Steve Ballmer spoke at the University of Washington this afternoon on Microsoft and the cloud. He spoke for a little over an hour with some Q&A at the end and included demos of BingMaps (by Blaise of course) Sky Player on XBOX. He touched on almost every aspect of Microsoft’s business and how it’s influenced by the cloud – noting that ~40k people within the company work on cloud and literally stated that we’re betting the company on this trend. I guess the closest thing I have seen to this before at Microsoft was Bill’s infamous Internet Tidal Wave memo. The lineage of today's talk can in many way be traced back to Ray Ozzie’s Internet Services Disruption memo. It’s actually pretty interesting to go back and read that memo and see how the company has religiously pursued the section on opportunities and delivered on the vast majority of them.

Steve’s talk focused on the following 5 dimensions and walked through each with examples.

1. The cloud creates opportunities and responsibilities – think Azure enabling a small business to get off the ground with low startup costs or Domino’s scaling their pizza order business on demand. On the responsibilities, it’s about having a business model that doesn’t block putting users in control of their data.
   
   
2. The cloud learns and helps you learn, decide and take action – here Steve was talking about the way Bing is approaching search by working on user intent rather than serving up a set of blue links. Plenty of work to do here but it’s a long game. Steve also talked about Excel and though he didn’t mention it by name, our Dallas cloud service for accessing and easily analysing public data sets in the cloud. This was the point Blaise Aguera y Arcas and did what he does…rockin’ demos.
   
   
3. The cloud enhances your social and professional interactions – Steve talked about email and social networking and again though he didn’t switch in to a product pitch, the Outlook Social Connector is a great example as is the work of Live. Even my thinking was too narrow on this though as the social work we do has extended way beyond those two obvious platforms and in to Zune (Twitter, Facebook, Zune Social) and XBOX which not only have a Twitter and Facebook applications but 20m+ users of XBOX Live and interactive services such as Sky Player. I’ve not had much of a play with Sky Player but will now having seen the demo. If I think even further, we have some terrific partner applications built on Microsoft technologies that are social – Seesmic being a fine example.
   
   
4. The cloud wants smarter devices – Steve alluded to the work we’ll be doing on browsers and standards and went on to talk about the PC, TV and phone. He talked about out TellMe service which will get about 10 billion utterances submitted to us in the cloud. Again, not a cloud service that naturally came to mind for me….I’ll get back to that theme later. He also talked about Natal and the importance of smart devices (i.e. not just a dumb device connected to a cloud). He also took the chance to show off the evolution of PC and held up my PC (not actually mine), the superthin Sony Vaio X. As you’d expect when talking devices, he also mentioned Windows Phone 7 Series which promises to come with a lot of social and a lot of cloud built in from what I have seen.
   
   
5. The cloud drives server advances that drive the cloud -  Steve talked about the impact the cloud is having on how we (and the industry) thinks about servers. The cloud is after all a set of servers and virtualisation is a big part of the cloud. He noted though how virtualisation is just one part of the story when it comes to scale. Taking an existing app and simply dropping it on to a virtualised infrastructure doesn’t necessarily means you now have infinite scale. Designing applications with the cloud in mind is what gets you that and it’s something we think about in our developer tools and our cloud platform in the form of Azure. Steve also took along a containerised “cloud” with him that was parked outside of the facility – nice :)

That was the meat of Steve’s speech and he finished saying “the cloud fuels Microsoft, and Microsoft fuels the cloud” – noting 70% of Microsoft staff are working on the cloud across those 5 dimensions.

My takeaway? I work on this stuff every day and have done for the last 2 years and even I was surprised when I stepped back from the coal face how much Microsoft has going on that is cloud related. Things like TellMe hadn’t occurred to me and XBOX as a cloud service is huge, successful and often overlooked when people say Microsoft is late to the cloud. I suspect many would be happy to be called late if they had a service with 20m+ paying users as XBOX Live has. I’m not aiming to be boastful here…in fact I’m a little embarrassed that it’s taken me until now, a guy who works on the cloud, to realise all of the assets we have and put them together in to a coherent story.

