TechEd US 2008 session - How Microsoft does IT

Bink.nu has done a fantastic write up of a "How Microsoft does IT" session at TechEd this week

Barry Briggs, CTO of Microsoft IT, spoke about the challenges and ambitions of what Microsoft IT wants to  achieve, as you can see from the image below, the environment they have to manage is huge

Below is a summary but go to Bink.nu for the full report:

Information Database
How to deal with serving over 80m companies and over 1b individuals, and consolidation

Newsletter or Newspaper?
Barry showed off a little something he cooked up using WPF: a  newsletter app. The tiny mini app allowed MS IT employees read the newsletter like a normal newspaper. He encourages people to pick up the free tools and get started! https://windowsclient.net/wpf/starter-kits/sce.aspx

Security
Barry spoke about the challenges of internal and external access, as well as user authentication

Virtualisation
They want 80% of all new server workloads to work on the Hyper-V platform. ”No excuses!”

GreenIT
The criteria on which they select datacentres, for example, the new datacenter in Quincy, Washington is nearly 100% carbon neutral, they use special reflective paint and training companies about waste