Talk to Me

I've been playing lately with various voice-activated assistants; the common ones, such as Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana, and a brief game with Amazon's Alexa. I'm a bit of a latecomer to this because, honestly, voice communication is not my strong suit, even with human beings. Even today, making a routine call about my retirement savings, somehow the interpreter misheard my birth month by four months and my year by about thirty years. Se va. Onwards and upwards with talking to machines.

All of these systems have a couple of key things in common. They all have a trigger word, typically the service's name, like "Siri", or "Cortana".  That's the prompt that tells it to listen, so that it isn't wasting time listening to you mumble under your breath or talk to your significant others on the phone.  They then parse what you've said and try to match it to a catalog of commands and objects; verbs and nouns, if you will. If they aren't sure they'll ask, and if the task requires confirmation (i.e. for a purchase), they'll ask you.

Siri may be the best known. Apple named it early on, defining Siri as part of the Apple brand. Siri debuted on the iPhone and later was introduced to MacOS. When I used early versions of Siri, I wasn't impressed - she (or he, you can choose) could search a limited set of apps and didn't understand me very well. However, Nowadays Siri is pretty good at finding me things on the go - coffee, gas stations, fast food, people I want to call, events I want to attend. Having become a car owner again recently, Siri's growing on me as a hands-free assistant - though she still prefers Apple apps as opposed to third-party apps for displaying results.

Siri on Macintosh is about as useful - that is, if your Mac was an iPhone. I find that most of the time, it assumes I'm looking for a Maps location. For example, if I had a client named "Agloco", and I want to find my Agloco documents, or contacts, etc, I'd have to specify that. If I just say, "find Agloco" Siri shows me map locations. If I say, "find Agloco on desktop" or "on my Macintosh", then Siri finds my files. So, as weird as it feels to talk to my Macintosh and get a response, it's moving in the right direction. It just needs a little prodding.

Cortana is another story. Cortana is part of Windows 10, and the current Windows Phone, and Xbox - the last of which is where I use her next (Cortana is defined as female - see below). It's actually pretty good - I can tell my Xbox to power on and open an app - but beyond that, its functionality is limited by the app. For example, I can say "Open Amazon" and the Amazon Video app will open up, but I can't tell it to "play Man in the High Castle", because Cortana doesn't know how to tell Amazon that.

One funny thing here is that voice recognition was rolled out on the Xbox One's debut, and Microsoft made a great deal about being able to tell it to start up, sleep, open apps, etc, by voice command. This was part of the drive to make Xbox the center of home computing. So I'd come home and say, "Xbox, On", and then "open Netflix" while I poured a beverage and started dinner. Then they changed it to Cortana, and "Xbox" no longer worked.

[[Bonus funnies for the longtime Mac/Windows cold warriors: Cortana comes from the name of an artificial intelligence character in the Halo game series, presented as a holographic female dispensing advice and lot as the player shoots through alien warriors on various planets and spaceships. Halo was developed by Bungie Software, which had its initial success with the Marathon series, in which the player shoots through alien warriors on various planted and spaceships, and gets advice and plot from artificial intelligence characters. Marathon was a Macintosh-only hit (except for a port of Marathon 2). Microsoft bought Bungie to make a breakout game for the original Xbox, it became a hit, and now Microsoft has named their voice recognition software after a character created by a company that once made an amazing video game that was exclusive to the Apple Macintosh.]]

So next up, Amazon's Alexa. Alexa can tie into home automation systems, but is mostly there to get you to use Amazon services you might already be using. "Alexa, order laundry detergent". "Alexa, play some music." And so on. The Economist recently reported that, with online ordering set to be automatically approved, ordering anything is as simple as talking to the little pod on the table. For example, a girl was able to order an expensive dollhouse without any confirmation from her parents - and in some reporting of the story, the wording of the original order was repeated, and Alexas with automatic approval on also  ordered dollhouses. Sounds apocryphal, but the larger point is that these devices don't recognize your voice. Any utterance of the activation word sets them listening, and taking action from there.

