ProActive – Sharepoint 2010

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På tredjedagen var der igen focus på cloud og ingen partner – uanset type – kunne være i tvivl om at Microsoft ønsker at vi alle har “Cloud Services” øverst på vores produkt- og serviceslister.

Mulighederne for at udvikle og hoste applikationer,databaser m.m. via Azure blev igen og igen fremhævet og vi så flere løsninger hvor f.eks data fra Azure blev hentet ind i f.eks et Sharepoint intranet.

Microsoft har også lanceret en særlig “datatjeneste” med kodenavnet “Dallas” på Azureplatformen, der bl.a. gør det muligt for dataudbydere – f.eks Danmarks Statistik, CVR m.fl. – at benytte Azure til at formidle data videre til virksomheder og organisationer på en enkel og kontrolleret måde.

Jeg vil klart anbefale interesserede i at læse mere på “Dallas” på dette site – http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/dallas/ – hvorfra jeg har taget et uddrag af teksten:

“..Microsoft® Codename “Dallas” is a new service allowing developers and information workers to easily discover, purchase, and manage premium data subscriptions in the Windows Azure platform. Dallas is an information marketplace that brings data, imagery, and real-time web services from leading commercial data providers and authoritative public data sources together into a single location, under a unified provisioning and billing framework. Additionally, Dallas APIs allow developers and information workers to consume this premium content with virtually any platform, application or business workflow.

Herudover følger som sædvanligt det officielle referat.

Deres udsendte – Peter Lunding Smith

Jon Roskill, the new corporate vice president of the Worldwide Partner Group, began Day 3 of WPC 2010 with the “A – list”. Scott Huston of Intergrid featured “The Green Button,” a plug-in which is embedded in an application to provide seamless access to Windows Azure. Brett Brewer, general manager at Microsoft showed the latest project from Live Labs called “Pivot” to amalgamate and organize large volumes of data in user friendly and informative ways. “Pivot” is available as a free download with the latest version of Silverlight. Mathew MacLaurin, principal program manager at Microsoft showed “Spindex” which merges your social media and leverages the Cloud to create a customized search page based on user’s interests. Lastly, Bill Buxton, principal researcher, showed new ways to think about user interface design and Jon Roskill finished by introducing the Imagine Cup winners and Students to Business members who are attending WPC 2010 to network and find their next jobs in technology with Microsoft partners.

Kevin Turner, chief operating officer for Microsoft, gave an energetic overview of the competitive landscape. Turner reminded partners of the continuing relevance of his 5 point game plan for success he introduced last year, and thanked partners for their hard work in growing market share in FY’10. He featured Microsoft’s progress against Google, Apple, VMware, and Oracle as well as reasserting Microsoft’s big aspirations going into a new world of “Continuous Cloud Services for Every Person and Every Business.” Turner said Microsoft is the undisputed leader in commercial cloud services and that Microsoft is the best bet for every partner to transform their business and succeed now and into the future.

Igen een “overskyet” dag, men også spændende præsentationer af forskellige produkter som f.eks Windows 7, Windows Mobile , X-box kinetic m.m. Brugergrænsefladerne bliver bedre og bedre og grænserne imellem arbejdsbrug og privatbrug bliver flydende. En fed lille feature på Windows mobile 7, var muligheden for at have flere mail- og kalenderkonti og få vist dem samlet via “hubs”

På onlinesiden var der også mange partnere, der har lavet spændende tillægsløsninger – bl.a. en utrolig god integration imellem CRM Online og SharePoint, hvor der direkte fra CRM kan oprettes sharepointsites med opslag i CRM og tilsvarende visning af dokumenter fra sharepoint i CRM.

Tiden er desværre alt for knap, med alle de sessioner og møder vi deltager i, men herunder er igen det officielle referat fra dag 2.

