November 20th, 2009

Office Starter 2010 private beta, with 'Office to GO,' goes to testers

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 8:21 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Office 2010/Office 14, Office Live, Office Live Workspace, PDC 2009, SharePoint Server, Utility/cloud computing, Virtualization

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Beta, Microsoft Office, Office Suites, Software, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft released a bunch of public betas of various Office 2010 products this week. But it also released another one under non-disclosure to a select group of testers: Office Starter 2010.

Microsoft made the code for Office Starter 2010 available to select testers via its Connect Web site late this week. Office Starter 2010, as Microsoft officials have disclosed previously, Office Starter 2010 is the replacement for Microsoft Works. It will be free and ad-supported, includes Word and Excel only and allows only basic document viewing and editing.

There’s one new feature in Office Starter 2010 that I had not heard about previously. It’s called “Office to GO,” according to testers with whom I spoke, who asked not to be named. Office to GO is installed using the Click-to-Run setup that is part of Office 2010. (Click to Run is one of the new ways Microsoft is planning to distribute the Office 2010 bits. It streams the bits onto a user’s PC using virtualization technology so that users can be up and running with Office more quickly than if they had to wait for the entire product to download.)

The Office to GO application allows users to download Word Starter, Excel Starter and any related documents to a USB drive that users can then run onany  Windows Vista Service Pack 1 or Windows 7 PC, according to the aforementioned tester.

Office Starter 2010 also includes a permanent sidebar that includes links to a Gettting Started guide, help and support, templates and clip art, and an “upgrade to a paid version now” (with PowerPoint and/or Outlook) setting. Here’s what that sidebar looks like (click on the image to enlarge):

I’ve asked Microsoft for more details about Office to GO and will add anything I get back to this post.

Meanwhile, in other Office 2010 news from this week, I have a bit of additional information about the Office Web Apps public beta that Microsoft released to testers this week.

As Microsoft officials have said before, Office Web Apps — the Webified versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote — will be available in three versions. One will be free and ad-supported and aimed at consumers. The consumer version, which is tied to Microsoft’s SkyDrive, is what Microsoft released as a Community Technology Preview (CTP) test build to selected testers this past summer. Microsoft officials told me this week that the final version of the free Office Web Apps product will be released in conjunction with Windows Live Wave 4 (which sounds as if it is a “spring 2010″ kind of thing).

There also are going to be two business-focused versions of Office Web Apps that are going to be available as paid subscription offerings: One that will be available to enterprise customers to run on-premises and one that will be hosted by Microsoft. The beta that went out this week is the on-premises business version of the Office Web Apps release. To be clear: It’s not the updated beta version of the consumer test build that Microsoft released earlier this fall. (It sounds like the consumer version of Office Web Apps may not get a new public build refresh before it is released in final form this spring.)

The business versions require SharePoint Server on the back end. Microsoft’s Office Web Apps team did a blog post earlier this week explaining more about the Office Web Apps-SharePoint tie-in. That post includes this diagram:

I’m interested in hearing more from anyone who’s test-driving the new Office Web Apps beta and/or Office Starter 2010. How are the products shaping up? What’s working or not for you?

November 17th, 2009

What's next for Microsoft's Azure cloud platform?

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 3:47 pm

Categories: Azure, Code names, Corporate strategy, Database, Google, Management tools, PDC 2009, Red Dog, SQL Server, System Center, Utility/cloud computing, Virtualization, Web 2.0

Tags: Microsoft Azure, Data Center, Microsoft Corp., Data Centers, Microsoft Windows, Storage, Operating Systems, Hardware, Data Management, Software

In the past year, customers and developers testing Windows Azure have been running primarily brand-new (and largely Web 2.0 style) apps on Microsoft’s cloud operating system. But when will Azure be tuned to handle host legacy enterprise apps? And when and how will users be able to take advantage of some of the Azure technologies inside of their own “private clouds”?

Microsoft officials didn’t share dates for its next phases of the Windows Azure platform. But they did talk about some of their plans for their next steps with Microsoft’s cloud platform during meetings and sessions at the company’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) on November 17.

Microsoft said the Windows Azure platform — which is the Windows Azure operating system and the SQL Azure database — is feature-complete as of today. (Officials said a few weeks ago that Microsoft wouldn’t begin charging customers to use the platform until February 1, 2010.)

