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 17th, 2009

Three new codenames and how they fit into Microsoft's cloud vision

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 2:09 pm

Categories: .Net Framework, Azure, Code names, Corporate strategy, Database, Development tools, PDC 2009, Red Dog, SQL Server, Utility/cloud computing, Windows server

Tags: SDK, Vision, Microsoft Corp., Dataset, Microsoft Windows, .Net, Operating Systems, Software, Software Development, Software/Web Development

Any Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) wouldn’t be complete without a few new codenames. On November 17, Microsoft introduced three new ones that all are related to Microsoft’s evolving cloud-computing vision and infrastructure.

During the Day One set of keynotes, Microsoft officials attempted to explain further how the company’s three-screens-and-a-cloud vision will take shape in product and service form.

Last year, when it rolled out its first Windows Azure Community Technology Preview, Microsoft showed a “layer cake” type diagram which showed all of the various Azure layers and components as a comprehensive whole. (See last year’s layer cake at right.)

This year, there was no diagram. The new message is that Microsoft’s cloud is comprised of Windows Azure (the Red Dog operating system), SQL Azure and a new AppFabric development platform. That’s it. Gone are the Live Services, .Net Services, SharePoint Services, and Dynamics CRM Services that wer all part of the original platform.

Did Microsoft decide its original vision was too ambitious? It seems more the case that it has decided some of the original pieces didn’t belong as part of the core Azure platform, such as Live Services, which are now part of Windows/Windows Live. In other cases, Microsoft has repackaged other elements of its original platform in different ways (example: the slimmed-down .Net Services is now part of AppFabric).

In the midst of all this movement, Microsoft introduced the three new cloud-related codenames today. How do they fit into Microsoft’s newly flattened cloud cake?

* Project Sydney: Technology that enables customers to connect securely their on-premises and cloud servers. Some of the underlying technologies that are enabling it include IPSec, IPV6 and Microsoft’s Geneva federated-identity capability. It could be used for a variety of applications, such as allowing developers to fail over cloud apps to on-premises servers or to run an app that is structured to run on both on-premises and cloud servers, for example. Sydney is slated to go to beta early next year and go final in 2010.

* Dallas: Microsoft’s “data-as-a-service” offering. Dallas is a new service built on top of Windows Azure and SQL Azure that will provide users with access to free and paid collections of public and commercial data sets that they can use in developing applications. The datasets are available via Microsoft’s PinPoint partner/ISV site. Dallas is hosted on Azure already and is available as of today as an invitation-only CTP. No word on when Microsoft is hoping to release the final version of the service.

* AppFabric: AppFabric is a collection of existing Azure developer components, including the “Dublin” app server, “Velocity” caching technology, and .Net Services (the service bus and access control services). The version of the Windows Server AppFabric on-premises version of the product is available for download today, with final availability slated for 2010. Community Technology Previews (CTPs) of the Windows Azure AppFabric version are slated to be available during 2010. No word on when the final Azure-based version will be out. (Note: The CTPs of the Access Control and Service Bus technologies are still available separately in CTP form today.)

Microsoft made available last week a November release of its own Windows Azure SDK and related tools. The new releases include an update to Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio, which extends VS 2008 and VS2010 Beta 2 so they can create, configure, build, debug and run Web apps and services on Windows Azure.

Roger Jennings, a cloud computing expert and author of the Oakleaf Systems blog said that the November release of the Windows Azure SDK includes “something Azure devs have been asking for and needed to compete with AWS EC2 (Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Cloud 2): Variable-size virtual machines (VMs). Using that featue, Azure developers may now specify the size of the virtual machine to which they wish to deploy a role instance, based on the role’s resource requirements. The size of the VM determines the number of CPU cores, the memory capacity, and the local file system size allocated to a running instance, Jennings noted.

In a similar vein, Amazon quietly released on November 11 version 1.0 of its Amazon Web Services (AWS) software development kit for .Net. The SDK allows developers to “get started in minutes with a single, downloadable package complete with VIsual Studio project templates, the AWS .Net library, C# code samples and documentation,” according to a note Amazon forwarded me over the weekend.

November 10th, 2009

Microsoft whittles away at Oslo; now plans to fold it into SQL Server

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 11:23 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Code names, Corporate strategy, Database, Development tools, Oslo, PDC 2009, SQL Server, Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas), Windows server

Tags: Oslo, Microsoft SQL Server, Server, Microsoft Corp., Databases, Research & Development, Enterprise Software, Software, Data Management, Business Operations

There are few initiatives at Microsoft that have undergone as many twists and turns as Oslo, Microsoft’s modeling platform/strategy.

