There is still no business case for tablets in the Enterprise

iPads and android tablets are getting a lot of attention from IT departments at the moment as they creep slowly into the enterprise, usually by executive order from a marketing executive who demands we be as cool as the next guy, but before you go out and buy a bunch of iPads to put your sales force on I want you to stop and really ask 1 question... why?

The reason I want you to ask this question is because I am yet to see or even hear about a truly compelling business case to put tablets into the enterprise, I would even go so far as to say that people are suffering productivity and financial loss as a result of the incursion of iPads to customer facing staff or executives. To put this in perspective I am a huge advocate of mobility solutions and I know it we'll get there as we push into the new era that it doesn't mean you have a good reason to do it yet and last time I checked you should have a solid business case before implementing any new services.

Lets look at some of the touted reasons for iPads and my thoughts on each point.

• We will see an increase productivity

• This is probably the least offered and easiest to debunk with sensible thought. Its very unlikely there will ever be a time that it is quicker and easier to create a document or other file on a tablet than it is to use a keyboard and mouse. A person cannot perform any where near as many actions per minute with one hand and therefore you will never get a productivity increase for people filling out forms or creating documents. I suggest if you want to see a productivity increase then look to your forms or software and see how you can build better UI which if done correctly would see your productivity go through the roof even on your old machines.
• For those who are considering a move to handwriting recognition which always demos quite well when the salesman does it and theoretically can be done more quickly I suggest you take a careful look at the training costs of have each staff member write a small bible before the tablet will recognize their handwriting to a point where its usable.
• Beware data entry elitism in the organisation. I have seen a few times now where slates are brought in as a time saver to senior staff (say doctors or salespeople) but the impracticality of entering data on the tablet means they they are then spending a lot more time filling out the information later or even worse the organisation is hiring new staff to do the data entry for them on the old keyboard and mouse driven systems after the higher staff member has done the easy tablet bit. 

I want to make a special note here that staff with more influence in the organisation tend to win when tablets are brought in as it forces IT to deliver a simplified experience to them BUT organisations without great software or architecture will pay dearly in giving them that experience and the cost/benefit never stacks up no matter how much that person earns. The costs associated with re-architecting your internal systems should always benefit the customer or operations staff first to maximize your ROI so beware the selfish executive.

• We will increase sales

• This is normally just a plain lie made by salespeople to get a tablet device but you may get a benefit from delivering up to date information to them during a presentation... I don't see why this can't be done on their laptop now as the tablet doesn't give them any additional functionality.
• The argument that a laptop creates a barrier between you and the customer is a fallacious as one a salesperson today should probably not sit directly opposite their customer anyway and if they do then turning the laptop to the side removes the issue and can actually be used to focus the attention of the prospect.

• We will reduce cost because tablets are cheaper than laptops

• This is where are a lot of business cases for table devices are won but the practical experience so far is that tablets become an additional device, not a replacement due to the limitations in data entry. If  you need to update then in my view the sensible interim solution is in fact to the "old style" laptop tablets (check out the sexy new ultrabook versions coming soon) as you can begin building your software solutions to support the tablet experience without losing the productivity of the laptop.

• We will enhance our customer experience

• This is absolutely true, you can of course build a great customer experience on a tablet device but this is rooted in having great applications, not the delivery method. Therefore it's another example where you need to re-write your application suite and related processes before implementing these new devices.

Anyway that's enough on this subject for now. I hope you noticed the pattern: In my view the tablet experience is based in the creation of great software and in particular a great UI. If your executive want to go to tablets then tell them you want to start writing applications which will work great on those tablets and require very little data entry first, no-one saw the iPad coming and so there is some catching up to do before we can put them in the field. Otherwise it's a fat waste of cash.

XBMCbuntu let me count the ways...

Since Microsoft decided no-one uses Media Centre and removed it from the standard Windows 8 build (it will be available as an add-on) I thought it would be fitting to talk about the potential alternatives for media player computers.

Now, I was going to go through and install a whole mess of different media players and review them here but basically I put XBMCbuntu on a old Asus laptop and it was so good I never even needed to look at the rest. I love this box.. allow me to elaborate;

First off here's my list of requirements on a media centre and gives a clue as to why I don't just go and buy the excellent Western Digital network media player or the like.

