WPC 2007 Rod US

Allison Watson hosted a special section during the final keynotes.  The A list of new products and exciting soon to be released items.  This was a very exciting presentation with demos on each product.  Here are a couple of highlights.

 

Sea dragon

A soon to be new product that views hi-res images that can zoom with multi GB images to very high details.  In the demo, we zoomed into areas as small as a 10x10 pixel area of a webpage where continued zooming focused on entire books with page after page of absolutely clear text.  This technology will be released into Silverlight in the future. 

 

PhotoSynth

Is another new product produced by Microsoft Live Labs  that includes context based browsing.  View a picture of a retail store and product information appears for the product that you are focused on.  Move you mouse and you'll see details on the items that you pause and zoom on.  This really adds a visual experience and emersion when shopping on the net.

 

Surface

Of course the presentation included a nice demo on Microsoft Surface Computer.  

http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

 

Rod

Some nice UC tidbits for you

Exchange Server 2007 includes 15 text to speech languages in the box and let me tell you, they really work.  The voice enabled Outlook and text to speech demo was flawless.  Exchange recognized the correct language and reads back in the correct language by itself.

 

MOC will let you leverage AD groups by dragging groups already in your messaging Distribution Lists right into MOC.  Then you can expand and see each individual presence info.  Creating multiparty conference calls and video calls was very easy.  The latency on the video was very high but did offer value.  I really like to phone additions for call divert, forward all, ring all, etc.

 

OCS 2007 licensing

Client is delivered thru the office suite, office pro and office enterprise

There are some great licensing options if purchasing LCS Standard 2005 w/SA as the upgrade will automatically include the Enterprise CAL for the same price.

 

Pricing will come on the price list in Sept and Oct. 2007

 

Rod

 The new web 2.0 look and feel with Silverlight, WPF and SharePoint are great.  The visual experiences are quite amazing.  Sanjay hosted a few demos that included Silverlight HD programming on NetFlix, a SCIPPS medical collaboration site that was deep in integration and a Zurich airport experience.  I say experience because  the visuals for each solution were so good and the depth of data intelligence so great that I could feel the experience of using those tools even while only watching from the audience.  It was more immersive than "live" and better than any static document or collection of documents could provide.  The Zurich airport example is publically accessible.  You can zoom in on each airplane and see seat capacity load, zoom in for more information and back out to see the airport as a whole.  Very nice. 

 

Here are a couple of good links:

 

LAUNCHING NEXT WAVE

www.innovate-on.com

 

User Experience

www.microsoft.com/silverlight

www.silverlight.net

 

Rod

Day One Keynotes

Kevin Turner gave some nice info on the state and future of Microsoft.  Here are a couple of numbers

·         Vista 30M + copies in first 100 days!

·         FY08 300B partner opportunity in Vista alone

·         Office 2007 85M licensed SharePoint users

·         Exchange 2.5M+ Notes converted to Exchange this year alone

o    Looking for 4M notes to exchange this next year as goal

·         Software as Service or Software + Services continue to be very strong strategic directions

 

Each of these themes resonated through each keynote

 

Steve Ballmer was dynamic and presented the overall Microsoft vision for the next 1-2 years.  Software + Services and the way it will change the way business thinks about software and how varied deployment / hosted models may be the right fit.  I can see this as being able to enable technology into business process for small and mid-sized companies at a faster rate than installing on premises.  Steve showed how hosted services models include the partner deeply in the customization, 3^rd party plug ins for online CRM.   So Steve presented a demo that leverages live.maps.com, business intelligence and Microsoft Silverlight technology hosted by Microsoft that may be leveraged by Microsoft partners to enhance and enable Software + Services adoption.

 

How does this relate to Unified Communications?  The current adoption will require companies tie into existing services for telephony, and messaging.  But this would enable small and mid-sized business to adopt UC much faster. 

Rod