Microsoft Tech-Ed deadblog

By Richi Jennings. June 7, 2010.

Greetings from Microsoft's Tech-Ed conference in New Orleans. Apparently, there's another big technology conference going on today, but I wouldn't know about that. I'm here as a guest of Microsoft's Server and Tools Business, which has made some interesting announcements this morning.

(By the way, if you're wondering why this is a "deadblog" not a liveblog, it's because the Wi-Fi in the keynote hall is utterly unusable while thousands of IT geeks hammer away at it.)

In no particular order, here's what's caught my eye so far...

Application virtualization on servers: desktop application virtualization isn't new, but now Microsoft has moved it to the Windows Server platform. That means you can bring up new server instances based on a template OS image, and simply apply a virtualized application on top of that image.

Analysis: this could be a boon for testing and deploying new versions of live applications; especially at scale. Also good for cloud environments where you require quick on-demand, elastic capacity increases.

Federated identity from ActiveDirectory: Microsoft demonstrated a B2B scenario where a customer was booking a deliver from a shipping service. In the demo, the shipping website recognized the user without an explicit logon. The explanation was that the shipping site recognized the user based on his ActiveDirectory authentication being exposed across the Internet.

Analysis: yeah, right. I simply can't imagine many organizations being willing to federate their AD forest in this way. Perhaps this is more a criticism of the choice of demo scenario, but I just don't see it.

Service Pack 1 Beta in July for both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. The latter includes the new Dynamic memory and Remote VM features (we discussed these back in March).

Analysis: in a way, Microsoft had to get an SP1 out for Windows 7, to satisfy the folks who "won't deploy until SP1." The new virtualization features should make it easier to manage environments with a high ratio of VMs to hypervisors.

Excel and PowerPivot: for years, there's been a tension between Excel and Access. It's incredibly common that users would build what were essentially database-driven applications or workflows on top of Excel. Office 2010 attacks this pragmatically, by putting more database into Excel, allowing it to support far larger datasets and perform far better when manipulating large sets. The newly-announced PowerPivot technology adds new UIs for slicing and dicing data.

Analysis: PowerPivot makes a super, whizz-bang demo; let's see how well it works in real life. If you've ever suffered using data analysis tools such as SPSS, you should take a look at PowerPivot.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics: Microsoft is claiming 40 million users of their "Online" cloud-based services, which compete with Google Apps.

Analysis: specifically, this statistic is the total number of users of Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and LiveMeeting; one of these things is, however, not like the other. You shouldn't infer tremendous momentum for the Online versions of Exchange and SharePoint. Based on some other statistics, I'd estimate that only about 4 million of these users -- 10% --- are Exchange Online.

 
Comments? Questions? Hit me up below...
 

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Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and security. A cross-functional IT geek since 1985, you can follow him as @richi on Twitter, pretend to be richij's friend on Facebook, or just use good old email: TLV@richij.com.

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