The analyst summit portion of TechEd is about 1/2 over. We're over in the newly named Hilton in the Finical District, crammed into a little ballroom. There's a customer panel up next (panelests: Dell – Glen Curry; Mediterranean Shipping Company – Fabio Catassi, Chief Technology Officer;
US Veterans Health Administration - Jack Bates, Director, Corporate Data Warehouse).
In the meantime, here are some bullet points from this morning's general sessions and break-outs:
Office System 2007
As James has noted, Microsoft is planning on Office being the center of your information life. SharePoint will be a services hub, and things will fall out from there.
The demo in the keynote last note showed a slide in a PowerPoint being shared on SharePoint. So, while you were editing the presentation, you could see if someone else had modified it. If they had, you could merge in the changes. So, the sell is: no more non-technology people using CVS and Subversion, plus, of course, plenty of added bonuses for being pure Microsoft.
Still...I am highly, highly skeptical of Microsoft being able to deliver on a seachange like that the world switching over to such a different setup as that. We'll see.
Steve and I have a 1:1 with him later this afternoon, and my biggest question for him is how we can get more Microsoft people as active members of OSS projects.
I have no doubt that there are already people participating both officially and unofficially, but it's certainly not a well know fact or lore. The JBoss and SugarCRM partnerships are interesting, and it'd be great to see that extended out into more projects: getting Microsoft people to write code that makes running OSS applications better on Windows. Can't hurt Windows to get more apps running on it...well, more or less depending on the app ;>
SDM and MSFT Systems Management
During Ed Anderson's breakout on DSI, Omar Kouatly showed a demo of modeling with SDM in System Center 2007/MOM. He's also a nice guy. We both share that weird interest in systems management. I am, of course, very interest in SDM.
We talked afterwards briefly, so hopefully we'll get more on the SDM angle. I'm still awaiting finding out what MSFT thinks of the OMC and co., and vice-versa.
We also had some hallway chat about MSFT's path to ITIL, which, as we found at at MMS, starts with SDM, continues to Service Desk, and will sometime in the next few years have a CMDB. I suspect MSFT is waiting for Vista/Longhorn to get out the door before jumping whole-hog on the ITIL wave.
Also: Microsoft say they're #5 now in systems management by revenue, after HP, IBM, BMC, and CA. They had 13% (?) growth
yr/yr. "We ultimitly can see ourselves going up this ladder quite
dramatically."
The Long Tail of Your User-base
They've bumped up against the Wisdom of Crowds system idea quite a lot when hosted services come up, e.g., from my notes:
Exchange Hosting: They use a Google Idea of harnesing a quantity of
information -- hotmail and microsoft.com spam -- to create better spam
filter. Sure, it's a Google idea, but what the hell, it's a good
one. What's interesting is if they do it in areas other than email, like my favorite, collaborative systems management.
A Bumper Crop
Finally, get ready for a million products to blossom this over the next 12-18 months. It's gonna be overload, dear readers:
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