On November 10, Microsoft announced the latest Oslo shift: Oslo’s three main remaining components are going to be be renamed “SQL Server Modeling” and be folded into some future release of Microsoft’s database.

In 2007, Microsoft first discussed publicly its plans for “Oslo” — an amorphous multiproduct effort that encompased future releases of .Net, Visual Studio, BizTalk and SQL Server. By the fall of 2008, Microsoft had decoupled .Net, VIsual Studio, BizTalk and SQL Server from Oslo. When officials said Oslo, they meant Microsoft’s evolving modeling strategy and technologies, specifically the M language, the Quadrant tool and the metadata repository. This past summer, as part of one of Microsoft’s countless reorgs, the Oslo team was combined with Microsoft’s Data Programmability team (which manages Astoria, Entity Data Model (EDM), Entity Framework (EF), XML, ADO.Net and tools/designers).

Going into the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2009 next week, Microsoft is planning to make available a new Community Technology Preview (CTP) test build of Oslo, which will be its first since May 2009. This new CTP will be known as the SQL Server Modeling CTP.

According to a November 10 blog posting by Product Unit Manager Doug Purdy, this new CTP “will begin to demonstrate how developers will use these (Oslo) technologies in concert with things like T-SQL, ADO.NET, ASP.NET and other parts of the .NET Framework to build database applications.”

“All of these components are now part of SQL Server and will ship with a future release of that product,” Purdy blogged this week. (Purdy doesn’t specify a ship date target, but I’m doubtful it will be in time for the next version of SQL Server, SQL Server 2008 R2, which is due out in the first half of 2010.)

As of next week, Microsoft also plans to integrate the Oslo” Developer Center and the Data Developer Center into a new site, http://msdn.microsoft.com/data.

On Twitter, the overwhelming sentiment about the latest change in Oslo’s direction are largely negative. Here are a few reactions:

Scott Banwart: With this announcement, I no longer see the point of Oslo.

Tomas Restrepo: Cynical thought of the day: Oslo == Longhorn. OK, could’ve been worse (i.e. Cairo).

James Hart: Any expectations anybody had for what Oslo might turn out to be came from their own imagination. Disappointment was inevitable.

Ryan Rinaldi: The Oslo story just got more confusing.

Steve Bohlen: good lord; Oslo follows in the footsteps of WinFS; big (if nebulous) idea degenerates into dull implementation w dubious value

Sean Munger: Friends dumbstruck at flying saucers descending over Oslo. (Oops. Maybe a different Oslo)

Any developers out there see a silver lining in the latest Oslo moves? Or is it time for the aliens to rush in and take over?

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 5th, 2009

Billing system testing behind Microsoft's SQL Azure outage this week

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 12:51 pm

Categories: Azure, Corporate strategy, Database, PDC 2009, SQL Server, Utility/cloud computing

Tags: Billing, SQL, Billing System, Microsoft Corp., Outage, Manufacturing, Programming Languages, Databases, Software Development, Software/Web Development

Testers of Microsoft’s SQL Azure service experienced a three-plus hour unplanned outage this week — just a couple of weeks before Microsoft is set to remove the beta tag from its Azure cloud service.

During prior Azure outages (planned and unplanned), the team made sure to blog about the causes. This week’s outage, which occurred on the opening day of Microsoft’s SQL PASS user group conference, received no mention (other than a brief acknowledgment on the MSDN SQL Azure forums).

A tester wondering what happened sent me a note. From his e-mail:

“Microsoft didn’t formally acknowledge the problem until the outage was almost resolved. That’s 3+ hours wondering when the cloud would recover. Still no details on what happened.”

When I asked about what was behind the outage, I received the following note back from an Azure spokesperson:

“We were doing testing on the connection of the central billing platform yesterday and unfortunately experienced some downtime with SQL Azure. When discovered, we notified (Community Technology Preview) CTP customers right away and within a few hours had the service back online.”

Yes, Azure and SQL Azure are still in the test phase. But Microsoft is trying to lay the groundwork to get consumers, developers and enterprise customers to trust the availability, reliability and privacy guarantees of the service. Speaking of privacy guarantees, Microsoft published today a white paper outlining the company’s privacy policies for cloud computing.

SQL Azure will be feature-complete by November, the Softies have said, and testers will have the option of rolling over existing projects seamlessly to the fully supported production environment and a paid subscription to the SQL Azure Database service.

