Archive for October, 2006

With 1720 delegates, this year’s Tech-Ed is the biggest yet.

The keynote address focused on the upcoming LOVE promotion Microsoft will be launching to promote Office 2007, Vista and Exchange Server 2007. Where the L comes from is a mystery, but is probably the brainchild of the Microsoft marketing department.

The keynote certainly showed off some fancy new technology, with the requisite non-working applications every Microsoft product demonstration seems to be famous for. Microsoft focus on four trends that they have determined drive business. These are simplification, content protection and management, search and cost reduction and security. Here’s a quick run-down.

Microsoft Groove is a P2P information sharing component that is supposed to assist with simplification. With Groove, users are able to create online workspaces that maintain context when content is offline and provide collaboration features. Outlook Web Access (OWA) has been augmented to provide better functionality for scheduing meetings and is able to provide secure document viewing with built-in HTML translators for Excel and Word files. Within Exchange Server 2007, there is a rather nifty feature that allows a user to dial-in using a telephone and issue speech commands to retrieve mail or schedule and re-arrange meetins. This is a great feature for roaming users – nowadays, who isn’t? OWA now supports fax and voice messages with built-in viewers and players.

To protect and manage content, Microsoft is taking on the concept of Information rights management. Not content with owning all our media with their DRM restrictions, they’ll soon own all our documents! The record vault is used for compliance and audits. Within Office SharePoint Server 2007, managed folders may be created for backups and maintaining repositories. Specific backup schedules may be created to exclude personal mails and to aggregate similar content. Shadow copies created for all documents in Vista permit restoration to previous document versions. That’s a very useful feature.

Search is tackled by extending search capabilities across personal, workstation-based documents to centralized repositories. Excel-services allow publishing of documents for other users and to be viewed within thin-client HTML viewer. An impressive demo of the mini business intelligence solution showed aggregation of data and easy construction of a balanced scorecard from data within a SharePoint portal. There is talk of an analytics engine being included in Microsoft SQL-Server 2005 SP2.

For cost reduction and increased security, simplified deployment is supposed to reduce support costs. Mitigation of security threats is taken care of by increased user account control. The windows reliability monitor (WRM – hopefully not soon to be Windows Rights Management ) attempts to assist in the investigation of issues with new software versions being installed. USB devices can be locked down to prevent attempts at data theft. Bitlocker drive encryption should help protect against drive theft by encrypting a hard drive’s content. The encryption key may be stored on a USB device (hopefully not locked-down )

That’s it for the keynote. I’m off to the geek trailer trash party in the car park…