TechEd Europe report: Andrew Lees Keynote: Ready for Business
Andrew Lees Keynote: Ready for Business
Andrew Lees' opening keynote session at TechEd Europe 2005, "Ready for Business," discussed how Microsoft innovations across the board address productivity and security challenges from three viewpoints in an organization: Developer, IT Pro, and Information Worker. Lees' presentation was interspersed with a number of interesting demos, as well as a cute, episodic theatrical dialogue between archetypal employees that represented the 3 aforementioned perspectives.
Lees' timesplit was weighted in favour of developer productivity, with initial commentary on: 64-bit computing providing a "bump in Moore's Law," the coming release of Windows Server 2k3 R2 providing branch management and Active Directory Federation Services, and the Corporate Cluster Edition, which will allow tasks to be distributed around a cluster of computers; virtualization, with Virtual Server 2005 today and moving forward to "Hypervisor" virtualization capabilities built into Longhorn.
Lees offered a particularly well-articulated description of the move toward connected systems and the creation of composite applications using service orientation. He addressed how Microsoft makes this easy for the 3 roles, citing ultra-high availability (e.g. of databases), and stronger security through techniques such as (1) reduction of surface area, (2) enhanching data security and (3) providing configuration guidance.
We saw an interesting comparative demo of SQL Server performance, where SQL 2000 was compared against SQL 2005 32bit, which could bear roughly 2x the load. SQL Server 2005 64 bit could then bear more than another 2x the load without breaking a sweat, for more than 4x the original SQL 2000 load. Finally, with drama for emphasis, we saw database mirroring demoed as Lees quite literally took a hammer to the network switch and showed the failover from one machine to another.
More integrated innovation was called out in the dev tools - he cited ASP.NET 2.0's capacity for SQL Caching; the integration of the CLR into SQL Server 2005; BizTalk for architectural integration, and Team System's ability to move Visual Studio from a developer focus to a development focus.
The most engaging demo of the developer piece was a demo of an early release of Microsoft's RFID technology. All of us thousands of attendees had been given an RFID tag that anonymously tracked our movement through the TechEd convention centre. Our movements were being logged in real-time into SQL Server 2005 database. SQL Server 2005 Service Broker was being used to trigger a stored procedure written in Visual Basic.NET (thus demonstrating CLR integration). The procedure would indicate when a particular tag (allegedly worn by the wayward developer from the theatrical shenanigans) entered into the room. As we watched, the gentleman doing the demo updated a Smart Client (WinForms) application which visualized our movements, and deployed the changed version using ClickOnce, the new deployment and updating technology in Visual Studio 2005.
Lees talked about business intelligence, and the SQL Server Integrate, Analyse, Report paradigm. The #1 requested tool for SQL Server was a Report Builder that would allow Information Workers (read: non-geeks) to build custom reports without having to call the IT guy, which SQL Server 2005's Reporting Services delivers. Lees also really drive home the point with two impressive SQL Server competitive metrics: its lead in unit share, but lags in cost. This moved quite cleverly (complete with a laugh and applause) into a discussing of migration assistance from Oracle to SQL.
The Information Worker component of the talk focused on some of the manifestations of the Trustworthy Computing initiative, and included some new stats I haven't heard before - such as the 3/4 of a million IT Pros that have been trained by Microsoft on security best practices, using webcasts, prescriptive guidance, events like this, and so on. Moving forward, one unifying initiative is Windows Update, which provides one infrastructure for updating across the platform. Microsoft Baseline Security Analyser 2.0 was just released (and I just finished using Remote Desktop to run it against my own home server!). Windows Server Update Services, MOM and SMS2003 round out the updating tools, and the overall result of all this is a significant reduction in cost and time to patch Microsoft systems, both compared to their previous incarnations, and their current competitors.
The final focus of the keynote was Microsoft's Security Innovation Commitment, and included a demo of Sybori, a layered, server-level defense against virii, which scans all in-bound traffic to a network using multiple engines. The final demo also included a look at ISA2004 and Windows Mobile 5 security. A server pushed out a device-level policy onto a mobile phone, which, when stolen, would allow only an attacker a few attempts to log into the device with failed passwords before it automatically wiped the contents of the device.
[Disclaimer: I am writing these pieces at warp-speed while trying to absorb the content and do all the other things one does when at a conference! So I'll do my very best to keep these accurate, but please cut me slack if I come back to clean up these entries, and to add links, as time permits.]