This week, the Macworld Conference and Expo returns to San Francisco, and, for the first time since the 2002 show in which Apple’s pre-show boast of, “Beyond the rumor sites. Way beyond” turned out to refer to a flat-panel iMac, I’m feeling excited about the announcements that the Black Mock-Turtlenecked One might hand down in his annual Expo keynote.

It’s not that I expect Apple to confirm my June 2005 prediction that the firm would unbind OS X from Apple-only hardware and take on Microsoft in earnest in the client and server operating system space.

While such an announcement would certainly be exciting, it seems that Apple’s 2007 iPhone success has confirmed the belief of Steve and Co. that as long your hardware is sufficiently insanely great, you don’t have to play by the same rules as rest of the computer OEM crowd.

However, after watching Apple succeed at coaxing some actual innovation out of the molasses-slow cell phone industry last year, and after receiving one of my all-time favorite Christmas presents last month–a slim, shiny iPod Touch–I’m ready to believe that Apple is capable of shaking up the client OS world on its own terms.

I haven’t thought in the past–and I still don’t–that the iMacs and PowerBooks and Xserves that have headlined previous Macworld Expos were great enough to prompt individuals and organizations to surrender the privilege of choosing from a variety of vendors in order to purchase their desktops, notebooks and servers.

Unlike those systems, which really aren’t much different from the systems that Dell, Hewlett-Packard or your friendly neighborhood white-box purveyor offer, the iPhone and the iPod Touch (once hacked to admit the installation of third-party applications) blow competing smart phones and PDAs out of the water.

For Macworld 2008, most of the rumor buzz is centered around a new sub-notebook form factor, possibly featuring a version of the iPhone’s multitouch user interface and solid state storage for long battery life.

Given a display broad enough to render full-sized Web pages, and a keyboard large enough for an adult to type with, such an Apple sub-notebook could fill the mobile writing and browsing device gap that I’d hoped Palm might fill with its short-lived Foleo.

I’m still rooting for Apple to make OS X a first-class citizen of the operating system world, but if the folks from Cupertino are too busy prepping the devices of my dreams to set their big cats free, I’m ready to forgive them.

If, on the other hand, I were a loyal Mac ISV developing software for an OS X market artificially constrained by Apple’s hardware protectionism, or an OS X Server admin looking to dip into the forbidden-by-Apple realm of server virtualization, I wouldn’t feel so forgiving.

What are your Macworld hopes and dreams?

Microsoft’s release of Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista is nigh, which means that it’s nearly time for organizations sold on a “better SP1 than sorry” approach toward deploying Microsoft’s latest client operating system to start polishing off their imaging tools.

However, based on the conversations I have had with readers and with eWEEK’s Corporate Partners, it seems that many IT managers are viewing Vista’s SP1 not as a green light for deployments, but as something like a pop-up reminder to schedule some time to think about maybe deploying the new OS.

While Windows XP is getting rather long in the tooth, age alone is not reason enough to undertake an upgrade. As unsettling a truth as it may be for Microsoft, the bottom line on XP versus Vista is that there’s not a whole lot that you can do with the latter OS that you can’t do with the former.

Vista’s number one, “how does this solve my problems” opportunity was its support for hard drive encryption, which could have driven a campaign around lost notebooks and data breaches that would have grabbed the attention of business and consumer users alike. Instead, Microsoft opted withhold this support from business customers unwilling to sign up for software assurance.

However, moving to Vista has not been a slam dunk for those volume license customers either, since the new operating system comes with product activation stickiness that Microsoft had spared its enterprise XP customers. It’s not that product activation is particularly onerous, but since activation chores add management overhead with no return on investment, it’s another drag on Vista deployment.

The most important feature of any OS is security patch availability, followed by software application and hardware device support. Vista does add support for some new hardware, and SP1 adds more. On the software front, Vista will work better with Windows Server 2008 than XP does–boasting, for instance, much faster file transfer speeds.

