Silverlight on Nokia Phones

Wow! this is quite some news. Never imagined something like this to happen.

Microsoft Silverlight, the cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering next-generation media experiences and rich interactive applications will now be available for S60 on Symbian OS, the world’s leading smartphone software, as well as for Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets.  Adding support for Silverlight will extend opportunities for developers to create rich, interactive applications that run on multiple platforms in a consistent and reliable way. This move will enable S60 application developers to use a wider range of dev environments.

Here’s the offiicial press release from Nokia.

This is BIG for Microsoft and Silverlight, as the collaboration with Nokia will enable taking the Silverlight experience to millions of users on devices which will be used everyday by end users. This will also be a lithmus test for Silverlight for ensuring it’s cross platform compatibility.

I think that is a great move, which will enable mobile users to see their applications move to the next level of user experience and usability.  I am personally looking forward to seeing some great mobile apps built on Silverlight. Some demos are expected at the MIX.

Of tears and Microsoft !

Scoble claims to have been moved to tears after seeing a demo by the Microsoft Research team.

Something like this coming from Scoble is quite rare and this of course led to an avalanche of blog posts and predictions as to what this ground breaking thing could be. Popular predictions included Photosynth , Seadragon etc.

Scoble then came back with ‘Misreading Scoble on Microsoft cry’

One particular line caught my attention

The thing I’m talking about is NOT anything you’ve seen Microsoft do before.

And this

 That said, I think it will stand up to the kind of hype I unleashed yesterday. It is still inspiring me and I still want to get my hands on it as soon as possible.

Wonder what this could be ? Any predictions ? Btw, as per Scoble’s claims we would be getting to know about this by Feb 27.

Microsoft beats Google to win Facebook deal

After much speculation and rumours, looks like Microsoft has won the Facebook deal with a $240 million investment for 1.6% of the company. If Microsoft’s investment is indicative of what Facebook is worth, its valuation is somewhere in the ballpark of $15 billion. After having lost out on some other high profile deals such as MySpace, this will be great joy for Microsoft.

The deal makes Microsoft  the sole advertising provider for Facebook in the United States and internationally. With facebook’s mamoth user base, this definitely means serious business for Microsoft.

The crucial aspect is how Microsoft takes this forward and improves it’s partnership with Facebook. There is a lot of scope for Microsoft to leverage this deal and work on it and bring on enhancements which will enable some Microsoft Products such as Live Messenger and the Live platform as such to be integrated with Facebook.

My bet is that this is going to be a very interesting time for the Web 2.0 space as we see major players getting into this space.

Image Courtesy : Webcommunityforum

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Microsoft’s Web 2.0 strategy with SharePoint

For Microsoft, Sharepoint and MOSS 2007 have always been dear products, with a lot of sales and marketing activity happening on this front. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a key product for Microsoft – it has collaboration, business intelligence, content management, search and “social computing” capabilities (Microsoft’s idea for ‘web 2.0′, according to this page on Microsoft’s website).

Microsoft is going Web 2.0, and what better way than to go with Sharepoint. Some of my previous posts talk about MOSS 2007 and building Web 2.0 sites using MOSS.

Microsoft recently announced two strategic partnerships, with enterprise software  company Atlassian and RSS solutions vendor NewsGator. The   partnerships link togther Microsoft’s SharePoint product with Atlassian’s wiki collaboration product Confluence and a new offering from Newsgator called ‘NewsGator Social Sites’, a collection of site templates, profiles, Web parts and middleware for SharePoint.

The big picture which Microsoft is of course looking at is to sell SharePoint as a social collaboration platform rather than just an enterprise productivity platform by adding more Web 2.0 features such as collaboration, user generated content etc. The other IMHO is of course the limited out of the box functionality which Wikis, blogs and other web parts provide in MOSS 2007 and customizing these can take quite a hit on the timelines and cost of a project.

According to this source,  Microsoft has around 80 million users on SharePoint and is reported to be worth $800 M per year in revenue for the Redmond company. Atlassian has 4,100 Confluence enterprise customers. So this definitely seems to be a win win relationship and a great advantage for SharePoint users.

There is in fact a new connect launched by Atlassian which is available for download.

Microsoft fixes Excel calculation bug

I’m pleased that Microsoft responded quickly to the demands of the online community. They have made available patches to the calculation problem which involves calculations around the number 65,535 and 65,536 in Excel 2007 and Excel services.

Here’s the take of the problem from the Excel and Excel services team blog.

The Problem
” This issue was introduced when we were making changes to the Excel calculation logic in the Office 2007 time frame.  Specifically, Excel incorrectly displays the result of a calculation in 12 very specific cases (outlined below).  The key here is that the issue is actually not in the calculation itself (the result of the calculation stored in Excel’s memory is correct), but only in the result that is shown in the sheet.  Said another way, =850*77.1 will display an incorrect value, but if you then multiply the result by 2, you will get the correct answer (i.e. if A1 contains “=850*77.1”, and A2 contains “=A1*2”, A2 will return the correct answer of 131,070).”

The good part is that they will be pushing this out with Windows update, which mean you can have the potential fix without any explicit download. The fix will also be available along with the Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Office 2007 (official date of release for which has not yet been announced).

Round up of “Expression around the clock”

The Expression around the clock event happened yesterday in Bangalore at Fuga, a cool venue for an even cooler event. This was a global designer conference(taking place simultaneously in 10 venues around the globe) aptly themed “Design is back!” 

The event started with out with registration, Microsoft had a very strict registration and confirmation process for this event and inspite of that the place was packed with people. There were about 200 people and seating was available only for about 70 people.

