SharePoint is one of the jewels in Microsoft’s crown; a powerful bulding block that pushes Microsoft servers into departments, a really rather good collaboration tool with links to applications and other server-side applications and a really, really hard product to explain. If you can see it in action, in a custom application that does just what you need, you’ll probably buy it on the spot. So why not show it to more people?

That - and the desire to keep up with Salesforce and the other on-demand services as much as any threat from Google’s rather basic online office tools - is the impetus behind Office Live, which is finally in beta in the UK. It’s a set of canned SharePoint sites - no option to customise them and no third-party tools of the kind that work so well for the salesforce system, but they cover the basics of what any small company needs for online collaboration. The JavaScript development model bodes well for add-ons in the future and ISVs will be able to offer custom SharePoint solutions at some point (or seduce people off to a custom hosted service running SharePoint).

You can just get the free domain or sign up for two levels of SharePoint at http://OfficeLive.Microsoft.com/UK. But grit your teeth and prepare to choose your State or Province, put in your ZIP code and remember to add +44 to your phone number. Once I finish gritting my teeth I’ll go check whether the applications have been localised any better than that. The Internet may cut across borders but if you’re going to hold users back so you can launch your services in specific geographies further down the line, how about using the time to actually make them suit the country?

 EDIT: I’m baffled; I can’t fathom the format it wants my phone number in. Have you been able to sign up and try it out?

-Mary Branscombe

Wooden toy train manufacturer Brio has unveiled its new line: The Networkers.

Fictionalising the inside of a computer, little wooden trains of packets rush around with email, and giant LEDs light up when CDs are burnt. There’s a search engine with a magnifying glass, a recycle bin, a wooden router, and a pop-up virus.

It’s the return of Reboot. Just in wood and plastic.

Of course we could imagine a few new characters for their world. How about a firewall, with a packet filter that let only certain shaped trains through. Or a web server, with a set of encryption tools that shuffled the carriages on the train (sorry, the packet). Stick four tracks together and you’ve got a quad core processor!

I’m not entirely sure how we’d get the ITIL documentation in, though….

Another way of looking it is as an excellent illustration of a service oriented architecture - the trains are messages, the playsets are services, and the wooden tracks, the message bus.

(Navigate through the Flash-heavy site to download the 90MB video for a rather delightful little movie, which teaches a useful lesson in basic network security.)

–Simon

It’s always nice to see a sinner recant. In the past 3 has been one of the worst offenders in terms of walled garden access, based as they were on Vignette. To hear them talking about how the value of the Internet is not being limited to a few hand-picked, carefully monetised sites is a breath of fresh air. And to be fair, a few years back you could make some kind of case for the walled garden as a useful stepping stone while the technology matured - just as AOL acted as training wheels, providing content before the Web matured and then providing categorised access for the online novice (I know, as the Welshman said, because I was there).

If you remember the debacle of WAP or you’ve tried to use a currency conversion Web site on your smartphone browser only to be told you don’t have enough JavaScript (tip: the BlackBerry browser turns JavaScript off by default to make Web pages load more quickly),  then you might appreciate a serviec guaranteed to work on your phone. But the answer isn’t to bar the gate to the garden, it’s to develop the technology so users can get out of the nursery. As Kai  Oistamo from Nokia put it, the killer application for 3G is the Internet.

3 doesn’t have any new phones. What is has is some new software; a version of Skype written for the UIQ Symbian phones in the X-Series range (based on the iSkoot system so we might see versions for Motorola and Palm phones fairly shortly), a custom MSN Messenger client and so on. There’s Yahoo’s transcoding engine that massages Web sites for the limited browser and small screen.

What’s really new is 3’s approach to the ways the Internet undermines the traditional income of a mobile operator. Instant messages take away all that lovely SMS revenue. Skype calls threaten revenue from voice calls. Google, eBay, Yahoo and the like are much more familair online names than 3 or Vodafone. With nothing reminding you over and over that you get your connection from your mobile network (other than the monthly bill), will you still love them in the morning? Well, if the connection is good you will. And it turns out that the 3 users who already have IM on their phones send just as many text messages; they IM people they wouldn’t have texted anyway. Until the world and his wife all have Skype on their mobile phone or we get VOIP interoperability (tip: don’t hold your breath), then we’ll be making voice calls as usual. But we’ll also be paying a monthly fee on top of the standard voice bill - and far less likely to switch to another operator.

