Microsoft aims Office 365 at small businesses

For the launch of its first full-fledged online office suite, Office 365, Microsoft is paying particular attention to how the new service could help small and medium-size businesses.

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“While we launched Office 365 for all customers, we wanted to focus today on the small and mid-sized opportunities,” said Kirk Koenigsbauer, Microsoft corporate vice president within the Microsoft Office Division product management group, in an interview with the IDG News Service.

During his presentation in New York, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer dropped the names of large companies already using Microsoft cloud services, including DuPont, Hyatt, Starbucks and Volvo. However, the company’s overall marketing emphasis was centered on making Office 365 as appealing as possible to small and medium-size businesses (SMBs), which spend US$800 billion annually on IT products, according to Gartner estimates.

That market is fragmented in terms of what Microsoft products are being used, Koenigsbauer elaborated. Some may be using older versions of Exchange or Microsoft Office, or may just may be using a mish-mash of different products. Worse, many organizations have small, if not non-existent, IT departments.

“Cloud services are a great value propositions for SMBs,” Koenigsbauer said. “They have very small IT staffs. They don’t have the infrastructure. They don’t have the capital to buy new racks of servers.”

More than 70 percent of the users of the Office 365 beta versions were small and medium-size businesses, Ballmer said. He ticked off a list of potential types of users for the new service, including real estate agents, accountants, lawyers, cleaning services and auto dealerships.

Office 365 can be exciting “particularly for companies that have little or no IT support and very little time and financial resources to dedicate to technology,” he said. “Office 365 … is a big step forward. These businesses really will be able to let their employees share information in new ways.”

At the press event, Microsoft gathered representatives from a number of small and mid-sized organizations that have tried Office 365 in its beta form. Chiefly, these businesses seemed most interested in using Office 365 as a way to avoid maintaining in-house Microsoft Exchange servers.

One company considering its use is the Hendrick Automotive Group, which operates 75 car dealerships throughout the U.S.

“For us, one of the reasons we’re looking at Office 365 is that we have a very small IT department. By moving services to the cloud we will be able to realign those resources to those applications that are unique to our industry,” said Robert Taylor, who is the director of information technology for Hendrick. “We’ll be able to deliver applications faster to our users.”

Currently, the company runs a centralized pool of Exchange servers. Its IT services department supports around 4,000 users with a staff of only 13. The company also uses Microsoft SharePoint as an aid to help train employees, and get personnel from new dealerships up to speed.

Another company testing the technology is Perkins Eastman, an architecture firm. Based in New York, the firm has 600 employees across 13 offices worldwide, which are supported by an IT staff of 14. “We’re constantly looking for ways to be more efficient,” said Hamilton Esi, who is director of practice applications for the firm. “Office 365 was a natural transition for us, because of its value proposition.”

The company has been testing the service since December, first with 15 e-mail accounts, then with 50 mailboxes. “Down the road, I see the entire organization moving over to the cloud,” Esi said.

Chief to the appeal of Office 365 for Esi is the ability to quickly spin up new accounts for new offices. The company is rapidly expanding, and plans to open two offices this year. With Office 365, the company can centrally provision email accounts without the need to set up separate servers in new locations. Employees can get their email accounts even before the office is fitted with a new Internet connection. “We now have the ability to set up the office in record time,” Esi said.

One area in which Microsoft will still have to prove its mettle is with the service’s up-time. The company’s precursor to Office 365, BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite), had experienced a number of outages.

Koenigsbauer has noted that Office 365 apps inherently are different from BPOS ones in that they were designed to work in multi-tenant environments, which should minimize troubles. Ballmer promised that the SLA (Service Level Agreements) for Office 365 will be “the best in the industry.”

Office 365 may ultimately prove to be more reliable, agreed Scott Gode, vice president of product management and marketing for Azaleos. Azaleos offers a service to manage federated Active Directory instances, which will be essential for blending internal office use and Office 365 deployments under a single-sign-on.

The mistakes Microsoft made with BPOS come with the territory of ramping up a new service, he explained. However, Office 365 is a higher profile service for the company, and so Microsoft has probably devoted more resources to keeping it running. Engineers have also probably learned from running BPOS.

“We’ve been affected by the [downtime], but we don’t expect it to be totally without hitches,” said Chris Robert, senior manager for information security for Scripps Network Interactive, which runs a number of cable channels such as the HGTV.

When Scripps was spun out from its parent company, Scripps Co., management decided to switch over to BPOS for all employee e-mail needs. The company has been using the service for several years now. “Overall, we’re pretty happy with the [BPOS] service. It is quite a bit more stable,” than a typical in-house implementation, Robert said, noting that in-house email servers can go offline as well. “People have forgotten. It’s not like we’ve never had downtime,” he said.

New Firefox interface to speed up Firefox on Android

Mozilla has decided that when it comes to Android devices, performance is more important than the wealth of add-ons that can be used to customize Firefox.

Yesterday, Mozilla’s Director of Firefox Engineering Johnathan Nightingale announced on a mailing list that Firefox will move to Android’s native user interface, ditching the XUL technology that has been in use by Mozilla since before there even was a Firefox.

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“Firefox on Android is a critical part of supporting the open Web, and this decision puts us in a position to build the best Firefox possible,” Nightingale said.

Firefox is widely used on personal computers but a rarity on mobile phones, where–unlike Apple’s Safari or the unbranded browser Google builds for Android–it’s not installed on any phones by default. Firefox is the chief way Mozilla tries to implement its vision of empowering users of the Web and keeping that Web an open technology.

Firefox with a native Android interface should mean faster start-up, less memory usage, and smoother zooming and panning, Nightingale said. The native UI project page for mobile Firefox, aka Fennec, also listed better battery life as a benefit.

It’s not clear when the rebuilt version will arrive, but it won’t be for either the beta or Aurora versions currently in testing, Nightingale said.

Start-up time is a big deal when comparing Firefox to the built-in browser on Android, especially since Firefox often gets kicked out of memory when not in use, forcing another sluggish load when a person taps a link and needs the browser again.

“After substantial discussion, we have decided to build future versions of Firefox on Android with a native UI [user interface] instead of the current XUL implementation,” Nightingale said.

Only the user interface will change; the browser will still use the underlying Gecko engine for processing Web page elements. But leaving XUL behind will be a big deal for anyone who built Firefox add-ons using the technology, and it complicates the process of translating Firefox into different languages, too.

“It’s still early days, so we have a lot of questions to answer,” Nightingale said. “We’re talking with the Add-on SDK team about the best way to support extensions. We’re talking with l10n [localization] about how to ensure we support Firefox users wherever they live around the world.”

One possibility, according to Some meeting notes on native-UI Firefox is blunter: “Extensions are gone.” The notes raise the possibility of using Mozilla’s Add-On Software Developer Kit (SDK), an online tool for creating add-ons, but at present that works only for new-style “Jetpack” add-ons that aren’t available on mobile right now.

For now, there’s a lot of planning to do about the transition.

“By the end of next week, we will have a clearer outline of the work ahead,” Nightingale said.