The event kicked off with a keynote from Shelly Armstrong of the Microsoft Design team. Shelly has been involved in various projects in Microsoft, including the interaction design for the XBox and the Zune. Her talk was totally targeted towards designers and tips on improving UX, design, importance of keeping up with latest trends, networking etc.

After this there was a break, with the bar being opened up [:)]. There was more action ahead though. The next session was by Supreet Singh, an UX designer and Pandurang, a dev. They started out with a desinger dev duel and demostrated how Expression Studio supported the designer-dev collaboration with ease. This was pretty interesting, with Surpreet putting in a video on to his canvas and then Pandurang writing a bit of code for the play and pause functionality.

The dev, (as they put it, didn’t have much idea about UX) and hence he puts up text messages for play and pause. Surpreet then takes this XAML and immediately ports this message into a cool button.

The next part was demos – impressive stuff overall, though I had seen most of them before. The demo which impressed me the most, was the one of a Silverlight video player being able to play 10 high definition videos simultaneously with ease, and the ability for the user to seamless switch between them with no system overload.

Post this was the usual networking session (with more beers though!). Met a couple of interesting people and managed to market ADITI’s UX blog. People seemed to be very interested by this, especially because we are not a design only firm.(Thanks Ram ! for mentioning our blog in your post.)

At the end, Microsoft gave away a goodie bag to each participant. It had a 60-day trial of the Expression Studio, a design magazine and a Reebok t-shirt!.

Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 with Linux support

Microsoft has finally officially announced the release of Silverlight 1.0 with Linux support. Silverlight is Microsoft’s direct reply to Flash and is expected to play a big role in the future of Rich Internet Applications (RIA).

Microsoft’s Silverlight will be supporting Moonlight, the Linux implementation as part of the their partnership with Novell, which was signed earlier this year. They have some really cool partners including Entertainment Weekly and the WWE.

According to Miguel de Icaza, vice president of Developer Platforms and leader of the Mono project at Novell. “Novell is excited to work with Microsoft to extend Silverlight beyond Windows^® and Macintosh to Linux with Moonlight, so Linux users everywhere can enhance their rich media and interactive experiences on the Web.”

Most RIA enthusiasts are however looking for the release of Silverlight 1.1 which will support the Common Language Runtime (CLR) in .NET and make writing applications for the web much easier.

However this is going to be a very interesting period, with Microsoft penetrating into the Linux user base and enhancing their experience and with Adobe working on various improvements to flash at the same time.

Using Office Business Applications to increase productivity

This post is long pending. I have been fascinated by the new generation of composite applications which are very powerful and help in boosting productivity and operational efficiency. So let’s take this step by step.

What are OBAs ?

OBAs are basically a new breed of composite applications which enable information workers to work on their legacy systems and other systems in the backend with a Microsoft Office 2007 front end. These systems surface up the data from the Line of Business (LOB) applications and enable people to perform actions on them.

What is the need for OBAs ?

People typically perform significant additional work outside of the formal processes of a line-of-business (LOB) system as they collaborate with other people via phone and email, obtain information from multiple sources in the form of documents and spreadsheets, and switch between online and offline modes for meetings and business trips. OBAs help simplify this interaction by fitting within the informal processes that information workers actually follow. Organizations can use OBAs to build their won solutions, integrate with it and connect to an external line of Business (LOB) application so as to ensure that information is easily available and people can be more productive. This also rules out the need for getting resources trained on the Line of business applications.

Typical scenario for an OBA

Let’s look at a typical scenario where OBAs can be used and how they can help solve problems within the existing systems. The legacy systems are based on transactional processes that are necessary in order to accomplish specific tasks—for example, creating a Purchase Order. What is not effectively captured are the ad hoc, local people-driven processes that people do in order to accomplish a task like this. For instance – people have to collaborate with other members in their team to get required inputs from them for completing a purchase order. The purchase manager will also require to get information from suppliers and other requirements which need to be collated. Once he has completed the purchase order, he might also have to get it approved from his maanger. The exisitng systems do not support these activites and they are outside of the system.  So these systems are being used for merely storing the data and not for collaboration and decision making.

However using an OBA, the purchase manager can collaborate with other people in his team using a sharepoint team site, brainstorm on ideas using a wiki and then collate all this information easily as this available in one single place. He could also have ad hoc meetings and discussions if his MOSS portal is integrated with Live Communication Server, enabling him to start a chat conversation with any of his colleagues or suppliers. On completing the purchase order, he has a custom workflow which routes the document to his manager and once it is approved, he has it automatically sent to the suppliers. The business application simulates the actual way the work gets done rather than just being a repository for information.

If you are interested in browsing OBA solutions built by Microsoft Partners, check

Microsoft Cloud OS

Microsoft plans at creating core infrastructure services like storage and alerts which developers can build on top of. This set of capabilities are being referred to as the Cloud OS, though it’s not a term Microsoft likes to use publicly. But this was hinted at by Brian Hall, Ballmer and Ozzie at the Worldwide partner conference in Denver.

This looks like the next big thing that Microsoft is working on, with Ballmer stating “”We are in the process today of building out a services platform in the cloud.”

Ballmer said that later this year Microsoft will deliver the first version of a set of developer tools to build on top of Microsoft’s Windows Live effort and noted that the tools will be based on .Net.

This looks like Microsoft is opening up more of their services and with the Web 2.0 trend of web services, looks like Microsoft wants to continue their presence on the web the way they have been ruling the desktop world.

Microsoft also previously  introduced two new Windows Live Services, one for sharing photos and the other for all types of files. While those services are being offered directly by Microsoft today, they represent the kinds of things that Microsoft is now promising will be also made available to developers.

Among the other application and infrastructure components, Microsoft plans to open are its systems for alerts, contact management, communications (mail and messenger) and authentication.