Deres udsendte – Peter Lunding Smith

Jon Roskill, the new corporate vice president of the Worldwide Partner Group, led the show on Day 2 of WPC 2010. After a video tribute to Allison Watson, the new corporate vice president of the Business & Marketing Organization for North America, Roskill & Watson congratulated each of the 2010 Partner Award winners.

Roskill then spoke to partners about the industry transformation that is under way with the emergence of the cloud, and the opportunity it creates for partners to grow and evolve their businesses. Roskill detailed new tools, resources, internal usage rights for Cloud products, and sales support that Microsoft is delivering to help partners plan and build profitable businesses in the cloud and advance their Cloud knowledge. He also outlined partner opportunity guides for Cloud services, the new Microsoft Cloud Essentials Pack, the Microsoft Cloud Accelerate Program designation, new solution incentives for partners and the rollout of Pinpoint, which helps business customers find technology experts, software applications, and professional services, to 40 countries this year. More information on Roskill’s announcements can be found here.

The much anticipated Consumer Keynote was delivered by Brad Brooks, corporate vice president, Windows Consumer Marketing and Product Management and Andy Lees, senior vice president, Mobile Communication Business. Showcasing Windows Phone 7, Windows Live, Xbox and more, they demonstrated how Microsoft platforms combine the power of immersive software with smart services accessed instantly via the cloud to deliver experiences that make lives easier, more entertaining and more fun. Brooks challenged partners to “Raise our game” and build applications to help people be more connected, more creative and more productive. He demonstrated how the Windows 7 personal cloud will bring consumers the information that is important to them whenever and wherever they may be.

The Consumer Keynote concluded with a compelling preview of Xbox Halo: Reach and an interactive demo of Kinect for Xbox 360, a controller-free gaming device that Microsoft is positioning as an entirely new way to experience entertainment in the living room. Kinect for Xbox 360 will launch November 4, 2010.

View keynotes on demand here.

Microsoft Announcements

Microsoft announced that Windows Phone 7 will be complemented in the cloud by a new Windows Phone Live site that will also be home to the new Find My Phone feature that allows people to find and manage a missing phone with map, ring, lock and erase capabilities — all for free. More information can be found at http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/windowsphone.
Microsoft Services Launches Practice Accelerator to Make Training and Offering IP More Accessible to Partners: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/wpc/docs/ServicesPartnerStrategyFS.docx
Intuit Partner Platform Delivers Windows Phone 7 SDK: http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev
News Coverage

The Washington Post
Ballmer says Microsoft intends to become industry leader in cloud computing
The Wall Street Journal
Giants Join Microsoft in Cloud
Windows IT Pro
WPC 2010 Brings News About Windows 7 SP1, InTune Beta 2, SBS, and More

Jeg var i dag inviteret til eksklusivt Rountable moede med Microsofts Adm. direktoer Steve Ballmer. Der var i alt inviteret knap 20 partnere, og kun 2 fra Europa – saa det var et lille selskab. Vi er kommet med paa baggrund af det arbejde vi har lavet med Microsofts teknologier over aarene, og specifikt med fokus paa de resultater vi allerede har naaet med Microsofts Cloud offering (BPOS og Azure).

Alle partnere havde forberedt spoergsmaal og kommentarer, og lad mig starte med at slaa fast at der er KUN 1 tema: CLOUD! Microsoft er med Steves ord ‘All in’. Alt SW, alt infrastruktur, alle forretningsmodeller Microsoft har, vil i fremtiden komme til at handle om ‘Skyen’.

Saa, vi kommer til at hoere meget end vi allerede har, Azure bliver stort og BPOS (som skifter navn naar de har fundet paa et bedre) bliver kaempe stort. Vi er klar!

Jeg ser et stort potentiale i at vi taenker vores projekter, udvikling og raadgivning opp imod de nye muligheder Skyen giver. Microsoft investerer massivt, og vi skal udnytte det forspring vi allerede har.