But Vista SP1 is not the only client OS service pack on tap from Microsoft. Windows XP SP3 is set to ship around the same time–a fact which, along with the still broad availability of XP on OEM machines, indicates that XP is still very actively supported. What’s more, XP still holds an edge over Vista with regard to driver and application support, and XP runs on a wider variety of machines than does Vista.

As long as XP maintains those advantages, and as long as Microsoft keeps XP patched and up-to-date with features such as WPA2 and Network Access Protection support, clear upgrade cases for Vista will remain difficult to discern.

Today my colleague Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is reporting on Mandriva founder Gael Duval’s Ulteo, which now offers online access to the OpenOffice.org productivity suite:

OpenOffice.org goes online with SAAS version

I’m an OpenOffice.org user and overall fan of software as a service–particularly when it’s a free service–so I thought I’d take Ulteo for a spin.

It took me a few tries to access OpenOffice.org on Ulteo, and when I finally made it in, I received this somewhat disconcerting message. Apparently, my previous failed attempts left some loose ends in my Ulteo hosted home directory.

I forged ahead, broke the lock held by the phantom user, and I was staring down the barrel of Calc. Time to spend some time with my fantasy basketball spreadsheet, in all of its unsupported-by-google-apps functions glory.

Trouble was, I could tell how to upload my spreadsheet to Ulteo. The grayed-out box seemed to be the source of the trouble. A Java applet that failed to load, perhaps?

I consulted Ulteo’s search for help, but there were zero non-advertisement results for the term “upload documents.”

I read in SJVN’s story that I needed the “real” Java runtime from Sun to use Ulteo. As far as I could tell, that’s what I was using …

Have you tried Ulteo’s OpenOffice? Did you fare any better than I did?

Eyeing the trends around user-friendly Linux desktops, sub-$500 notebooks, universal broadband, and Web 2.0 office applications, my colleague Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols opines that we’re on the brink of a low-end Linux revolution.

For my part, I’m not so sure.

Without question, Linux has matured into a effective, manageable, and low-cost solution for companies’ and individuals’ computing needs—I’ve been getting my work and play accomplished quite nicely since just after Windows XP went gold, in 2001.

However, I’m severely underwhelmed by most of the low-cost notebook machines that Steven cites in his column. The Asus EeePC, for instance, sports a paltry 800×480 pixel display at a time when dread horizontal-scrolling is becoming the norm on even 1024×768 displays.

What’s more, universal broadband doesn’t seem so universal to me, and I live and work in the ultra-connected city of San Francisco. As long as our government opts to parcel out spectrum for wireless data exclusively to cell phone carriers, I don’t see this situation improving significantly enough to allow us to relocate our computing to the clouds.

Finally, while I’m an enthusiastic user of Web 2.0 applications such as those that Google offers, until Google and others nail the problem of offline access, most of us will have to stick to fat clients with plenty of storage.

Don’t get me wrong, I want to see a revolution in mobile computing and connectivity as much as anyone else, and I believe that Linux, as an open and vibrant software platform, can play a significant role in such as transformation.

However, software is only one part of the equation, and we simply will not see the sort of thin, light, and well-connected hardware required to deliver us into this flexible computing future as long as we lack mobile Internet connectivity service providers that are satisfied to shelve their walled garden aspirations, get out of the way, and give us simple IP dial tone we need bring this future online.

Last week I wrote about how the lack of a Linux and open source answer to Microsoft’s Active Directory is slowing the spread of desktop Linux.

Could the Linux and open source answer to Active Directory be Active Directory?

Today, Likewise Software (the firm formerly known as Centeris) launched a new open-source software project that consists of the authentication services core of the firm’s Linux-to-Active Directory product, Likewise Enterprise.

The project, called Likewise Open, is licensed under the GPL and is set for inclusion in the forthcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 and Ubuntu 8.04, with to-be-determined bundling with Novell’s SUSE Linux on the way.