“Our initial focus on the platform was on enabling Web 2.0 customers to develop and run their apps on it,” said Amitabh Srivastava, Senior Vice President in charge of Windows Azure. These kinds of applications are Xcopy-deployable, while older, legacy apps typically are not, Srivastava said.

Microsoft’s next Azure steps — which it will be executing largely in parallel — will be to get existing, and typically more complex, line-of-business apps to run on the platform and to make it possible for customers to implement Azure technologies in their own data centers (a k a, to be able to create private clouds).

To enable existing apps to run on Azure, Microsoft is planning to make virtual machines (VMs) available to developers, which they will be able to customize and run their legacy apps inside them. Srivastava wouldn’t provide a timetable or more details as to how or when Microsoft will do this. Apps running in VMs won’t be able to take full advantage of the elasticity, multitenancy, and other cloud functionality, but they still will derive some benefits, such as automatic cloud backup for apps running on the Azure platform. (The name of this VM capability will be “Windows Server Virtual Machine Roles on Windows Azure,” Microsoft execs later told me.)

On the private cloud front, Microsoft didn’t have much new to say at the PDC. Microsoft officials have said in the past that Microsoft won’t allow customers to run the Azure operating system in their own datacenters. Microsoft’s main focus here continues to be to provide customers with software like Windows Server, SQL Server, Exchange Server, etc., for them to run in their own datacenters. That said, Microsoft isn’t simply leaving the delivery of a private cloud solution to Amazon and other cloud competitors.

“Lots of the technologies we have in the cloud are things people want to run in their datacenters,” Srivastava
acknowledged.(He cited as an example the ability to run a scalable cloud-storage appliance on premises.)

Microsoft is working on a longer-term solution that would allow the company to offer datacenter containers that can be dedicated to individual customers, Srivastava said. That way, clouds can be customized for individual users and users will be able to manage these containers themselves. Again, Srivastava wasn’t ready to talk about deployment specifics or timetables for this. That said, “Project Sydney” (Microsoft’s newly announced connectivity offering for private datacenters and public clouds) shows the general direction where we are going,” Srivastava said.

Microsoft officials made a vague reference in this morning’s keynote to System Center in the cloud. I asked Srivastava if this meant Microsoft was looking to offer System Center as a Microsoft-hosted service, the way that it is offering Exchange and Office Communications Server as Microsoft-hosted offerings. That isn’t the case, he said; instead, Microsoft has opened up the Windows Azure management programming interfaces so that System Center — as well as third-party management products like HP OpenView — can manage Azure-hosted applications.

Not everything about what’s next for Azure is a longer-term direction. In sessions on November 17, Microsoft officials outlined some of the nearer term deliverables for Microsoft’s cloud platform. The recently introduced content-delivery-network (CDN) support for blobs in Windows Azure’s storage system is one of those deliverables. Another is a capability MIcrosoft is calling “Windows Azure Drive” (also known as Xdrive) which allows Azure developers to create a drive inside their virtual machines, providing them with an automatic back up capability. Microsoft plans to officially “turn on” Xdrive support in January, officials said.

November 12th, 2009

PDC 2009: Tune in for our live blogging frenzy next week

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 6:31 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Azure, Corporate strategy, Development tools, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Big Brains, Multicore/distributed computing, Office 2010/Office 14, PDC 2009, Red Dog, Research, Silverlight (wpf/e), Utility/cloud computing, Virtualization, Visual Studio 10 ("Hawaii"), Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 /("Windows 7 Server")

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Professional Developers Conference Keynote, Blogging, Internet, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2009 kicks off the week of November 16. Like we did last year, a handful of us Microsoft watchers will be live blogging the keynotes as a group.

The PDC keynotes are slated for Tuesday November 17 from 8:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. PT and Wednesday November 18 from 8:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. We’ll be using CoverItLive to blog, so the more of you who chime in and comment along with us, the merrier. Your group-blogging hosts (besides me) will be Ed Bott, Kip Kniskern, Paul Thurrott, Rafael Rivera, Tom Warren and Long Zheng

Come back here next week and watch along with us as Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie; Server and Tools President Bob Muglia; Kurt DelBene, Senior VP of Microsoft’s Office Business Productivity Group and more talk about what’s coming for developers in the next year. (I’ll post the CoverItLive viewer on my site during keynote viewing hours next week.)

