Microsoft moving Office to the cloud: Implications for VFP 1

[Mike Lewis]

I see that Microsoft has just announced that the next version of Office (Office 365) will be cloud-based rather than a traditional desktop product.

See, for example, Microsoft Office 365 bets on the cloud.

If I've understood it right, it will mean that users will tend to no longer install a desktop copy of Office, but will access the functionality via a web browser, in much the same way as some people already use Google's spreadsheet and word processor apps.

If that's right, it will break thousands of VFP applications that use Automation for various purposes such as mailmerge, spell checking, charting, etc. These applications rely on having Word, Excel or whatever installed on the user's system. It's not clear if they will be able to access that same functionality in a web-based environment. Even if they can, it's certain that the programmatic interface will be different.

It looks like another case of Microsoft abandoning its loyal VFP customers.

Any comments would be appreciated.

Mike

__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

Visual FoxPro tips, advice, training, consultancy
Custom software for your business

 

[JRB-Bldr]

I know that for myself, it is scary from a business risk perspective to think that 'Big Brother' would be controlling my access to the applications that I need to run my business on a day-to-day basis.

I assume that the documents that I would create using this 'cloud' based Office could be kept somewhere locally within my own organization, but who's to say if a copy were somehow created concurrently somewhere else on the web?

And if my Internet connection was acting in a problematic manner that would mean that I might not be able to perform 'mission critical' business operations.

Hopefully the business community's skepticism and hightened concern about security (PII, Financial documents, etc.) and concern about business risks would cause them to reject this latest idea from M$ en masse.

Unfortunately the 'Cloud' has been touted (highly hyped) as the latest technological advance (???) coming our way so MANY people are blindly interested in jumping on board.
NOTE - Leaping before Looking can sometimes prove problematic.

And, equally unfortunately, in the past, when M$ says "Jump!" too many people have just said "How High?".
Remember Vista!!!

Mike - Thanks for the Heads Up.
JRB-Bldr

 

[DSummZZZ]

The trouble is, since they charge such enormous prices for their products, Google Apps is fast becoming an option, and MS has to stay competitive. It is yet to be seen what their pricing schedule will be like though.

Our company is seriously looking at Google Apps as an alternative to Office. Instead of spending several hundred dollars per user every couple years for software 'upgrades', we can spend what, $50 per year per user instead?

I think there is going to be a market slot for some sort of 3rd party interfacing between desktops and web-based Office or Google Apps automation. But yes. Our current automation techniques are going to suffer if MS does go that route.
However, Office apps may become deprecated, but so has FoxPro.

But then here is Open Office...


-Dave Summers-

Even more Fox stuff at:

http://www.davesummers.net/foxprolinks.htm

 

[craigber]

Mike, I have two points...

1- You misread. "
The company will also offer traditional Office as a subscription-based service." Users will still be able to install Office. MS already had Office on the web. It's simply rebundling and rebranding it. At any rate, why should this come as a surprise. Hosted applications is the way software is moving.

2- I'm growing tired of the line "Microsoft abandoning its loyal VFP customers". How about "Microsoft's VFP customers are not moving to newer technologies". Did Ford abandon its customers when it stopped making the Model-T or the Edsel? Don't tell me that if you learn to drive one car, you can drive them all. There are differences and things to learn. Is the windshield wiper control in the same place? How about the switch for the lights? Was cruise control something new at one time? When you move to .NET you don't have to relearn everything all over, you have things in different places and new functionality to learn. But the basics are still the same.

It's not Microsoft's job to support you forever. You need to take responsibility for your own career. It's up to you to move forward or be left behind.

Craig Berntson
MCSD, Visual C# MVP,

http://www.craigberntson.com/blog

 

[TamarGranor]

AIUI, Office 365 is simply an alternative way to use Office. Office 15 is definitely in development (or at least, in design).

I'm hoping to hear a lot more about Office 365 this weekend when I see my son, who worked on it.

Tamar

 

[Olaf Doschke]

Dave,

if you're at $50 per year per user, you're already over the prive of Microsofts Action Pack, which offers 10 Office licenses among many other things like Windows Client & Server, SQL Server etc. for about $250 a year.

Even planning a budget of $1000 per year per user would be just a fraction of loans, wouldn't it?

As a software developer it's ridiculous to moan about the price of MS products. How many hours do you work for $50? one? two?

Bye, Olaf.

 

[Nigel Gomm]

Mike,

i'm finding that more and more customers don't have MS Office. For that reason i changed all my document generating/mailmerging a couple of years ago to use RTF, vfp textmerging and moxie objects (

http://www.moxiedata.com).

XFRX does a good job of exporting the report to OpenOffice, MSWord, Excel or PDF if the user requires. The merged RTF can also be saved as a file and opened with whatever the user has installed.

