Microsoft’s New Office Faces the Web
Office 2010, the latest version of Microsoft’s hugely profitable Microsoft Office productivity suite, will begin shipping to business customers early next month. Its arrival will be an important test for the software colossus as it adapts to an increasingly Web-focused software landscape.
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| Credit: Technology Review |
That’s because at the same time, Microsoft will also offer free, ad-supported Web versions of Office applications. The Web versions are Microsoft’s attempt to fend off a growing number of free Web-based office apps, including Google Docs and Zoho. (The regular versions of Office 2010 will cost between $99 and $499, and those who buy these versions will also have access to more complete Web versions of the apps).
The threat to Microsoft from these Web-based apps has intensified as a handful of organizations, including the Los Angeles city government and Genetech, have adopted enterprise versions of Google Docs alongside Microsoft’s software. In a report released by IDC in September 2009, some 20 percent of business users said Google Docs is in widespread use at their companies–up from less than 6 percent 18 months earlier. IDC expects this figure reach 27 percent this year, which could spell trouble for Microsoft, which gets as much as 60 percent of its profits from Office, if it means users are turning away from its software.
Office 2010 brings with it Office Web Apps, which includes Web versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. Microsoft is positioning the software as a complement to the regular version of Office and focusing on compatibility with its existing software as a key selling point. Office Web Apps will let users create and save documents that look exactly the same when opened with the regular versions of those applications.
Microsoft’s Kurt DelBene, senior vice president of Office Business Productivity, says the company’s number one focus in developing Office Web Apps was making sure that files look and behave the same both offline and online in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari browsers (DelBene says Microsoft has not seen enough demand for Google’s Chrome browser to support it), as well as on Web-enabled mobile phones.
DelBene adds that most business users don’t create documents on the Web, so when they move documents from the desktop to a cloud application, this typically results in formatting errors. This is an issue that Google is also keen to address. In March, the company acquired DocVerse, a startup whose software lets people collaboratively work on Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents in the cloud. DocVerse’s founders posted on their blog that “our first step will be to combine DocVerse with Google Apps to create a bridge between Microsoft Office and Google Apps.”
Office Web Apps will not include all of Office’s features, like the ability to create macros. Further, Office Web Apps will remain in beta after Office 2010 launches.
Microsoft clearly faces pressure from free Web apps that offer similar functions to many of its Office programs, although so far, increased use of services like Google Docs hasn’t been matched by a drop in the use of Microsoft Office, says IDC analyst Melissa Webster. In its September 2009 study, IDC found that Office is widely used in 97 percent of companies surveyed, “and the needle on that has not moved in three years,” according to Webster, who says most companies use Google Docs to complement Office. “If you’re in a large organization, you’re running this huge number of enterprise applications,” she says. “You’re stuck with selectively implementing things in the cloud.”
Organizational psychology may also help Microsoft. “What works for Microsoft is human behavior; we really don’t like change,” says Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group.
Office Web Apps will also offer Microsoft a chance to assess the logistics of offering other software over the Web. DelBene was says cloud computing is creating a “total transformation” in Microsoft’s business model.
One Microsoft rival agrees that the company is wise to take a measured approach. “It would be a mistake for Microsoft to put it all in the cloud right now,” said Raju Vegesna, who works for Zoho as an “evangelist.” Zoho has only one customer with more than 10,000 users, and that customer uses a special, client-based version of Zoho’s applications. Still, Vegesna says, Office Web Apps provides validation for cloud applications, and he says that Zoho expects to see a substantial jump in users this year.
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Share on Facebook Microsoft’s New Office Faces the WebResearchers are working on ways to make encrypted data easier to find.
December 3, 2009 by raj
Filed under The Latest Web News
Recent advances in cryptography could mean that future cloud computing services will not only be able to encrypt documents to keep them safe in the cloud–but also make it possible to search and retrieve this information without first decrypting it, researchers say.
 Credit: Technology Review |
“This will be a challenging endeavor,” says Dawn Song, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has made fundamental research contributions to using encrypted search strings to find encrypted documents. “However, some of these recent advances are very powerful and, if cleverly engineered and deployed, could lead to significant advances,” in adding security and privacy to cloud computing over the next few years.
At the ACM Cloud Computing Security Workshop in Chicago tomorrow, Microsoft Research will propose a theoretical architecture that would stitch together several cryptographic technologies in various stages of development to make the encrypted cloud more searchable. The basic idea is that cloud users could download software that would encrypt their data before it’s sent into the cloud. In addition, the software would issue encrypted strings, called tokens, which can be used to check that documents are intact and–crucially–to search their contents without first having to decrypt them.
While the underlying technologies weren’t developed by Microsoft, “we want to show how existing and emerging cryptographic techniques can be combined to make data in the cloud more secure,” says Kristin Lauter, head of the Cryptography Group at Microsoft Research, who will describe the proposal tomorrow.
While cloud computing has exploded in popularity in recent years thanks to the potential efficiency and cost savings of outsourcing the management of data and applications, a few high-profile glitches and hacks have left many potential users worried, and prompted experts to suggest that new technologies may be needed.
For example, early this year, a hacker who guessed the correct answer to a Twitter employee’s security question was able to extract all of the documents stored in Twitter’s “Google Apps” account. And, in March this year, a software bug led to a foul-up in the sharing privileges of Google Docs. As a result, for a small number of users (a fraction of 1 percent), choosing to share a single document instantly gave that contact access to all other shared documents, too.
Encrypted search architectures and tools have been developed by groups at several universities and companies. Though there are a variety of different approaches, most technologies encrypt data in a file–as well as tags called metadata that describe the contents of those files–and issue a master key to the user. The token used to search through encrypted data contains functions that are able to find matches to metadata attached to certain files, and then return the encrypted files to the user. Once the user has the file, he can use his master decryption “key” to decrypt it.
While some parts of these encryption processes are already mature, the technologies needed to execute encrypted search are still painfully slow because of the heavy computation involved. Unless limits are imposed on the extent of the search, conducting a general search even with a single word could take “tens of seconds” to complete, says Radu Sion, a computer scientist at Stony Brook University in New York, who is co-chairing the cloud security workshop tomorrow. Performing searches with two or more words, if possible at all, could increase the needed computation exponentially, he adds.
Microsoft’s report is an architecture proposal, and does not describe a new advance in the underlying encryption technologies. But, along with other research groups, the company’s research team is working on next-generation search using more computationally efficient versions of cryptography.
“Cryptographic storage and key management are interesting areas, and we are exploring some of the technologies that are discussed on a theoretical basis in this [Microsoft] report,” says Eran Feigenbaum, director of security for Google Apps. But Feigenbaum notes that it’s not clear how such techniques could be used while still allowing cloud users to collaborate on documents in real-time. “There are significant implementation challenges that would need to be addressed,” he added.
Still, Sion says that the new technologies and architecture proposals are badly needed. “This would be a first step to providing technologies that address the new liabilities the cloud brings,” he says. “You don’t want the cloud having access to your data, number one, and being subpoenaed for your data, number two. The cloud hosts all your stuff–but you don’t want to shift all your liability to a lawyer in the cloud.”
Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/23929/page2/
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Share on Facebook Researchers are working on ways to make encrypted data easier to find.