Jeg glaeder mig til den kommende strategi proces

/Max

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Beklager de manglende “danske” bogstaver, men dette blogindlaeg skrives fra en af de mange pc’er i foyeen.
WPC er kommet godt igang med et par gode keynotes og spaendende sessioner.
For min egen del er det selvfoelgelig Cloud’en , der er mest spaendende og her var det jo en ren fornoeejlse at hoere hvor mange gange Steve Ballmer kunne sige “Cloud”

Jeg har herunder indsat et godt officielt referat fra dag 1, men synes selv at det mest spaendende var nyhederne omkring Windows Intune og Azure.

Windows Intune er endnu en Cloud services, der goer det muligt for IT / administratorer at overvaage og fjernstyre pc’ere  – uanset om der er tale om kunders pc’ere , interne pc’ere eller for den sags skyld hjemmecomputere.
Servicen forventes at koste ca. 11usd per md., men saa kan kunden ogsaa faa ret til at opgradere til den nyeste windows 7 enterprise version, saa laenge abonnementet betales.
En super tillegsservice som ProActive og Installers kan bruge til at servicere vore kunder endnu bedre !
Beta2 blev frigivet paa WPC og servicen forventes tilgaengelig i november !

Windows Azure er ogsaa under stadig udvikling og giver flere og flere muligheder for at bygge webservices, platforme og infrastuktur op i hostede miljoer hos Microsoft. Microsoft vil dog ogsaa give mulighed for at lade virksomheder og organisationer udnytte fordelene ved Azure paa egen lokationer (privat cloud) og det kan vaere meget interessant for f.eks offentlige myndigheder, der ooensker mere kontrol med data, men som samtidig gerne vil have stordriftsfordelene.

De bedste hilsner / Deres udsendte “Cloud-korrespondent”
Peter Lunding Smith

Official Report from the opening day of Microsoft World Partner Congres :

” Opening band, Mosaic, provided a musical beginning to the morning’s tone of gratitude and change. It was a perfect lead-in to Allison Watson, corporate vice president of the Business & Marketing Organization for North America, kicking off the WPC 2010 Conference by thanking and bidding a fond farewell to partners, the Microsoft field, and the WPG team she has led the last 8 years. She introduced and passed the leadership baton to Jon Roskill, the new corporate vice president of the Worldwide Partner Group. The music continued with the audience singing “O Cloud” as Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, took the stage to acknowledge the path Microsoft has chosen to embrace with partners. Ballmer discussed the key dimensions of the Cloud and finished by challenging partners to reinvent the business model.

Bob Muglia, president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft, outlined how Microsoft provides a comprehensive, integrated service and server platform that allows customers and partners to deploy clouds when and where they want. The Windows Azure platform offers a standardized service platform; the customizable Windows Server platform lets customers and partners build public and private clouds that leverage existing investments with maximum flexibility.

Tami Reller, corporate vice president and chief financial officer for the Windows business, detailed the tremendous partner opportunity with Windows 7 and announced the beta release of Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1, which enhance the deployment and management of virtualized desktop infrastructure. Reller also emphasized the role of the cloud in Windows and announced the second public beta of Windows Intune, a new offering that uses the best of both Windows cloud services and Windows 7 to manage and help secure PCs.

Closing out the keynote addresses, Stephen Elop, president of the Microsoft Business Division, highlighted growing partner momentum for Microsoft Online Services (MOS), shared examples of how partners are delivering value to customers with MOS and announced the new partnerships with communications service providers, including Bell Canada, BT, PGi, TDC, and Telenor Group, as well as distributors Ingram Micro and Tech Data. Elop also announced the naming and expected beta availability of the next version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Microsoft Announcements