For Likewise Software, the idea is that once organizations get a taste for managing authentication for their Linux desktops via Active Directory, they’ll want to trade up for the non-free, Enterprise version of the company’s product, which adds support for additional management goodies such as Group Policy.

I’ve tangled with Linux and Active Directory in the past, and while it’s long been possible to join Linux clients to AD domains, the process typically requires more tutorial-following, config file tweaking, and log data spelunking than most organizations wish to undertake.

The Likewise Open site offers ready-to-install packages for OpenSUSE 10.3, Fedora 8 and Ubuntu 7.10. I took Likewise Open for a quick run today by installing the bits on an Ubuntu 7.10 test machine. When I installed the package, my test system pulled down six dependencies required to use the software, including the appropriate Kerberos and Samba bits, as well as some Mono libraries.

I managed to use Likewise Open to join a Windows 2003 Server domain in our lab. The process was definitely easier than I’ve experienced in the past, although it could have been easier.

I had to modify my DNS configuration to point to my domain, which is typical for AD join operations on any platform, but I also had to forgo my “roaming” network configuration in favor of a static IP setup on my Ubuntu client.

In what I gather is part of the magical, behind-the-scenes massaging required to bring Linux clients into an AD fold, the Likewise Open software restarted the NetworkManager service on my test notebook, thereby interrupting its network connection and stopping the join operation.

Once my Ubuntu client had joined the AD fold, I was able to log onto the system as one of my Active Directory users. I was not, however, able to ssh into my system, and the Likewise Open project page is rather thin on documentation at this point.

In any case, I think that Likewise Open is a very promising development for Linux in general, and large managed desktop Linux deployments in particular.

Of course, many Linux-embracing organizations will be reticent about building their infrastructures around Microsoft technology, but with a wholly open source alternative on the horizon in the form of Samba 4, AD may end up being the great directory hope of Linux and open source, after all.

Earlier this year, while writing about the fortunes of Linux on the enterprise desktop, I came across the paper, “World Domination as an Optimization Hack,” in which the GNOME Foundation’s Federico Mena-Quintero identifies bulk Linux deployments as the lowest hanging fruit for Linux moving forward.

Although Mena-Quintero doesn’t call it out explicitly, the common thread that runs through administrator feedback he presents in the paper is the absence of directory services and the management functions, such as Group Policy, that these services make possible.

I finally got around to columnizing about open source’s directory services leadership vacuum:

It’s the Directory, Stupid

Opinion: Until Red Hat, Novell, or another party focuses around open-source directory services, Linux will be stuck playing catch-up with Windows 2000.

Doesn’t Linux need an answer to Active Directory? Is Samba 4 the way forward? Fedora Directory Server? OpenLDAP? FreeIPA?

I’d love to hear what you think about it…

I scratched the surface of three of the most popular Linux distributions out there–and I took plenty of screen shots.

Desktop Linux Trio Offers Look at What’s To Come

Review: The latest versions of fast-moving OpenSUSE, Ubuntu and Fedora make a strong case for Linux on the desktop, but there’s lots of integration work to be done.

Desktop Linux Showdown

Slide Show: OpenSUSE, Ubuntu and Fedora are three of the most popular and innovative Linux distributions available. But do their latest versions–OpenSUSE 10.3, Ubuntu 7.10 and Fedora 8–and the enterprise Linux distributions they foreshadow deserve a spot on your organization’s desktop and notebook clients? eWEEK Labs checks out the three new distros.

Last week I attended a technical workshop on Windows Server 2008 at Microsoft’s Redmond campus, where I, alongside a gaggle of other tech journalists from all over the world, spent three days having my head stuffed with details about Microsoft’s forthcoming server revision and the tools that complement it.

Microsoft has done a lot of impressive work on Windows Server: faster networking, strikingly mature-looking server virtualization technology and administration interfaces for everything that beats the pants off the competition–both in GUI and command-line flavors.