REQUIREMENTS:

1. Plays everything with minimal codec installation/downloading required,
2. My wife can use it without hurting me (Intuitive UI)
3. Stable, never crashes.
4. Sleep/Wake via my MCE remote so I don't have to get up to turn it on (particularly annoying when you run a laptop as your media box because you need to open the lid),
5. Runs a SNES emulator for super mariolicious fun from within the interface,
6. Play/Records the TV stream from my HDHomeRun,
7. Gets all my album info from the interwebs,
8. Doesn't require a beastly machine to run it,
9. Has iTunes DJ type functionality (Party Mode).
10. I don't need my mouse and keyboard plugged into it constantly.
11. Remote control from my phone.

OPTIONAL

1. Torrentz
2. Rent movies legitimately (like on iTunes) 
3. Receives Airplay from my iPhone
4. Sound over HDMI (not really required because I plug the audio into an amp anyway)

The reason its such a weird list is because this reflects exactly how we used our existing media box which was Win 7 based, we used iTunes for music and renting movies, uTorrent for Torrents, Media Center for TV recording (which we never used because we had a Pay TV recorder) wzSNES for snes emulation. 

The biggest problem was that I couldn't run it from just a remote so I constantly have a keyboard and mouse plugged into the thing which sat on my coffee table and got in the way, the plus side to that is we could surf the web if one of the 800 other machines were in use.

When faced with the prospect of building a completely new IT solution from scratch my mantra is "always, always, always check out where the Linux based open source options are up to." I suggest this is a very prudent thing to do for any solution especially if you don't want to spend big dollars on IT or if you think your requirements are pretty standard. Even if you know only a little about computers Linux distros like Ubuntu are so easy to use you'd be surprised what you can achieve at the attractive cost of zero dollars... and the pre-built appliances on turnkeylinux.org are AMAZING http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/turnkey-12... you could literally run an enterprise IT department on those things. Another plus is that you can Google the answer to ANY issue because all the experts are online, unlike a proprietary solution.

So I picked up a copy of XBMCbuntu (its really important not to forget to type the "b" in "buntu") which is XBMC (short for XBox Media Centre) on Ubuntu from here: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=XBMCbuntu. It's origins are that some clever nerds decided that we really needed a port of the X-Box Media Centre experience to Windows and Linux but it has morphed slightly into just an awesome open media solution.

So here's the first reason I love this thing... I installed it and it just worked.

Not just worked a little bit but did pretty much everything on that list above without any adjustment Googling or messing around, I'm not going to give you a full tutorial on how I set up my XBMCbuntu, there plenty of that on the website but to make it basically PERFECT here's what I needed to do:

1. Install it.
2. Set my music library to to my external HDD and scan the music files into the library, then go into "Library mode."
3. Install the "Rom Browser" add-on so I could launch zSnes emulation (which is just epic AND downloaded the covers and boxes for my game roms)
4. Fixed wake on remote issue by specifying my remote hardware ID using this wiki post: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=134252&pid=1135997#pid1135997
5. Install Web Admin tool which allows me to control it via my phone.
6. Setup the HDHomeRun as a video source.

And that was it... God it's such a good media player, the media format support is off the chart. Plus I can run classic super NES games nights with my mates and it cost me nothing and I never need to plug in the keyboard.

Note I didn't even try to set up torrents (which I know for sure can be done easily) or find a video rental service (which I don't know about but hey... torrents right?)

Now I don't care if Windows don't want to give me media centre, Linux FTW again!

Windows 8... why it matters to IT guys like me.

With an October Launch date just around the corner and because I needed something to talk about I thought the imminent next wave of Microsoft mayhem would make a good first blog post. Oh... and the fact that it will shape my future as an IT professional more significantly than any previous release of anything by anyone. 

The reason I am so melodramatic about this particular release is that for the first time I am actually nervous  about Microsoft's future all together if they fail in this latest foray, if they have got it right then it will mark a day in history that the unified OS became a reality.... but... Microsoft are putting ALOT of eggs into this basket, a new version of every single MS product is being released this year and what will follow no doubt is a massive marketing push into the phone, tablet, desktop and what-ever else market which could be a spectacular disaster given Apple and Google's knack for thwarting Microsoft's mojo using clever marketing or undermining their core products in some way.