There will be new info on Microsoft’s Azure cloud operating environment, .Net 4.0, Oslo, Office 2010, Silverlight, SQL Server and more. And more than a few of the “Big Brains” — Microsoft’s Technical Fellows — are on tap to present during the four-day confab.  I’ve already posted about some of what’s on tap (and not on tap) for PDC 2009 over the past few weeks. Expect lots more PDC news on my blog throughout the week next week.

Hope to see you (virtually) and/or live in Los Angeles next week!

November 9th, 2009

Which should a small business choose: Windows Home Server or Windows Server Foundation?

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 1:36 pm

Categories: Channel, Corporate strategy, Database, Exchange Server, Management tools, OEMs, Resellers, SQL Server, System Center, System builders, Virtualization, Windows Essential Business Server (Centro), Windows Home Server, Windows Server 2008 R2 /("Windows 7 Server"), Windows Small Business Server (Cougar), Windows server

Tags: Microsoft Windows Server, Microsoft Windows Home Server, Small Business, Microsoft Windows, Servers, Operating Systems, Software, Hardware, Mary Jo Foley

Until quite recently, Microsoft officials emphasized the “home” in Windows Home Server (WHS) when explaining how that product fit into its server line-up.

Last week, however, something changed. Microsoft officials added small office/home office (SOHO) users to its list of potential customers for WHS. On November 5, the WHS team posted a new blog entry entitled “Top 10 reasons to use Windows Home Server in your SOHO.” From that post:

“Don’t let the name Windows Home Server fool you into thinking that this product was created for home use only. A lot of the reasons that you would use Windows Home Server in your home are just as applicable to a small or home office. Windows Home Server provides a dependable and affordable way to organize and safeguard your work on up to 10 computers.”

Up until this point, Microsoft’s business-focused Windows Server family looked like this (with entry-level servers listed first):

• Windows Server Foundation
• Windows Server Standard
• Windows Server Enterprise
• Windows Server Datacenter

Other “specialty” versions include the Web Edition, Windows Small Business Server and Windows Essential Business Server. (The latter two bundle together various Microsoft applications, like Exchange Server and SQL Server, with Windows Server.)

Microsoft delivered the first release of Foundation Server in April 2009. The R2 version of Windows Server Foundation is globally available (covering all countries in Western Europe, Central Eastern Europe, France, German and Korea and Middle East/Africa) as of this week. Like WHS, Foundation is primarily an OEM product. The first release of Foundation was available preloaded on servers from Dell, HP, NEC and Fujitsu. The R2 version will be sold by these same server vendors, plus IBM, Lenovo, Acer and local OEMs such as Wortmann (in Germany) Datateknik (Turkey) Lanix (Mexico), Positivo (Brazil) and NTT (Japan), among others, according to the company.

So which should a small business user choose: Foundation or WHS? The biggest difference seems to be in the number of users that are supported. Foundation scales up to 15, while Home Server only supports up to 10, company officials said. In addition, Home Server is also designed specifically as a media server, with storage and file backup features for movies, music and photos,” a spokesperson added when I asked for more information.

“Windows Home Server is for people who work and play at home,” said Eugene Saburi, General Manager in the Windows Server & Solutions Division. “And it’s still based on Windows Server 2003,” at this point, he said. “Windows Foundation is more of a general-purpose platform,” Saburi added. “You can install a line-of-business app on it.”

(There’s no official word on when Microsoft plans to upgrade WHS so that it is based on Windows Server 2008 or 2008 R2. Maybe that’s “Vail” — which could be out next year if the latest rumors are right.)

Meanwhile, if you’re wondering when will the R2-inclusive versions of Windows Small Business Server and Windows Essential Business Server will be out, Microsoft officials aren’t saying. They are not talking about a month, a quarter or even a year (!) in terms of shipping commitments for these two products. Sigh.

One would think it wouldn’t take the Softies long to update the existing SBS and EBS products to include the “minor” Windows Server 2008 R2 update… but if they also include the new Exchange Server 2010 bits, it could take a bit longer. And if they wait for the SharePoint 2010 ones, the next releases might not be out until after mid-2010….

November 6th, 2009

Microsoft puts more Azure cloud plumbing in place

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 6:39 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Azure, Code names, Corporate strategy, Development tools, PDC 2009, Red Dog, Utility/cloud computing, Virtualization

Tags: Content Delivery, Content Delivery Network, Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Windows, Operating Systems, Software, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft is continuing to lay the groundwork for the commercial version of its Azure cloud environement, rolling out a new content delivery network (CDN) capability, as well as the November update to its Azure developer services.