• Microsoft introduced the Microsoft Management and Virtualization Solution Incentive and the Private Cloud Deployment Kit, which offers financial rewards and guidance to partners as they build virtualization and private cloud solutions. More information is available at http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive /2010/07/12/realizing-the-promise-of-cloud-with- microsoft.aspx.
• Microsoft announced the beta release of Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1, which enhance the deployment and management of virtualized desktop infrastructure. Reller also emphasized the role of the cloud in Windows and announced the second public beta of Windows Intune, a new offering that uses the best of both Windows cloud services and Windows 7 to manage and help secure PCs. More information is available at The Windows Blog (http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/business/arc hive/2010/07/12/windows-intune-second-public-beta-available- today.aspx).
• Microsoft announced the naming and expected beta availability of the next version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. More details are available at http://blogs.technet.com/b/msonline/archive/2010/ 07/12/worldwide-partner-conference-join-us-in-the-cloud.aspx and http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2010/jul 10/07-12WPCDynamicsCRMPR.mspx.
• Dell Expands Cloud Strategy and Services with Microsoft Windows Azure Platform Appliance
• Fujitsu and Microsoft Expand Partnership to Provide Global Cloud Computing
• HP and Microsoft to Partner on Windows Azure Built on HP Converged Infrastructure
• eBay and Microsoft Announce Cloud Computing Agreement

It’s 2 days to the big launch event and 7 months since ProActive attended the SharePoint conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. Although part of a confidential partner program there were many questions that remained in our minds:

Just what is Microsofts approach towards a Social Enterprise?

Will Business Connectivity Services be the ground breaking solution that it’s predecessor promised to be?

How will SharePoint 2010 improve our customers business and just as importantly will be it be easier, more flexible for developers?

These questions, and a whole lot more, were on our minds as we arrived at our hotels. For a company such as ProActive, that specializes in SharePoint products and technologies, this event was the pinnacle of many years speculation. Familiarity and subsequent expertise in a product leaves one with the knowledge of what works well, what works with tweaking and what shouldn’t be attempted at all.

Over the next 5 days we did our best to attend some of the hundreds of sessions and labs that were being held. Our 5 man team split into separate areas of focus: Communities, Insights, Composites, Search and Sites/Content. At the end of those hectic 5 days (and some late nights) our curiosity for the most part was satisfied. Better still our worries were no more – Microsoft had been paying attention to it’s developer community and had delivered the goods.

One final question remained: When will SharePoint 2010 be available to customers? Back in October the powers that be were a little hazy on that answer. Some said April, some said August. Now with the launch just 2 days away the timing couldn’t have been any better and is a testament to the hard work of the team in Redmond.

On this blog and with the fast moving pace of development for this platform you will hear more about the initiatives and solutions that ProActive will be bringing to market. Already a number of new initiatives are underway internally as well as a number of client projects starting on SharePoint 2010.

The question any organization should ask itself is not if they will migrate to SharePoint 2010 – it’s when.

As anticipated Microsoft have made good on their promise to launch SharePoint & Office 2010 to the public in the first half of 2010. The official launch date is now confirmed to be May 12th. ProActive are already well under way to delivering SharePoint 2010 solutions to a number of our clients and look forward with anticipation to the official launch.

For more information on SharePoint 2010 please see here. For demos or more information about how ProActive can deliver cutting edge enterprise solutions on the SharePoint 2010 platform please feel free to contact Mikkel Aude or Victor Schwartz Keegan for more information.

Steve Tullis and Charlie Ellis gave a session on the new and advanced Excel and Excel Services in 2010. The room was packed and people very enthusiastic. Rounds of applause every 5 minutes.

To put it into perspective he once again told of the decision they made leading up to 2007: that Excel, which were the business users’ favorite tool, should not just be somewhere that data ended up, but THE place to go for Business Intelligence. Excel has become a client for BI and a service.

