The launch of Microsoft Vista was a big moment in the software giant’s evolution, especially since it coincided with the release of Office 2007. The firm has invested $20 billion in developing Vista and the new version of Office, in what has proved to be a major overhaul of its key product lines. The question is, after several delays, was it worth the wait?
“It is such an audacious rewrite,” said Daniel Chait, managing director with Lab49, a consulting firm that specializes in building applications for global financial institutions. “They [Microsoft] had the foresight to see people might stop automatically upgrading unless they did something that provided a lot more value. They did that, and I think people are going to want to take advantage of it proactively.”
According to Greg Haislip, managing director of banking for Microsoft’s Financial Services Group, both Vista and Office 2007 focus on three broad areas of business improvement. The first concerns collaboration, both within an organization and with a firm’s partners and customers. Next is business insight, aiding banks’ ability to glean information from multiple data sources and thus understand their business, risk tolerance and customers better. The third relates to compliance, helping banks control systems and access to both processes and information.
Security
Certainly one of the main talking points has been Vista’s new security features, as Microsoft has sought to plug some of the fallibilities that beleaguered XP. “One of the things we’ve done in Vista is we’ve built encrypted data right into the platform itself, so when banks write information to a PC, laptop or Tablet, it becomes secure through encryption,” said Haislip.
And security has been a big expense for banks to date, either because they employ an army of people to safeguard their desktop environment, or alternatively have no staff doing that and accept the risk of something going wrong, says James Gardner, director of retail banking at Getronics’ global financial services group, which has launched a consulting service to help firms migrate to Vista and Office 2007.
“The way Vista was constructed around the new security models, new firewalls, the new way of patching them to the desktop, the new control an administrator has over what can be done on the desktop, all these things reduce the threat,” Gardner said. As a result, Gardner expects the cost of security in a bank to drop dramatically.
The Interface
At a more visual level there has also been a major overhaul in the design of the operating system. “It’s very different from the XP platform, in that it gives you a three-dimensional, very multimedia-like interface,” said Haislip. In addition, search capabilities have been integrated into the platform itself, so that it is easier to find information, thus making employees more productive and improving customer satisfaction, he adds.
Chait, meanwhile, highlights the enhanced graphics capabilities of Vista. “Once people start developing applications that use that graphics capability it’s going to become quite compelling for firms to take an interest in it,” he said.
The Deployment
Vista should also be easier for organizations to deploy. As Gardner noted, “Sometimes banking applications last longer than the refresh cycle of the desktop, and you can’t just blithely install a new operating system and expect your applications to work.” However, according to Microsoft’s Haislip the firm has worked hard on application compatibility with the Vista platform.
Meanwhile, the actual process of rolling out Vista across an enterprise has been simplified. So rather than having to run a specific setup program and go through a script on each installed workstation as was previously the case, with Vista the entire setup can be done once, captured as a snapshot of how it is to look, and then that snapshot rolled out, explained Chait. As such, Microsoft is “solving a customer pain point and also removing one of the barriers of potential adoption.”
And adoption is predicted to be widespread, with 100 million computers forecast to be using Vista within 12 months of its launch. Raymond James Financial is one firm planning to upgrade to Vista, although according to chief information officer Tim Eitel it wants to wait for the second version of the system, when any bugs will have been ironed out and it is made more stable. He therefore expects the firm to begin converting its existing stock of machines to the new operating system in late summer/early fall. “It will take about a year to be totally converted,” he reckoned, and will require not only a lot of testing to ensure its third-party applications work with Vista, but also considerable user education to familiarize them with the product.
Sharing the
Spotlight
Then there is Office 2007. Here, one of the central tenets of the product release concerns enabling people to collaborate regardless of the media they are using, says Haislip, what Microsoft is calling its Unified Communications and Collaboration platform. “What we’re trying to do is create a better way for people to communicate so that it is efficient, it’s easy to use, and from an IT perspective it is easy to manage,” he said.
For example, users will be able to send email messages to a phone, or voicemail messages through email. Or if employees want to create an instantaneous workspace to communicate, or share documents or information, that can be done whether working in Outlook, the SharePoint portal platform, or Microsoft’s instant messaging platform, with everything integrated through its Active Directory service. “We’re giving you the opportunity to choose your communication method of choice, and do it in an integrated fashion,” said Haislip.
Ralph Baxter, director of marketing and strategy at ClusterSeven, an enterprise spreadsheet management software provider, also points to the SharePoint solution, which he argues is the most important aspect of the new launch. It has become the central document management hub for the whole Office solution set, he says, as a result of which “organizations will adopt a far more centralized approach to all their Office documents.”
Server-Based
Spreadsheets and Forms
What that means for Excel is that, providing it is compatible with what Microsoft calls Excel Services, the solution will be able to utilize the power and distribution environment that is available on the server side, as opposed to being constrained by the limitations of a client-side application. So by leveraging SharePoint a user can send particular slices of a spreadsheet out across the Web, rather than having to publish the entire file and applying protections to those bits they don’t want any receiving parties to see, Baxter explained. “It’s then server-side security they are trying to crack, rather than file-side security.”
The way Vista was constructed around the new security models, new firewalls, the new way of patching them to the desktop, the new control an administrator has over what can be done on the desktop, all these things reduce the threat,” said Getronics’ James Gardner.
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At the same time, by transferring files to a server-side environment users will have access to far more powerful analytic and computation capabilities, while removing the consumption of CPU time from that client machine. So for instance with tasks such as modeling and price calculations, users can take advantage of an ad hoc computation capability without having to get a programmer involved or write a whole lot of infrastructure, with the results able to be distributed out across many users at one time, says Lab49’s Chait.
And then there is the question of supervision and support. As Getronics’ Gardner observes, many banks are running substantial percentages of their businesses on Excel, with multi-billion dollar transactions being executed on the basis of a spreadsheet over which a firm’s IT department has no control. However, with the new Office version those spreadsheets can be moved onto a server and thus brought under the remit of IT, thereby reducing the risk of something going wrong. “So for anyone doing parts of their business on Excel, and I’d count most banks in that category, there is an immediate business case [for adoption],” he said.
On a similar note, the new Office suite allows organizations to create electronic forms and publish those at a server level as well, instead of having to use an on-desk or local copy. “I may want to create an account opening form or a loan application document that I can leave resident on a server, and then when I want to change it or start a workflow using that form [for example for the underwriting process in the case of a loan] I can do that through the server,” said Haislip.
The new Office applications also come with a range of high quality templates to make documents look much better, plus Microsoft has rolled out a programming model for customizing the user interface, noted Chait. “You can add in tabs, you can add in side panes, and you can work with the menus and toolbars in a much more flexible way to really customize the user experience.”
Even the user interface itself has been overhauled, with the introduction of a string of icons at the top of the applications that change in context with the tasks a user wants to perform, rather than forcing them to scour through a multitude of drop-down menus to find what they are looking for. And that should make it easier to discover and make use of the capabilities that are embedded in the applications. “In the past, 80 percent of the functionality that Microsoft got requests for with Excel was already there, it’s just people didn’t know how to find it,” said ClusterSeven’s Baxter.
Microsoft has taken some bold steps then in its latest product iterations. How much of a welcome they receive from industry participants though remains to be seen.
www.clusterseven.comwww.getronics.comwww.lab49.comwww.raymondjames.comBy Paul Allen