Looking more broadly, this is where to consider how these services fit in to a non-consumer context. It's unlikely that you'd have employees in a cubicle or shared workspace using these things - but in a closed office, an employee might walk in, say, "Automaton, open recent email" or "Check for Agloco case file" and have the documents open and highlighted by the time they sit down. Or, a conference room might have voice-activated controls. "Everpresent, switch to HDMI. Everpresent, call conference bridge," and so on.

The next consideration is, how do these systems learn, and what do they learn about us? Apple has stated they don't retain information about the users: every search is new, and searches online and locally; you can't find things that you don't have access to already. Amazon ties its search to an Amazon account: if I say "order detergent", it assumes to order what I ordered last time, and if it's something new asks me for more detail. They're not retaining any more information about you that they didn't already have, but that is information.

Then there's Google. Now, I haven't used Google's voice-activated service, but I will point out that like all of Google's services, it's tied to an identity, and Google is adding your voice queries to information about that identity.

So, that's all for now on voice-activated assistants. They rely on a key activation phrase. Their strengths and weaknesses are based on what they are intended to search. And, they all retain some information about you - it's just a question of what.

Secure Servers - Secure Cloud

For a lot of my customers, any discussion of moving to the cloud started with, "will it be as secure as my servers?"

That is: servers with strong administrative policies, limited role-based access, behind a corporate firewall, on a network that is patrolled by appliances looking for unusual traffic.

The short answer is that it can be. You have to design it that way.

One key concept that gets missed in early stages of cloud migration is that the cloud is, essentially, one giant co-location. It's a shared data center. "How," asks the engineer, "do I know my competitor's cloud isn't on the same network, or server, or even hard drive as my cloud?"

You don't. But that's OK, because they are logically separated. My cloud doesn't see your cloud.

On top of that, I can build in the cloud a virtual network. I can build a firewall in that virtual network. I can attach appliances and servers and services in the virtual, cloud-hosted environment. I can, in short, build everything I have on-premise in the cloud.

"But," says the engineer, "what if someone breaks into the data center and hacks the host machines?"

Well, OK. If they are truly nefarious they can shut down those machines, if they have privs. But they can't get to your data. Even if they somehow manage to copy your hosts outside, or to some other place they can access, they can't access your data without all the credentialing you put in yourself.

On top of that, your hosts themselves can be encrypted.

"What if they break in and steal the hard drives?"

This is the example Microsoft loves to cite, because they encrypt all their drives. If someone yoinks a drive from their data center, they'll have to un-encrypt it first, and then get past whatever security was on the contents of that drive.

Types of Clouds

"The Cloud" is all the rage these days in the world of information technology. Whether it's a startup subscribing to email services in the cloud, or a global enterprise contemplating a move to put all its infrastructure in the cloud, "cloud" is a thing. But, what kind of cloud are you talking about?

Technical types may already understand the following, but the distinction may be lost on the managerial and executive class. In my current line of work I run into misunderstandings about what cloud computing means, and when working with clients I start with this simple distinction.

Are you moving to cloud-based services, or cloud-hosted infrastructure?

Cloud services include offerings like Microsoft's Office 365. You get email, Sharepoint, and Lync, with no servers to manage. Your IT team can manage the settings of the services themselves, but they do not have access to the servers that host them.

The consequences of a move to cloud services are that you no longer have to maintain these servers (email, Sharepoint, and Lync), but there are certain things that your IT team cannot do, which they might have if they were still using actual servers. 

Alternately, cloud infrastructure means you are still going to build servers, but they will be hosted in the cloud. Microsoft's Azure offering, as well as Amazon Web Services, both offer this. Your servers are virtualized and hosted in vendor data centers, and your team can build and manage services on these servers just as they did on-premise. From an operations perspective, very little changes other than the location of these servers.

Put another way, cloud services is taking your laundry to have someone else clean it, and cloud infrastructure is going to the laundromat and using the machines there. Not a perfect analogy, but it'll do.

So which approach is right for you?

As is usually the case, it depends. What are your goals with going to the cloud? What services do you need?