Also impressive was the focus that Microsoft has begun to train on the midsize company market–a huge, currently underserved group that Microsoft defines as firms with 50 to 1000 employees, 25 to 500 PCs, and between 1 and 5 IT staffers.

Microsoft’s newly minted Windows Essential Business Server offers a very compelling answer to the question, “How can a midsize business consume all the same sorts of Microsoft core server products that a large enterprise might consume?” Here’s the rub: It seems to me that the new server is an excellent answer to the wrong question.

For instance, at the heart of Microsoft’s new midmarket server products lies Exchange, which makes sense, since every company requires e-mail services. However, rather than ask, “What’s the best way to deliver e-mail services,” Microsoft is asking: “What’s the best way to deliver Exchange?”

When you’re talking about organizations with between one and five IT people, does it really make sense for those limited IT resources to be spent on something as amenable to outsourcing as e-mail? Hosted e-mail can mean cheaper and more bountiful mailbox storage, anti-spam and anti-virus filtering that occurs up in the cloud, and more scalability than is possible from servers installed on-site at companies that may not even have server rooms.

What’s more, for many companies, remotely hosted e-mail services will be more reliable, as well. Windows Essential Business Server is meant to span three or four physical servers, but the product is not outfitted–as far as I can tell–to take advantage of these separate machines to provide failover for its e-mail and other services.

Fortunately for Microsoft and its midsize business customers, the company boasts more than enough technologies to enable these businesses to reach the best balance between locally run and in-the-cloud services. If a midsize business is lacking in server room security, for instance, they could turn to a hosted directory service with a local Read Only Domain Controller for speedy authentication.

For failover, Microsoft could draw on its new Windows virtualization technology to keep server workloads running across multiple servers both local and–taking a page out of Red Hat’s recently announced virtualization playbook–provide customers with the option of scaling workloads up into the cloud.

Microsoft is on the right track here, but they have to start thinking outside the shrink-wrapped box.

The OpenDocument Foundation has announced its plans to sever itself from participation in or further advocacy of its namesake office document format in favor of the World Wide Web Consortium’s XHTML (Extensible HTML)-based Compound Document Format.

Although the OpenDocument Foundation is a fairly small organization, the group sports a certain cachet that stems from the ODF-to-MS Office plug-in that the group announced–but did not release publicly–about a year and a half ago.

At the heart of the rift between the Foundation and the rest of the ODF backers–led by Sun and IBM–lies a dispute over the proper strategy for achieving round-trip document fidelity between Microsoft Office and ODF-consuming applications, such as Sun’s OpenOffice.org or IBM’s Lotus Symphony.

When you open an MS Office document with one of these applications, a conversion engine attempts to map every formatting element it finds to a feature of the application doing the importing. If some formatting elements are unknown or otherwise unmappable, those elements are stripped and thrown away.

Stripped formatting elements mean formatting inconsistencies in documents passed between MS Office and other applications, and these inconsistencies have made it extremely tough to sell organizations on MS Office alternatives–even alternatives with zero licensing fees.

The OpenDocument Foundation wanted to see ODF applications pick up the capability to pass along unknown elements in order to maintain formatting fidelity, albeit at the cost, at times, of file format purity.

It turns out, however, that the backers of ODF care a great deal about file format purity–they’re out to create a group of MS Office-killers, and as they see it, perpetuating bits of proprietary MS document formatting runs directly counter to their Office-slaying plans.

For my part, I don’t care about file format purity, and I don’t care about vendor hopes of building or maintaining supremacy for some particular brand of office application. I care about my data, and I care about having as broad a set of options as possible for accessing and manipulating that data.

I would, however, like to see more diversity in the office applications space, because Microsoft is currently dominant enough to get away with offering a very slim set of options for accessing MS Office formatted data. The only way to access and manipulate MS Office documents is to do so from a fat Windows client machine running a fat Office suite.