On November 5, Microsoft delivered the November Community Technology Preview (CTP) test build of its Service Bus and Access Control Service — both of which are feature-complete. Those two elements are known as .Net Services. (Workflow services, queuing and routers also originally were set to be part of the first .Net Services release, but the team decided to pull those components in order to sync with Microsoft’s .Net 4.0 release, due out in March, 2010.)

Microsoft also rolled out on November 5 a new CDN capability that extends the storage piece of the Windows Azure cloud operating system.

(A quick refresher: Windows Azure, codenamed “Red Dog” is what networks and manages the set of Windows Server 2008 machines that comprise the Microsoft-hosted cloud. At the highest level, Red Dog consists of four “pillars”: Storage (like a file system); the “fabric controller,” which is a management system for modeling/deploying and provisioning; virtualized computation/VM; and a development environment, which allows developers to emulate Red Dog on their desktops and plug in Visual Studio, Eclipse or other tools to write cloud apps against it. Azure services including .Net Services and SQL Azure sit on top of the Windows Azure operating system)

The new Windows Azure CDN is designed to allow developers to deliver high-bandwidth content more quickly and efficiently. Here are more details from a November 5 blog post by Brad Calder, who is a leader of the Windows Azure Storage team:

“Windows Azure CDN has 18 locations globally (United States, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America) and continues to expand. Windows Azure CDN caches your Windows Azure blobs at strategically placed locations to provide maximum bandwidth for delivering your content to users. You can enable CDN delivery for any storage account via the Windows Azure Developer Portal. The CDN provides edge delivery only to blobs that are in public blob containers, which are available for anonymous access.

“The benefit of using a CDN is better performance and user experience for users who are farther from the source of the content stored in the Windows Azure Blob service. In addition, Windows Azure CDN provides worldwide high-bandwidth access to serve content for popular events.”

For the remaining CTP period, Windows Azure CDN access will remain free to testers. (Pricing information isn’t yet available.) Microsoft is recommending caching blobs less than 10 GB in size for best performance.

Speaking of the remaining CTP period, while Microsoft officials have said for the past few months that they planned to remove the beta tag from Azure at the Professional Developers Conference in mid-November, Microsoft isn’t closing the CTP until the end of December. Developers and customers won’t be charged for Azure until February, 2010.

November 3rd, 2009

Microsoft to raise prices, add more high-end editions with SQL Server 2008 R2

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 9:04 am

Categories: Azure, Channel, Code names, Corporate strategy, Database, OEMs, Office, Office 2010/Office 14, Resellers, SQL Server, SharePoint Server, Utility/cloud computing, Virtualization, Windows server

Tags: Processor, Microsoft SQL Server, Server, Microsoft Corp., Datacenter Edition, Microsoft SQL Server Team, Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Databases, Enterprise Software, Software

With the new version of its database due out by mid-2010, Microsoft is increasing its retail prices. It also is adding two new high-end editions of SQL Server 2008 R2 to its line-up.

Microsoft is planning to make the next Community Technology Preview (CTP) test build of SQL Server 2008 R2 — which will be feature-complete — available later this month, but officials declined to specify a date. The timing is “aligned with” the public beta of Office 2010, which many are expecting around mid-month. Customers can sign up today for notification about the November SQL Server 2008 R2 CTP. Microsoft released a first CTP of SQL Server 2008 R2 (codenamed “Kilimanjaro”) in August.

Microsoft went public with these details on the opening day of its PASS Summit, its SQL Server user group conference, on November 3.

The two new versions of SQL Server will be a Datacenter edition and a Parallel Data Warehouse edition (formerly codenamed “Project Madison”). The Datacenter edition builds on the SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise product, but adds application and multi-server management; virtualization; high-scale complex event processing (via StreamInsight); and supports more than 8 processors and up to 256 logical processors. The Parallel Data Warehouse version will be sold preloaded on servers as a data warehouse appliance. Using the DataAllegro technology Microsoft acquired in 2008, it will scale customers’ data warehouses from the tens of terabytes, up to one petabyte plus range, according to the company.

