Introduction

Ready for Business – Innovating for Impact was the first keynote of TechEd, presented by Andrew Lees, and as you might expect for a keynote, it didn’t delve too far into any specific technology but covered the broad thrust of where Microsoft is heading over the next few years. And the basic theme of the talk was that software is currently too complicated for business and Microsoft wants to simplify it.

Please bear in mind when reading this that I’ve put the TechEd reports together based on notes made and photos taken during the talk. I’ve tried as far as possible to stick to what the speaker has said but it’s inevitable that I’m going to have misremembered or misunderstood a few things, so don’t expect 100% accuracy. (And don’t expect photos, where provided, to have the same quality as real screenshots!). In cases where I wanted to add thoughts of my own, I’ve normaly done so in italics. Also, a talk and a written report are two different things. Hence the headings and subheadings are mine, chosen to make each column piece easy to read. And in a few cases I’ve swapped the order of material round to make it flow better in the column piece.

The Problem: People not Working Together

A big theme of the talk was that IT workers don’t communicate sufficiently – current software doesn’t make it easy for them to do so, thus for example there is little integration between a developer writing a project and the phase at which the IT manager installs it. Microsoft’s aim is to make the process of software development more seemless, thus allowing better communication and better data flow. The talk actually made this point with some drama, by bringing on to the stage three supposed typical people, a developer, an IT Manager, and a data worker continually who argued amongst themselves. All said they were overworked, and each made it clear s/he thought the others didn’t understand the problems s/he faced.

I was pretty sceptical on this point. It seems to me that software inevitably gets more complex as it gets more powerful, and far from making things simpler, it’s more likely that any new generation of software will simply change the demands that people make on a system. However, if you look behind the supposed theme, there were some interesting insights into Microsoft strategy in the talk.

Product Development

There are essentially three steps in a product lifecycle:

• Design – build


• Deploy – operate


• Act -interact

The claim was made that only 30% of IT resources are spent improving systems – the remaining 70% on ‘standing still’ – which presumably means maintenance etc. The reason given for this was complexity. Microsoft’s aim, as indicated, is to reduce complexity.

Amongst the coming things that will work towards this:

• Windows Server 2003 R2 coming this year. A 64 bit version will be out too. Features of R2 include a multicore hardware branch and ADFS innovations including a single sign on. There is also a cluster edition coming up, to allow high performance task scheduling.


• Virtualization – hyperviser based virtualization will be built right into the OS.

In terms of timeline:

• Virtual Server 2000 is available today


• Service Pack 1 will appear around the end of 2005 and will support Linux


• Hyperviser will appear around the Longhorn timescale (2007 ish).

Connected Systems

The point here is to bring separate application together

Andrew briefly recapped the history of systems – starting in the early days of computing with a single mainframe, which people connected to through dumb terminals. This evolved into 3-tier architecture and now components are increasingly based on web services. The modern idea is to put the overall flow controller of the application into middle, controlling various web services. This allows code reuse, since the same web service might be used by different applications, including applications that present different types of user interface.

If anyone is thinking, this sounds familiar, that was my thought too. I’m sure I’m not the only person who remembers how COM was going to facilitate code reuse via COM components about 8 years ago. And the fact that Web services helps code reuse isn’t exactly the hottest news I’ve heard this year. So I was a bit surprised that Microsoft would make an issue of the fact.

There are a couple of new issues that arise from this which Microsoft is seeking to address:

• For this to work you really need a federated identity system so people can have the correct level of access to various systems without repeated logins.


• If web services etc. are to serve multiple applications then continuous operation becomes a lot more important. Bluntly, you’ll increasingly find that even a single web service can’t afford downtime

Enter SQL Server 2005 which includes new technologies aimed at these kinds of problems.

SQL Server 2005

Amongst relevent new SQL Server technologies are: On the one hand it includes out of the box database mirroring, failover clustering, and the ability to remain always online even during maintenance – eg. for indexing. On the other hand it also brings stronger security, including native data encryption, and an integrated best practices analyzer (this was also available as a separate component for SQL Server 2000). The best practices analyzer scans the system, looks for potential security problems arising from aspects of your system, and provides recommendations.