Microsoft officials have said to expect the company to remove the beta tag from Azure by mid-November. Last week, the Softies said that the company will go public with a number of new Windows Azure features on November 17 during the company’s Professional Developers Conference. The Azure CTP will remain open through December 31. Customers won’t be charged for Azure usage in January, but as of February 1, Microsoft will begin charging customers for using Windows Azure.

Microsoft provided Azure pricing details earlier this year.

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.

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October 29th, 2009

Microsoft's lawyers will be busy in the next few months

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 11:49 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Database, Legal, Office

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Fact Discovery, Corporate Law, Business Operations, Mary Jo Foley

In the midst of all the Windows 7 hoopla last week, Microsoft released its first quarter fiscal 2010 10-Q. In that document was mention of a number of the pending lawsuits against the company that are due to see some action during Microsoft’s fiscal 2010.

(Microsoft’s fiscal year runs from July 1 to June 30.)

Some of these suits have been covered extensively by us bloggers and journalists, including the seemingly never-ending Opera antitrust case against Microsoft and the i4i suit over alleged patent infringement by Microsoft’s Office suite.

But there’s been relatively little coverage as of late about what’s going on with the Novell antitrust suit filed in 2004 against Microsoft over WordPefect. In June 2005, the trial court granted Microsoft’s motion to dismiss four of six claims of the complaint. Both parties appealed, and in October 2007, the court of appeals affirmed the decision of the trial court, and remanded the case to that court for further proceedings. Fact discovery has closed and summary judgment motions were filed in October 2009

The latest is that a hearing has been set for January 22, 2010, before Judge Motz in the Federal District Court in Baltimore, to present oral arguments on Microsoft’s motion for summary judgment, a Microsoft spokesperson told me late last week.

The 10-Q also mentions “over 50 other patent infringement cases pending against Microsoft, 10 of which are set for trial in fiscal year 2010,” Among those on the list:

• A lawsuit filed by JuxtaComm Technologies against Microsoft and other defendants — including IBM, Oracle, Business Objects and others with ETL (extract, transform and load) tool vendors — in U.S. District Court in Texas. JuxtaComm claims that technologies in several Microsoft products including SQL Server, Visual Studio, Visio, and .Net Framework infringe a JuxtaComm patent relating to data integration. Trial has been scheduled for November 2009.
• A lawsuit by VirnetX in U.S. District Court in Texas in which VirnetX asserts that various Microsoft products including Windows client and server operating systems software and communications software infringe patents relating to certain secure Internet communications. Trial is scheduled for March 2010.

Microsoft’s 10-Q notes that as of September 30, 2009, Microsoft had accrued aggregate liabilities of $700 million and $400 million in other long-term liabilities fo all of the contingent cases described above. The 10-Q also points out that:

“There exists the possibility of adverse outcomes that we estimate could be up to $1.9 billion in aggregate beyond recorded amounts. The foregoing amount does not include the January 15, 2009 European Commission statement of objections, the outcome and range of which is not reasonably estimable. Were unfavorable final outcomes to occur, there exists the possibility of a material adverse impact on our financial position, results of operations, and cash flows” once the effects start to hit.

October 29th, 2009

Microsoft adds more choices for developers targeting its Azure cloud

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 9:05 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Azure, Code names, Corporate strategy, Database, Development tools, Open source, PDC 2009, Red Dog, Utility/cloud computing, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 /("Windows 7 Server")

Tags: Developer, Java, SDK, Microsoft Corp., Eclipse, Java Development Tools, Microsoft Windows, Open Source, Development Tools, Software Development

Microsoft is getting its Azure ducks before it removes the beta tag from its cloud service in mid-November.

Update: The Azure team posted a bit of a roadmap update to their blog on October 29. The team noted that the Azure preview will remain open through the end of 2009. Microsoft plans to start charging for Azure usage/hosting as of February 1, 2010.

On October 28, the company announced plans for more development tools aimed at programmers who want to use PHP, Java and the Eclipse IDE to create and modify Web applications for Azure.

At the Eclipse Summit Europe, Microsoft announced a plug-in called the Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse which is targeted at PHP developers. The plug-in bundles together the already-announced Azure software-development kit (SDK) for PHP into the Eclipse PHP project.Soyatec is developing the new toolset, with funding and guidance from Microsoft.

