Tech-Ed 2007
On Monday evening I attended the JAM Sessions at Tech-Ed 2007. This years sessions were held at The Groove, Universal Studios. The idea of JAM sessions is to enable “normal” geeks to jump up on stage and play their favourite instrument or sing to the crowd along in a band scenario.
It’s great fun and all in good spirits, sometimes people sound like drowned rats but most of the time you can tell these guys are pretty good! Check out the pics and video from the event below.
The Groove:
On Stage at The Groove:
Inside The Groove:
Universal Studios:
I met with Deborah Sommer a short time ago to discuss the new features of Windows Mobile 6.
I asked Sommer several questions regarding usability of the devices. A lot of people have complained that Microsoft have moved the new SMS/email option to a menu with more clicks required. Sommer explained that this was down to usability studies and that many businesses simply view email and delete email straight away on the devices - mainly due to spam.
Sommer demonstrated Live Search for Mobile, this allows users in the United States and United Kingdom to search for businesses in a specific area and then grab a map associated to this. I haven’t tried this application on my HTC S710 but I was rather impressed with the demo. You can get this for your Windows Mobile phone here.
I asked Sommer about Windows Update for Windows Mobile 6 devices. This will only be used for critical patches as Microsoft cannot distribute updates/new product features because of the tight control that mobile device operators require.
Sommer demonstrated the new UI changes with Windows Mobile 6 including searching email with predictive txt and searching email across an Exchange server. Both of these features are great additions to Windows Mobile 6 and allow users to search the device extremely quickly. Flagging email messages has also been built into Windows Mobile 6 but this does require Exchange 2007. For more information on the features of WM6 that require Exchange 2007 please see the Exchange teams blog.
Setting up email in Windows Mobile 6 is a lot easier as Microsoft has added the top 100 email providers (gmail, yahoo etc) to auto config all the required pop3 servers to grab your email onto your device.
I asked Sommer about the recent announcement of Windows Mobile Device Center 6.1 for Windows Vista, this is coming in mid-june and will continue WM6 support and a few bug fixes for various exception errors that a limited amount of users have been experiencing.
One interesting new feature is the ability to encrypt SD cards with Windows Mobile 6. The cards can only be used in that specific device but one draw back is that if you wipe the device and the card is not present and you put the card back in at a later date, you will not be able to access this data as it’s based on a “per session, per device” method. Microsoft is aware of these drawbacks and is working to address these according to Martin Booth.
As for all the new features of Windows Mobile 6, I will be taking videos of the demonstrations Microsoft has on display this afternoon and will upload these accordingly.
Today I attended what looked to be a great session on the future of Windows Mobile Device Management. Microsoft didn’t really go into detail about what they were planning but there were a few indications.
Martin Booth, Program Manager in the Mobile Communications Group at Microsoft took us through the current offerings of Windows Mobile Device Management. The top customer requests are as follows:
Obviously most of these concerns from customers have yet to be addressed. Compared with RIM’s Blackberry management software, Microsoft’s is rather lacking.
Microsoft has the age old problem of device owners when it comes to Windows Mobile 5 & 6. Microsoft would love to push out feature updates over Windows Update (Windows Mobile 6 devices only) but as network operators ultimately support the devices, they’re unable to do so.
Microsoft has to balance the power control between the 3 and yet ensure critical updates are fed through to the devices.
Microsoft admitted in the briefing that they are simply “not quite there yet” with management of mobile devices.
Clearly Windows Mobile 6 is a great jump in security and management of devices comparing Windows Mobile 5 to 6:
Windows Mobile 6:
Booth then moved on to explain the several ways of best pushing policies and controlling devices in an Enterprise environment. These were Exchange 2003, 2007 and SMS (no support for smartphones). There is also clearly a big improvement between Exchange 2003 policies and 2007:
Exchange 2007:
SMS 2003:
Booth didn’t want to mention exactly what Microsoft was planning and instead gave us an amusing (for 1/2 a second) slide of his “vision”
In System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (SMS 2007) Microsoft is planning to add over the air support and smartphone support as the major updates.
