Microsoft further confuses their Office web branding

Yesterday Microsoft announced, among other things, that they would soon release a web-based version of their office suite, along the lines of Zoho Office and Google Docs. This announcement is a major step forward for the company and allows them to target users of other browsers and operating systems. As Micheal Arrington said, “Thank you Google” for kicking them in the shorts enough that they actually created a product that people want, rather than delivering a product and telling people this is what you get.

However, unless something changes Microsoft could still fumble the ball on this one through a confusing brand strategy for Office on the web. Currently, Microsoft has the following Office related websites/brands:

• Office Online — A website where users can download templates for the Office software
• Office Live Workspace — A website or sharing files between the Office desktop software and Web
• Office Live Small Business — A service that Microsoft offers for domain registration, website & email hosting. It also has some online CRM and project management components.

Add to that the new brand of “Office Web Applications” for these new web-based versions of the Office Applications. Also be sure not to confuse any of this with the Windows Live branded software and websites, and Mesh.com, which we will not even go into here. Personally, I think that Microsoft needs to pick a single overall brand for the web and create a consumer & business strategy around them. They started down this road with the original “Live” brand, but they have bobbled it terribly and managed to confuse most people that I have talked to. It looks like they will continue this trend with the release of these new products, which is upsetting because they look great, and should serve as a wake up call to Google to get their products out of beta and make some real improvements to them.

Howto: Entourage 2008 for Exchange 2007 Configuration

With all of the Macs being deployed in companies all over the world there are a lot of admins scratching their head on how to integrate Macs into a Windows world. The most common request these admins will get is, “Can you configure my Mac to get my Exchange 2007 email?”. The simple answer is, Yes. Regardless of whether or not you have configured, your Macs to authenticate against your Active Directory (which you should), you can configure Entourage to sync with your Exchange 2007 Server, to allow all of your Mac users to take advantage of your existing Exchange infrastructure. Use the howto below to configure your Entourage clients.

1. Give the account setup a useful name.

2. Enter the name and email address of the User for which you are configuring Entourage.

3. Enter of username of the user, enter the FQDN of the Active Directory domain name, and the password for the user.

4. Enter the public URL of your Outlook Web Access server. If you are using SSL to secure your OWA server as you should be make sure you specify that.

5. Enter the public URL of your Outlook Web Access server, with “/public” on the end. If you are using SSL to secure your OWA server as you should be make sure you specify that. This will allow your users to access your Public Folders.

6. Enter the internal FQDN of a domain controller in your Active Directory domain. This will be used to look up users from the Global Address Book.

7. Enter the Search Base for your Active Directory domain. This usually is just the internal DNS name for your NetBIOS domain name broken out into LDAP-centric format as displayed in the example.

These instructions will allow your Mac users to make full use of your Exchange Server. The one important note, is that your LDAP settings will be inaccessible outside of your LAN, as I do not recommend opening up port 389 on your firewal to allow LDAP traffic outside your LAN. This may prevent your Macs from making Global Address Book lookups when not connected to your LAN. What you may consider instead is setting up a VPN connection on the Mac to allow this to function fully.

The top 10 most Innovative companies in tech

This month’s Fast Company magazine has a listing of “The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies”. While it is a great article, it has some traditional “low-tech” companies such as Wal-mart mixed in with the tech companies. I recognize that some of these companies are doing some very innovative things, many don’t have technology that is useful in our daily lives today. So I have created my own list of the 10 most innovative companies in my opinion, with products and services that you should be using today.

1- Amazon.com – Through the deployment and monetization of their Services they have singlehandedly popularized the cloud-computing industry.

2- Google — Big Surprise here. Google is designing products/services that are giving Microsoft a run for their money, too bad they are not as polished and as capable as Microsoft’s products. However, Microsoft has a 20 year jump on Google.

3- Sun Microsystems — Sun is taking on power consumption in data centers with some of the most unique designs in the server hardware segment that I have seen years.

4- Microsoft — Vista in all of its glory, or lack there of have in a way lit a fire under Microsoft. The new versions of some of it’s products are looking promising. Pair this with the fear of God that Google has struck into them, Microsoft is finally making a whole-hearted effort into moving some of their applications online.

5- Revision 3 — Kevin Rose and Company have taken on the network studios by producing full-length high-quality shows that are free. The networks should be very afraid of these guys.

6- Apple — They made my list simply for the iPhone SDK and Enterprise support. These will transform the mobile phone industry.

7- Zimbra (A Yahoo! Company) — These guys have been working hard to produce a viable, complete alternative to Exchange. They have succeeded, after using their collaboration suite over the last 6 months I do not miss Exchange at all.

8- VMWare — Using their Virtualization patents to throw their weight around these guys rule the Virtualization market. One such product that has made them a household name is VMWare Fusion for the Mac. Also, by giving away their VMWare Server product they have firmly cemented their place at the top of this market for the foreseeable future.

9- Intel — They make my list for simply making CPU’s smaller and more power efficient, such as the one used in the MacBook Air

10- OpenOffice.org — Another example of a feature complete Microsoft alternative that is making a active effort to make their as ubiquitous as possible on as many platforms as possible.