Vision for Excel 2010:

• User experience – Excel Everywhere: increased collaboration capabilities, across pc, browser and phone, bring ideas to live…
• Analysis – More flexible Business Intelligence
• Extensibility – Better integrated platform for BI

He then quickly skipped to the demo and showcased some pretty breathtaking scenarios:

• SharePoint dashboard with current data and graphs on all day-to-day business activities (the whole dashboard was build in Excel)
• Even in the browser the dashboard is interactive and allows for drilldowns etc
• He opens the spreadsheet in Excel and it renders completely as the dashboard – 2010 now support advanced layout, pictures etc etc (if a spreadsheet contains formating that Excel services cannot handle it will no longer be discarded, but instead the parts that cannot be rendered are ignored)
• In Excel they added search to the filters! So that if you have loads of data with different properties you don’t have to scroll through an impossible list of properties to filter, you can search for properties directly within the properties dialogue – with millions of data lines the search utilizes an OLAP source
• Awesome ability to build and package logic based on data sets and MDX queries and use these across spreadsheet, OLAP cube, server etc
  Using named sets makes it possible to enable intelligent filtering in pivottables, so that you can correlate or disregard columns without having to have all columns in the there or compare data across different filters (compare 2008 realized revenue to 2009 forecast and disregard 2008 forecast and 2009 realized was one example)
• Filters from pivottables and named sets are accessible in Excel services to allow for dynamic cross filtering in the browser – looks almost like search based facets to allow for dynamic filtering of displayed data
• Ability to build “slicers” instead of pivot tables so that you can easlity build dashboard with predifined ability to slice data based on properties selected by the designer – as powerful as pivot tables, but much more usable for casual users
• Along the same lines you are able to make a pivottable look like a querytable and use all the usual features (filtering, sorting etc)
• Ability to extend Excel services features using Javascript and REST – in essence making it very easy to build interactive online BI applications

And much more – it was pretty exhausing so at one point I just had to quit typing and try and keep up………….. many of the last scenarios was based on REST and the possibilities that this gives in terms of developing powerful interactive apps that draws on OLAP data and Excel features with very little javascript code…

Bottomline: Microsoft are really pushing the envelope on Excel for BI and today you are able to do stuff that you would never have thought possible a few years ago. BI for the masses…

Gorm Priem

As you might expect this is another Microsoft conference where the “cloud” or “online” is being mentioned in every second sentence… I think by now we are getting the message: there may be huge benefits in moving all or some part of your it infrastructure to the “cloud” and thereby reduce the level of daily it hazzle…

As with anything Microsoft things really takes off with version 2. For version 1 of SharePoint Online the Exhange and Communications cloud services were a no brainer as these are pretty standardized services. The SharePoint service however was scaled way down and with virtually no or very little opportunity for customization. Not a scenario that appeals to that many who are serious about SharePoint.

With SharePoint 2010 this changes drastically. Within a Standard subscription (for corporation with more than 5 employees) you will get nearly a full SharePoint experience and you are alowed to customize and even deploy some code!

This is possible due to the whole new context/sandbox development features in SharePoint which effectively seperates contexts in a multi-tenance environment. This means that bad code in one solution will not take down another even if the run on the same server. Also Microsoft provides very impressive debugging tools alllowing them to shut down bad components on the fly and report back on exactly what is going on in terms of database connections, SharePoint calls, etc etc.

Of course you also have the Dedicated scenario which is almost the same as buying a dedicated server at a hosting provider meaning that you have full freedom with the platform.

I am sure that this will mean that many larger corporation will (and should!) seriously consider SharePoint Online as a scenario for fully or partially running there SharePoint installations.

Did I mention that SharePoint Online also will come in a SharePoint Online for Internet targeting at providing web solutions? Oh, yeah! This should be a very interesting scenario for future WCMS investments.

This is the last session of the day and the conference in general. Before this session I attended the Architectural Guidance session. It was so packed there was standing room only and my line of sight to the presentation was obscured so I will blog about it later on.

In these tough economic times many companies are trying to extend the value out of older systems instead of purchasing newer ones. Consolidation is key and using SharePoint 2010 to expose those products and services is a cost effective way of giving new life to older products. The presentation is done by Donald Farmer and Kevin Idzi from Microsoft.