Microsoft isn’t increasing the Server/Client Access License (CAL) pricing — which is the primary way its customers buy SQL Server, officials said — with the new release. But the new SQL 2008 R2 retail pricing is as follows:

Standard: $7,500 (Per Processor), or $100/Server + $162/CAL (a $1,500 increase over SQL 2008 Standard)
Enterprise $28,800 (Per Processor), or $9.900/Server + $162/CAL (a $3,800 increase over SQL 2008 Enterprise)
Datacenter $57,500 (Per Processor), Not offered via Server/CAL (no previous version available)
Parallel Data Warehouse: $57,500 (Per Processor), Not offered via Server/CAL (no previous version available)

No pricing information was available for other R2 versions of SQL Server, including the Workgroup, Web and Developer, company officials said. For the four aforementioned versions, there will be discounts available for customers purchasing via volume licenses, Microsoft officials said.

Microsoft’s SQL Server team has focused on pricing as one of its main differentiators from its database competition, especially Oracle, so any kind of price increase is a sensitive topic. Company officials said they hadn’t “adjusted” database prices since the introduction of SQL Server 2005. Microsoft is still not charging per core like Oracle does; instead, it charges per processor, which benefits users who run databases on multicore servers.

Read the rest of this entry »

October 5th, 2009

Microsoft's Midori: Who's on the all-star roster?

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 8:11 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Code names, Corporate strategy, Development tools, Multicore/distributed computing, Research, Virtualization, Windows client

Tags: Operating System, Blog, Microsoft Corp., Midori, Operating Systems, Software, Mary Jo Foley

It’s been a while since anything new about Microsoft’s Midori project has leaked. But thanks to a post on the “Codename Windows blog” plus a little poking around, I found an interesting list.

Microsoft officials have repeatedly refused to talk about Midori, other than to admit it is an incubation project (and with the disclaimer that it may never see the light of day). For a project that may never materialize, Midori seemingly has some heavyweight talent behind it.

First, a quick recap: Midori is all about building a new operating system that isn’t based on the current Windows kernel. Headed by Senior VIce President of Technical Strategy Eric Rudder, Midori is/was slated to be a distributed, concurrent operating system, according to various tips.

Rob Jellinghaus — a Principal Architect at Microsoft “working on an unannounced incubation project” — posted to his blog on September 11a “list of worthy programmers.” Jellinghaus doesn’t ever state that these folks are working on Midori, but he does note that he is part of a team that “working on a new operating system stack from boot loader all the way to applications. I can’t really say much more, except that what we’re doing is not entirely unrelated to the Singularity operating system.” Sure sounds like Midori to me….

Early leaks about Midori indicated Midori had roots in the Singularity microkernel operating system developed by Microsoft Research. Low and behold, a number of the programmers on Jellinghaus’ “worthy” list have worked on Singularity, as well as on other distributed operating systems, compilers and other related components. (Jellinghaus himself was “one of the first outside contributers to the Google Web Toolkit. He also worked on the Xanadu hypertext system.)

On Jellinghaus’ list:

•Daniel Lehenbauer: Describes his role on the unnamed Microsoft incubation project — which he calls the “most exciting and revolutionary work to happen in the industry since (Xerox) PARC” — as involving “the exploration of a radically different approach to the UI/Graphics platform which guarantees security, responsiveness, and leverages modern GPUs and manycore.” Software Design Engineer Lehenbauer says the incubation team of which he is a part is “revisiting every layer of the stack from device drivers, through rendering engines, up to application frameworks and programming/computation models.”

• Pavel Curtis: Software Architect, who, according to his profile on Wikipedia, “is best known for having founded and managed LambdaMOO, one of the best-known online communities of the 1990s. He created LambdaMOO during his 13-1/2 years as a member of the research staff at Xerox PARC, from 1983 to 1996, where he worked in the areas of programming language design and implementation, programming environments, and online collaboration systems.”

• Jonathan Shapiro: One of the chief developers of the BitC language and Coyotos operating system, joined the Midori team this past spring, he acknowledged in a blog post.

• Ravi Pandya:  An “Architect, Technical Strategy Incubation,” according to his blog profile. From a 2007 blog post: “I moved from Windows Security to an incubation group which is, as Chris Brumme so eloquently puts it, ‘exploring evolution and revolution in operating systems.’ I’m having a lot of fun working with a variety of interesting systems technologies, including security, distributed systems, many-core, virtualization, managed systems code, dynamic resource scheduling, asynchronous & adaptive user interfaces, etc.”

