On the day that Windows 7 was generally released in October 2009, Microsoft announced that it was "simplifying" the PC. It was a long awaited, much appreciated response to nearly three years of wrestling with the sea of sloth that was Windows Vista.

My review of Windows 7 was both notorious and, even in hindsight, correct. I called it "Vista without the crap." For that review, I ran a scientific test which produced this real-world calculation: Windows 7 expedited the Web browsing process for folks who use Web apps and browsers for their full-time work (like myself) by three-and-one-half minutes per hour. That's 385 hours of productivity regained per year, which is enough time for my company Ingenus to produce one book and rake in a nice heap of cash. I suggested to Microsoft that it use the following slogan: "Use Windows 7, Get Six Weeks of Your Life Back."

I look at the Consumer Preview of Windows 8 and I fear I may lose those six weeks again.

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All through the Windows 7 promotional tour, Microsoft demonstrated the many ways that the new operating system simplified the PC. Product managers and executives gave the following explanation: They watched the way people work in the real world. They realized these people want to take fewer steps to accomplish the things they do most often. Users don't like to be told what to do, or led into one way of doing things that the designer of the software may prefer. People feel better about their computers when they're not thinking about them as computers - when they can concentrate either on their work or whatever they may be having fun with. The operating system should say hello, welcome, and then get out of the way.

If these things were all true as recently as 2009, what manner of cataclysm upset the balance of the universe so horrifically as to have made black white, and to replaced Windows 7's design philosophy with that of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview? As I run through these examples with you, as an exercise, imagine explaining them to your mother.

The Search for Start

Dividing a smartphone's small screen into eight or nine tiled blocks, makes sense and makes the phone easier to control. Using the same logic to divide a larger PC screen into dozens of mosaic blocks, does not do either. Does any Web site you've ever used, work like this? Or to be more specific, any Web site since 1998?

What makes the Windows 7 Start Menu work well (which I said at the time of its release) was its simple, two-column division: things you typically use on the left, things you typically do on the right. I typically open a Network window to see which computers in my office are functional. I open up documents I've been working on recently. And to search for stuff, what could be simpler than simply typing what it is you're searching for?

One aspect of Windows 8 design - which was literally explained to me in a positive light using these words - is that you'll learn how to do something once you've discovered it for yourself. It is not obvious from the Windows 8 Start screen that you can still just type something and Windows will search for it. There's no search control that says that. However, this is still how Start works - you type a character, and search begins.

But in everyday work, you shouldn't have to go searching through the entire file system for stuff you did just yesterday. Not everything in life requires search, contrary to whatever Google design philosophy Microsoft has commandeered.

Zones Instead of Buttons

When the Start Button premiered in Windows 95 (to the Rolling Stones singing backup, you may recall), it was with the idea of giving the user one obvious place at all times for beginning any task. The most sensible place to put something that will most always be on the screen, at that time, was the lower left corner of the Desktop.

As you may already know by now, in Windows 8, the Desktop is one of two staging grounds for applications, the other one being the "Metro-style" world where the easier, device-like apps will run. So there is no longer any one single place on the screen that will always, or most always, be visible. How does one get to "Start" if she can't always see it? Microsoft suggests that you might try looking at the keyboard - and indeed, on most PCs made in the last decade, there's a Windows logo button. (Of course, the Windows logo has changed with Windows 8, but that's not too confusing - just uninspired.)

With the Consumer Preview, Microsoft addressed this for the first time by adding a zone in the lower left corner that brings up a kind of Start button when you hover the mouse pointer toward that corner (assuming you're one of those old-fashioned folks who still use a mouse).

In the Developer Preview, it was difficult to control the Metro-style apps, the new class that uses the WinRT library. When I asked why Metro apps couldn't share the Taskbar with the other Desktop apps, the response I got was that the Taskbar would not always be on-screen. Why wouldn't it be on-screen all the time? Because sometimes you'd be running a Metro-style app.

Well, so much for that explanation. If you hover the mouse over the Start zone button, or if you hover it in the upper left corner of the Desktop, you'll get what amounts to the taskbar for Metro-style apps. Yes, friends, you are now looking (above) at a Desktop with two Taskbars (which calls to mind the lyrical phrase, "And now for something completely different"). Typically, bringing up a Metro app replaces the entire Desktop with the app, in which case, the Desktop gets miniaturized and changes places with the app you just clicked on.

Why is any of this important? Imagine the following situation: You want to play a song. Sounds simple enough, right? Assume you've made it through to the Desktop, you've opened an Explorer window, and you have a list of your MP3s in front of you. When you double-click on any of these, your Desktop goes away.

Within 20 seconds, the Desktop is replaced by this thing (right). It's not a list of the music you own - it's a piece of wallpaper containing some random album covers from music published in the last century. Granted, you'll be listening to your song now, but you'll want to return to your work. This is something the former designers at Microsoft (whom I guess were all sacked) used to know: Sometimes you do other things while you work, and sometimes you do more than one thing at a time.

Getting back to your work is a matter of rearranging the screen. First, you click on this wallpaper in order to get the music player controls back. (Ask yourself, on what class of device whose screen is larger than a postage stamp is it absolutely necessary for the music player to consume all the real estate?)

