Late last week, Microsoft Research shared a couple of things about Social Desktop, a prototype of which they are debuting at TechFest 2009 in a couple of days (along with dozens of other things). From the looks of it, this will be a much talked about product even if it stays in proof-of-concept phase for now.
And if they decide to open it up even just a little, this could be a major breakthrough in tearing down the virtual wall between the desktop and the web, a trend we’ve been noticing for years.
The service would essentially be capable of providing you with a secure unique ID for all the files and folders on your desktop, enabling users to share, comment on, tag and search files like photos and videos via a dedicated web page powered by .NET. Think of this as social URLs that link to files which could easily be pushed to third-party services like Twitter or Digg but also Microsoft’s own Windows Live Messenger without the need for you to copy, move or upload anything. Furthermore, social interaction around the files would be visible from inside the Windows desktop OS, blurring the line between the desktop and the web even more.
You can have a URL drill into a subportion of a document or a PowerPoint deck, or data can come from a Web service or a database. Social Desktop is a local service that maps the user’s local data into a .NET service bus service, enabling local data to be accessible through firewalls. Social Desktop also provides a Web-service view over the same data, with inherent RSS event streams for any container. New data sources can be mapped into the URL hierarchy, enabling a distributed view to be built. There are simple sharing paradigms that enable URLs to be shared temporarily or permanently.
Social Desktop runs on Silverlight and leverages both the Windows OS and Windows Azure, the software giant’s very own cloud services platform which Microsoft announced in October 2008. TechFlash reviewed the service as well last week, and asked the project leads how Social Desktop differs from Live Mesh. The response came from Lili Cheng, who manages Microsoft Research’s Creative Systems Group: “In the Mesh model, you can almost imagine your PC being pushed to the cloud,” she explained. “In this, you can almost imagine the Web being embedded inside your desktop.”
I don’t know about you, but to me this all sounds very promising and I’m curious if using Social Desktop would change my file sharing habits. Even with the plethora of free, simple and fast online backup and sharing services around, there’s still a trust barrier not easily overcome by startups who need to market their services extensively on an inherently low budget to reach any kind of scale. Besides, Social Desktop even relieves you from the not-so-cumbersome task of moving a file to the cloud in order to store or share it, so that makes for one hell of a substantial benefit compared to other services where you’d be required to register and do a series of actions before that happens.
Unfortunately, a Microsoft spokesperson told NetworkWorld that Social Desktop at this point is merely a research prototype which will not be a feature in Windows 7, nor will it be available for public use.
But I still want to get my hands on Windows 7 Beta (it makes use of the new operating system’s file-preview functions) right now even if just to test this application once (and if) they release it.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Ideas, Internet, Microsoft, Software, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment »
Microsoft Corp. is unveiling a Web component for its desktop-based Office programs that lets computer users store, share and comment on documents, but the software maker did not go so far as to let people create new files from scratch online.
Microsoft Office Live Workspace, as the free Web site is called, isn’t quite live. Starting Monday, users can sign up to be part of an early “beta” test of the service. A number of those users will be able to start using the service at some point this year, Microsoft said.
Office Live Workspace will give users about 250 megabytes of storage, or room to keep about 1,000 average Office documents “in the cloud.” PC users can upload Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, and use the site to e-mail friends or colleagues and invite them to read and add comments to those documents through a Web browser.
However, if users want to edit the text, they must open the document using an installed copy of Microsoft Office.
Office Live Workspace taps into a few of Microsoft’s Web offerings. Users with Hotmail, Xbox Live and other Microsoft accounts can use that information to log on to Workspace. Once there, they can use their stored contact list to send invitations.
The service is compatible with Office 2003 and Office 2007, and users will be able to save from Office to the Web site and open files they’ve stored online.
Workspace wasn’t intended as a standalone program, said Chris Capossela, a corporate vice president in Microsoft’s business software division, but rather a “companion service.” At a media event last week, Capossela and Jeff Raikes, president of the division, stressed that users were most interested in using the power of the Web to access their documents from any computer, and for collaborating, and not for creating sophisticated documents.
Office Live Workspace is not to be confused with Office Live, a set of tools Microsoft first developed to help small businesses build Web sites and manage online advertising campaigns. Office Live will be renamed Office Live Small Business, Microsoft said.
The vast majority of computer users use Word, Excel and other Office programs, in spite of challenges from open source desktop programs like OpenOffice. Google Inc. and several small startups offer Web-based word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software, and recently, Google launched tools that even let its programs work offline.
While Microsoft is officially mum on whether it will add more useful features to an online version of Office, Capossela said the software maker plans to remain the leader in productivity software.
John Rymer, an analyst for Forrester Research, said that on its own, Workspace isn’t all that exciting, but it’s unlikely Microsoft will stop there.
“The payoff is going to come later, when you’ve got editing, real collaboration … when it’s really Office reconstituted,” he said. “That’s not going to come for a while.”
After experimenting online in areas far from Microsoft’s core business software products, the software maker’s first step is, in part, meant to prove it is serious about offering software online, Rymer said.
Microsoft also announced Monday it will sell its Exchange, SharePoint and Communications server software as services over the Internet. That means that information technology departments at companies with more than 5,000 PC users won’t have to buy disks, install software and manage the server computers. Instead, Microsoft will host the software on servers in its own data centers and sell access to companies on a subscription basis.
The software maker did not disclose any pricing details.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Internet, Microsoft, Software | No Comments »
Late last week, Microsoft Research shared a couple of things about Social Desktop, a prototype of which they are debuting at TechFest 2009 in a couple of days (along with dozens of other things). From the looks of it, this will be a much talked about product even if it stays in proof-of-concept phase for now.