In both cases, you're no longer on the hook for buying expensive hardware that will last three to six years, monitoring that hardware to make sure it doesn't go down, and managing the life cycle of that hardware. This is all hosted in the cloud now. This can save capital costs, this can save rents on floor space, electric, and temperature controls, and this can reduce labor costs if you don't need server engineers for other reasons.

In the case of cloud services, you're also no longer managing updates to the operating system and other software, or ensuring security updates are installed, because these things are all included in the service. Your vendor says, "I will give you email", for example. That's it. You get email, with no concern about what boxes are used to provide it. You do still need engineers to manage those services - someone to create new mailboxes, create mailing lists, and so on, in this example - but they're managing the house, not the foundation, so to speak.

In the case of cloud infrastructure, you still need engineers to build and maintain these servers, as well as understand the cloud service itself. This is more common in businesses where significant infrastructure exists to support platforms that are not commonly offered as services. For example, a company whose primary product is an online classroom-management service, or a database used to manage mining operations across the world. 

What about privacy? With the growth of the cloud, as well as the globalization of business and commerce, privacy protection has become a concern - not just for citizens but for companies as well. Where is my data, is the common refrain. I'll write about that in more detail later. For now I'll just say, it's a valid concern and should be brought up in discussions with cloud vendors.

Hopefully this simple distinction will serve to clarify discussions with vendors, and also between engineering leads and business managers. Moving to the cloud offers significant savings in operations and capital. Knowing what kind of cloud you need, and which you're moving to, helps to understand those savings in the first place.

Dark Data

One of the challenges I've come across with several customers lately is that of dark data, that is, data in the environment about which little is known. This can be content with no owner, content that is no longer required, content with an unknown purpose. It's kind of like the big dark attic in a house you've lived in for many years: boxes and boxes of stuff that may or may not be important one day.

This problem usually presents itself in one of two ways: either a company is going to migrate content from one environment to another and realizes there is a lot of "cruft" to move, or a company is seeking to make an environment more efficient by reducing, by various means, the amount of content in the environment. Dark data can be files on file systems, in collaboration platforms such as Sharepoint, or on endpoints such as PCs or mobile devices.

Dark data consumes storage and processing resources that can inflate IT costs.

There are basically two ways to address dark data: reactively and proactively. A reactive approach fixes the problem, while a proactive one prevents it.

Reactively, IT can use a discovery tool to find data of questionable utility. When was the last time it was accessed? When was it created? Is there a valid owner of this content? What kind of content is this - tax documents, or research, or is it just memos about where to order pens and paper from? The IT team can communicate this information to business managers to say, "hey, here's how we're going to find stuff that isn't needed, and then take it offline."

If there is no discovery tool, then IT has to rely on the information available about the content. Even a simple file system has file creation and last modification metadata. In some cases IT may try to figure out who it belongs to based on file name or nearby content, but without a proper discovery tool, IT can only take stabs in the dark.

The proactive approach is to adopt a content life cycle policy, then communicate it and enforce it. Content has to have a valid owner, and there must be a process for electing one in the case one isn't known. Content is not expected to be immortal: project files can be archived and taken offline once a project is complete, forms go out of date and are replaced with new forms, and employees (and their content) come and go.

Certain content types have specific requirements. Financial and legal documents may be required to be kept for years at a time - and once no longer required there may be a requirement to destroy them. Often, a business unit may be unsure of how long it needs content - no one knows what it might be used for, but no one wants to be responsible for throwing it away. This is how attics gets stuffed with three different Christmas trees - it's the role of IT to offer a method for keeping things that are important without consuming unnecessary resources.

Dark data is a problem everyone has but few address. Cleaning it up, followed by measures to prevent its recurrence, are low-cost "easy wins" requiring just a little planning.

Notes from the Road Show

I recently attended Microsoft's New York City stop on their Cloud Roadshow. Here are my notes. Full disclosure: I work at Avepoint, a Microsoft ISV and Partner of the Year for 2015.

