/O developer conference, and I read several comments on the web. I often found myself shaking my head. This five-part series covers eight of the causes that made my head shake: security, accessibility and ability, updates and backup, usability and cloudability.

I must add a disclaimer before I start. After reading this, you might conclude that this is just another one of my Microsoft fan boy posts. The truth is that I am also a Google fan boy. Not only is the Google search engine much better than Bing, they also have the better web browser. And I couldn’t live without many of Google’s great web applications. Although I had quite a few issues with Android, I believe it is the best mobile OS out there. I want you to keep this in mind when reading the following rant against Chromebooks.

1. Security

My neck still hurts from shaking my head too intensely when Sundar Pichai (senior vice president of Chrome) brought up the security argument against Windows. Frankly, this is plain FUD. It is true that you won’t need antivirus software for Chromebooks. But the only reason for this is that their market share will be even lower than for other Linux netbooks. Thus virus writers have no reason to specifically target the underlying Linux of Chrome OS. They can just rely on the inherently low security of the Open Web. However, if Chromebooks ever reaches a significant market share (which I doubt), then virus writers will target Chrome OS in exactly the same way as they do today with Windows. Rest assured that you will then have to install antivirus software on Chromebooks.

Besides, when it comes to security, conventional viruses only play a minor role nowadays. You don’t have to be a security expert to know that the bad guys have shifted their attention from Windows to the Open Web years ago. Hacking a popular website and infecting it with malware, or creating a new website and then pushing it to the top in Google for popular search terms, is certainly much more effective than writing a Windows virus, considering that Microsoft raised the security level a few bars with Windows Vista and again with Windows 7. Funny thing is that Google Chrome is the most vulnerable application out there. It is no coincidence that almost all of the top 15 most vulnerable applications are related to the web.

Yes, Google invested a lot in Chromium’s security. But if you take a closer look at the security measures, you will notice that Chrome OS faces the same security issues as any other operating system. Google wants us to believe that a Chromebook is a new kind of computer that didn’t inherit the legacy problems of operating systems created decades ago. The truth is that Chrome OS is simply a Linux distribution that can only run one conventional application. This application happens to be the most vulnerable program facing the Open Web, which is the most insecure place in cyberspace.

It is a nightmare for any admin if users can run any kind of application on the Open Web, exposing the whole company network with their Chromebooks. Traditionally, firewalls and other security mechanisms shielded the corporate network from the dangerous Internet. How can you shield Chromebooks? As soon as all your data and applications are in the Open Web, your firewall has become obsolete. This means the bad guys can access your data anytime and from anywhere. Unlike business travelers, hackers around the planet always have high-speed Internet access. So, for them, the “high accessibility” of your organization’s data has a completely different meaning. Moving your complete corporate network to the Open Web increases the attack surface of your organization’s IT to the size of the whole Internet.

And what about the cloud providers? Do you really trust all Google’s employees and those of other cloud providers 100%, considering that you’ve never met even one of their admins in person? Everyone who has physical access to your data and applications has a range of new ways to do bad things to your organization’s most valuable assets.

Of course, these objections against cloud security are not new and are debated heavily on the web. But to tout Chromebooks as more secure, just because their insignificant market share in the foreseeable future makes antivirus software obsolete, is either barefaced or naïve.

In my next post, I will compare the accessibility and the ability of Chrome OS and Windows applications.

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What is it? When people discuss which operating system is the best, they often focus on technical features or ideological arguments. Honestly, those kinds of arguments don’t interest me much. What counts for me the most is the whole ecosystem in which an operating system is embedded. Creating and maintaining a huge ecosystem is Microsoft’s real achievement.

And this strategy is exactly what made Amazon big. Amazon doesn’t have an online store. Amazon is a retail ecosystem. And Amazon doesn’t just have a nice e-book reader. Amazon is an e-book ecosystem. You can guess by now where I buy most of the virtual and physical things I need. Obviously, it is only natural to also buy my cloud server at Amazon.

And guess what? Amazon is not a cloud provider. Amazon has a cloud ecosystem. This is the fascinating thing about Amazon’s cloud. It appears to me that the ecosystem is growing as quickly as Microsoft’s Windows ecosystem did 25 years ago.

It is just that more and more software vendors offer tools to manage Amazon’s cloud. There is also a growing ecosystem of service providers. Let me give you just one example: the “AMI sub ecosystem”. The AMIs (OS images) that you can launch in EC2 are not only from Amazon. Actually, the most interesting AMIs are from third parties.

There are free AMIs from geeks and service providers and there are also paid AMIs. Just like there is a market for Windows software and services, there is a market for virtual machine images in the cloud. Service providers can easily sell AMIs in the EC2 ecosystem through Amazon DevPay. What do you think Amazon calls these companies? Yes, they are “Amazon partners”, in the same sense that ISV’s are Microsoft partners.