Then you grab the top of the wallpaper as though you were about to rip it off of your screen (above), and drag it to one side or the other of your screen. You'd think the Desktop would come back now, but no. Although you've zoned your music player, you now have about 84% completely blank screen. How many of your co-workers do you know who would be freaked out by even a partially blank screen - doesn't that mean something's gone wrong? The next step is for you to fill the remainder of the space with the Desktop.

So you point to the upper left corner to bring up the Desktop miniature (above), and click on that. This restores the Desktop to the scary blank space, and now you can continue about your work (below). Now, this is not Windows Media Player we're looking at - although it's offered in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, it's as a kind of fallback alternative. This Music app, which replaces Media Player as the default, takes up either the rightmost or leftmost 16% (roughly) of the screen. Although the border between the Metro and the Desktop world looks like it includes a handle, in practice, you can only change the app's relative size to 84%, 100%, or zero.

When you size a Metro app to 84%, it reduces the Desktop space to 16%. For the moment, there is no functional reason to do this. Like in the screenshot above, the Desktop doesn't shrink or partition itself; it just makes itself a big taskbar. In Windows 8, there are quite a few surprisingly detailed procedures for doing things that accomplish nothing whatsoever, this being one of them.

(This just in: If you happen to own a mouse with one of these programmable page up/page down buttons, pressing it when you're listening to a song in the Music app will bring up this little box in the left corner for about five seconds, whether or not you have the app showing along either side. You won't know this fact unless and until a) you discover it accidentally for yourself, therefore "learning;" or, b) I tell you about it.)

Next page: Share what with whom?

Share What with Whom?

One of the earliest design philosophies in graphical computing is not to offer someone a choice to do something that can't be done. Either take it off the screen, or "grey" it to demonstrate that you can't do this thing right now.

One of the design points Microsoft touts for Windows 8 are the "Charms," which are the five Android-like icons that appear along the right border of the screen when you point to the upper right or lower right corner. Hiding a menu until it needs to be seen, is not a bad thing at all. In principle, I actually like this approach. It was explained to me that Charms would respond with information that was in context with the function the user is performing or the app that she's currently using.

"Share" is among these five charms, and you might think its purpose is to make the document you're working on or the item highlighted in your Metro app become sharable through some Internet conduit with one of your contacts. Maybe. The only way to determine when and where Share has no purpose whatsoever is to choose it, and be punished for doing so. (Charming.) With respect to the entire Desktop, although Share remains a selectable charm, it appears intentionally designed to serve no purpose in this context whatsoever.

So let's move to the Metro world of the Start screen. Share is available here too, but when you choose it, you're greeted with this message: "Start can't share." You must launch an app first. Now, the app that most folks would consider a candidate for sharing something with someone, would be an app named People. When you launch People, and then you select Share, you're given the prophecy shown below: perhaps the single most fitting tribute to the ethos of Windows 8: "People can't share."

The Difference Between Settings, "Settings," "More PC Settings," and Control Panel

The whack-a-mole game continues as you try to locate the one place where the operating system settings are stored. Since using Windows 8 truly does feel like using two operating systems - perhaps one from Venus and the other from Mars - a reasonable person may guess that there are two places to locate system settings.

Almost right. "Share's" charming cousin "Settings" is also always available. It's where one will eventually locate Shut Down, which confirms "off" as one of Windows 8's various settings. When you pull up the Settings menu from Start, the first menu choice is "Settings." You read this correctly.

With this much redundancy, you'd think you'd be on the right track. Not really, unless you're looking for settings pertaining to the Start Menu specifically, of which there are two. To get to where you think you want to go, you have to take a kind of backdoor exit from this menu. It's at the bottom, it's not as charming as the Settings charm itself, and it's marked "More PC Settings."

Here, common sense tells you this screen will give you the Metro-style settings, and the Desktop-style settings will appear elsewhere. For the most part, that's right. But how would you then divide, in your mind, the settings that pertain to your PC as a whole, whether it's in one world or the other? As it turns out, you'll find some of them here (above) and some of them in the Control Panel that's familiar to users since Windows 95.

Amazingly, you can locate the Control Panel from the Settings menu for the Desktop, but you do have to go to the Desktop to get there. (In the Technical Preview last September, a tile for Control Panel did appear on the Start screen; in the later Consumer Preview, it does not.) Some settings appear in both the Metro screen and the Control Panel - for example, the option to join a homegroup network. But other very important settings - for example, setting the date and time - appear only in the Control Panel.

There are two franchises about which most folks who have known me for any duration of time will conclude I am a loyal fan, despite all the headaches and the miserable episodes. But between Windows 8 and the 2009 Star Trek movie, it is the latter which displays the greatest continuity with its predecessors. And that is saying something.

There is a new, vast, and potentially loyal group of users who are just now being introduced to a higher plane of technology by way of tablets and multitouch PCs. If Microsoft seriously intends to meet these new users with a schizophrenic, disjointed, loose assembly of dead ends that is anywhere near the state of the current Windows 8 Consumer Preview, then it will lose those users and it will never get them back. This is where the future of Windows either finally comes together or completely falls apart.

Scott M. Fulton, III is the sole author of this document, and is solely responsible for his content.