The number one reason why people return phones that aren’t broken is that setting up email is just too hard. If you switch away from 3 you’ll have to set up Skype and Sling and Orb and MSN and eBay and everything else. If we don’t change to a better bank account because setting up direct debits is such a hassle, how many people will rush to a better tariff or a new phone with so many settings to copy across? 3 might have found the ideal way to reduce their high churn level.

It’s not all good news. There’s no word on when 3 might launch HSDPA in the UK so that you’re getting the mobile Internet at a reasonable speed. No word on pricing either; that will be announced in December when the service goes on sale. And while the plan is to have a flat rate in the long term, initially there will be higher fees for higher bandwidth services like Orb and Slingbox, and what Frank Sixt calls “fair use limits so we don’t get eaten alive, but no unfair limits”. Any guesses on whether what you think is fair and what 3 think is fair will be the same?

Getting this many Internet services together for Symbian smartphones makes them look more like competition for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile (which has the Pocket PC heritage and a big development community providing plenty of software). You could get a flat rate 3G tariff from TMobile or Vodafone already, but you might not think to get it for a Nokia or Sony Ericsson phone that looks more like a phone than a PDA (if you really want to browse the Web and check your eBay bids on a smaller screen). But the big question is the price. If it really is the £10-£15 a month on top of your voice subscription we’ve heard rumoured, then 3 will have a winner and we’ll see a 3G data price war. And that should break down a few more garden gates.

- Mary Branscombe

While at CERN for the Intel quad core launch yesterday, I took a little walk, down a corridor and some stairs to a small museum. It’s worth visiting for many reasons, but my pilgrimage was to a small case, containing a small black computer.

There are many NeXT cubes out there, still ticking over, still providing sterling services. The one in the case isn’t one of them. It’s too important to be still in use. There’s a sticker on the front, part torn off. It reads:

“This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!”

There are many machines like that.

Workstations that run large chunks of businesses, storing critical Excel spreadsheets, or a project’s document library. Some may be tower case PCs that have been turned into branch office servers, with the judicious application of a copy of Microsoft’s Small Business Server. Others might be LAMP boxes, Linux machines with Apache running chunks of a company’s intranet.

Small servers are the backbone of many SME businesses, and budget concerns mean they’re often machines that began life as a desktop PC or a workstation. After all, most server OSes will run on them quite happily.

This machine, however, was something different.

If a computer could be said to have changed the world, this one was it.

This was Tim Berners Lee’s original web server.

It’s hard now to imagine a world without the web. It’s everywhere - from management interfaces on printers and network hardware, to server configuration utilities, to SOA applications - it’s even on our phones.

All thanks to the little workstation that could.

It’s a good job that people paid attention to that sticker and that nobody powered it down…–Simon Bisson

Intel’s new quad core chips aren’t going to show up in your average desktop tomorrow. Until software goes parallel, the new Core 2 Extreme cpu is going to appeal to gamers more than spreadsheet jockeys. The  Xeon 5300 quad core server will be more mainstream, but its first home will be in high performance computing - like the new Large Hadron Collider that CERN is building on the Swiss French border.

 A massive ring of magnets and sensors buried up to 150 metres underground (the Jura mountains slope, so some of the chamber is further down), the collider generates a huge amount of data from its 150 million sensors: when it’s finished next year it will produce 15 million GB a year. There’s so much information that CERN is building a grid  to process it and make it available to  researchers around the world. Openlab, CERN’s R&D section, is already looking at quad core Xeons for processing the data, so Intel took us along to see the collider and the data centre. According to Sverre Jarp, the CTO of openlab, it’s a perfect fit. “Events from the detectors are truly independent so we can parallelise at a very low level. Our simulations show almost perfect scaling as we go from single to dual to quad core. As long as we have memory and bandwidth to access memory we can keep scaling.”

CERN uses mostly open source software that the researchers are rewriting for parallel execution. Commercial software is going parallel too, but moving to quad core means you’ll have to look into upgrading or rewriting your apps. But multi-core processors will affect software development in other ways. Intel’s Stephan Gillich believes “developers will do more experimental stuff because it’s easier to run it and try it than speculate about different possibilities and choose one and find later that it’s not the right way to go”.