Steve sent an internal email on the gravity of his talk today and as often happens, that’s in the public domain. He urges the company to move at “cloud speed” and I can assure you if my work is anything to go by, that is happening already :)

Okay, I’ll finish there as it’s been a long and interesting day (01:48 here in the UK) but will leave you with this Wordle view of Steve’s speech today (note I removed Steve & Ballmer from the transcript for this). Are we really “All In” in the cloud? Yep, I think so.

Last week, I played answer guy to a couple of chats about Microsoft's clould services on two popular websites. I wasn't expecting a big crowd and was pleasantly surprised as they were well attended and there were a lot of great questions. Questions ranged from very general "what is SharePoint" to specific "can you migrate to Exchange Online using automated tools". I thought it would be good to post a few of the most common questions and answers here.

Q: What does BPOS stand for?

A: Business Productivity Online Suite - a set of services sold by Partners (and directly to customers) at  https://mocp.microsoftonline.com that include SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Live Meeting Online and Office Communications Online.

Q: Does SharePoint Online have a rich set of APIs we can use to integrate with our existing applications?

A:  There are APIs you can use that allow you to interact with SharePoint Online using web services. This allows you to interact with the service to push and pull data, query contents, add list items, query calendars, etc.  You cannot do everything you can do with SharePoint on-premise since SharePoint Online is a multi-tenant environment. See the SharePoint Online Developer's Guide for detailed guidance about what is in scope. Note there is also a

Exchange Online Developer's Guide.

Q:  What is the average time it takes to migrate Exchange server mailboxes to exchange online for a company of 500

A: Depends on specifics regarding mailbox size and system complexity

(for example, do you on premise mail enabled devices or applications that require specific mail capabilities/ routing) but for a typical organization, you could easily do this over the weekend.

Q: Do you have tools that let me move existing users into Online?

A: Yes. You can use the free directory synchronization tool to automatically create all users for you from your AD.

Q:  What are the pros and cons of having on premise vs in the cloud services?

A:  On premise gives you complete control, access to lower level details like security logs (iis logs for example), server auditing events, and server level services such as enabling transports and transport rules.  In addition, you can add custom software to the servers to suit your business requirements.  You also need to invest in solutions for spam management, virus scanning, security maintenance, upgrades,  backups and recovery. With Online, we manage the servers in our very high availability and secure multi-million dollar data center. You get to use the server features that provide the most benefit without the overhead of maintaining the on premise servers and associated technologies. Your ability to customize the service is more limited as we have to normalize usage In order to scale high and keep prices low. For many businesses, this is great opportunity to use enterprise class technologies in a highly available and secure environment at a low cost.

Q: We're a multinational organization what are the advantages for us? Especially on language support?

A: The services support multiple languages in all our portals and

supporting software. This is configurable on a per user basis directly in the browser. We have been continuously updating the languages supports. Also, support is available in different language. See the Microsoft.com/online FAQ

Q: What are the differences between the Online version of the servers and the on premise version?

A: The best place to get detailed information on this is the Service Descriptions. Go to this page  http://www.microsoft.com/online/products.mspx and click on the service you are interested in. Then find the Service Description link. These have very useful information and are continuously updated.

All in all, these chats were really fun to do an points out there is a lot to learn about cloud services. A good place to start is Microsoft.com/online. And go get a free 30 day no obligation trial account at https://mocp.microsoftonline.com and see for yourself!

I had to go to Bainbridge Island for work last Friday afternoon. It was Valentine’s Day weekend, so I decided to kill two birds with one stone and invite my wife. She, of course, decided to invite our dog.

Speaking of dogs, my team is dogfooding the Microsoft Online Services Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), which includes Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Communications Online, and Live Meeting. This means that all my e-mail, SharePoint sites, presence indications and secure IM communications are provided by BPOS and they’re available from anywhere that I can reach the Internet.

Anyway, while hanging out in our hotel on Saturday night eating Safeway sandwiches and watching the Olympics (because we couldn’t leave the dog alone), I got the urge to work on a document that was due on Monday. My laptop is my only computer, so I grabbed it, connected to our hotel’s wireless network, opened the Sign-In application, and clicked My Company Portal. From there, I clicked on our team’s SharePoint Online site and started editing the document. While accessing the doc, the integrated presence indicators showed me that a few other folks on our team were working on the weekend too.