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The presumed "elasticity" of cloud technology tends to fall apart whenever the bindings change. That is, when a virtual machine or virtualized application relies upon the specific configuration of the hardware providing its infrastructure, it isn't exactly cloud-like when you have to migrate that element to a new host. You often find yourself rewriting some configuration file or maybe even engineering some one-time script. You don't have to write an instruction manual every time you stretch a rubber band.

In rethinking its approach to making it easier for you to rewrite and reconfigure components that are said to be elastic, VMware has decided to engineer an administrative system that dispenses with the notion altogether. Call it a "zero-step process." In its place, the company's vFabric Application Director, which VMware We introduced you to vFabric App Directorannounced last October and is generally releasing this morning, substitutes this process for application deployment with a procedure that's reminiscent of drawing an org chart in Visio.

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It's called blueprinting. You draw a chart of the components that your cloud-based application will rely upon, wherever it happens to migrate to within your cloud infrastructure. It's a map of the virtual app. When the component migrates, the vFabric system takes over the process of marrying the map to the new configuration of its supporting hardware.

Modern business applications don't really run on the operating system's infrastructure anymore - the platform has become completely virtual. So the paradigm of using the OS to figure the app is now broken, states VMware group product manager Shahar Erez in an interview with ReadWriteWeb. "Ten years ago, when you developed an application, you went to the procurement team and asked for a huge server to be provisioned for you. Today, you either use a credit card or provision a VM with a click of a button. You start working on that, config that application and move it around, without caring if that physical component runs, breaks, if it's an HP or a Dell server - all that is irrelevant for me in building that application."

Erez demonstrated the entire blueprinting process for me over the course of 15 minutes. For someone who manages cloud infrastructure day-to-day, it might not take any longer. The basic building blocks - the grey chrome squares in the diagram - represent individual virtual machines. You drag them into the canvas from the Logical Templates bin, which contains a list of VMs organized by their OS configuration. As you create more VM classes for your enterprise, you configure new templates for them, which will appear here. Like drawing a relationships diagram of database tables, you double-click on the top of each virtual component to place your cursor there and rename it. Placement of the components in the diagram is completely arbitrary; you arrange them as though you were composing a presentation.

The green boxes dragged into each of these grey blocks come from the Services bin. They represent the servers and middleware components that provide the service layer through the operating system. In this example, Apache Web Server, JBoss, and MySQL all qualify.

"When we finish building the blueprint, this is a logical representation. We still don't describe where it's running, how it's running - all these things are only going to be in the late binding," explains Erez. "So when we finish building the blueprint, we can save it, provide it in a catalog to your builders, your building release team, they can pick it up where they want and place it anywhere they want. So it can support any vCloud instantiation; but we have to go broader than that, to pretty much any cloud that you want it to run on."

VFabric accomplishes this by means of VMware's patent-pending cloud abstraction layer, Erez goes on. "We don't touch the infrastructure. We work with the cloud API, [which] uses whatever APIs we need to instantiate a machine - it doesn't matter whether it's a vSphere machine or [Amazon Machine Image] or maybe Hyper-V one day, because we don't deal with the actual machine. We interact with the cloud API... At no point in time does the user dealing with App Director need to worry [about] what is the underlying infrastructure or who is the underlying cloud."

The application relationships are represented by the dashed arrows. In this example, the AppTier component running JBoss relies on the Apache server to be running, and the DBTier component running MySQL relies on JBoss. The predecessors need to be running ahead of them, so the dependencies denote the start order. "Each of the elements that we just placed on the topology map comes with a best practices provisioning script," explains Erez. This way, the IT guru will be able to review these default settings prior to any of these components ever being deployed, and specify at the blueprint stage which settings may be overridden at deployment time.

Any business logic which needs to be run by a service (for instance, a JBoss WAR file) can be loaded into the service during deployment by adding its orange box from the Application Components bin. Enabling a class of component to become clustered is as simple as clicking on its associated component's cluster icon (in the upper right corner), and choosing the number of units in the cluster.

Once the blueprint is complete, the designer has the option to publish it for anyone in the organization to use for later deployment, or to deploy the system immediately. During the deployment phase, App Director previews how the execution will take place with a NASA-style diagram - this isn't the one you drew yourself as a blueprint, but rather an extrapolation of that blueprint into a workflow, where the X-axis represents time consumed.

Then when VM systems are deployed, you can monitor their status and progress through this All Deployments screen. Of course, the entire App Director service may be run through a modern Web browser, which does mean it can run in a tablet - Erez' demonstration was using Safari on Mac, though it could very easily have been Safari on iPad.

"The reality is, provisioning a new application in enterprise IT takes anywhere between four days for a very small application, to eight weeks," states VMware's Shahar Erez. "Which really doesn't make sense. When you talk about the problems of the cloud, and the cloud getting infrastructure up and running very fast, you're really alleviating a portion of that wait time. On the other hand, we accelerating the development cycle, and then we're stuck in the middle with getting the code to run on that available infrastructure. And that problem is what's delaying getting your business value out to the market sooner. This is the gap that we're trying to bridge."

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Here's a very serious question: Are the tools your company's employees use to do their job more or less motivating to that end than the apps, games, and social services they use to do something other than their job? Put another way, does the software your people use for play improve the quality of their work, more than the software they use for work?