Research computing needs high performance computing systems because nothing is ever fast enough, Sverre Jarp told us in the circular wooden Innovation Centre opposite the museum housing the NeXT cube that was Tim Berners-Lee’s first Web server. “A scientist never stops; you can never say we have enough performance and capacity. Every time you improve it, it’s just more useful work that can be done by the scientific community.”

Intel is happy enough with CERN’s results to trumpet them in a press release today; Jarp says multicore is a good way of boosting both the measurements he cares about - the SPECint per Swiss Franc and the SPECint per watt. Performance matters, price matters - and power matters. As well as getting the data closer to the researchers who work with it, using a grid means no one data centre has to deal with all of the heat.

Itanium didn’t make the grade for CERN when they evaluated it although there are several racks of Itanium and a solitary Montecito in the data centre; the  hardware just didn’t have the bang-for-the-buck that CERN needed according to Jarp. “We did not reach the SPECint per dollar that we today reach with the Xeon processors. Building the grid we’re relying on the best SPECint per dollar and today that’s Xeon. Intel is still pushing the Itanium hard for floating point solutions, and Dario Bucci (on his home turf as Intel’s country manager for Switzerland and Italy) pointed out that that’s where Itanium really shines, unlike CERN’s applications which mainly use integer calculations.

CERN has a grid to pump out the data. If business goes to quad core you might need faster network connections - but not always. You’d think the more data you can process on a CPU, the more IO capacity you’d need, and usually that’s true. But you can also use faster computing to reduce the bandwidth you need by implementing more efficient compression because you can afford the effort it takes to decode. Take HD TV. High Definition video takes a huge amount of bandwidth if it’s uncompressed but H264 streams and files use far less bandwidth, because they’re highly compressed - and multi-core systems can work with them in near real time.
 Where quad core breaks through into business first is when it’s used for research computing within the business. Monte Carlo simulations and risk analysis are essentially high performance computing, working on the complexities of money and risk rather than chemistry or weather patterns. And of course design and rendering - for CGI animation like Pixar’s Cars or for real car design - will take as much power as a CPU can churn out. With quad core your simulations can run faster, or they can just be more detailed. If time’s not an issue, whole body simulations can give much better results than just simulating a section of an aircraft wing because you can see interactions you might miss looking at things piece by piece.

As simulation becomes more affordable more businesses are going to find ways to use it. But once database applications and other mainstream software goes parallel, more cores will mean better value for mainstream computing. How long does it take? Gillich is coy about actual dates: “if I told you it would tell you our release dates and I’m not allowed to do that, but it won’t take long. Compare it with dual core - just look at consumer machines, they’re all dual core. How fast did that happen? Half a year. We expect a similar curve to occur in quad core.”
- Simon & Mary

Our last stop this trip is Hong Kong and the plane lands at dark o’clock so it’s jet lag that has us checking our BlackBerries for email in a tunnel on the Airport Express MTR (think a larger, cleaner London Underground). As this is Hong Kong, we don’t just get a connection, we get EDGE. In a tunnel.

While the operator market seems to have consolidated over the last few years, the Hong Kong SAR is still an interesting place to watch how a culture adapts to truly ubiquitous mobile technologies. Bluetooth headsets are rare, but the tell tale cables of a handsfree headset (often stereo - after all, who needs a dedicated MP3 player) are every where. The girl giggling behind her hand on the MTR is probably gossiping with a group of friends, while the chap in the suit juggling a Windows Mobile device and a BlackBerry is probably alternating between home and work emails. No one bats at eye - it’s all part and parcel of everyday life, just like the parent and child side by side, both engrossed in their text messages.

The MTR’s wide tunnels make it easier for signals to propogate, but the technology is sound. London Underground could learn from the MTR, both how to manage fiercely competitive wireless opertors, and how to encourage a culture of widespread considerate communication. We have a lot more to say than “I’m on the tube”…

The 211,000 commuters who surge up the escalators that link the peaks with the business district every day know where they’re going, but with so many visitors in town the signs on the MTR need to be clear. They’re illuminated and informative. The Airport Express lights up the route in blue LEDs so you can see how far between stations you are and flashes the next station when you’re a couple of minutes out. The standard MTR display shows all the lines at eye level in the carriage, with the next station flashing, a light for exit this side or exit other side and a light to show which direction the train is going in. Plus when you get to a station that’s an interchange the whole line it’s connected to flashes.

