Following a flurry of left-hook announcements aimed at its
cloud competition over the past few months, Amazon is going for a body
blow with corporate cloud-hosted email business.
Word of Amazon's new Workmail service
began circulating on Wednesday, with a full launch due in Q2 of this
year. Even with the scant details currently available, it's clear
Amazon's ambition is to heavily bait the hook and lure business users
away from Google's Gmail and Microsoft Exchange.
Most of WorkMail's offerings, as described in detail by Forbes's Ben Kepes,
should sound familiar to any IT administrator. Aside from hosted email,
it also provides calendaring and resource booking, contact lists and
task management, and public folders. In addition, it's meant to
integrate with either cloud-based or on-premises directory services. It
should work transparently with existing email clients like Outlook, as
well as any client that uses Exchange ActiveSync, but a Web client such
as Gmail or Office 365 is available.
Amazon rides hard on
other advantages in security and ease of migration. With security,
Amazon ties in another recent announcement: KMS (Key Managament Service),
its cloud-hosted encryption key vault. Keys from KMS, including those
provided by the customer, can be used to encrypt email at rest. Users
also have control over the geographic regions in which their WorkMail
data is stored. Finally, Amazon is said to be providing ways to migrate
from an existing Exchange store, although it isn't clear if other
providers (such as Google) will get tooling by launch time. The service
is set to cost $4 per user per month, but email boxes allow only 50GB
per user.
Amazon
has established itself as a major -- if not the -- leader of cloud
infrastructure. Apart from AWS, few offerings have set standards, even
if only de facto, for how the cloud works. But it has made less of a
splash when attempting to horn in on the enterprise desktop. WorkSpaces
was meant to compete with VMware for providing virtual desktops at
competitive rates, but left open questions of compatibility, offering
what amounted to a reskinned version of Windows Server 2008, not Windows
7. Zocalo
document-management service was designed as a further complement to
Workspaces, but held little incentive for anyone already using Box,
Dropbox, or Google.
WorkMail, by contrast, seems more
deliberately designed to sway new users, in big part by providing the
kind of granular control over data -- encryption in particular -- that
other mail providers presumably skimp over or dance around. The major
competition, Microsoft, already has some of the same functionality, if
not quite in the same form. Microsoft has added message encryption
to Office 365, but mainly as a way to protect individual messages in
transit. While Microsoft offers geolocation for customer data, it's in
an automatically determined form. According to its documentation
for Office 365 users, "the customer’s country or region, which the
customer’s administrator inputs during the initial setup of the
services, determines the primary storage location for that customer’s
data."
Read More News :- Techies | Update
1/30/2015 04:20:00 PM
Microsoft kicks off C# 7 language planning
The design team working on C# are examining data management, performance.
Designers are off and running with plans for the next generation of Microsoft’s C# language, with key themes centering on data management, performance, and reliability.According to meeting notes for the C# team, posted earlier this month on GitHub, the team is looking beyond the planned version 6.0 of the type-safe, object-oriented language. As posted by Microsoft’s Mads Torgerson, a design team member, the notes say: “This is the first design meeting for the version of C# coming after C# 6. We shall colloquially refer to it as C# 7.” Likely themes to investigate for C# 7 include working with data; performance, reliability, and interop; componentization, distribution, and meta programming.
In accordance with theme of working with data, possible C# features could include pattern matching, “denotable” anonymous types, working with common data structures, slicing, and immutability. The notes state that today’s programs are connected and trade in rich, structured data -- what's on the wire, what applications and services produce, manipulate, and consume. Traditional object-oriented languages, while good for many tasks, deal poorly with this setup.
For performance, reliability, and interop, the team states that C# has had a history of being “fast and loose” in performance and reliability. “Internally at Microsoft there have been research projects to investigate options here. Some of the outcomes are now ripe to feed into the design of C# itself, while others can affect the .Net Framework, result in useful Roslyn analyzers, etc,” Torgerson’s notes say. “Over the coming months we will take several of these problems and ideas and see if we can find great ways of putting them in the hands of C# developers.”
Concentrating on componentization, the notes state the “once set-in-stone issue of how .Net programs are factored and combined is now under rapid evolution.” Most work in this space is more tooling-oriented, covering capabilities including the generation of reference assemblies, static linking, determinism, NuGet support and versioning. “This is a theme that shouldn't be driven primarily from the languages, but we should be open to support at the language level.”
To help with the distributed nature of modern computing, C# designers are pondering async sequences and serialization. “We introduced single-value asynchrony in C# 5 but do not yet have a satisfactory approach to asynchronous sequences or streams.” For serialization, “we may no longer be into directly providing built-in serialization but we need to make sure we make it reasonable to custom-serialize data -- even when it's immutable, and without requiring costly reflection.”
Meta programming, meanwhile, has been “on the radar” for a long time, with the Roslyn compiler project intended to enable programs about writing programs. “However, at the language level we continue not to have a particularly good handle on meta programming.”
The team is also considering null capabilities as a theme. “With null-conditional operators such as x?.y C# 6 starts down a path of more null-tolerant operations,” the notes say. “You could certainly imagine taking that further to allow e.g. awaiting or foreach'ing null, etc. On top of that, there's a long-standing request for non-nullable reference types, where the type system helps you ensure that a value can't be null, and therefore is safe to access.”
Also with C# 7, designers are pondering pattern matching, providing a way of asking if a piece of data has a particular shape, then extracting pieces of it. Array slices, meanwhile, would boost efficiency by providing a “window.”
“Array slices represent an interesting design dilemma between performance and usability. There is nothing about an array slice that is functionally different from an array: You can get its length and access its elements,” notes state. “For all intents and purposes they are indistinguishable. So the best user experience would certainly be that slices just are arrays -- that they share the same type. That way, all the existing code that operates on arrays can work on slices too, without modification.”
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Design notes state that while input and openness is sought in the development of C#, ultimately, decisions are made by the design team. “It's important to note that the C# design team is still in charge of the language. This is not a democratic process. We derive immense value from comments and UserVoice votes, but in the end the governance model for C# is benevolent dictatorship."
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