All about Microsoft

Live Services as Microsoft's consumer Web platform

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.Net Framework
Corporate strategy
Development tools
Live Mesh
Management tools
PDC 2008
Search
Utility/cloud computing
Virtualization
Web 2.0
Windows Live

It's been tricky keeping separate all of the "layers" in the Microsoft cloud strata. One of those layers, Live Services, has been especially amorphous. But now Live Services is a little clearer, thanks to a new Web site detailing an upcoming series of Microsoft events. Live Services Jumpstart 2009 -- a paid event Microsoft is planning to host in 11 cities worldwide starting in November -- offers a lot of clues about how Microsoft is planning to position and explain Live Services to developers at the upcoming Professional Developers Conference (PDC). From the Jumpstart 2009 agenda (cached), it looks like Microsoft is lumping these technologies into the Live Services bucket:

Windows Live ID
Live Messenger
Live Search
Virtual Earth
Silverlight Streaming
Live Sync (which those sneaky LiveSide geniuses, with the help of LiveSino.Net, figured out was the new name for FolderShare)

Powering these services are a variety of Cloud application-programming interfaces (APIs) -- for things like virtualization, storage, networking, management, etc.., no doubt -- along with the .Net libraries. Here's how Microsoft describes the Jumpstart event in the overview:

"Live Services Jumpstart provides in-depth technical training sessions (level 300-400) on Microsoft’s cutting edge consumer web platform technologies that help developers / partner organizations build rich web applications, sync and share them across devices and more importantly, build audience for the web applications." "Upon attending this event, you should be able to Jumpstart your web application development with the power of Live Services."

Here's another description of how Microsoft intends to describe/position its Live Platform, courtesy of an October 10 blog post by the US ISV Developer Evangelism Team:

"Microsoft’s Live Platform lets you easily put the social and collaborative capabilities into your website to create rich experiences online, and helps consumers keep those experiences synchronized, online and off, across all their devices. Live platform enables you to add compelling, sticky web capabilities, and dramatically increase audience engagement on your site. You can make your web site more 'social capable' by integrating

Presence and awareness

Representing data in visual, geographic ways

Sharing info across mobile workforces who are occasionally connected

Storing data in a distributed, peer to peer fashion and delivering in an event driven manner"

I'm sure all of these postings will disappear from the Web real soon now. So check them out while they are still findable if you're interested in learning about Windows Live Services before Microsoft peels back the covers in another two weeks.

posted by Mary Jo Foley
October 10, 2008 @ 2:40 pm

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