The Next Enterprise Web

Personally I never considered MS software to be of enterprise quality. Actually I wouldn’t think anyone in huge companies would be using it. Now that more enterprises open up, I appear to be sadly mistaken.

But why did I even think that? Well, in an enterprise (in any company actually), you want:

• uniformity in applications and uniformity in the controls
• ease of installation
• controllability (who does what when etc with which data on what application)
• security (access, viruses, phishing, hacking etc)
• maintanability (update apps and systems efficiently without possible problems)

etc

For me, the solution for this is very simple; modded Linux, Firefox full screen with NoScript enforced, a few company custom browser plugins and further internal or external web 2.0 apps.

A few years ago this would be laughable (and, for a lot of huge companies it still is), but with online collaboration and communication (gmail, intranets, extranets etc), ERP moving to web apps (SAP, Oracle, but also custom systems we have seen), office moving to the web (Google, Zoho), the barrier becomes quite small to just do the above.

No more DLL hell, difficult upgrades, installing different apps for different people, uniform interfaces, trivial security enforcing (well; you need to deny your employees certain things like trusting flash everywhere) and central storage and provisioning. Computer broken? Plug in a new one, log on and there all your data is back. Want to work at home? Log on (via SSH and some kind of key generator) to the central nexus and there you go; all your data and so on is there. Working at home becomes a breeze.

Ofcourse this is all possible under Windows, but not so easy, not so trivial and well known.

Is there no place for Windows/MS in the enterprise? Sure there is; some financial guys need Excel; there simply are a lot of things the open and online solutions cannot do (properly). Some people need Word because of templates, however most of the latter can be fixed with some simple transformation software and Google docs. But not all. Simply put; for some jobs you need specialized software, but for most you don’t. Most can simply work with a dumbed down Linux (or another OS, even Windows, as long as you cannot run local apps other than the browser).

MS is very stuck to the Desktop metaphor of doing things. They cannot do anything on the web without using some kind of annoying desktop connection (like Sharepoint being annoying to use without Windows/Office).

It still is quite surprising when I see young cool/hip companies using some really stale old crap like MS Exchange and Outlook while you have so many better choices these days, with open standards so you can switch at any time. For enterprises I find it even more difficult to imagine; large companies actually do spend a lot of money on their infrastructure and are able to actually set up something usable for their employees which will save them so much work in maintaining and using. Even to the point you are not maintaining at all anymore with something running in the cloud like Google will offer with Salesforce.

Enterprises are usually very slow, but this blog is about those enterprises and are more agile or enterprises that are becoming more agile through using online systems.