The first day of TechEd IT Pro has been very busy! I’m just now getting a chance to write up my notes from the keynote this morning. If you’d like to hear the original, looks like you can do that here (http://wm.istreamplanet.com/customers/ms/100_ms_teched_080610.asx).

The first guest was Hunter Ely, an IT expert who used SharePoint and Groove to help lost family members find each other during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (more here – http://blogs.technet.com/nap/archive/2008/02/22/nap-heroes.aspx). Hunter is definitely good people.

Next topic was the re-introduction of Microsoft’s Dynamic IT marketing initiative. It’s a 10 year effort and they’re half-way in. The first bit mentioned was Infrastructure Optimization (here’s a MORG link; I can’t seem to find a better one – http://www.microsoft.com/midsizebusiness/mmrp/deploy/it-infrastructure-optimization.mspx).

After that came “Managing Identities – Federation”. Specifically, the announcement of Identity Lifecycle Manager 2 Beta 3 (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver/ilm2/default.mspx). There were two ILM demos: one showing an integrated employee on-boarding work flow with SAP, another showing how an approvals process can be driven by email.

Next came Interoperability. The first bit was a reminder that Operations Manager supports Linux now (http://blogs.msdn.com/scxplat/archive/2008/04/29/announcing-system-center-operations-manager-2007-cross-platform-extensions-and-connectors.aspx).

The second interop item was probably the most technical of the keynote demos, with some developer content having been included. In summary, the demo started with a stock trading application based on .NET 3.5 + WCF + WPF (for a smart client). Then a representative from WSO2 (http://wso2.com/) came up and showed interoperability of the same web service based solution with PHP, Apache, and native C (for the Axis2 project). Finally, they showed replacing the .NET backend with a Java-based order processing service to receive requests from the .NET middle tier.

Then the keynote moved on to Virtualization. Microsoft is working with Citrix to present virtualized Vista on dumb terminals. Next up, a video showing how Kroll (http://www.kroll.com/) uses Windows Server virtualization technologies in its data center.

Muglia took this opportunity to talk about Hyper-V, basically with a lot of superlatives about how Microsoft’s brand-new technology is totally production ready. Then he briefly introduced application virtualization that left me totally confused – no idea what points he was trying to get across in this little segue piece.

But things got much better with a System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/scvmm/default.mspx) demo. They showed integration with VMware ESX to present a single VM management console (owned by Microsoft) compatible with both product suites. The console is reportedly completely PowerShell based, so everything it does can be scripted – they even have a button you can click on each action window that allows you to capture the equivalent script for subsequent automation.

He also showed the Performance Resource Optimization (http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2008/04/29/system-center-virtual-machine-manager-2008-beta-has-arrived.aspx) feature of SCVMM, which allows virtualization-related operation center alerts to be handled automatically (e.g. VMs overloaded? The system will bring up a new web server image to balance.).

As an aside, the PRO demo was based on DinnerNow (http://www.dinnernow.net/)!

Muglia next mentioned SoftGrid (http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/softgrid/default.mspx), a segue into the demo of the recently acquired Kidaro (http://www.kidaro.com/). This one was pretty cool. They first showed a client VM policy that dictates in which directions the clipboard may be accessed (e.g. you can
paste into the VM, but not from the VM).

The second Kidaro demo showed hosting an XP-only application in a VM window with a red border, running on Vista. Seamless. And they can do the same thing with Internet Explorer. Have a website that only supports IE6, but you need to access it on Vista? Launch the URL and a virtualized IE6 window comes up.

The final piece that I caught (I left a bit early, partly out of boredom and partly because I wanted to get over to the Forefront demo pod) was Software + Services. Microsoft’s hosted offerings include Exchange, SharePoint, and LiveMeeting. A demo showed Exchange with a management console that integrates hosted directory data with what’s available locally.

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