I found a few unexpected questions that I had to get answered before I could finish the doc. Office Communicator is always running on my laptop, so I took a look at my team contacts and noticed that Damien was available. He’s one of those guys with the answers to almost every question, so I pinged him and, sure enough, he was able to help. I finished the document before Apolo Ohno won his silver medal, and checked it back in to our SharePoint Online site. I sent an e-mail to my boss via Exchange Online with a link to the doc to let him know it was ready, and then scheduled a Live Meeting for Monday morning to review the doc with some team members in Boston.

It’s important to understand that I was able to do all this without the hassle of creating a VPN or initiating a remote desktop session. With BPOS, I can work from anywhere; all I need is an Internet connection. My user experience was exactly the same as it is every day at work, except that I was propped up in my hotel room with my wife and our dog. I’ve been in this business long enough to appreciate just how amazing and how cool this really is!

From time to time a storm sweeps across the IT landscape and transforms the landscape. We've seen this before with the PC, the Windows operating system, the internet, and object oriented programming to name a few.  There have been a lot of other technologies of course in the mix, but the latest technology that has this kind of authority is the movement of on premise services to the cloud.

The three few years, I've been working in Partner Technical Readiness for Business Productivity Online Suite and it's been a wild ride watching from the inside as Microsoft and our partners come to terms with the new opportunities and challenges presented by cloud services.

While Microsoft has been learning the ropes along with the rest of the industry, Microsoft started this rope course a while back with online services like Live Meeting and Hotmail. And don't forget there are a million or more at any time using Xbox Live!  One of the busiest services on the planet - Windows Update runs reliably day in and day out worldwide keeping system up to date and downloading more content than most any free public service. Since these services debuted, many other services have since arrived including BPOS (SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Office Communications Online, and Live Meeting Online), Azure, SQL Azure, Dynamic CRM Online, Exchange Hosted Services. Recently, Microsoft System Center Online Desktop Manager announced a beta as well (http://www.microsoft.com/online/system-center.mspx).

I work on the BPOS product team and the momentum we're seeing is truly extraordinary And while I can't say much about it, I can say that with the next wave or services that are coming online are going to bring an unprecedented set of services to the market. Yeah, I know I'm a a bit over the top on the enthusiasm scale, but I come about it honestly as I believe that technology is what's going to create new wave of business momentum in the world that will result in even greater productivity,  improved  ROI, and predictable costs.

As a hard core IT Pro I know there are lot of tech guys out there worried that the cloud is going to move their jobs out of the enterprise into the data center. And for some that will be true, but for others, the challenges simply move from managing mailboxes and resetting password to doing truly productive work. A lot of shops have upgrade plans for applications, networking infrastructure, optimizations, and even security work that have languished under the burden of routine system administration. Once you outsource those tasks to Microsoft, your expertise can be put to work implementing changes that can have much more dramatic impacts on your organizations efficiency.

Toward that end, a lot of IT Pros need to get up to speed about what BPOS is and how it differs from the on premise version Exchange and Sharepoint. While they share the same name and many of the same core features, it would be a mistake for a SharePoint administrator to assume since they know SharePoint on premise, they know SharePoint online.

Where to start? Here are some good resources that will get you going:

• Service descriptions at http://microsoft.com/online. These are really great references that are kept up to date. You should be sure to review these periodically.

                               o    Exchange Online

                               o    SharePoint Online

                               o    Office Communications Online

• Microsoft Online Services Team Blog - You MUST subscribe to this blog for the latest announcements, service updates, webcasts etc. For example, we recently posted new details on updated Blackberry services This is the fastest way to stay to up to date.
• Infrastructure Planning Guides for Microsoft Online Services - Great guides for walking you through deployment planning
• Webinars

        • And of course, for Partners: https://www.quickstartserviceonline.com which is produced by my team.

There's a lot more to come - so stay tuned!

Hi everyone, I'm writing this post to introduce myself, and let you know who you're dealing with. My name is Jim Glynn and I've been working in the high-tech/information technology field for about 25 years. I've been at Microsoft for the last 12 of those years. Wow! This is the first time I've slowed down long enough to figure that out!