Performance

At this point Francois Ajenstat came in to explain about SQL Server 2005 in more detail. He presented some demonstrations that compared the performance of SQL Server 2000 and 2005 for identical processors running queries. There wasn’t any great detail given about the queries used other than that they were apparently fairly complex ones. Both systems were stress-tested simultaneously and real-time graphs of different aspects of system workload were displayed. These indicated the machine running SQL Server 2000 was tending to max out, but the one running SQL Server 2005 was running quite comfortably with lots of spare capacity. Francois then pushed the 2005 machine by doubling the rate of queries being sent to it – the machine responded quite well, but was now starting to max out. He then added a further test by bringing in a 64-bit machine working on the double query rate- this machine was obviously well within capacity, which Francois explained was due to the ‘almost unlimited’ memory which means queries were remaining in memory, not being held in the page file.

Of course, the improved performance means you’re likely to place the server in much more mission critical situations. That makes it particularly relevent that SQL Server 2005 supports database mirroring.

Statistics

Andrew showed us some statistics. He claimed SQL Server 2005 was 37% better on performance than 2000 – though there was no indication of the nature of the tests that lead to this conclusion. He also stated SQL Server 2005 is more scalable than 2000 and has better performance than Oracle for a lower cost.

We were then treated to a video of the Paris Firefighters who apparently use a SQL 2005-based system developed with Visual Studio 2005 to determine amongst other things which firefighters to send to an incident. The SQL Server 2005 mirroring capabilities are used to mirror data to all fire stations and to a secure site. A smart client application updates the current status – where the firefighters are etc. All the data is stored in native XML. As was emphasized several times, this wasn’t merely a mission-critical application; it was a life-critical one.

I couldn’t help but be amused by the unstated implication of the video that, if it is accurate, the Paris firefighters must be running on beta software.

Amonst other statistics shown – apparently 43% use .NET as primary development tool, 35% for java/J2ee combined. I’m not clear what the 43% is 43% of .

SQL Server and NET 2.0

SQL server 2005 is fully integrated with Visual Studio 2005 – eg. it has the same IDE and same runtime; it is for this reason that both will be released on the same day.

Sql Server Usage and Prices

We were presented with a number of statistics. I’ll report them here without comment.

Of the database market, in terms of units sold, the proportions are: SQL Server 41% (406K), Oracle 25%, IBM 7%.But in terms of revenue the figures are Microsoft 20%, Oracle 33.7%, IBM 34.1%. It was claimed this was due to the lower cost of SQL Server.

In particular, the claim was made that the price is affected by add-ons. The Enterprise edition base product price for SQL Server is 25K, wheras Oracle is 40K ( I didn’t notice whether the currency was specified; since this is a European conference and a US product, it’s most likely to be either Euros or dollars ). However recover add-ons etc. take the Oracle price to 76K, and business intelligence to 116K. These are included out of the box as part of the basic SQL Server package. Also Microsoft charge per processor not per core, so for a multicore system the Oraclr price comes to 232K. (The IBM figure quoted was 330K)

There was some amusement when Andrew said that in view of this price difference Microsoft thought it only fair to introduce a free Oracle -> SQL Server migration tool, which he claimed reduces the manual effort to migate by 80%. The tool is a free download available on Microsoft’s website.

Busines Process Integration

Andrew claimed BizTalk is the most popular integration product.

BizTalk 2006

BizTalk 2006 will include substantially enhanced business activity monitoring. You’ll be able to go through and let you see where various processes are at. And with BizTalk 2006 you can set up alerts, eg. you could ask BizTalk to send you an alert if an order takes more than 24 hours to go through. Than you can also see where the problem is and talk to correct people, eg. not bother your developers about a bottleneck that actually occurred in the credit card processing department.

Visual Studio and Coding

In order to assist in integration, Visual Studio 2005 is broadening out vs to entire lifecycle, most notably through the new Team System. Visual Studio 2005 will, with team system, provide services to the infrastructure architects, the solution architects, the developers, the testers, and the project managers.

There’s also been a lot of work done to make web and smart client development much simpler. Microsoft has done a lot of analysis of common scenarios and as a result reduced coding required for these scenarios by 50-75%, being largely replaced by more drag and drop.

Smart client application gave you the full power of Windows, but the problem always was deployment. Now click-once technology will allow the developer to put/update the application on site very easily.