Probably not what Craig had in mind by moving forward but it did get rid of the dependency on MS Office.


Nigel

 

[Olaf Doschke]

Mike,

to adress the original question:
The Office XML format, which specifications are open to everone is the basis of Open Offices MS Office compatibility, and you can also make use of it to create Office 2007+ files without any Office installation. Servoy has this aspect integrated in their software suite, which proofs this works. You need decent knowledge of XML and XSLT to create Office XML anyway, so there is some work getting to that.

Taht said peraps Nigels way to create RTF is a bit simpler and also RTF files just need Wordpad, which is universally available on the Windows platform, but that would just solve such reports, not spreadsheets.

On the other side there are Office Document Viewers, so even for clients without MS Office you could create office files and display them via the Viewers.

Bye, Olaf.

 

[Mike Lewis]

Lots of interesting comments. I agree with some, disagree with others, but all are worth reading. Thanks to those who have replied so far.

Just a couple of quick observations:

First, the problem I highlighted isn't specific to VFP. If it's right that we won't be able to use Automation to control Office applications, that's going to be a problem for developers on many platforms, not just VFP.

Second, the problem isn't specifically related to accessing documents (although that might be an issue in some cases). It's more concerned with instantiating Word, Excel, etc, as COM objects so that we can make use of them in our apps.

Look forward to reading more of your words of wisdom.

Mike

__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

Visual FoxPro tips, advice, training, consultancy
Custom software for your business

 

[DSummZZZ]

Olaf,

As I understand it, the Action Pack is for VARs or OEMs, and must have less than 100 employees. My company doesn't meet any of these requirements. All of our development is for in-house applications.

But let's not even get started on my 'moans' with MS.
I wasn't 'moaning' about the price of MS products. Their developers spend plenty of time on the products and deserve to get paid for it.
My 'moan' is the forced upgrades and lack of backward compatibility as well as the depredation of some products.
For example, we rely heavily on ActiveSynch for some applications. It plain won't work on Windows 7.
Now I'll have to spend more of my time updating applications or exploring options, that have run fine on XP for years, rather than spend it on newer and better projects.




-Dave Summers-

Even more Fox stuff at:

http://www.davesummers.net/foxprolinks.htm

 

[Olaf Doschke]

I'd say without further investigation, that in regard of more than 100 employees licensing programs of MS do offer even better rates per employee. If not this is something a bigger company should be able to invest additional to loan costs.

I can't tell anything about ActiveSynch in special, I agreee the topic downward compatibility is not equally good in all MS products, it's astonishingly good in VFP for example. It's reasonably good in Windows OS and SQL Server.

Also MS is quite open in letting you test things in beta phase and blogging about upcoming things in blogs. For example I found this blog article from 2005 about the Office XML format talking about why MS changed from their older binary format to this:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brian_jones...n-xml-format-as-the-default-in-office-12.aspx

(may take a while to load)

The blog article reports back to an announcement not exsting any more, which is said to be even one year older. Even, if you only take the provable date of that blog article from September 2005, you could already know Doc format is changing five years ago, two years before it actually was ready to manufacture.

And while that is already 3 years old the pressure to support Office 2007 or newer is still not present. I can report our biggest customer has moved to Office 2007 and the OLE automation we programmed for Office 2003 still works as usual, the outlook automation that is 10 years old and initially was used for Office XP too continues working.

It's not all that bad. With what do you want to compare? With Linux or Mac OS? I think there are also stories to tell on how these environments changed.

Bye, Olaf.

 

[GriffMG]

It's not just the cloud... have you heard of Click To Run?

It disables Automation in Office 2010 when installed in this mode!



Regards

Griff
Keep [Smile]ing

There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.

 

[Mike Lewis]

Yes, I've just been reading the KB article you referenced in your other post today, Martin. Keeping up with these kinds of changes can be a nightmare at times.

Mike

__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

Visual FoxPro tips, advice, training, consultancy
Custom software for your business

 

[TamarGranor]

I got a chance to have a chat with my son about what Office 365 is meant to be. It's primarily about providing an affordable way for smaller businesses to have things like an Exchange Server or a SharePoint Server. Microsoft is hosting those in the cloud, and is offering pricing that's affordable for small business (from $6/user/month).

We discussed two product lines that it supersedes. One is the BPOS in the article that Mike linked. The other is Office Live. As I understood what he said, Office 365 is really the next version of BPOS, but it incorporates the Office Live space as well.

Tamar

 

[Steve Bowman]

I am just throwing this out to a somewhat convoluted conversation. But going back to the initial conversation. I am sure I am not the only developer creating google apps using the google data API. once i got past the "curve" i can whip out spreadsheets and documents in both public and private. i wouls hope MS will provide like API's

Steve Bowman
Independent Technology, Inc.
CA, USA