The best place I know to get an overview of this AMI ecosystem is at the cloud market. At the time of this writing, they listed 9761 different AMIs. Admittedly, this ecosystem is focused on Linux, but you can certainly also find Windows-based AMIs there. At the moment, the cloud market has 2389 Windows AMIs. So if you quickly need an up-to-date Windows server with SQL Server installed, this is a good place to get started.

I want to highlight one provider in this AMI ecosystem: Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu. Those guys are very active in Amazon’s cloud. Every new Ubuntu release is available almost immediately in EC2. So why would you waste your time installing your own Linux server, if you could have one created by the Ubuntu makers themselves? What I find interesting about Ubuntu is not their desktop system. It is mostly how well Canonical and the Ubuntu team has adapted to this new online world. No other “OS vendor” has a comparable strategy.

I suppose Microsoft sees Amazon too much as a competitor in the cloud market to offer Windows images in EC2. However, I think that just as they offer Office for Macs, they should also offer Windows and other software packages in Amazon’s cloud. Why not offer the whole System Center suite in the cloud? That would really be an easy-to-use and cheap testing environment.

I believe that soon more software companies like Canonical will use this infrastructure to demo their software or offer their conventional on-premises software in the cloud. Of course, the AMI sub ecosystem is only a part of the larger Amazon system because EC2 is only one of the many Amazon clouds.

So now you know the main reason why I stay with 4sysops at EC2 despite its high costs. For me, it is important to actually use such a new technology instead of just reading in the news every day that the cloud is coming. And it is really true. Working in the cloud is much more fun than managing on-premises systems.

Whenever I have time to explore the cloud, it reminds me of the days when I started with system administration and much later when I discovered the possibilities of the Internet. PCs and the Internet were expensive in the beginning, but it was also obvious to me that the future belonged to them. Thus, I was among the first to explore those new worlds. Cloud computing, and especially Amazon’s new cloud ecosystem, is such a new world.

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Last time I complained that I can’t add more memory to my 32-bit instance. However, this problem does not exist with 64-bit instance type because you can just bundle the instance (create an image) and launch this new AMI (Amazon image) with another instance type that has more memory. This can be done without downtime which wouldn’t be possible with on-premises server where you have to add more RAM.

If you need a new full-blown server, then you can indeed get more computation power within a few minutes and you don’t have to wait for weeks until the new server you ordered at your server vendor arrives. This is the main reason the name “EC2″ (Elastic Compute Cloud) is justified. Even if all your servers are virtualized you can’t get this kind of elasticity with on-premises computing.

This is especially useful for testing purposes. Often, when I want to try a new feature for 4sysops I launch a second instance with a exact clone of my server. I can run tests with the 4sysops.com domain by using VPN and my own DNS server which is an advantage over Platform as a Service (PaaS) clouds. The costs for launching a test instance are negligible in my case because I usually only need the server for a few hours.

For IT shops with large storage needs, Amazon’s cloud has even more elasticity to offer. While I find Amazon’s EC2 instance relatively expensive, the storage costs appear reasonable to me. Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) costs $0.10 per GB-month of provisioned storage plus $0.10 per 1 million I/O requests.

The main advantage here is that you don’t have to plan and buy storage in advance. You can just add storage gigabyte-wise on the fly as you need more without worrying if you really have the space for another storage device in your server room. This is real elasticity and much more flexible than the EC2′s instance types. I wish, I could benefit from this storage elasticity, but no matter how many screenshots I add to 4sysops posts, I currently only need about 1.7GB for data storage. I have a few snapshots of my data volume as backup, but this doesn’t really amount to cloud dimensions.

However, what I really appreciate is having my database (MySQL) and the CMS (WordPress) on a separate EBS volume. This allows me to create snapshots, that is, backups, of the most essential data within a few seconds. The storage costs for the snapshots are negligible and the performance of my server is not affected during data backups. I can easily create a new volume of this snapshot and work with a copy of the latest data in a test environment. And whenever I have to make irreversible changes to the database, I create a snapshot with a mouse click and I am on the safe side.

To sum up, in some scenarios, cloud computing offers indeed more elasticity. However, as outlined in my previous post, this is not always true. It depends very much on your environment and your computational needs. In the case of 4sysops, I’d say the EC2′s elasticity is a plus, although this alone does not justify the high costs.

For my next post, I will blog about my main reason for running 4sysops in the cloud.

• FREE: SolarWinds VM-to-Cloud Calculator – Compare VM hosting costs (0)
• Decaf – Amazon EC2 client for Android (0)
• Office 365 review – Part 8: SharePoint Online and conclusion (0)
• Office 365 review – Part 7: Lync Online (0)
• Office 365 review – Part 6: Exchange Online Hybrid, Archiving and IRM (2)