WEDR 2006 has kicked off

The Windows Embedded Design Review (WEDR) is currently in progress and is held this year at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Bellevue. This event runs over 3 days and is an opportunity for Microsoft to host over 200 Windows Embedded customers, partners, and MVPs who represent a cross-section of industries and device categories. Space is limited at this event and attendance is therefore by invitation only. WEDR is the Windows Embedded teams’ principal product planning event held to present and incorporate feedback on Microsoft’s roadmap and plan for future releases of Windows Embedded CE and Windows XP Embedded. This year we also added the WEPOS/POS for .NET track to the WEDR event.

At WEDR, our technical experts present detailed plans and proposals for our next Windows Embedded releases and systematically gather their feedback to ensure that our products reflect highest priority needs of the market. Each of the sessions deal with a part of our product roadmap, and we present the various ideas, features and work items we are thinking of implementing in each of these areas. We also ask a series of very specific questions and customers vote using hand-held voting consoles, and these responses are collated and displayed after each question. This process allows us to get targeted and immediate feedback from customers on which items have value to them, and what priority we should assign to each of these areas, so we can make better use of our resources to implement the most important, valuable items first. Customers and partners greatly benefit by being deeply involved in our product planning process and having the first glimpse of the plans for our future, allowing them to adapt their investments and plans accordingly.

Another benefit to the product team is the opportunity to meet with a variety of customers and get exposure to the many different industries that Embedded devices are deployed in, as well as gain a better understanding of the types of devices that customers are building, as well as the unique challenges each customer faces. All roles within the product team are represented at this event - Product Planning, Test, Program Management, Development, Marketing. Customers also have the opportunity to ask questions of the product team to gain better insight into some of the decisions we made in the past, what our plans and timeframes are around future products, and how we think to implement those plans.

The whole focus of this event is to receive feedback from customers regarding what features are important to them moving forward in the next 2-3 years. As always, we are interested in feedback on all levels from all customers, so we encourage people to send us their feedback to either the wecrt@microsoft.com alias, or by posting a comment to this blog post (if you would prefer to give feedback but remain anonymous). The areas we are most interested in feedback in are:

- what need to you see for a Vista Embedded Product (what sort of devices would benefit from Vista technologies)

- what features of Vista are most interesting to you in an Embedded space

- what features of Vista that may be made available to down-level systems like XP Professional would you like to see back-ported to XP Embedded

- How important is footprint to you (if you are using something other than a HDD, what size storage device do you see yourself using in the next 2 years?)

- Lynda

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 22, 2006
  Just in time for Thanksgiving, at least for the US folks. When you’ve finished up your turkey and ready