• Dean Tribble: A Principal Architect at Microsoft, Tribble led development of security and compliance features for Microsoft Exchange, and “now is incubating new operating systems technologies.”

• Chris Brumme: A Microsoft distinguished engineer who was an architect on the Common Language Runtime (CLR) team. More recently, Brumme “has been one of the architects on an unannounced systems project.”

• Bjarne Steensgard: Since 2007, has been “part of an incubation team at Microsoft that is an outgrowth of efforts started at Microsoft Research.” At Microsoft Research, he worked on the Marmot and Bartok compilers and runtime systems. (Bartok was influential in the development of Singularity, on which Steensgard also worked “since its inception,” he said. Bartok also seems to figure into the Midori picture.) Before joining Microsoft, he worked on the Emerald distributed operating system.

•David Tarditi: A former Microsoft researcher who worked on Singularity.

•Tanj Bennett: One of the 40-plus Softies running the revamped Microsoft ThinkWeek program. His area of specialization is “OS in the Future.” Bennett also seems to have a connection with a Microsoft Research project known as the “Microsoft Solver Foundation,” which is described as “a new framework and managed-code runtime for mathematical programming, modeling, and optimization.”

• Joe Duffy: The Lead Developer and Architect for Parallel Extensions to .NET. Author of the book Concurrent Programming on Windows

• Leif Kornstaedt: Worked for several years on the CLR as a developer and a senior development lead; now “work(s) in Technical Strategy Incubation.” His area of specialization, according to his Web page, is “design and implementation of a programmable middleware.” He contributed to Alice, a functional programming language, and Mozart, an implementation of the Oz language.

Midori has been in the works since 2006/2007, based on the bios of some of these individuals. But there’s no inkling of when it might emerge from incubation land. As I’ve reported before, Microsoft is working on a couple of related projects (codenamed “RedHawk” and “MinSafe”) that are supposedly pre-cursors to Midori and which could work their way, at least in part, into Windows 8.

October 2nd, 2009

Microsoft System Center team primes the beta pump

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 7:49 am

Categories: Azure, Code names, Corporate strategy, Database, Exchange Server, Management tools, Office 2010/Office 14, SQL Server, SharePoint Server, System Center, Utility/cloud computing, Virtualization, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 /("Windows 7 Server")

Tags: Team, Microsoft Corp., Beta, DPM Version 3, Microsoft Windows, Team Management, Microsoft Windows 7, Servers, Enterprise Software, Operating Systems

When Microsoft held its business soft-launch for Windows 7 and related enterprise products earlier this week, System Center got next-to-no love.

But that doesn’t mean nothing’s happening on Microsoft’s system-management front. In fact, in the past couple of weeks, the team has delivered relatively quietly more than a few new test builds of a variety of new wares in the works.

Even though Microsoft’s “The New Efficiency” launch focused primarily on Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange Server 2010, Microsoft officials increasingly are playing up the manageability of Microsoft and third-party software and services as one of the biggest differentiators between Microsoft and competitors in the PC, phone and Web-centric productivity arenas.

Over the past couple of weeks, the System Center team has pushed out and/or mentioned a number of new test builds. Among them:

System Center Essentials 2010: Microsoft made available for download a beta of its small/mid-size-business-focused suite of server management products. Essentials provides monitoring and diagnostics for Windows clients, servers, apps and network devices; deploys Microsoft Installer and EXE-installed software from Microsoft and third parties; conducts hardware and software inventories, handles health-status reports and updates deployment. Microsoft officials try to avoid calling Essentials a bundle of products, even though the suite uses technologies from Operations Manager, Windows Server Update Services, SQL Server and Microsoft Update. Final ship date target: Not sure.

Configuration Manager 2007 R3: Microsoft is lining up Technology Adoption Program (TAP) partners who will be testing Release 3. The focus of the R3 update is on power management. The beta for R3 is slatd for late October 2009. Final version due in first half of calendar 2010.

Data Protection Manager 2010: Also known as DPM Version 3 or “Zinger,” the next release of DPM hit beta at the end of September. DPM provides continuous data protection for Windows Server, SQL Server, Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, Dynamics AX and more by backing them up to disk, tape and the cloud. The new release will add protection and recovery for live migration in Hyper-V, SharePoint 2010, Exchange 2010 and more. Final ship date target: Not sure (but I’d guess sometime after mid-2010, since SharePoint 2010 support is included).

