Swiss IT Professional and TechNet Blog : cloud computing

Microsoft Connection Days

mepprecht — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 11:46:55 GMT

At five locations in Switzerland from 28 September up to 8. October 2009, Microsoft Connection Days (ex Partner Days), an event for Partners and IT professionals will be held.

This year, Microsoft Partners and now IT Professionals will have the opportunity, under one roof, to network and make interesting contacts. Five IT professional topics will be available for you to obtain the latest information about cloud computing (key note), Windows 7, Office/Exchange 2010, Windows Server R2 and Hyper-V R2, SQL Server and Online Services (BPOS).

Azure Business Model and Pricing

mepprecht — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:39:56 GMT

At the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2009, we just announced the business model and pricing for the Microsoft Azure Platform.

Have a look here for the details. Azure is available in Switzerland, among other countries.

Test Microsoft Online Services for Free for 30 days

mepprecht — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:46:27 GMT

On the 19th March, at x.Days, Microsoft Online was officially launched in Switzerland. Microsoft Business Productivity Online suite (BPOS) is this offering’s name which encompasses Services like SharePoint, Exchange and Unified Communications (IM, Presence and Live Meeting). Planned future enhancements are Online Versions of CRM.

BPOS is hosted in Microsoft Data Centers, under Microsoft Control. Currently for Europe, the data centers are in Dublin, Ireland and Amsterdam, Netherlands.

The whole suite costs about CHF 22.- per month, per user.

You have the opportunity to test the services for free for 30 days, and have a chance to win a HTC Touch Phone.

To test the service, following the following procedure:

Create a Live ID if you don't have one yet https://signup.live.com
Subscribe to the free 30 days Test Suite of Microsoft Online (“Sign up for a trial”) at https://mocp.microsoftonline.com
Wait for the confirmation e-mail. During this time, your Microsoft Online account will be provisioned.
Visit the Customer Portal to retrieve the Administrator Account Information.
Login to the Administration Center with the Administrator Account https://admin.emea.microsoftonline.com
Create your first user accounts, configure Outlook and create your SharePoint site.

Further Technical Information can be found on TechNet (English / German / French). If you want to continue to use the service after the trial 30 days, you may wish to have a Qualified BPOS partner guide you further. These Partners are capable of helping you with Migrations, further Setup and can answer questions relating to your specific needs.

Originally posted on http://blogs.technet.com/chitpro-de/archive/2009/03/20/microsoft-online-services-30-tage-gratis-testen.aspx

SQL Data Services – The New Features

mepprecht — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 22:14:00 GMT

It was announced today which features will be in version 1 of SQL Data Services, the data platform running on Microsoft’s Azure platform.

Do not confuse SQL Data Services (SDS) with SQL Server, the product you can install on your laptops and data centers. SDS is highly scalable, on-demand data storage and query processing utility services, running in the "Cloud" (Microsoft’s Data Centers)

Among the features supported are Tables, Stored Procedures, Triggers, Views, Indexes, Visual Studio Compatibility, ADO.Net Compatibility and ODBC Compatibility. Access will be via TDS, encrypted by SSL. From a development perspective, most things you can do with the SQL Server in your data center can be done with SDS.

See the SDS Product Team blogs for further information:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ssds/archive/2009/03/10/9469228.aspx
http://blogs.technet.com/dataplatforminsider/default.aspx

Azure - How does Microsoft build, provision, monitor and run the environment

mepprecht — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 12:17:52 GMT

A recorded session from the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is available that discusses the Microsoft Azure platform from a technical perspective.

In this session you will about the internal service management system and virtualization technologies responsible for monitoring, configuring, and lifecycle management of the cloud computing environment. Hear about the mechanisms used to deliver self-healing, dynamic scaling, and auto-deploying cloud computing data centers

http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/ES19/