This is a question that a company called Rypple first started tackling three years ago. Identifying what Rypple was, was evidently hard enough - in 2009, ReadWriteWeb called it an enterprise solution for garnering feedback; two years later, we re-introduced it as a tool for rewarding employees for good performance. Both were partly right. Fortunately for Rypple, Salesforce perceived it as something substantially greater, and today Rypple is being re-reintroduced as the latest cloud-based component in the Force.com arsenal.

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What is it now? It frankly hasn't changed all that much from its original mission - to be a feedback and motivational tool for a digital workforce. Salesforce is unusual among software companies for perceiving motivation as a principal component of IT. Then again, it's already unusual for eschewing the use of the word "software" to describe its line of work.

"The way we started Rypple was, we thought the world would change. It was more social, more collaborative, less hierarchical, more real-time," says Daniel Debow, Rypple's former CEO, now the vice president for Rypple at its new parent company, Salesforce. Debow tells RWW, "Everybody's expectations of both the tools and the way that they work was changing. The problem was, the things that were being given to them by the HR organization to help improve performance were designed for fifty years ago. None of these apps are truly social; they're certainly not delightful. They're basically automating forms, and they're driven by the compliance requirements of an HR organization. We took a totally different approach to build Rypple, and it was very similar to a company like Zynga: a consumer-first approach."

Debow demonstrated the new Rypple running on the Force.com platform. Its newsfeed provides a platform for ongoing conversation about the business. There, the manager can set variable-term goals for the workgroup sharing this feed as well as for one or more individuals within the group. These goals are represented by icons that appear within the "Key Objectives" column along the right side. Employees may use these icons to gauge their progress toward achieving these objectives. "It starts envisioning the world as a graph of objectives that companies do," he remarks.

While the Rypple system is designed to cultivate verbal feedback, its principal tools are metrics and symbols. Employees need to see how well they are performing, and from time to time, to have some tangible proof that anybody in charge is truly paying attention to them, truly appreciating them. Annual evaluations are failing in the modern workforce, Debow explains, compared to real-time metrics.

"Instead of process automation, it's behavior amplification," he says, "Take the things that great managers do and make it easier for them to do it. At a high level, those are the things around goal setting and alignment, recognition in real-time, feedback that's open and easy to give and get, and coaching."

While on the surface this may sound ominous - an automated coaching algorithm, like something out of "The Martian Chronicles" - Rypple's Debow believes that it actually takes digital tools like his to get managers more personally involved in the process. "One of the common misconceptions about usage of social applications is that it's replacing face-to-face, or real interaction, with online virtual interactions. Nothing could be further from the truth. Great social apps encourage people to meet more often face-to-face - you see this with Twitter with meetups, and on Facebook with events."

Debow imagines Rypple being used as a kind of background app for a manager and employee actually communicating - not just with IM, but face-to-face. The objective setting process can take place in an office, with the employee looking at the manager's screen while he assigns them to her. "This is what I mean by encouraging more real-life, face-to-face conversations," he says.

The part of Rypple that generated all the buzz last year was the use of badges - literally, on-screen graphics that look like sewn-on Scout patches - to reward workers for various accomplishments. At the time they were introduced, the badges took some heat. As software developer Frank Caron wrote for his personal blog, "The problem here is that these 'status' symbols are awarded by non-quantitative and subsequently arbitrary means. The only guideline for 'earning' a badge, in this context, is the small text description that accompanies the badge during the selection process. The onus is on the nominator, the person awarding the badge, and not the product itself to use the appropriate badge at the appropriate time."

As Dan Debow describes Rypple's badge system, the fact that the awards process is not based on some automated score is what ensures direct, personal involvement on the part of the manager in the awards process. Contrary to Caron's description, badges in the new Force.com version are attributable to core competencies defined by the company ("leadership," "taking charge," "ethical behavior") - tags for personal behavior that work like tags for articles on a blog. So employees can discern why they've earned a badge, not just that they've earned it.

"What's amazing is, you can build these badges - they're not top-down, they're bottom-up," says Debow, "so that badges reflect culture. They reflect the words and the means that people use with each other, rather than top-down, HR-speak. You describe the great things that others do in a language that they already use. It can be as formal or informal as the company's culture requires."

In the world of public social networks, individuals have become notorious for "gaming the system" - triggering avalanches of usually negative commentary that unduly influences the community's ability to contribute to a ratings or voting process. What controls does Rypple provide for preventing employees from doing the same with its "social enterprise" network, with results that are more likely quantifiable in dollars?

"You can actually create rules around badging that can stop that kind of gaming, to create value and currency," answers Debow. For example, individuals' use of feedback or voting may be capped at the manager's discretion, or only certain individuals may be empowered to bestow particular badges.

But it's here that Debow risks breaking with his new boss, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, by pointing out that behaviors in enterprise networks will tend to differ psychologically from those on public networks, where users tend to be anonymous and are not necessarily held accountable. "You cannot give an anonymous public comment in Rypple," states Debow. "Your identity is there; people know what you say." And just as how it's hard to imagine two co-workers monopolizing a company meeting by behaving like social networks users - for instance, ping-ponging kudos with each other to build up their value and consume valuable time - it's just as hard, he says, to picture these same people behaving in the digital social enterprise in a similarly contrived fashion.

