Jun 10
TechEd Opening Keynote
Tim Allison
After graduating in 1989 I worked as a consultant, then off to Herman Miller as a Network Admin, and finally landed at C/D/H. So ultimately 23 years! Wow!
I enjoy making life better: at home, at play and at work. Technology happens to be one of those areas, and helping those around me become better only results in a better place for us all.
Family is important to me. I am finding my granddaughter (yes, I have three grandchildren) is always on the top of my “love to spend time with” list.
More about Tim
Articles by Tim Allison
There’s no better way to kick off the 2008 Microsoft TechEd IT Professionals conference than with the return of Bob Muglia, Senior Vice President of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft. Join us as we blast forward “into the future” through the vision of the IT industry in the years to come.
A very pragmatic approach to today’s IT environment was given. The focus was on the IT Heros, those that have shown excellence in applying MS technology in the real-world. While these were inspiring, they were also case studies for their soon-to-be released products.
A demo of the new ILM 2 (Identity Management) was provided. It is in Beta 3 but promises to be a great product! It appears that this product is built upon the WSS (Windows SharePoint Services) foundation. It is a simple to use, but fully extensible engine for user identity management and provisioning. I can already see where this can fit into several environments. I am eagerly awaiting this much needed tool.
Another demo of the interoperability of MS code was shown. This was an example of a stock trading company (fully available via MSDN) built upon MS .Net 3.5. They showed us how the PHP and Java-based engines can be seamlessly swapped out. This is possible, of course, since all modules are using web services to provide the connections. While I doubt there will be a mixture like this within a client, the reality is there are open source web services out there that will be used by MS applications. All in all this is a good thing for the future of MS developed code.
Lastly, the demos and discussions surrounded the virtualization initiative. While this is not new, the emphasis was on the ability for the MS tools to interact and manage with “other” industry virtualization tools. Virtualization is not limited to the server architecture but extends into the application layer, desktop layer and presentation layer. This is all controlled by robust models, simplifying the management of these images and the run-time environment.
Upward and onward…More TechEd to come…