The plug-in includes a Window Azure storage explorer so developers can browse data in Windows Azure tables, blobs or queues, according to Microsoft. A Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse is available for download now. The final “release to Web” of the toolkit is slated for November.

Microsoft also took the wraps off a new Windows Azure SDK for Java on Wednesday. The SDK is being developed by Soyatec in conjunction with Microsoft.  A CTP of the Soyatec SDK for Java is available for download; the final release-to-Web version is slated for November.

(Microsoft and another partner, Schakra, also are developing a Java SDK for Azure. This original SDK is targeting Azure .Net Services, while the new toolkit from Soyatek is targeting Windows Azure, the OS layer of Azure, which was codenamed Red Dog. Microsoft recently decided to pull workflow services out of the Azure .Net Services layer, so as to wait for the final .Net 4 release, slated for late March. A new CTP of the Schakra Java SDK is slated for November. There’s no word on when the final release will be done.)

In other Eclipse-related news, Microsoft and solution provider Tasktop Technologies announced they will be developing updates to the Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE) to take advantage of new features in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Tasktop will contribute enhancements to the Eclipse IDE that will be available under the Eclipse Public License for early access the first quarter of 2010; general release is slated to happen as part of the Eclipse Helios release in June 2010. Microsoft is funding the project.

While Microsoft continues to put more of its Azure pieces in place prior to its PDC launch, its foremost competitor, Amazon.com, is continuing to roll out more elements of its own cloud computing environment that are squarely targeted at Microsoft. Earlier this week, Amazon announced the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) beta. As cloud-computing maven Roger Jennings explained in a blog post, Amazon is now delivering pre-configured MySQL 5.1 instances with up to 68 GB of memory and 26 ECUs (8 virtual cores with 3.25 ECUs each) servicing up to 1 TB of data storage

October 27th, 2009

SharePoint: The team that makes the donut(s)

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 7:32 am

Categories: Azure, Corporate strategy, Database, Development tools, Office, Office 2010/Office 14, SQL Server, SharePoint Server, Utility/cloud computing

Tags: Team, Microsoft SharePoint, Ribbon, Content Management, Collaboration, Groupware, Team Management, Enterprise Software, Software, Management

When Microsoft officials describe SharePoint Server, they often refer to what’s called “the donut” diagram — a picture of the six server workloads that comprise the overall product.

But who actually makes the donut(s), and how does the team decide which features to bake into a new release of the product? I was curious about the people and the processes of the 5,000+-member team that is working on the SharePoint 2010 release. To get a better feel for the SharePoint team, Microsoft gave me a chance to interview over the past few weeks not just the “usual suspects,” but some of the other lesser-known but key SharePoint managers.

SharePoint is built by the Office group and includes approximately 40 teams. According to company officials, the core teams are in Redmond, but there are other large SharePoint teams in Silicon Valley, Boise, Boston, Ireland, Norway, India, China and Japan.

The first thing I noticed during my interviews was that everyone with whom I spoke mentioned the calming, analytical influence of the” father of SharePoint,” Corporate Vice President Jeff Teper. Sure, the SharePoint team can have fun; after all, the team’s mascot is the Flying Screaming Monkey that can and has been flung via slingshot onto unsuspecting targets of all kinds. But SharePoint isn’t a team that lurches from crisis to crisis or one characterized by all-night coding marathons and mandatory pancake breakfasts during the final “death march” of a new product release.

The SharePoint team, which is patterned intentionally on the same culture/processes that have characterized the Microsoft Office team, spends a lot of time and energy talking to customers. Like the Office team, the SharePoint folks spend countless hours watching how customers use (and attempt to use) their product. Team members actually count the number of clicks it takes users to perform specific tasks, with the goal of making each and every feature easier and quicker to access.

When planning a new SharePoint release, the team starts with “an intuitive sense of what should be in here,” said Lauren Antonoff, Partner Group Program Manager and 13-year Microsoft veteran. “We look at what’s currently hard and why it is hard. We ask why can’t it be better.”

“We’re working with our partners differently than we did in the past,” Antonoff added. “In the past, TAP (the Technology Adoption Program test phase) was a nominally assigned kind of thing. It gave us a fractured picture of what our customers were doing.”

But starting in 2007, the team started asking users more and deeper questions, which led to the reegineering of the SharePoint development process, particularly the customer feedback loop. Microsoft began hooking up customers with whole teams inside of a product group so they could talk to developers in different disciplines across the whole SharePoint team so that the SharePoint folks could better understand users’ businesses and pain points, Antonoff said. Going forward, the new structure should give Microsoft more real-world feedback earlier about how customers are using SharePoint, she said. The new processes are somewhat similar to how the Exchange team operates, she added.