"This is a big difference from traditional HR system design," Dan Debow tells RWW. Where the old design tried to bake the rules into the system, therefore requiring an enormous amount of time and energy to set up - you have to deal with the hierarchy, rules, permissions, who's visible, who's invisible, what's visible to whom, which always results in extremely expensive consulting - a socially designed applications relies heavily upon social norms inside of a company, and the fact that the systems are transparent."

Rypple is available for existing Salesforce customers for an additional charge of $5 per user per month. Though the Rypple service is accessible now, its integration with Salesforce.com (pictured above) will be made available in April.

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The firm that entered our lives as "The Document Company" must reinvent itself again if it is to thrive in a world where paper is used less and less as the agent of transferring information. Taking a cue yesterday from Research In Motion, which last November set up a safety net for itself as a mobile document device management (MDM) company, Xerox is now headed the same direction.

Now, the former "Document Company" has announced it's setting itself up as a managed service provider for SMBs and enterprises to provision secure mobile devices, effectively reselling an MDM platform from Boxtone. If you think you're experiencing déjà vu, there may be a less-than-supernatural reason: Verizon has entered into a similar agreement with Boxtone, for similar services, on the exact same day.

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Boxtone's MDM platform is geared around a policy management tool that extends the policy framework of Active Directory. The goal is to enable employees to bring their own devices (BYOD) into the workplace, including Android and iOS, and enable them to be provisioned, enrolled into the network, and secured. This places Boxtone in direct contention with Centrify, which last week announced a similar BYOD platform using Active Directory, available to some customers for free.

Xerox's ACS division will be offering Boxtone MDM service on its own cloud, with what it promises to be competitive fees, calculated per-device. ("Free" will be difficult to compete against, but we'll see how Xerox manages the quality issue.) Administrators will assign mobile policies to existing employees in AD, and will then be able to provision devices over-the-air. A white paper released by ACS yesterday (PDF available here) states the provisioning tool will work with iOS, Android, Windows Mobile (other sources list Windows Phone), and BlackBerry OS devices.

Boxtone's MDM monitoring dashboard [shown: Boxtone branding]

Boxtone's compliance management tool offers end-to-end compliance monitoring, with automated alerting of IT to potential violations, and background auditing and reporting.

According to ACS, Apple iOS users will need to acquire what's called an Apple Push Notification Service (APNs) certificate separately. It's an SSL certificate required for the signing of secured transactions, including e-mail - and with the Apple ecosystem, there's only one way to get it. Luckily someone outside of Apple thought it might be a good idea to document this process (PDF available here).

Xerox closed its acquisition of ACS in February 2010.

In the wake of its recent release of all new Droid devices including Droid 4 with a revised QWERTY keyboard, the thinner Droid RAZR, and the new Xyboard tablet, Verizon Wireless announced yesterday it will also be reselling Boxtone MDM tools to enterprise customers. For now, VZW will be concentrating on the healthcare segment, in hopes that health providers moving off the BlackBerry platform will consider Droid.

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Last December, a company called GigaSpaces began demonstrating a unique kind of Java-based abstraction layer made for use within cloud platforms. Cloudify is a layer that abstracts the application platform from the cloud that it's running on. So you can literally do this: You can set up and fully flesh out your SaaS application on your local system, complete with middleware, just as though it's running in the cloud.

Then once it works, you relocate it. A unique cloud driver makes the homogenous application cloud run atop the specific platform cloud. The upshot is that if you can make your app run on the local platform, you can move it to Windows Azure just as easily as you can move it to Amazon EC2. (One payoff: running a Java app on the Azure cloud.)

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On Tuesday, GigaSpaces concluded Cloudify's beta program, opening it up as a commercial service with an optional free tier. To be explicit, Cloudify is not a PaaS - it isn't a cloud in and of itself. It's a driver with services that enable you to deploy applications on cloud infrastructures you're already using, such as Amazon and Rackspace. What Cloudify Free Edition gives you for free are the tools to assemble your application components in a virtualized environment, and then deploy that environment to your cloud of choice.

Cloudify, writes GigaSpaces architect Sean Kumar, "makes any application agnostic to the underlying deployment environment. With Cloudify, the same application can be deployed to a cloud infrastructure, a non-cloud infrastructure or even a local machine without any changes to code. Deploying, managing and monitoring an application on any of this environment becomes very easy, and the look and feel of the management and monitoring tools remains consistent."

A self-service portal and 24/7 customer support, among other features, brings Cloudify's fee up to $1,000 per month. Actual cloud-based services in addition, which include the option of incorporating MongoDB, Cassandra, Tomcat, JBoss, and Oracle Web Logic in recipes, are offered as part of Cloudify's $5,000 premium tier.

Instructing the GigaSpaces cloud driver as to how your app is constructed - complete with underlying services and database, and various dependencies - is a text file called the recipe. It's assembled using a human-legible declarative language based on the Groovy dynamic language.

The recipe specifies how your application will be deployed and monitored. As Kumar goes on, there are two types of recipes. "The Application Recipe describes the application components, which are its services and their dependencies. The Service Recipe describes service characteristics, such as the number of service instances, lifecycle events, scripts that handle these events, monitoring configurations, scaling rules and custom alert rules."