I'm currently working on the Microsoft Online Services Community effort. When I was asked to take on this project, I jumped at the chance. I love the energy and urgency of a startup environment, and I'm passionate about providing the best possible customer experience. I understand the delicate balancing act between getting a product running and supporting early adopter customers. We're building the community by engaging with the product team and providing valuable information to our customers and partners. We want to involve the community in the product development process and feature contributions by customers, partners and MVPs. You can follow the Microsoft Online Services Team Blog and follow us on Twitter.

I attended college during the Vietnam era, dropped out, and returned in my late 20s to earn an Industrial Design degree. I discovered computers late in my college career and seriously considered changing my major to Computer Science, but it was time for me to be done with school. My university was one of the few at the time that allowed open access to IBM mainframes via ASCII terminals. I took a few punch card based programming classes, but I learned best by playing with those terminals 24 hours a day.

In early ‘85, I moved back to the Seattle area to work with a friend of mine who had started a company that created hardware, software, and firmware for the Industrial Engineering and Statistical Process Control (SPC) industries. We introduced new products about every 6 months. I travelled extensively training customers, support and field personnel. I participated in trade shows and provided technical sales support. I also installed and managed the company's network, phone system, BBS, and eventually their web site. My favorite part of that job was walking into my friend's office/lab and hearing him say, while pointing to a bird's nest of wires "It's the only one of its kind on the planet!"

I took a year off in 1997 to decompress, earn my MCSE and MCT certificates, do some consulting, and work as a technical trainer. I joined Microsoft in 1998 as a lead Technical Writer, working on Server 2000 and Active Directory. I managed the UA team for Small Business Server 2003. After shipping SBS, I took a PM job running the Live Meeting 2005 Technology Adoption Program (TAP).

After shipping Live Meeting, and a series of re-orgs, I became one of the first PMs on Microsoft Online Services. After about 6 months, it looked like I could contribute more as a technical writer, so I became one of the first writers on their User Assistance (UA) team, concentrating on our migration, coexistence, and onboarding/offboarding documentation.

When I'm not working, I'm usually remodeling my house or outdoors hiking and scrambling with friends and family in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest.

Hi….is this thing on? Hi….I’m Steve

lets dispense with the rambling history of my life and do this in the tried and trusted, 10 things list to help clear the clouds on who I am and why I’m here.

1. Steve Clayton, at Microsoft for 12 years, currently Director of Cloud Strategy in a part of the Microsoft world that we call Microsoft International
2. I’m sort of a techie. I studied information and computing at Loughborough University a long time ago. I loved the ergonomics course…closest I got to being a designer
3. I hail originally from Liverpool, England and yes, I’ve lost my Scouse accent. Nothing a few beers can’t resolve but found years on the speaking circuit meant I had to talk slower and with less of a twang to be understood. I think
4. Prior to Microsoft, I worked at Zeneca (now AstraZeneca) and helped to build a global Intranet back when the word Intranet hadn’t been invented.
5. At Microsoft I’ve been involved in some way in these products: Internet Explorer, Proxy Server, Tahoe (SharePoint), Stinger (Windows Mobile), Exchange, Windows, BPOS, Azure
6. I’m addicted (not clinically) to Twitter and helped launch something called the Blue Monster
7. When not playing with technology, I love football, motorsport, design, architecture, cycling and scuba diving.
8. I have a blog that I spend way too much time writing. It helps me get stuff out of my brain and I’m a big fan of sharing
9. My favourite product of the last few years at Microsoft? Live Mesh
10. I’m here because I spend all of my time working our our cloud technologies at Microsoft – SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Windows Azure Platform etc.

let me expand a little on #10 as that’s why I’m really here. I don’t work in the product teams though, I work in a strategy group that helps determine how, when and where we launch these services. It’s a lot of fun and challenging. I get to work with lots of folks in the product teams as we think through what it takes to launch services at scale, how to support them, what the implications are for data centers and much more.

What I hope I can share here are some perspectives from an international point of view around our continuing shift to cloud services.