The power of three
With so much attention being focused on the imminent arrival of Window Vista, it's easy to forget that Microsoft is about to ship the latest versions of Office and Exchange. Individually, these are important enough upgrades, but when you look at these three products together, you see a far more compelling argument to upgrade.
13 November 2006
For corporates, there are two things which make Vista compelling. First, it’s going to be difficult to avoid. If you’re running a Windows-based infrastructure, you may choose to not upgrade to Vista, but it’s going to trickle in when you order new PCs. Sure, there will be a crossover (or denial) period, as there was with Windows XP, when hard drives of new machines were wiped and replaced with Windows 2000 – but in the end, you’ll be going Vista. It’s unavoidable. Second, the most important reason for moving to Vista is security. Security is every organisation’s biggest IT headache – and while Vista may not be perfect, it’s a substantial improvement over Windows XP.
True, there will be some initial application compatibility problems, especially with current security tools, but once these are sorted (and they quickly will be) security is going to be Vista’s most impressive trump card. Forget the (terrific) new glass interface and the new bundled applications – for companies, security is the biggest (and possibly the only) truly cast-iron reason to upgrade.
Enter Exchange 2007. As you might expect with a new version of one of the world’s most-deployed e-mail platforms, security is high on the agenda with the next version of Exchange. Exchange’s anti-spam and anti-virus features are significantly enhanced – as they should be, since unwanted inbound files are one of the biggest IT headaches. Exchange 2007 provides a comprehensive set of tools to control inbound e-mails, including connection filtering (block-and-allow listing based on IP addresses), sender and recipient filtering, safe sender lists, content filtering, Outlook postmarks, assessing the spam potential of all e-mails, two-tied quarantine (first for administrators and one for the recipient), attachment filtering and, if it’s needed, better integration with other spam and virus solutions.
Exchange 2007 features Exchange Forefront – a rebranding of Antigen’s anti-virus and anti-spam products which Microsoft has acquired – these add up to a good, strong security solution.
True, Exchange 2007 boasts a host of other features too. These include WebReady Document Viewing – a new feature of Outlook Web Access which allows Office documents to be opened and displayed as HTML on remote machines, even if Office isn’t installed. Exchange uses five ‘server roles’ which allow for quick configuration – in each case, only the features needed for that role are enabled, making Exchange more secure by reducing its attack surface. Exchange ActiveSync gives improved connectivity, using push e-mail for ActiveSync clients. Outlook Web Access is further improved and is now pretty hard to tell from the normal application – especially because performance is now almost comparable to the Outlook application itself. Improved search enables much, much faster searching of the message store.
Finally, there’s Microsoft Office. This is the biggest overhaul to Office – well pretty much ever. In terms of new features, there’s plenty to be had, but the most obvious change is the radically new task-based interface, which we’ve covered before. With an office suite as powerful as Microsoft’s, adding new killer features isn’t easy – it’s so feature-rich that it’s hard to imagine how it could be improved. But there are some strong features. When you compare different versions of the same Word document side-by-side, it highlights the differences for you – more than useful. Spell checking is more contextual, so correctly spelt words in the wrong place (as in “how have you bean?”) is now improved. When choosing styles and fonts, the document shows the changes live, as you scroll through the options, before you select them. Excel only shows minor improvements, but PowerPoint is nicely beefed up, retaining its ease of use but adding more graphical power through SmartArt – which provides access to all kinds of high-class charts and graphics. Outlook, despite looking less changed than the rest of the suite, contains many improvements. For example, you can share calendar data with people who don’t even have Outlook, via HTML files. Different parts of Outlook are better integrated – you can drop a task onto the calendar and turn it into an appointment, for example, or turn an e-mail into a task.
And it’s Outlook that provides the centre of many people’s working days – more than an e-mail client, Outlook is how people organise their working lives. Sit that on top of Windows Vista, connect it to exchange and the three products become much more than the sum of their parts. These products combined represent a kind of power, ease of use and security which (while it may not be perfect) is certainly well ahead of the game. Looking at individual products for reasons to upgrade finds enough to make the process and cost worthwhile – but when you look at the entire solution, the corporate case for upgrading becomes much clearer. These are today’s solutions, to today’s IT problems. It doesn’t get much better than this.