Executing the recipe as a script is a component called the Universal Service Manager (USM). As Cloudify's documentation explains, "The life-cycle phases of the USM can be controlled by the user, allowing for a high level of customization. The USM life-cycle is split into phases, each contains one or more events. The recipe can implement any of these events and ignore the ones it does not need."

Those six phases are: Service Start, Initialization, Install, Start, Stop, and Shutdown. Each of those phases is divided into one or more events, with the start event being the only mandatory one. By giving these events names, Cloudify lets you define your recipe on a time-based scale, explaining exactly what happens, at what time, and under what conditions.

Monitoring running apps in progress takes place through a Web Management Console, which naturally runs from a browser.

The launch date for the official Cloudify Community - which is also part of the Free tier - is set for March 1.

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It's a demonstrated fact that as cloud application users find themselves logging on more and more often, they tend to oversimplify their passwords in an effort to avoid writing them all down someplace. It doesn't help that many IT shops' first course of action is to standardize identity around social networks such as Facebook, making these public repositories into the lynchpins of private networks' security strategies.

This morning's rollout by Ping Identity of a new point release for its PingFederate identity management system is an effort to reorient businesses that have already begun using public identity providers, around a centralized identity scheme that resides back inside the firewall. There, administrators can create policies that govern how users access privileged network resources, based on such factors as where they are, and whether they can also log onto - and authenticate themselves from - someplace else that's actually stronger.

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This latter concept is called authentication chaining, and it's one of three elements that Ping is touting in its new marketing push around "Adaptive Federation." Certainly being able to leverage authentication resources from Facebook or LinkedIn expedites the registration process for e-commerce sites. But the strength of that authentication is not enough during checkout, when a logged-in customer may have access to stored credit card data.

So what Ping suggests is a form of chaining that also incorporates a stronger, multi-factor authentication system such as PhoneFactor. An admin may then establish authentication rules that evaluate specified criteria ("Is this a remote user?") and, if the case is true, chain the process over to that stronger provider. If that provider is unavailable, or if something goes wrong, a separate rule may establish a failover identity provider - someone to trust in the absence of clarity.

"If you have users in multiple directories, and you want to be able to authenticate those users across those directories," explains Ping Identity technical marketing manager David Gorton in an instructional video published today (above), "you can actually chain those directories together." This way, after the user provides credentials, the newly enhanced PingFederate system will check them against each directory, until one is capable of validating those credentials. "If he doesn't get authenticated in any of those directories, he gets rejected," Gorton continues.

With the third added component, attribute aggregation, elements of a SAML assertion may be combined from multiple sources. This way, for example, when an enterprise stores its employee data in a database rather than Active Directory, PingFederate can collect elements from both sources and piece them together.

"This functionality makes virtual directory products unnecessary for attribute aggregation," reads a Ping Identity product guide released today. That may not be the best news for so-called identity service providers like Radiant Logic, whose RadiantOne Virtual Directory Server, released last July, manages multiple logons through a centralized console. Radiant and Ping had been partners since 2007 on virtual directory support.

Indeed, back in 2005, Ping CEO Andre Durand went so far as to call virtual directories and identity federation tools "natural product partners." But that was before providers started moving those virtual directories to the cloud, as services outside corporate firewalls. As the chart above from 2012 suggests, PingFederate remains firmly planted as a public-facing service inside the corporate firewall. While this move isn't enough to split the partnership, it does place the two companies on different rotational axes, if you will, with respect to where the federation takes place.

Ping Identity is holding a webinar on the new topic of authentication rules and chaining, this Thursday, February 16, at 11:00 am ET. Register here to take part.

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The original concept of the thin client device, which Hewlett-Packard helped pioneer, was to strip the PC down to just the minimum hardware needed to serve as a decent enough remote access terminal, while moving the compute power to the data center. But with new private cloud architectures enabling businesses to shift computing power between processors as needed, suddenly there's a trend toward fattening the thin client.

Yesterday, HP announced the replacement of two components in its thin client product line with some hardware components that would actually turn a few heads if they were released as ordinary desktop PCs. The first adds one of AMD's newest Fusion processors with built-in GPU, and the second marks the latest step in the comeback of one of a much-loved brand among system builders.

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HP's new t610 series thin client, which replaces the t5740, adds AMD's dual-core 1.65 GHz Fusion G-series processor. AMD calls it an "APU" rather than a CPU/GPU. It was introduced at about this time last year and made its way into the high end of HP's value line of Pavilion laptops. It's the presence of this not-so-ordinary APU from the mobile world that is enabling HP to exploit this thin client form factor in ways it couldn't before.

"This will be the only thin client in the world with a thermal management capability," says Allen Tiffany, HP's thin client marketing manager, in an interview with RWW. "The box itself is rated to 40 degrees Celsius [104° F], so it can already withstand some very harsh operating environments. However, customers being customers, every now and then they do something out of spec."

Tiffany and I shared some horror stories to that effect, me with the tale of a bank branch that duct-taped its thin client boxes under their desks in the gap between the front drawer and the backboard (which then overheated, charring the wood), Tiffany with the story of customers who drop their thin clients in locked filing cabinets and leave the power cords hanging out from the front.