The real focus is on using SSIS (SQL Server Integrations Services) to get data into and out of SharePoint 2010. Any developer can add on to the SSIS connector. Some of the challenges faced today are that business needs are constantly changing and data is locked into business applications – it’s meeting those needs and getting the right data out that needs to be overcome. SSIS has native providers for Oracle, SAP, TeraData etc. It’s impressive how Unstructured, Legacy and Application data can be integrated via SSIS in SQL Server 2008. Data Profiling in SSIS is really interesting and means that profiles can be carried out on tables to see what activity is happening there. Microsoft have recently purchased a company called Zoomix and that will allow for a self learning Data profiling system – coming next year.

The first example was the Data Silo problems. Geographic legacy apps from Asia, Europe and North America were used as examples. In the example the way to bring them together was to use the SharePoint Centralized Information Store. The construct demo was inspiring, Kevin used a Data Flow task to connect to a SQL datasource and then pulled in a SharePoint 2010 List as the destination. The property set was very rich and the SPList component is available now on CodePlex! Column Mappings and so on were a breeze and the result was a list, populated directly from SSIS into SharePoint without any solution deployment.

The next demo talked about an Agile world when tying in to Legacy Applications. This was a much more complex data flow but none the less very good. The 3 regional legacy apps where unioned, sorted, joined and then checked for compliance. SSIS uses the SharePoint Webservices API and therefore there is no transactional support for lists. A Non-compliance list was populated with 765 items in 18 seconds. The session dug down into making a custom connector and again the example shown is available on Codeplex.

This was a great session and good way to finish off the week here. There is a big potential for companies to integrate their legacy systems (HR, Time Registration etc) into SharePoint 2010 without sacrificing functionality or business logic and this will be a big driver for future growth in the integration segment.

Mvh Victor

It’s the first session of the last day of this conference and it’s the first session I have had the opportunity to attend regarding SharePoint 2010 Online. The presenters ran through comparisons of Online vs On-Premises hosting. One of the great things was the one-way trust that can be established between customer and Microsoft datacenters.

The first customer case was British insurance company Aviva. They used key features such as Team Sites, My Sites and blogging. Microsoft Consulting Services was engaged directly for this project. As the company progresses they will use BI, Social networking and more. One of the arguments for using SharePoint online was the quick time to launch. Aviva themselves believe that if they had tried to host this themselves they would be 10 months delayed in getting launched. The customization of the solution was really impressive. Everything from personalized navigation to custom controls were added. This just goes to show that SharePoint Online can be just as flexible as an on-premises solution.

Aviva’s Online platform was not all smooth sailing. There were some performance issues with caching and the publishing of pages. Ultimately the NLB was set not to use single affinity and support for variations is still on hold until it can be predictably deployed and used. Challenges aside the platform was regarded as a big success.

The next case study was Coca-Cola. Again the screens were really important and served to show that the online offering is not as limited as some people would think. They have deployed a high number of customizations and retired 800 web applications. There is a lot of enthusiasm from current Online clients for SharePoint 2010. The goal for Microsoft is to move all of the on-premise features into the cloud. Features for SharePoint 2010 Online that won’t be available are Email Enabled lists, Site Definitions and Inline code. The first 2 are quite confusing as custom site definitions are literally everywhere. It seems the cat is out of the bag and that SharePoint 2010 will be available in April.

Claims based authentication and Remote Blob storage using Azure are also in the works and will be coming after launch in April. The feature summary for the online dedicated offering is quite extensive and will be fully rounded by April 2011 (Geo-distributed design). What’s really impressive is that prior to deployment companies will have to handover a HLD (High Level Design) document to Microsoft so that can review and suggest how the code should be built. This quality assurance and guidance that is seldom found with any other hosting provider.

An ISV solutions marketplace is also in the works so that preapproved solutions can be resold online. Productization of solutions is the next big trend and a marketplace like this could be a gold mine for developers and customers alike. April 2010 is inline with Microsofts release schedule so we can expect SharePoint 2010 to hit the market in that time J