System Center Online Desktop Manager: This is one of the System Center team’s first real forays into the Microsoft-hosted services space. In late August, the team said to expect a public beta of SCODM “soon.” There already is a fact sheet and a feature list (antimalware, Microsoft updates, desktop monmitoring, desktop configuration, IT asset management and remote assistance). Final version delivery target: I’d bet some time in 2010, but so far haven’t seen a firm date.

Service Manager 2010: Formerly known as “Service Desk,” Service Manager 2010 is in private beta now (with Beta 2 due imminently). Update: Service Manager 2010 Beta 2 is now available. This new tool is aimed at helping IT managers deal with trouble tickets, help requests and compliance auditing. Final version delivery target: Early 2010.

October 1st, 2009

Microsoft releases XP Mode virtualization to manufacturing

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 9:56 am

Categories: Channel, Corporate strategy, OEMs, Resellers, System builders, Virtualization, Windows 7, Windows XP, Windows client

Tags: Virtualization, Microsoft Corp., Manufacturing, XP Mode, Microsoft Windows 7, Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft Windows, Operating Systems, Software, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft has released Windows XP Mode to manufacturing on October 1, company officials said, and it will be generally available on Microsoft.com on October 22, the launch day for Windows 7.

XP Mode is a Microsoft virtualization technology aimed primarily at small/mid-size business users (SMBs), and is designed to allow them to run legacy Windows XP applications on Windows 7.

Microsoft made a near-final release candidate build of XP Mode available to testers in August.

The final version of XP Mode will be available to Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate users. It will be downloadable from the Microsoft Web site and also available directly from certain PC makers “based on their manufacturing cycle,” according to a Microsoft spokesperson.

Windows 7 users don’t have to have a Software Assurance license from Microsoft in order to get XP Mode. Microsoft is positioning XP Mode as a “last-mile compatibility solution” that is designed for use when Microsoft’s Application Compatibility Toolkit and other means don’t result in older apps working on Windows 7.

More questions and answers about XP Mode are available in this blog post I did earlier this year.

September 30th, 2009

Microsoft opens Chicago and Dublin datacenters; preps for more hosted offerings

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 1:32 pm

Categories: Azure, Corporate strategy, Google, Management tools, System Center, Systems integrators, Utility/cloud computing, Virtualization, Windows Live

Tags: Data Center, Microsoft Corp., Chicago, Data Center Knowledge, Data Centers, Storage, Hardware, Data Management, Mary Jo Foley

Just a week after celebrating the opening its “chiller-free” Dublin datacenter, Microsoft is turning on its $500 million, 700,000-square-foot Chicago one.

Phase one of the Chicago datacenter opened on September 30. Microsoft is turning on power in phases there so “customers today will enjoy top-notch performance and availability while we control costs for Microsoft and its shareholders,” according to a September 28 post on the Microsoft datacenters blog.

The Chicago datacenter is one of the largest datacenters in the world to make use of shipping containers, according to the company. Each of these containers holds 1,800 to 2,500 servers, which Microsoft officials have said enables the company to better conserve energy and take advantages of new power-effiency mechanisms.

“(T)he isolated nature of containers enables Microsoft and its vendors to research new approaches around power and cooling alternatives to reduce energy consumption even more in the future,” according to the blog post from Arne Josefsberg, General Manager of Infrastructure Services for Microsoft’s Global Foundation Services unit.

The Chicago center Chicago also is focused on “water-side economization, which enables us to cool the facility without requiring the high levels of electricity typically needed to power large chillers,” according to Josefsberg.

Dublin, which is aimed primarily at fulfilling the cloud-service needs of Microsoft customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, officially began operations on July 1. According to Microsoft, it covers 303,000 square feet, and currently is providing 5.4 mega watts of critical power. It can expand to a total of 22.2 mega watts of critical power. Data Center Knowledge has photos of the Dublin datacenter here.

Speaking of Microsoft and its hosting plans, here is an interesting Azure roadmap slide from a September 2009 PowerPoint deck from Microsoft Application Architect David Gristwood. (Click on slide below to enlarge.)

This slide shows some of the features Microsoft is planning to offer as part of its Azure cloud platform this November, when it moves from beta to its first official release. It also includes information on what’s on the team’s plate for inclusion in Azure in the future, including System Center integration, enterprise ID federation, Common Language Runtime (CLR) support and analytics and reporting functionality.