Skills Assessments

Skills assessments (two Visual Studio 2005 assessments, three SQL Server) and elearning courses (eight Visual Studio 2005, nine SQL Server) are available online Go to www.microsoft.com/learning. These assessments and courses will be free until November 7th.

Deployment and Maintenance

On deployment, there is a movement towards dynamic environments and using policy to manage networks.

Dynamic Systems Initiative

This is Microsoft’s attempt to allow better integration between developers and it managers. No more of the developers – as the speaker put it – ‘throwing things over wall’ once their software was written.

Tools for IT professionals aimed to help accomplish this include MOM (Microsoft Operations Manager), the System Center family of tools, and Systems Management Server.

The MOM Demo

At this point Josh Cohen came in to demonstrate how you could use MOM to manage hetergeneous systems. As an example let’s suppose an Intel machine in the network has been accidentally switched off. He actually engineered this on stage by having Andrew bump into a lever that switched the machine off. Then he found when he switched the machine on again it simply refused to reboot. This is the kind of situation where MOM comes in. He looked at the MOM report on another machine which showed that the hardware on the affected machine was responding but the operating system wasn’t. There was evidently a problem that would normally involve sending someone round to fiddle with the BIOS settings. However with MOM, you would able to correct the fault from a remote machine.

I’m actually quite puzzled by this. If I understood the demo correctly, a remote machine is able to talk to the BIOS on a machine that won’t boot. But doesn’t talking remotely mean it needs a network card and drivers working, which means a working and booted OS is required? Or can BIOS’s these days do a lot more than they could last time I had to fiddle with one?

Josh then developed the demo further to show that MOM can even manage other, non-Windows, OS’s. To achieve this he took a Sun computer in a rack running Solaris. The rack also contained a server running MOM on Windows Server 2003. He then physically ripped (or at least claimed to rip) the cooling systen from the solaris machine. Not surprisingly MOM very quickly reported an error, saying that there was a problem with the fan system on the Sun machine. Josh was therefore able to deal with the problem by asking MOM to send message requesting the affected machine to shutdown and also for a backup machine to boot up and take over.

Security

A key point of Microsoft’s security strategy is that the edge of the system should be defined not by physical network topology, but by your chosen policies.

Related to this, the main needs are:

Requirement	Solution
Better authentication / authorization	2-factor and biometrics claims-based security
Federated identity	active directory federation services
Universal addressibility	IPv6 replacing IPv4
To define and secure the boundary	ipsec policies

Internally, Microsoft uses IPsec to provide a very high degree of granularity of security policy, which can alsow work at a very low level. it’s used for example to stop source code from leaving the Microsoft system. As another example of the kinds of checks this can be used to achieve, apparently if someone VPN’s in to the Microsoft network, the system first checks that the machine has a running antivirus program, and that it has required Microsoft patches. A machine that fails these tests simply won’t get acces to the network.

More statistics: Apparently Active Directory is the most popular directory system (and in second place was NT4 ( people still use NT4??? ), then Netware, edirectory, and LDAP. In a new initiative, Microsoft will be working with partners to extend Active Directory to other platforms. A list was quickly presented of those partners, and Andrew said Microsoft was very grateful to them. The list was shown too quickly for me to see the full list, but I did notice that Sun was included. ( Yep, the same Sun whose computer Josh had ripped the fan from )

The New World of Work

This is the term Microsoft are using to describe how they think work should be done in the future. People will have one single identity for all the devices they use. This means for example that your calendar and your contacts would be synced up to all devices covering all your laptops, your PDA, and even down to your smart refridgerator.

Enabling the new world of work means allowing access wihout compromising IT systems. At its best it could save administrators time by relieving them of tasks – eg. you could allow people to create their own Sharepoint sites. But an obvious requirement is a secured infrastructure service for network access.

As an example, take direct mobile messaging. A few weeks ago Microsoft announced Exchange Server Service Pack 2 which contains a messaging and security feature pack for mobile devices. This allows the server to ensure policy is always up to date on devices with a technique called direct push (which is pretty much what it says: Exchange Server tells the device to accept any policy changes). There is support here for over 40 OEMs.

