Chip - Day 3

Today the keynote presentations were from Bill Gates & Brian Valentine.

Bill’s presentation was “Innovating through the digital decade”.  He spoke about Microsoft’s big dreams and investments over the years: The Windows PC, The Web and .NET Web Services.  And he spoke about the big investments we are making now, which is all about software and services.  We got to see demonstrations of Office 12 (the next release of Office, due out this summer), Exchange 12 (the next version of Exchange, due out towards the end of this year) and Windows Live (which you can experience for yourselves at: https://www.live.com) – it’s one place on the internet where you can go and look at everything you want, a focal point if you like.  Bill also spoke about Microsoft Assets both in the terms of the products we make and in terms of the technologies that we have and that we research – things like Translation, Speech, Ink, DRM, and the likes.  Some technologies we have had for years but the products are only just coming into play – IPTV for instance (we’ve had that for nearly ten years, but it’s only now that broadband internet is more widely available, that television over the internet is becoming a reality.  Bills presentations are always pretty interesting – it’s good to hear “the bosses” views on things.

Brian’s presentation was about Windows Vista (the next version of our client operating system, due to release to manufacturing (RTM) this summer – it will be widely available sometime before next Christmas.  Brian only had a couple of slides, which meant that his session was nearly all demonstrations.

I also attended a session that covered off the next point release of Systems Management Server 2003 R2 – which basically is SMS 2003 with service pack two applied and with two neat additions: a scan tool for vulnerability assessment and an inventory tool for custom updates.  The scan tool for vulnerability assessment uses the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyser (MBSA) 2.0 engine to perform vulnerability assessments on your machines and then lets you report on all the misconfigurations that you might have.  The inventory tool for custom updates will let customers deploy updates to any software, not just Microsoft (things like Adobe for example – or any in-house written application).

There was a good session on System Centre Reporting Manager 2006 – which has been in beta for a long while now.  It should be released before the summer.  SCRM takes operational data from SMS and MOM and joins it with business context data from Active Directory.  It’s going to helps IT and Business Managers to make better decisions, to improve their service quality and to better manage their IT resources.

I also attended a great session on Windows Mobile.  We’ve gone from having pretty much zero percent of the market (when the big battle was Palm vs. Pocket PC) to a place where Palm are shipping devices running Windows Mobile and we have the biggest share of the handheld market.  There are some great devices out now that are either telephones first (with all the other PDA software as secondary – mail, calendar, contacts, etc) or a PDA that has the telephone functionality built in.  We got to see loads of demos of the new devices and got to see how we can now compete with RIM – our solution is better and cheaper than Blackberry.

That’s it for Wednesday – more tomorrow..

Dave

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  September 04, 2008
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