Blogs

It’s been 3 days since I got here and I finally have gotten around to writing an update.

Sunday:

It took no less than an hour to get from the hotel to the convention center. I am not kidding. SUNDAY!!! It’s not even a work day. Why is traffic so bad here?

I got registered. Here is a picture of the bag, since I know you are wondering...

What swag is in it? The usual stuff: magazines, CDs, a few DVDs. What DVDs? Beta 2 versions of Office System 2007, Office SharePoint Server 2007, Office Groove Server 2007, Office Project Server 2007, Windows Vista (x86 and x64) and Windows Server Code Name “Longhorn”.

After checking in, I went to dinner only to look at the schedule and realize that the Keynotes were that night from 7:00 to 9:30. That was not what I expected.

Some things that I picked up from the Keynotes:

MaaS – This was a new acronym for me. It means “Management as a Service” Not sure how common that acronym is since I only saw it was listed 4 times together on Google. I’m proud to say that Live.com found it more often than that. It also contained more recent blog entries on it. Way to go guys!!! Back to MaaS – Exchange Hosted Services and the newly announced Forefront Client Security Services are examples of this.

The next version of Microsoft Operations Manager will be called System Center Operations Manager. MOM just sounds better than SCOM, don’t you think? “MOM takes care of my Enterprise” has a nice ring to it. I’ll stop there.

Bob Muglia spoke of 4 Promises –

1) Manage Complexity, Achieve Agility – Bingo! (kidding)

We are looking to do Virtualization at three levels: Hardware, OS and Application.
I think I heard that Softricity (another acquisition intent) allows you to run two versions of Office on one desktop.
There was a demo of the Virtual Machine Manager (in Longhorn?) that allows you to dynamically hot add memory and CPUs to your Virtual servers.
Another demo: There is a wizard you can run to migrate a Physical server to Virtual Server.
System Center Operations Manager will have a task to add more memory to a Virtual Server instance if needed. You can even have it done automatically.
Deployment of Vista is better with a System Image manager that allows you to see the components of an image and modify them.
SMS allows you to run an inventory of your machines to find out what machines you can deploy Vista on.

2) Protect Information, Control Access

Windows Update allow 250 Million computers to be updated within 72 hours of patch release.
Forefront was mentioned again. You can find information about it at http://www.microsoft.com/forefront/default.mspx . It seems like a Suite of products that include Antigen for Exchange, SharePoint and Microsoft Client Protection.
I heard that Antigen for Exchange removes only the infected files from zip files and lets the clean files through. That was nice to know.
Antigen for SharePoint recognizes when you rename a file so that it’s extension is different and will still block it if that attachment type is not allowed.

3) Advance the Business with IT Solutions

The Products that do this are Visual Studio and Expression. I’m not a developer, so this was over my head.

4) Amplify the impact of your People

Outlook Voice Access (OVA) – New to Exchange Server 2007. This is the ability to check your email over the phone. Actually it does more than that. Evidently there is a lot of buzz over this. In the spirit of being “Honest and Respectful”: I’m not sure I would use this, but I suppose that there are those that would love to have this. It looks innovative to me which I am very happy to see. The speech recognition of the product seems good. The voice also sounds very good. I just hate to have people reading to me. I like to read too much.
The future of search allow us to search the intranet and find content and then sort it by the writer’s Social relevance to me in the company. That way I can find data that is more relevant to my job. I’ve used this, and it is very interesting.
I heard the term Wiki again. On a side note: I used to live in Hawaii and when I lived there my roommate and I used to say “wiki wiki wiki” every time we saw the Wiki Wiki buses at the Airport. Turns out that is where the term Wiki comes from.
Slide Library – This was spoken of by Bill Gates in 2005, but this was the first time I saw this. It is part of SharePoint which along with Powerpoint 2007 allows you to do a search of your PPT library for that one Slide that you need to add to your own slide deck. Then you choose to add it.
Over 600K laptops are lost every year? Bitlocker would be helpful in those instances. Some estimates from other companies put this at 1-2 Million.