Principal Program Manager Rob Lefferts also played up more and earlier real-world customer exposure as something the SharePoint team is doing differently these days. Microsoft itself is one of these customers. He noted the entire Office division has been running SharePoint 2010 for over a year now, since it was in the alpha test stage.

“We’re putting a new build on our servers every week now,” Lefferts said.

Another change with the current SharePoint cycle has been the focus on scalability, said Eric Fox, Partner Development Manager and a Microsoft “lifer.” (Fox joined Microsoft as an intern in 1993 and held a variety of jobs in the Office client team since then.)

“Scalability has been much more of a core focus this time around. We are making sure we target (scalability) with our architecture and design. We’re asking whether any feature has any particular scalability issues,” Fox said. “Social networking is a big test case for this.”

With the 2010 release, for the first time, the SharePoint product team and the SharePoint Online team are working hand-in-hand. Up until now, the SharePoint Online team has been more focused on studying the Exchange Labs and Exchange Online teams’ work, Antonoff said. But with this release, “we’re working on it (SharePoint Online) way earlier than we would usually. ” She said it’s more like “one blurry virtual team” now, instead of two teams working in parallel. The goal is to make the SharePoint/SharePoint Online experience more consistent — which is key to Microsoft’s mission of allowing users to choose how and when they use the hosted version vs. the on-premises version of SharePoint.

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October 20th, 2009

SharePoint 2010 SKUs multiply like rabbits

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 7:59 am

Categories: Code names, Corporate strategy, Database, Development tools, Office 2010/Office 14, SQL Server, SharePoint Server, Utility/cloud computing

Tags: Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Corp., Groove Workspaces, Content Management, Collaboration, Groupware, Enterprise Software, Software, Mary Jo Foley

While Microsoft played up the November availability of a public beta of SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 during the opening day of the company’s SharePoint Conference, there were lots of other interesting product tidbits that went unnoticed by many.

Here’s a quick round-up of a few of them:

With SharePoint 2010, there will be (at least) 10 different SharePoint SKUs. (I guess the SharePoint team is bucking the trend that other Microsoft teams seem to be following — that fewer SKUs is better.) On the product editions list: SharePoint Server 2010 for Intranet Scenarios (with Enterprise and Standard Client Access Licenses); SharePoint Server 2010 for Internet Sites, Enterprise; SharePoint Server 2010 for Internet Sites, Standard; FAST Search for SharePoint 2010; FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 for Internet Sites; Search Server 2010; Search Server Express 2010; SharePoint Designer 2010; SharePoint Foundation 2010 (the product formerly known as Windows SharePoint Services). There are also at least two SharePoint Online SKUs: Standard and Deskless Worker.

Microsoft is replacing the current online-offline synchronization engine in SharePoint with its Sync Framework. Groove Workspaces are tied to SharePoint right now using an internal sync engine that will be supplanted by the Microsoft Sync Framework. (Sync Framework is not the same as Windows Live Sync or FeedSync, just to try to clarify Microsoft’s confusing naming scheme.) The change in engines will enable support of more users sharing Groove Workspaces and will allow developers to take advantage of exposed SharePoint programming interfaces.

Enhancements are coming to SharePoint Mobile Access. Buried in one of Corporate Vice President Jeff Teper’s dense, epic blog posts: “We both improved the experience for mobile web browsers and are introducing a new SharePoint Workspace Mobile client so you can take Office content from SharePoint offline on a Windows Mobile device. These clients let you navigate lists and libraries, search content and people and even view and edit Office content within the Office Web App experience running on a mobile browser.” It’s not clear whether this new client is the same one that may or may not be part of Office Mobile 2010, a product about which Microsoft is willing to say little

Project Gemini is now known as Microsoft SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel (or plain old “PowerPivot” for short). PowerPivot will be integrated with SharePoint Server 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2. Microsoft is touting PowerPivot’s benefits as integrating “massive amounts of data on the desktop from virtually any source”: and the performance fast calculations and analysis on large data volumes.

I realize there’s a theory at Microsoft that product names of business software can be more unwieldy and matter less than those of Microsoft’s consumer-focused products. Yes, SharePoint is a complicated, multifaceted Swiss army knife of a product, but it sure seems like all these SKUs and components would make it tough on customers trying to tread water in the SharePoint swamp.