Going beyond this and possibly into the next version of Exchange and Windows Mobile the company wants to make the device participate in Active Directory group policices, Windows Software update services, System Center and the recently announced Forefront security technologies.
Booth didn’t mention exactly when and how this would happen but clearly the company wants to tighten up the policy management and provide even better power to the enterprise.
Booth finished the session by showing us the companies vision:
I expected a little more insight from this session but unfortunately Microsoft is very tight lipped this year.
On the floor near the Microsoft green area are a selection of current Windows Mobile 6 devices on offer, i’ve snapped all of them - check them out below!
T-Mobile Dash
Motorola Q
Glofish X500
Toshiba G900
I-mate JAQ 4
Samsung Blackjack
Palm Treo 750
i-mate SPL
HP iPAQ 510
HTC S710
Cingular 8525
Microsoft kicked off the annual Tech-Ed show with an impressive keynote focussing on agility and Windows Server 2008.
The beginning of the keynote started with a fun video with Bob Mulgia and Christopher Lloyd as “back to the future”. This was one of the best jokes videos to date.
Mulgia kicked off his keynote emphasising that Microsoft wants to be your business partner for the long run and that the company is providing a road map to allow you to take advantage of software to improve your business. The usual PR but as the keynote went on you could see there was a clear point Microsoft was trying to make; interoperability.
Next up was a video focusing on Energizer (the guys who fuel most of your gadgets with their batteries). The company has 6600 users who (thanks to Microsoft) now use sharepoint and Office 2007.
Tom Bittman, Vice President and Chief of research at Gartner donned the stage next talking about the future and the next generation of workers. Tom explained that like children, we expect response times to be instant and that expectations are shrinking because of this. Gartner believes business needs to be agile, provide quality of service and focus on economics to make up infrastructure operations maturity. The company also believes that looking at different ways to mature, break up projects and structure projects into stages will make businesses more agile for the future.
Mulgia then focused on Microsoft making sure data in environments is secure. Microsoft is commited to taking platform and products that Microsoft create so they can share with other vendors. Mulgia then announced that Microsoft has been working with open source communities and that xandros (a linux distro) has taken a licence of Microsoft’s IP. This is the second distro after Novell so it’s pretty big news - maybe others will follow?
Jeff Woolsey, senior program manager jumped on stage to highlight Windows Server 2008 and the “server core” functionality.
IIS7 can now be installed as a server core component enabing businesses to just install IIS7 and only IIS7 on a Windows Server 2008 machine. Server core consists of command line arguements to operate.
Virtual Machine Manager was demonstrated to convert Vmware virtual machines onto the Windows Virtualization Server.
Mulgia and Brian Golfard talked about creating office applications with Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio tools for Office 3.0. This was an impressive demo intergrating WPF components directly into mail forms and contact forms in Outlook 2007. Golfard also demostrated ribbon customisation.
Mulgia explained user focused interoperability with the idea of Microsoft services and applications being able to be used on multiple devices.
Jamie Cool provided some great examples of Silverlight running 10 videos at the same time in Firefox. Silverlight deploys in seconds and within 3 weeks of development time you can create web apps with rich video at less than 50k!
Microsoft also announced that they have accquired Engyro, an enterprise managements system company. Microsoft will use this technology to connect to other management tools using System Center.
Mulgia briefly detailed the future outlining that SQL Server 2008 & Visual Studio 2008 will ship next year and Windows Server 2008 is still due to ship at the end of this year.
Today, Microsoft kicks off its anual Tech-Ed conference in Orlando, Florida.
It’s 7am and I am getting prepared to head over to the event, grab breakfast and get some pictures of the keynote etc.
Keep checking for regular updates as during the breaks I will be uploading content.