In reference to the OpenDocument Foundation’s abandonment of ODF, Microsoft’s director of corporate standards, Jason Matusow, posted a telling comment on his blog: “….when you are speaking about document formats, you are really speaking about an adjunct technology to the applications which are the real ‘solutions’ in this discussion.”

On paper, file formats may be of little intrinsic value, but consider the real world, where file formats serve as containers for our data–it’s ludicrous to argue that our data should take a back seat to the tools we use to access and manipulate it.

Back on the ODF side of the aisle, we have a format that’s undoubtedly better suited to offering a broad range of access and manipulation options. However, if it really is possible to boost fidelity between ODF-consuming applications and MS Office, then the ODF’s backers should be working to make this possible.

As for the OpenDocument Foundation and the CDF, I must admit to keeping my file exchange nirvana expectations low. While the Foundation has some promising ideas, I question its track record for actually making things happen. The group’s Office file converter took an inordinately long amount of time to become publicly available, and unless I’m mistaken, the project’s source code has yet to see the light of day.

This time around, I suggest that the CompoundDocument Foundation keep in mind the mantra on which all successful community projects are based: Release Early, Release Often. Ideas and proposal text are fine, but it’s tough to rally around a white paper. If the ODF backers have it wrong, then show us the code and prove it.

On Tuesday morning, while jotting down some column ideas, I took note of the top two items I wanted to see from Google’s Gmail service:

1. Enable IMAP access to mail; and
2. Make labels persist beyond Gmail’s Web UI.

On Wednesday afternoon, I read Andrew’s blog post about how Google had delivered on the first of my Gmail desires–IMAP for Gmail.

I’m a big fan and heavy user of Gmail–I love the conversation-grouping interface, the search, the spam filtering, and the tie-ins to Google’s online Docs and Calendar applications.

However, the biggest drawback to Gmail for me is the fact that my main e-mail address, at eweek.com, isn’t hosted by Google, which means that I have to deploy a series of workarounds to process the loads of mail I receive at my work addresses through Gmail.

Gmail allows you to send mail under a separate e-mail address identity, but those messages show up for recipients with the somewhat confusing (and arguably phishy-looking) “Sent by $GMAILADDRESS On Behalf of $WORKADDRESS.”

I’ve been daydreaming about the possibility that the upcoming e-mail platform migration necessitated by the recent secession of Ziff Davis Enterprise from our Ziff Davis Media mother ship might be an opportunity to go Google. However, without IMAP support, it was tough to expect many companies to give Google’s mail services a shot.

While Google’s online apps have picked up some mindshare within eWEEK’s editorial ranks over the past year or so, I still consider a move to Google Apps a fairly long shot–but with IMAP it’s gotten shorter, at least.

Anyway, returning to the world of things actually in my control, I quickly clicked my way from Andrew’s blog post to the settings dialogs of my Gmail account, where I clicked on IMAP support before configuring my Evolution mail client to work with the account.

As Evolution puttered through the process of pulling down my message headers, I was pleased to note that Google had delivered on my second wish list item as well–support for persistent labels. All my Gmail labels turned up in Evolution as folders, and I found that when I moved messages to those folders in Evolution, the labels appeared appropriately in my Gmail interface.

I’ve always found Gmail’s labels fairly handy, particularly in conjunction with the Firefox plug-in GTDinbox, but the fact that the labels couldn’t make their way beyond the confines of the Gmail interface seriously limited their usefulness.

So, it looks like I’ll have to craft a new wish list for Gmail. Here’s a start:

1. I want to be able to create new calendar items through Evolution or another Web client. This is another must-have if Exchange shops like ours are to move to Google’s mail services.

The only other wish list item that jumps immediately to mind is search support for Google Reader, but our Friendly Search Overlords took care of that a few weeks ago.

What’s on your wish list for Google Apps?