PDC 2008 Wrap Up

I think we can all agree that the PDC 2008 was pretty special. Azure, Windows 7, Office Web, Azure Services, Live Mesh..the list goes on. The sheer amount of information given out at these conferences often means that we miss bits that are interesting and/or pertinent to our jobs & lives (this was certainly the case when I was at the WPC in Houston!).

Fear not, as Mike Swanson over at MSDN Blogs has put together a wonderful collection of all the Keynotes and sessions, and where possible he’s included the Powerpoints and sample code!

Some of the sessions I’m glad to see are below. The main links go to the video on Channel9, the Powerpoint link will download the .pptx presentation.

A lap around the Azure Services Platform (Powerpoint)

Microsoft Office Communications Server & Exchange: Platform Futures (Powerpoint)

Office Communications Server R2: Enabling Unified Communications (Powerpoint)

Microsoft Silverlight 2 for Mobile: Developing for Mobile Devices (Powerpoint)

The whole, wonderful list can be found here. There are countless sessions on SQL, Azure, .NET, Windows 7 and more!

I really want to give a big thank you to Mike for doing this..there are sooo many sessions on there I didn’t know about that are really interesting and useful!

Microsoft Software Plus Services

Microsoft Software Plus Services will be available to UK partners sometime during spring 2009, said the company’s Software plus Services reselling exec Maggie Chan Jones.

This is exciting for me as a UK Microsoft Gold Partner and I hope for you as a potential customer. Over at this year’s Partner Conference (WPC), there was a LOT of talk about Software plus Services, and it was a hot topic again today in London.

Software plus Services (S+S) is Microsoft’s version of SAAS (Software As A Service). The main difference is SAAS indicates that it replaces traditional “on the desktop” software while S+S complements it. The most well known examlpe of SAAS is salesforce.com, a complete CRM (Customer Relations Management) system that sits in the “Cloud”, so is all accessed via a web interface and not installed on the clients internal PC’s and servers.

This goes against Microsoft’s typical business model and so many people have announced the “end of Microsoft”, which seems a bit over the top to me! I’m sure it’s true that Microsoft wouldn’t have come up with SAAS on their own and in fact, in Houston this year, Microsoft called it “a disruption”..but one that they will meet and embrace.

The Software Plus Services line up includes:

Microsoft Exchange Online

Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services

Microsoft Office Sharepoint Online

Microsoft Office Live Meeting

Microsoft Office Communications Online

Most of these are available as Beta versions in the U.S at the moment.

Bechtle UK are a leading Microsoft Gold Partner and our MS business is built upon “on-premise” software that is installed into the customer’s environment; so S+S is very different to what we’re used to. I think it’s safe to say that some people were unsure about S+S/SAAS a while back but now, we’re all excited about the opportunity and ready to go!

S+S will make it easier for customers whose software budgets can’t stretch to the purchase of a company wide setup ofSharepoint or OCS for example. With the advent of S+S, they’ll be able to utilise the software and experience it’s countless benefits to efficiency and productivity at a price that will be more affordable and easier to manage for them.

Microsoft Server Software VHD’s

Microsoft have released a slew of Virtual Hard Disks (VHD’s) making it quick and easy to evaluate Microsoft software for free, in your environment.

Their “Run IT on a Virtual Hard Disk” initiative can be found here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/bb738372.aspx

and includes product such as:

• Exchange 2007
• Sharepoint 2007
• Windows Vista
• System Center
• and many more

By installing these on a virtual machine, you can have the application up and running very quickly, reducing the amount of time that Test & Dev takes..which can only be a good thing right?

Microsoft Exchange in Virtual Environments

Microsoft Exchange on a Virtual Server: The official line was always “No-it’s not supported”, but the release of Hyper-V has brought some changes.

Hyper-V now lets you run the Exchange 2007 SP1 64 bit versions of Mailbox, Hub Transport and Client Access Server Roles  without losing support, however Unified Messaging is still only supported on physical hardware.

Here’s a link to the support policy and recommendations paper for Exchange 2007 on Microsoft Virtualization technology:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc794548(EXCHG.80).aspx

“What about us non Hyper-V users?” I hear you cry..

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=897615

is a link to the ”support policy for Microsoft software running in non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software”. As you can see, your Hypervisor needs to have been validated to be supported and so far the only on is VMWare ESX 3.5u2.

Also, here’s a link that shows all the MS Server software that is supported when running on a validated Hypervisor:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/957006

To see what Microsoft have got to say about the world of Unified Communications, head over to the Microsoft UK UC Blog at:

http://blogs.technet.com/msukucc/

Cheers

Rich