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.
Detail shmetails…we will hit on the points discussed later
For now….some more pics!
Awesome burger place! Killed the quality of McDs late tonight 
How some of the staff look in infrared!
Few of us clowning around…. (pun intended!)
Yea someone else already posted it….but c’mon! ORLY’S!
Us waiting to chow down at ORLY’S! Yea I didnt aim the camera so well…conveniently not getting me much in it….this place was awesome, it’s also a bakery, so the bread and muffins that came before the meal were the best
Us planning the last trip of the last night of our Neowindex…midori sours are a new found love (good, now I saved the name so I might remember it!)
Today was another great day for those in attendance of NeowINDEX 2007 USA. We started out by eating lunch early and then grabbing a cab to the Museum of Science & Industry. We bought general admission tickets & tickets for the 8pm (the only show they had open) for Body Worlds 2. Some of you may have heard of the Body Worlds exhibitions as they’ve drawn some controversy off and on. They include many body parts and complete cadavers in various stages of disection, almost all sans skin. So we spent several hours making the rounds through the museum seeing the various exhibits, then we had a few hours to kill until our 8pm Body Worlds show. One of the locals working at the museum information desk suggested a few bars and a cafe a few blocks away, so we took off on foot. We soon found Cove Lounge, a somewhat small, typical neighborhood bar. At least they had a dart board, and in honor of our illustrious frontman Neobond, we snapped a few pictures of some of our crew in action. Afterwards we made our way back towards the museum where we stopped at Orly’s Cafe for dinner. Orly’s has it’s own bakery on site and the food & service was great. After dinner it was time to make our way back to the Museum of Science & Industry for the Body Worlds 2 show. There are a lot of photos to come, as several of us were armed with cameras, and I’ve got some video footage to upload as well. I’ll get to work on all of that tomorrow and post it as soon as I can. Be on the lookout for our AWOL attendee Tim Dorr as he made several random appearances throughout the day.
Tim… wait, that’s not Tim. Or is it? 
Tim couldn’t bear to miss NeowINDEX.
SkyPunk, Timan, & AgEnTsMiTh throw down.
Orly?
Yesterday was a blast. We all got in fairly early, with AgEnTsMiTh being the last of the flights to arrive. Poor guy had to get up at 3am to catch his 4 hour flight. Dreamz had to work Friday so we had some time to kill before he was able to join us. We walked from our hotel to Michigan Avenue a.k.a the Magnificent Mile looking for a clothing shop that had coats in stock as it turned bitterly cold in Chicago with highs in the 30’s(F) and Frank managed not to bring a coat. So, we grabbed a quick bite and Frank found a coat, well, sort of. It’s not much more than a lightweight jacket, but the selection of coats was very slim. After Frank secured a reasonable facsimile of a coat, we hit a few shops including *gasp* an Apple store. We played with a few of the systems and I even got an Apple Store employee to say the words “Mac’s crash” after the system we were using barfed and locked up. Later on we popped in to Mortons for dinner. I think Marshalus, Frank and AgEnTsMiTh were in some kind of steak heaven. After dinner we met up with Dreamz and decided to visit the Signature Room lounge on the 95th floor of the John Hancock building. We stood in line with and rode the elevator up with actor Dennis Quaid. After a round of drinks in the lounge we decided to find something a little more entertaining to do so we headed to Dave & Busters. For those of you who don’t know what Dave & Busters is, I think one of the other guys described it the best way I can think of. It’s like Chuck E. Cheese for adults. They have a huge arcade, pool tables, food, several bars. It was a great time and we closed the place down. After that it was back to the hotel to graba few winks before heading out again, which is what we’re about to do. More to come later…
As you can tell by the meter above his head, Frank has no power.
Frank & Marshalus blast away at the bad guys
You ain’t gettin me on that thing!” (Dance Dance Revolution) Suuuuuuure Tim 
AgEnTsMiTh & Timan blasting away.”
Dreamz, Frank, Shockz, & Marshalus at closing time.
So, while we upload some photos from cameras, let’s fill you in on a summary of the events so far in Haarlem, NL:
- Steve (Neobond), Marcel (Redmak) and Tom (creamhackered) were all beaten by a Dutchwoman at pool;
- A significant amount of drinking by most members … and one of the best steaks I’ve ever eaten;
- Two random ex-pat Irishmen buying us drinks while extolling the wonders of the Netherlands;
- Dave (DaveLegg) stays up half the night coding (some things don’t change, even in Haarlem);
- Paul (kinetix63) dances to Take That in a Dutch bar;
- The staff model their swanky new badges (that get us into VIP areas in Neowin HQ);
- Curiously, half the staff have a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign up on their door … what can this mean?
- Paul and Dan got back to the hotel at 6:30am and had breakfast before going to bed!!
- Dan broke his new laptop;
- Joe (Cashman) snores.
