Back from Microsoft

The Microsoft trip was a blast. Great campus. Technology is everywhere. Very, very cool. I really liked the idea of providing every guest with a tablet PC loaded with OneNote. As you take notes or jot things down on the screen, everything is saved to a USB key chain. At the end of the trip, you take the key chain with you.

Some points from the trip:

• It is all about the collaboration. People and applications share data, contacts, files, ideas, and everything in between.
• Sharepoint is everywhere. It is the presentation server from MS. Every application we saw had a hook into Sharepoint.
• Sharepoint will have a huge overhaul. It will now support extranet deployment. It will support a knowledgebase, mixed mode authentication, and is the content management solution.
• Vista will be COOL. Great new technologies around performance, security and virtualization.
• All server applications from Microsoft are designed from the ground up to be centrally managed and monitored. The idea is that with current technology, applications should manage themselves, or should be managed by other applications. But not by people. This idea is broader then just Microsoft. Microsoft is a part of the consortium behind Service Modeling Language
• .Net - Well.. For one, there was once again a comment on ".NET 3.0 really should have been called .NET 2.5". It will be interesting to see how Microsoft responds to MONO. So far, it seems that Microsoft is discounting MONO as a viable .NET architecture. As far as Microsoft is concerned,  .NET means Windows. However, if the whole "Collaboration" idea is to work, it has to be beyond Windows.

Back from Microsoft