Sol Trujillo, head of the Australian telco Telstra, wants simpler phone interfaces - one button, one click, he calls it. That’s what the MTR interface is. It’s the kind of contextual interface Microsoft is trying to get with 2007 Office, although it’s easier when there’s only one thing you can do.

Simon & Mary

A couple of weeks ago we caught Billy Bragg in concert in San Francisco and he talked about the difference the Internet has made to the traveller; instead of gazing glassy eyed at hotel TV you can catch up on your email, use video chat to stay in touch with the kids, write blog entries or watch something on YouTube. He was particularly taken with one video which he described to the audience as The Cat and The Fan.

It starts with a black cat intently watching the pull cord on a rotating ceiling fan as it whips by overhead, out of reach. Then a slightly French Canadian voice calls the cat, in one of those ‘be cute for the camera’  tones of voice: “Muffy!” Infuriated at being disturbed the cat looks round to glare at the voice, looks back to the pull cord and seeing it at just the right angle out of the corner of its eye makes a leap for it - and catches it.

Holding on grimly the cat whips around in circles making a miaoow-iaooow-iaoooow noise as it flies through the air. A second voice says imploringly “Turn off the fan!” - but the first voice is laughing too hard. And then the cat loses its grip and flies out of shot.

The poster of the video promises that Muffy is unhurt, so you can enjoy the video in good conscience, as plenty of people already have. Muffy probably gets as much airtime as an arthouse movie, maybe more. We’ve been telling friends about Muffy as we travel; it’s fun to show them the clip - but oddly it’s funnier when you tell people about it than when you show it to them. Because when you tell the story you can pause, you can telescope the slow beginning - you can adapt the pacing of the video to create the most humour. That’s the true difference between amateur and professional video; not the budget or the equipment but the fact that professional video, even if it doesn’t start with a script, will impose the best artistic timing on the footage rather than just going with the timing that happens to be there.

That’s one of the differences between amateur and professional software; timing. Commercial or open source, amateur software comes out when the developers get it done. Perl 6 is rapidly becoming apocryphal. Professional software isn’t always on time (there’s no need to point the finger at Microsoft here, as they’re hardly the first software vendor with elasticated shipping dates, but it certainly adds to the comedy if you do). But it usually has a roadmap and a release schedule so users who want to upgrade can plan ahead. As I’ve yet to come across software that’s perfect I usually will want to upgrade; as I have better things to do, I like to know when I’ll be able to expect a new version so I don’t mark out time months too early.

Timing applies to hardware too. Sometimes it’s a problem; new mobile phones come out every few months, new mobile phone operating systems come out about every 12 months and new mobile phone radios take over 18 months so something is always out of step. Intel’s turnaround is due to its cadence, as it calls its roadmap of regular releases. It’s a process that’s led it to replace its core microarchitecture in less than two years, and jump to quad core systems in the same time. Yes, its changes are due to the challenges facing the company as it looks at the convergence of Moore’s law and the inevitable wall of quantum physics, but they’re also a move to a more disciplined strategy - a visible roadmap which its partners (and competitors) can use - if they want to. Developers can start to think about how the new instructions due in the 45nm chips planned for 2007 will affect databases and data warehouses, and start to develop new software architectures, ready to take advantage of the new hardware. That way you’re the director, calling the shots, and not Muffy, jumping for the pull cord and praying you have your timing right.

“Muffy!”

-Mary Branscombe

As you drive around New Zealand, every few hundred yards you see the evidence of a plan that didn’t work out. A number of years ago enterprising farmers imported the Australian possum to start a fur trade. Instead the furry menaces escaped and became endemic. They eat up vast swathes of the native vegetation that native animals like the kiwi depe nd on - and they litter the highway as roadkill at remarkably regular intervals.

The IT world has more of its fair share of projects that seemed like a good idea at the time and then turned into software roadkill. Almost every developer has a go at writing their own CMS; it’s almost a rite of passage. How many abandoned source editors are there on Sourceforge? Never mind the months late, over budget government IT projects.

Upgrades and replacements can be just as bad. After the rabbits farmers had imported went native and started eating the plants nearly as fast as the possums someone had the bright idea of importing stoats to eat the rabbits to give the native birds and animals a chance. But the stoats turned out to prefer the native animals and ate them instead.

The Department of Conservation eradicates rats and stoats from entire islands to protect native birds; they hand rear takehe chicks and teach them about the predators to avoid by putting on a show with stoat hand puppets (no, really). Remind you of how you have train your users?