Trustworthy Computing

Trustworthy computing has been made the number one priority at Microsoft. Longhorn has been delayed by quite some time, partly because of this decision and the consequence of needing to modify Longhorn to include new security initiatives. Another acronym was also introduced here – Microsoft Continuous Innovation.

To illustrate the success Microsoft claims to have had on trustworthy computing, Andrew presented statistics on the number of critical vulnerabilities that were discovered during the first 750 days after release for Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000 Server. For 2003 the figure was 35, compared to 67 for 2000. He also mentioned there have been 200 million downloads of XP service pack 2. Microsoft is also providing various events, web casts, and prescriptive guidance traning all free of charge to assist professionals involved with maintaining security.

Database security has not been left out of this (recall database security was the target of the blaster virus in 2002). SQL Server bulletins have been dropping: 11 in 2003, 2 in 2004.

Another part of this initiative is to make sure updates are as seemless as possible. To this end Windows Update services have been improved so there is now a single updating infrastructure for everything Microsoft, not just the operating system. To this end the service is now named Microsoft Update Services not Windows Update Services, though it has the same URL. Also, security analyzer 2.0 has been released.

Besides putting security into base products, Microsoft is providing specific security products. In particular Microsoft has purchased enterprise security firms Sybari and Giant, and the new IE 7 is coming out towards the end of the calendar year.

Enabling the New World of Work

Mike Hall came in to give a demo of the ‘new world of work’ (A new Microsoft concept)

The demo focused on email, which is, as Mike said, a mission critical application ("Bet we all started the day by opening outlook"). Now outside the office you perhaps have a pda or cellphone that gives you access to email or your calendar. How secure are they? To illustrate the problem, he claimed that in Chicago alone last year, 80K such devices were left in taxis!

To demonstrate how security policy can help this he illustrated a system in which the central policy indicated that a device should lock after 1 minute of inactivity and that after 3 failed login attempts the device should locally wipe itself. (And indeed on such a system, if you know the device has been lost you can phone up the IT department and have them force a remote wipe using direct push).

He used a pda to attempt to connect to the server. The PDA immediately received a policy push (such a push might say for example that al passwords must be changed). The PDA prompted the user to accept the push, and would not synchronize email until the user had done so.

He then tried typing in three incorrect password attempts. Immediately on the 3rd attempt the device wiped itself and went back to the factory-default startup screen. Mike mentioned that normally just before the last attempt the machine would warn and check he user wished to continue.

Internet Security and Acceleration Server

Work has been done in Internet Security and Acceleration Server (ISAS) to assist in protecting servers. Imagine for example you wish to publish a mail server. To secure access, you could work through a wizard on ISAS. ISAS could monitor all inbound traffic, and you would have it that users are authenticated at the ISAS server level not at the exchange level.

Email is particularly vulnerable – over 80% of viruses come in over email. Protection can be offered by AntiGen (one of the products gained in the purchase of Sybari). Antigen gives protection in layers – eg. it protects the SMTP layer and the Exchange layer. It allows up to 8 antivirus engines all scanning simultaneously – that means you only need an update from any one vendor that is able to catch some new viruses. On the other hand you can set it to max performance to have fewer scanners running and greatere performance.

And Finally

Andrew mentioned that Microsoft aim to meet common engineering criteria, which essentially means different products should offer similar user interfaces etc. to ease the learning required to learn new products. This should reduce both complexity and the total cost of ownership (tco).

He then drew attention to the roadmap of new products:

• Windows Server 2003 R2 is coming up in next 12 months


• Longhorn sometime in 2006-7. Details hopefully to be given at PDC.


• Office/Exchange: New versions of office and exchange are due in 2006

My Verdict

It was an interesting keynote, though more from the point of view of showing where Microsoft’s thinking is heading than from the point of view of new technology announcements: As far as I could see there wasn’t anything that was dramatic, new and unexpected (nor should there be: To be fair you can hardly expect Microsoft to come up with a new technology announcement every June/July when TechEd happens to be happening). There was relatively little hard technical information. On the other hand there was clear confirmation (implied though not explicitly said) that Microsoft is looking at moving into the market for managing heterogenous systems, along with a (not unexpected) emphasis on security. I was slightly disappointed that the talk descended into marketing more than I’d have liked in a supposed technical conference. But it was only the keynote, hopefully the deeper technical sessions would rectify that.