Microsoft is pushing hard for the cloud, competing well with incumbent players. Whereas a year or two ago they were prompting Office 365 as their cloud solution, now everything is about Azure. Don't just move your email and collaboration to the cloud, move your entire infrastructure.

Toward this end Microsoft has made several enhancements to Azure, their cloud infrastructure service. Previously, Azure supported Windows servers and services, and a handful of Linux systems. Now, Microsoft is certified to host Red Hat Linux implementations, meaning Red Hat won't hang up on you when you tell them your box is in Azure. Microsoft also supports Unix/Linux automation with Powershell DSC, though you can also continue with Puppet and Chef if that's your thing.

Microsoft is still pitching their 365 services; there was quite a bit on migrating to 365, in particular ensuring that Sharepoint customizations can make it to Sharepoint Online. Broadly, the story is hybrid support: customers who are ready to go to the cloud but have one or two things that don't fit well. Microsoft's story in 2015 seems to be: move what you can, and connect it with what you can't.

For example, say your company's sales team needs to send out mass emails to employees - thousands at a time. There are limitations on how many emails and how many recipients Exchange Online can send, in order to prevent Microsoft from being flagged as a spam factory. So, you might want to keep an on-premise Exchange server for just that purpose - but otherwise move your company email to the cloud.

Or, for another example, say you want to move to the cloud to lower infrastructure costs, but there are certain teams or categories of data that really shouldn't go to the cloud. Keep your Sharepoint on file server infrastructure on-premise for that data, while moving the non-sensitive materials to the cloud.

On a recent drive across Brooklyn, as we arced high on the BQE, I saw several old factory buildings in Red Hook that had been renovated and turned into spaces for small businesses, including startups. If instead of renovating an old building, new ones were being built, you'd have what Microsoft is doing: building big boxes (data centers) for businesses to move into. Never mind the electrical and the plumbing, or the security for who has access - just tell us how much space you need and we'll set it up for you. They're not telling you you can only use Microsoft furniture (err, operating systems and browsers) or phones. They just want you to use their infrastructure.

Admittedly, it is not quite as open-ended as Amazon's offerings. I'm reasonably sure that if you said you wanted to spin up a bunch of Silk VMs to act as scalable Kindle emulators, Amazon would pause and say, "yeah sure." But Microsoft is catching up, and arguably the more secure for it.

Irony

For most of my technical career, I've supported Apple products. When I was in college, after a couple of years in one lab supporting PCs and VAX terminals, I moved to another that was mostly Macintosh, and from there went on to a good run as an Apple tech: to a local Apple reseller, an on-site tech at a media company, to a field tech for an Apple-Authorized Service Provider, and eventually back to the education space before re-entering the corporate world as: Macintosh Support Engineer. For about twenty years, Apple products were my speciality, my area of expertise, that thing about me that made me alternately cool and god-like to some, weird and unlettered to others.

Early on it was just what I found myself using every day. If you're in college, and you work in a lab full of Macs, you learn to use them, and you understand how they were. I was always more or less bi-lingual: I could translate what I did on a Mac to what I was doing on a PC, back in those primitive days when Windows was, at best, little more than DOS in drag. I was never an ardent fangirl thinking Apple was superior. I knew I didn't know enough to make an argument. I knew what I knew, and it took me pretty far.

I remember the bad days for Apple. The 1990s, prior to Steve Jobs' triumphal return, were terrible for the company, even as they continued to innovate. They did not have the salesmanship they have now. They started the decade with product bloat, trying to be like the crowded PC marketplace with big breadbox-style machines, as well as their expensive all-in-one units. The PowerPC was a great leap forward in performance, but eventually ran its course as Apple's partnership with IBM ended and Intel caught up the performance race.

Even after Jobs' return, it took a while for Apple to regain its footing. Microsoft took an investment stake in Apple, offering some product support, a financial lifeline, all in return for helping shed its monopolist image. OS X took a couple of versions to really take off too: the 10.0 release was not ready for consumers, and it wasn't till 10.2 that it was really usable. Since, then, a steady progression of improvements and feature-adds have made OS X into a really good operating system. Sales of Apple's other product line (*cough* iphone *cough*) have helped as well.