Now when the ambient temperature exceeds 40° C, he tells me, the t610 will begin a process of stepping down the CPU's operating level until it's back within a safe operating range.

"Doing this allows us to best provide for ensuring the components have a very long life cycle," says Tiffany, "and we don't do any damage to the device by putting it into an excessively hot environment." The fact that the t610's dual Wi-Fi antenna are both self-contained also encourages customers to expose it to the open air, rather than hide it in the desk drawer with the Halloween candy.

The slightly wider space in the so-called "flex chassis" of the t610 Plus (left) gives space for one PCI-Express expansion slot (see what I mean about the desktop PC transition?). It also enables a quad-head display connector, which will make the device right at home in a financial management setting.

One more desktop-like feature that got my attention was the inclusion of a Trusted Platform Module, enabling the t610 to serve as a trusted component in a government setting where full session encryption is vital. Although IBM had been working on a TPM for Linux-based thin clients at least as early as 2005, this is probably the first commercial implementation on a Windows-based thin client.

Tiffany adds the t610's BIOS will also meet NIST's guidelines for BIOS protection (April 2011 edition as PDF here). So clearly HP is making a play for the government and public services markets, where the rapid migration to private cloud architectures has already shifted compute power to the server.

HP's other thin client introduction this week, more in the value space, is the t510 (right). It replaces the existing t5500, and marks the next step forward in the comeback of former system builder favorite Via Technologies. Via's niche today is the low-power space, so the t510's dual-core Eden X2 U4200 processor may not always turn heads. But it enables Via's ChromotionHD 2.0 graphics technology, which is optimized for playing back 1080p full-motion video - and that's something to see.

Tiffany confirmed that both t510 and t610 are both certified Citrix Ready, which means they're verified to work well with Citrix' Xen-brand application virtualization. The next step up in Citrix' certification system is HDX Ready, which Citrix announced last October. That tier is for devices that can utilize Citrix' HDX streaming, which lets thin clients serve as both superior graphics workstations and videoconferencing terminals. The HP manager said he expects both models to obtain HDX Ready certification soon.

He also reminded us that all HP thin clients will continue to come pre-installed with HP's Embedded Device Manager software, which premiered last December. This way, any thin client can serve as an administration station for the entire branch office.

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As part of a carefully timed preview of the forthcoming Windows on ARM (WOA) operating system, which borrows the new "Metro-style" usage model from Windows 8, Microsoft released a video showing WOA running what were described as technical previews of four "Office 15" applications - Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. But the key question for which Desktop application developers have been seeking an answer may have been obscured: As Microsoft adopts a new usage model with elements gleaned from the "Metro" style, will Office be moving away from the ribbon? The first clips of the new Office in action deliberately obfuscate the answer.

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What we do see from shots of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, as demonstrated by Windows Principal Program Manager Scott Seiber, completely obscures the title bar, assuming one is even present. Along the top edge are menu categories that are now presented, for the first time, in ALL CAPS, reversing a design decision made a quarter-century ago to avoid making software seem like it was SHOUTING at its user.

The full-color shading for the File menu suggests that Microsoft will continue its full-screen approach to loading, saving, and converting files, which premiered in the current Office 2010. Such an approach would be in keeping with the company's new "Metro" design approach, where options are made very clearly visible with plenty of white space.

But as these screenshots clearly show, Office 15 will not be a "Metro-style app," running in the fast and fluid new WinRT-driven environment being grafted onto Windows 8. Although technically these shots do not show an Office 15 preview for AMD- or Intel-based PCs, they were described by Microsoft Windows Division President Steven Sinofsky today as fully feature-compatible as their x86/x64 PC counterparts.

"The new Office applications for WOA have been significantly architected for both touch and minimized power/resource consumption," Sinofsky wrote. "This engineering work is an important part of being able to provide Office software with WOA, as these are not simply recompilations or ports, but significant reworking of the products with a complete and consistent user experience and fidelity with their new x86/64 counterparts."

At one point, the video (snapshot above) does depict the user right-clicking on a graphic object in PowerPoint (which, in multitouch, is accomplished by a tap-and-hold). This brings up a drop-down list, but also makes a pastel-shaded "FORMAT" menu appear. This behavior appears consistent with how PowerPoint 2010 works today. When you right-click on a graphic object, a new "Format" category appears, under a main heading "Drawing Tools" that extends into the title bar area. In the clips provided today, the title bar was obscured, so the "Drawing Tools" heading may actually be present and may also have been obscured.

Also in Office 2010, the Ribbon may be minimized until needed by way of an up/down carat button that appears in the upper right corner. That button does not appear in any part of today's video, though conceivably it may also have been moved to the obscured portion of the title bar.

The Ribbon screen device, which first premiered with Office 2007, is not exactly compatible with the "Metro" layout approach, and for some users has proven to be more difficult with multitouch than it is for the mouse. Rather than the traditional drop-down menu that at one time was "written in stone" by the Common User Access specifications, the Ribbon divides a horizontal strip into segments by category, and places command buttons of varying sizes into each segment. The size apportioned to each segment may vary according to the width of the window, and may shrink itself as that width is reduced.

