Microsoft's Office 'system' attacks collaboration from all sides

Because our e-mail-oriented way of life is seriously threatened by the spam plague, I was curious to see how effectively Outlook 2003 fights back. Evaluating the product at the height of the Sobig.F outbreak gave us an excellent chance to test the product’s anti-spam capabilities. I was only mildly impressed. Even after I cranked the content filter up to its most aggressive setting, lots of junk got through.

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To be fair, Microsoft intends the content filter only as a last line of defense. The foundation of Outlook’s anti-spam strategy is identity, not content. You can, for example, whitelist or blacklist e-mail addresses or entire domains, but such actions require more thought and effort than many users are willing or able to invest.

E-mail identity is also, in general, vulnerable to spoofing, although Microsoft points out that Exchange Server 2003 can distinguish between mail that is from the local domain and mail that only claims to be.

Identity filters may be the best tactic in the long run, but Outlook 2003’s most accessible anti-spam weapon is its content filter. And surprisingly, that filter doesn’t improve with use. Mac OS X’s Mail.app and the SpamBayes plug-in for earlier versions of Outlook learn what we want to read by watching how we manage our inboxes. Outlook 2003 doesn’t.

Here’s a trick question: What is Microsoft’s collaboration server? The answer used to be obvious: Exchange. Now it’s not so clear. Suppose you want to hold a discussion. You can still do that transiently in an e-mail thread, or with more permanence in an Exchange public folder. But Live Communications Server injects a new ingredient into the mix: IM-style presence. If you can see that the participants in the thread are online, you may want to switch to chat mode. Or you could launch a discussion on a SharePoint site that displays presence indicators. Even more intriguing, an Office document can now be a locus of presence-enhanced SharePoint collaboration.

E-mail, the intranet, and IM have been on a collision course for some time now. I am delighted to see Microsoft not only embracing all three modes but also looking for ways to weave them together. Yet I can’t avoid a sense of déjà vu. In the 1990s, Netscape tried something similar, offering a suite of collaboration servers and a matching suite of clients. There were compelling benefits, but also a lot of moving parts. I feel the same way about Office, Exchange, SharePoint, and Live Communications Server. Users will find no single unifying theme akin to the Groove shared space. Administrators will have to install and manage three or four sets of clients and servers. The new capabilities are exciting, but it’ll take lots more integration to make Office-based collaboration a seamless and manageable experience.