In all of that time, in the techie world - a world where you essentially are the products that you support - I was seen by corporate IT people as this weird specialist who could keep the one or two (or that, times a hundred) machines running, which were just a small fraction of the total population. To Mac users, I was this amazing smart person who could make things work. To fellow Macintosh techs, I was someone who learned and contributed to the composite body of knowledge? New update broke something? Shared. Here is the fix: do it differently.

As a user of computers I was always that minority - the weird Mac user, using second-rate copies of Windows, various browsers, finding ways to dance backwards in heels, but with amazing video and photo applications. "Macs are for Graphics", people would say. People still say that, though it isn't strictly speaking true. Most of the Mac users I know now are software developers. They like Macs because they are based on Unix.

Now, working in the corporate world, here I am now responsible for a much broader range of technologies, Windows as well as Macintosh, and the various tools to support them. Additionally, Apple's minority status in the computer world is completely reversed in the mobile world. Globally, Android is dominant, but very location-specific and fragmented across manufacturers. Apple dominates as a manufacturer and in providing a uniform user experience.

The strengths of the fragmented PC-based market in the 1990s are weaknesses today. The only spitballing I'll throw in here is that modern global supply chains did not drive the razor-thin margins on OEMs then that they do now. The point is, Apple is to the current mobile space wha Microsoft was to the personal computing space a generation ago: a giant cash machine defining how the market should work.

So, along comes Microsoft, with their Windows 8 and their Surface devices and their Office 365, and what happens? The cool Apple people, long underdogs, laugh and ignore them - even though Microsoft arguably provides a better experience for some of their products on the iPad than they do on their own operating system.

If ten years ago I was figuring out how to make Apple products work with printers and servers geared towards Windows, now I'm struggling to make sure our remote access and wireless solutions work with iOS. I have to get our email system to work with iPads and iPhones. These are problems we have solved where I work, but the point is, we're forcing infrastructure to work with the device, rather than the other way around. It's like designing a car around the steering wheel.

That, my friends, is irony. Take it from one of the ironic generation. It isn't as cool as it sounds.

Microsoft Surface Pro 3

I've been test-driving a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 for work lately. It's been pretty good, more of a true laptop than its predecessors.

In fact, the higher-end Surface Pro 3 models meet or exceed the specs for standard ultralight laptops at my company - the Dell Latitude 7240 and Apple Macbook Air 13". In all cases, these are Core i5, 8/256 SSD machines. It' pricier than the Latitude but about the same price as the Macbook Air, unless you add in the cost of Type keyboard and external mouse.

The Surface Pro 3 only has a single USB port, which in my case is occupied by the USB RF adapter used by the mouse. It has a single DisplayPort (or mini-HDMI, I'm not sure) that I have not tested yet. Wireless is built in. It's running Windows 8.

The chief complaints I've read about the Surface have to do with Windows 8. I honestly don't mind it. Perhaps because I have such a strong background in Apple's operating systems, I'm not emotionally invested in Windows pre-8. Getting to the Desktop is easy - it's a tile in what W8 calls the Start menu. Some of the swiping is not intuitive, and it's weird to have Explorer open sometimes in Modern mode, sometimes in Desktop mode, but otherwise - Windows 8 is new enough, to me at least, to be interesting.

Windows 8 and Office 2013 integrate well with Microsoft's cloud services. Since we recently adoped Office 365 as a productivity platform, this works out well. With cloud services, in particular OneDrive for Business and Sharepoint Online, arguably smaller local storage is required - we could probably get by with 64 GB or 128 SSD drives, and slower processors.

With the announcement of Windows 10 for late 2015, and a lack of people knocking hard for Surface Pro at work, I don't see us doing any kind of mass rollout. However, we are piloting for use as an executive, and a small group of sales people.

Surface Pro 3 is a good device. I'd consider it for myself. For the enterprise, the high cost makes it a specialty item. In each case though, it's not a "no". It's a "maybe".