The reasons this issue is so important are twofold: 1) Developers of functions and add-ons for Office 2010 need to know whether they must begin the long, arduous process of redesigning for Office 2013 - or instead just give up and develop for some other platform. 2) An entire industry devoted to training employees depends on the stability of the Microsoft Office platform. If Microsoft made cosmetic changes to the Ribbon that we're just not privileged to see yet, publishers can use in-house staff members to make new screenshots and quick rewrites. If it instead they scrapped the tool altogether in favor of a menu bar that looks more like Metro, those publishers will have to make significant new investments in completely rewritten content.

A Microsoft spokesperson declined all further comment on Office 15-related issues for now.

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Businesses are finally realizing there's a way to recoup some of their costs for building out their private cloud infrastructures. It's hybridization, but in the opposite direction: taking their residual compute power and storage capacity and making it public, reselling it back upstream.

This morning, VMware is introducing a kind of cloud service assembly tool called vCloud Integration Manager (VCIM) that enables businesses to gather their available resources together, from both private pools and participating public cloud resellers, and then present them to their own customers as cloud services. Suddenly, unused capacity is not a cash drain but a potential cash cow.

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Clouds as two-way streets

VCIM is an automation tool for businesses that already use vCloud Director to control their services. It presents a fairly simple window for provisioning classes of cloud services for various customers, and tailoring services to each one. The screenshot above shows the Resellers tab, whose principal intent is to enable administrators to supplement resources from public cloud resellers. But as VMware's senior director for cloud services, Matthew Lodge, tells RWW, it can also go the other way.

"The purpose here is to allow service providers to securely delegate the selling and provisioning of cloud services to partners and to the channel," says Lodge. The left pane identifies the various resellers with which your vCloud is aligned; the right pane shows the packages your business is offering via the chosen reseller on the left, with "minus" flags for packages that are not presently viable. A capacity quota appears on the right column of that pane, so you can avoid situations where a reseller overloads you with too many customer requests.

"The beauty of this is, resellers can instantaneously provision their own customers. They don't have to open tickets, make phone calls, go back to the service provider to get the customer up and running. They can just do it themselves... [VCIM] is designed for the kind of situation where, like with any other cloud service provider, you've built up a multi-tenant cloud," he explains. It's quite easy with this tool, he adds, to apportion the part of this cloud that is in-house, and the remainder that gets resold.

You also can set up the terms of sale on a per-customer basis, including offering a customer a trial service - perhaps free - of limited service over a short period, such as 30 days.

We asked Lodge whether VCIM makes it feasible for a CSP to automate the aggregation of capacity - perhaps in excess or overrun situations - from multiple resellers, effectively bringing in capacity on an emergency basis? That's not a VCIM feature yet, he tells us, though it could be implemented in a future version.

The cloud-making API

Equally as innovative as this reverse-hybrid scenario is VMware's inclusion of an API, essentially opening up the provisioning process to entirely different classes of programs - Lodge offers CRM as one example - that may need to provision cloud capacities on an ad hoc basis.

"Your typical CRM system, or customer portal, has a notion of a set of products that you would order for customers, and that you can manage - it'll be the database of record for all your custom data, for example. Your CRM system knows what customers can order, but it doesn't know how to provision them inside of vCloud Director, and it doesn't know particularly all of the technical parameters that vCloud Director needs in order to instantiate a service. That is the gap we're filling with vCloud Integration Manager."

By way of the API, an external front end can provision a customer with sets of products that have been assembled in VCIM (above). From there, VCIM follows the steps outlined here for building that customer's virtual data center with the chosen parameters. "Because this is API-based, you can integrate with the resellers' CRM systems." adds VMware's Lodge.

"We're moving beyond your basic software that sets up a cloud," he remarks. "We're now solving some more business-related issues: How do we increase the speed at which service providers can turn out new customers? How do we reduce their operational costs by automating more of the process? How do we help them create new routes to market using channel partners? And at the same time, resellers are looking to deliver on hybrid cloud. They want to be able to sell hardware and software for installation on-premises for their customers, but they also know they're going to need to have a public cloud component going forward."

VMware is a ReadWriteWeb sponsor.

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If you aren't happy with scheduling your Tweets and analyzing the sentiment of your social networking accounts, a new service from Gremln.com is available today that might be a better alternative. The company has been part of the St. Louis-based Capital Innovators startup accelerator/incubator program that we wrote about yesterday.

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Like Hootsuite, you can schedule your tweets in advance and the free service allows you to access five different social media accounts across Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. You can schedule up to five messages per hour for the free service. There are numerous charts and graphs to show you various statistics, such as the number of LinkedIn posts per day as you can see below:

Gremln has lots more to it than just stats, though. It works with Brev.is or Bit.ly to shorten and track your URLs in your Tweets, you can add RSS feeds to your dashboard, and it even has a UI that looks a lot like Hootsuite, if you don't want to leave that behind.

There are various paid plans that start at $6 a month and expand the number of Tweets per hour scheduled, the number of saved report templates, and that add the ability to include Web analytics so you can track the results of your social networking campaigns to see if they actually resulted in increased Web traffic. And there are ways for work teams to share and jointly manage their accounts, something that Hootsuite isn't good at. If you are obsessive about your Klout score, you can link to your account and watch it ebb and flow as the company tweaks its algorithms too.

You can sign up here on the Gremln site and try it out.

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