Is it possible that the other two in their bickering forgot (or stopped caring) that ole' MS still has a firm grip on the enterprise market? While the others battle it out for consumer mobility share is the enterprise is the ace in the hole that Microsoft are going to bounce back with in the next wave? The scary thing for the others is that Microsoft aren't going to go down without a fight and this next wave is their haymaker (I'm not sure they have any other type of punch) it's slow and you know its coming but when it hits it's supposed to really hurt... its painful to watch at times but this wild swing is looking like it might just land right on the chin.

Here is my reasoning: We all know the transition to Apple in the consumer space in the last few years has been remarkable and in my view the basis for Apple's superior user experience was based in very nice aesthetics and making things simple for their customers: "Plug it in, turn in on and it works they way we want it to work for you... also it looks great too" Apple got that so right with the iPhone and the iPad seemed a natural extension once we got our heads around this new way... For those who didn't already know (Microsoft and their friends) we learnt that you should never underestimate the power of beauty and simplicity in designing user technology experiences and as a result Apple absolutely crushed them in consumer mobility which is a market MS had been floundering about in very unsuccessfully.. which I'm sure now is all they think about. 

The problem I see now for Apple is that those who have transitioned to almost all Apple gear at home still invariably have a PC floating around with some work stuff on it. Apple have never shown any interest in trying to capture the enterprise's attention because I believe to do so would put their devices under a new level of scrutiny and attack from the real hackers and other nefarious folk who are making a living penetrating enterprise systems. The overhead of securing their OS withstand this onslaught would probably be too much to worry about it in the short term when you have the consumer market wrapped up nicely and everyone believing your OS is somehow magically more secure rather than attacked less.

In fact every person I know that has transitioned to Apple (with the exception of Apple employees) tell me the same thing: "I have this great Apple setup at home but I still need to have my old PC to use my work software" or "They wont let me connect my iDevice to the work network" or "I just cant run this one piece of critical software on it" etc... the touted solution to this of course is that you just transition the lot to the cloud, get rid of your dinosaur IT dept who are stopping you using iPads and then you can access work data from everywhere and it's device independent and you can keep your beautiful Apple or Android.

The cloud transition is fine for SMBs but has been stalling for some time at any higher level because the cloud has a raft of legal/data ownership issues and questions that have not yet been thoroughly tested in court. Until the risk dept know exactly what the deal is you will for instance, never convince a bank or large enterprise that their customer data is more secure in an undisclosed location mixed up with a bunch of data from other cloud customers than in a private data centre where their own IT specialists have control. 

So this is where Microsoft step in with this next wave. A whole new set of product releases that will work across all types of device, that will be able to access secure business data under the control of your IT guys, that will run legacy apps, is "enterprise class", looks good, has apps and is easy to use at home or work... check out the Windows website for some Propeganda

If the final outcome meets these criteria then in my opinion, it would probably re-take a big chunk the market in one fell swoop, IT departments all over the world have been champing at the bit for an enterprise ready tablet/slate alternative that they can confidently recommend to their impatient iPad wielding executives.. in fact If I were MS I'd start by giving every board member of the top 1000+ companies globally a free Surface Tablet. I'd take the hit in revenue to stop the rot into enterprise iPad use (because once the board gets it, everyone does... and the board have iPads now)

Then as people realise its just easier to have all one type of device OS on everything the consumer market trickles back under the Microsoft wing, people leave the constrictive Apple regime for a place where there is more freedom to mess about if you want to but not so much that they need to be a tech geek to use it for everyday tasks which is really where Linux lives.

Microsoft are doing their best to mobilise their substantial partner network for this release and a lot of these guys are the same ones who have been writing iPhone apps on the side to try and crack an "Angry Birds" lotto win. If MS can give their developers a similarly simple and popular method to release apps to the OS and make some sweet cash too then look out Apple.

So its an exciting time to be an IT guy, we are only a month or two away from what could be the dawn of a new age or a period of completely re-training ourselves to fit the new "no IT dept" model... either way I cant wait to watch it unfold.