Thought I would share my favourite books with you all:
All well worth a read and fantastic books!
Enjoy!
Yesterday afternoon and evening saw the first UK Enterprise Search Partner Community event. We had around 50 partners attend in two streams both technical and commercial and had a relaxed, jovial and fun time - not to mention educational!
The winners of the UK Search Awards went to:
They both won for their expertise on the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 platform, the number of customer wins and their ability to help Microsoft to change the landscape of Enterprise Search - both are absolutely fantastic partners!
The main announcement was that we in the UK have launched the first ever Microsoft based Search Appliance. SCAN Technologies have partnered with us to use their expertise and our technology to build on MOSS 07 and deliver a very simple to install, configure and deploy MOSS 07 based Search Appliance. If you are interested in this then please mail me directly at mikepal@microsoft.com or call Pete at SCAN on +44 7976 312 862
I have attached to this post one of the presentations and will post the other shortly.
Lastly but by no means least - thanks to Ovum and Mike for coming along and experiencing the buzz of the Microsoft channel community at its best - thanks for making the long trip down!
So following on with the third video in the trilogy with insights from Jeff Wierer Senior Product Manager for Windows HPC and Ryan Waite Group Programme Manager for Windows Compute Cluster Server. Some interesting points on what these chaps do but also:
Made me smile:
How to tell if your boss is nuts: saw this from the brilliant Execupundit blog: http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/bing/0706/quiz.crazybosses.fortune/index.html
Think I might be lucky having read some of those weirdo options to tick!
Why Search when you can find?
Check out the great new web site that we are using in Microsoft UK to showcase Enterprise Search solutions using MOSS 07. Initially, I and a small team have delivered a single site that showcases the following:
1. A dozen customers from a dozen different verticals using Microsoft Enterprise Search
2. A dozen sizes of customer from a 20 man business all the way to heavy weights like BP and EasyJet
Why is this cool? Because Enterprise Search isn't just for Enterprise customers - no, it is applicable and highly valued by all sorts of customer size. Here you will find small snapshots all about the customer experience as well as links to the full Microsoft case studies for the more technical amongst you. In the words of Clive a Tax Partner from Reeves and Neylan:
“We call our intranet the ‘Guru.’ It’s a teacher,a guide, a trusted counsellor and a mentor.Anything we have created in the last four yearsis available in an instant. I can type ‘sharescheme’ and it’ll show me all the reports andletters my colleagues have written. It could saveme hours compared to writing something fromscratch. It’s like a web search for everything mycompany knows.” Clive Relf, Tax Partner,Reeves & Neylan.
“We call our intranet the ‘Guru.’ It’s a teacher,a guide, a trusted counsellor and a mentor.Anything we have created in the last four yearsis available in an instant. I can type ‘sharescheme’ and it’ll show me all the reports andletters my colleagues have written. It could saveme hours compared to writing something fromscratch. It’s like a web search for everything mycompany knows.”
Clive Relf, Tax Partner,Reeves & Neylan.
Now come on hands up - how many of you have heard an end user customer use euphoric language like that to talk about an IT solution?! The customers include:
Huge thanks to all the amazing partners who have helped the above customers to find and not search!
So there I was working away and an e-mail from the World Communications Awards dropped into my inbox - so I had a quick look and the irony was amazing!
Made me smile - happens to us all!
Nice bit of fresh news and what great timing - just before ISC 07! Love it when this type of thing comes out!
This step-by-step guide is based on the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) cluster that achieved 4.1 TFLOPS and can serve as a basis for setting up your large-scale compute cluster.
Deployment steps described in this white paper are based on the highly successful cluster deployment at National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. The cluster was built as a joint effort between NCSA and Microsoft, using commonly available hardware and Microsoft software. The cluster was composed of 450 x64 servers, achieving 4.1 teraflops (TFLOPs) on 896 processors using the widely accepted LINPACK benchmark.The skill level that is required to complete the steps in this document assumes knowledge of how to install, configure, and manage Microsoft Windows Server 2003 in an Active Directory environment, and experience in adding and managing computers and users within a domain.
Hat tip to Steve for this great link to a whitepaper on CCS which sounds like it does just what it says on the tin and should help you out with those more prickly of problems you may encounter!
Step-by-Step Guide to Installing, Configuring, and Tuning a High-Performance Compute Cluster
I have spent this week at the International SuperComputing Show in Dresden - a great show with a really concentrated group of people from the industry.
I thought I would share a few of the significant press releases and announcements that have come out this year at ISC 07, some of my favorites include:
“I am pleased to see these new Top500 systems based on Windows Compute Cluster Server. The submissions underscore Microsoft’s profound interest in our community and prove that supercomputing can be done on Windows.”Prof. Dr. Hans Werner Meuer,Co-Founder of the Top500 list
Interesting write up here: Microsoft Back on the Top 500 List of Biggest HPC Systems
Interesting write up here:
Microsoft Back on the Top 500 List of Biggest HPC Systems
and
Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ), a provider of software solutions, on Tuesday announced that it has extended its worldwide sales and marketing agreement with Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) to address the high-performance computing or HPC market.The companies have planned to market high-performance computing into the mass market by delivering supercomputing clusters that are easier to deploy, support and manage for enterprise and mid-market customers.
Hewlett-Packard Extends Worldwide Sales And Marketing Agreement Microsoft
and this particular beauty...
Windows Server Woos Linux Customers - i had the pleasure of meeting Peter last year in Boston and it's nice to see our working relationship with him grow.
Just looking through a few slide decks that different colleagues are using around Europe. One of the most useful is a great slide on the value of Excel Services which I thought I would share:
As they say: a picture tells a thousand words....or in my case - a picture helps stupid people to understand things :-)
So as you will have seen last week and will see again tomorrow we have been out and about with the Partner TV video camera taking shots from the product teams when we manage to catch them!
Here is a fascinating video clip of some early work we have planned - all around making Human 2.0: The example used is my boss Steve Clayton - huge thanks go to Ryan Waite for this amazing product insight:
Hmmm ever felt that someone is putting their heart and soul into something but don't quite see the big picture?
Made me smile, thanks to Jon at TBS for sending through!
Great new reference in the Environmental Sciences Network.
Nice use of CCS for a new area – nice to see more than Finance, Academia and Engineering hitting the headlines – look forward to seeing those Media and Assurance references! Well done to all involved and of course to the University of Southampton – stunning work.