The Microsoft Innovation Machine

Spot the marketing speak...

Second to back row in large auditorium, and everyone has a plastic tube to hit. Fighting has not yet broken out. Six different notes, but no discernable tune. I was expecting "Close Encounters"--very disappointing...

Bob Kelly is going to dialog with us--he's really excited. There are 5200 people at IT Forum this year. He's thanking us again for "dialoging" with us--I wish I was playing bingo. No more industry trends now, we have "megatrends". …Msut remember… he is in marketing.

Hardware perf, web 2.0, software "breakthroughs" and broadband, wireless are the "megatrends".

Dynamic IT; Dynamic Systems Initiative; People_Ready. Bob is telling us about technical underpinnings today, not just marketing speak. Unified and virtualized; process lead, model driven; service enabled; user-focused. Not sure that they can really do more than pay lip-service to that vision right now.

Process-lead, model driven: sounds like the DSI stuff is an investment that MSFT is continuing to make--could be there's value in it someday… "User focused is at the core of our heritage". Good grief! Internally they know that they are not producing much in the way of Task Based UI, so this really is lip-service.

February 27th starts launch of Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008. Joint launch wave--although SQL Server 2008 will not ship until towards the end of the first half of next year.

Windows Server 2008: NAP; "read-only DC" in a branch. Interesting. IIS 7. True hypervisor . Announcing: "Microsoft Hyper-V Server" SKU. Hyper-V is the hypervisor in Windows Server 2008. Eight different SKUs… php natively supported on Windows Server 2008.

IIS 7 seems to have a number of new and useful features for building large roust web-sites -- but learning what it does might still be painful--does not seem to be a task-based UI, but MMC 3.0... I need to look at terminal services remote app--ran an app remotely from an externally facing SharePoint site. I wonder if they have a hands-on self-paced lab on TS remote app…?

Virtualization Strategy
1. Presentation Virtulaization (terminal services)
2. Application virtualization (SoftGrid)
3. Server Virtualizations (Virtual Server)
4. Desktop Virtualization (Virtual PC)

System Center -- focusing on building one toolset for managing both… (hmmmm… this must be some kind of change, since there was a separate Virtual Server Manager… wait a minute, there still is).

Integration components for Linux servers to run under Windows Server 2008--can roll-back a service pack without re-booting, through snapshotting. Not clear whether the snap-shot is just the OS and hence state…

So there is System Center virtual machine manager… isn't this a separate tool for doing virtual machine management? MSFT says that a new version of Virtual Machine manager will be able to manage ESX VM images. Moving virtual machines from one machine to another does not happen dynamically, but takes three or four seconds as a result of manual action. So behind VMWare.

Softgrid demo showing four different versions of MSFT Word running on the same machine at the same time in different virtualized environments. Softgrid is being re-named as "Application Virtualization Version 4.5". Being released in the summer. Very cool.

"Microsoft innovation machine." I don't think Bob Kelly can help himself.

Bill Anderson doing demo on Data Protection Manager, and incorporates System Center Configuration Manager Task Sequencer. Using driver catalog, so that all the drivers, for all the different servers and desktops you use have only the drivers they need in the images that are deployed. "Business Desktop Deployment" (BDD) is now called "Microsoft Deployment". Showed how to use Desired Configuration Management to set a configuration baseline.

Intellisense in SQL Server 2008 when writing SQL. New visualizations in SQL Server 2008 Reporting…

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Windows Home Server introduced--launched last week. Share files across the computers in the home.
Every desktop has a link to the servers that there is a central repository. Network health is monitored. Start daily back-ups every night--waking machines to do the work of back-up before putting them back to sleep.

Can do full system restore from the server--picking any back-up from any date. Can share home-server across the internet--and remote desktop to any PC in the house connected to the Home Server.