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Turkish engineer Omer Celik survived a massive earthquake in Istanbul, Turkey in 1989 only to spend the next five days living on the street awaiting rescue crews.

It was an experience that he hoped other disaster survivors would never undergo.

So Celik created a robotic helicopter – dubbed RoboTurk – that rescuers could use to see video of disaster-torn areas and find out where help is needed the most.

When it was time to equip the helicopter with software that enabled such video catpure and streaming it back to command centres, Celik took advantage of Microsoft tools.

The Turkish engineer's initiative was cited by Kevin Turner, chief operating officer of Microsoft Canada Corp. during his keynote at yesterday's Canadian launch of Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, and SQL Server 2008.

It's possible not all the IT professionals and developers present at the event would design a life-saving tool - as Celik did.

But Turner emphasized that they could use the same Microsoft products to advance their business.

Guelph, Ont.-based eMedia Interactive Inc. is one company that's already committed to doing this.

The Web design company that serves clients such as hockey.com plans on adopting the new 2008 models of all three Microsoft products unveiled yesterday.

 “You get big benefits if you go end-to-end,” says Lance Mohring chief technical officer at eMedia.

And some of these benefits – Microsoft execs say – have to do with the fact that the new products' design incorporates a lot of customer feedback.

“Windows Server 2008 is the most customer-driven and tested product we've ever released,” Turner says.

Waiting for Hyper-V

All that testing isn't done quite yet.

Held back from launch with Server 2008 is Hyper-V, the server virtualization technology that will allow even multiple operating systems to run in parallel on one physical machine.

“The biggest reason [for the wait] is feedback from our customers,” says Bruce Cowper, senior program manager, security initiative for Microsoft Canada.

He says while a virtual machine might be easy to deploy, more work is needed to ensure the proper management tools are available to track performance and security.

Optimizing performance on 64-bit processors was also a concern.

The delay is a disappointment to beta-version user Etienne Tremblay, lead technologist with Plano, Texas-based EDS Corp. But as a self-described “virtualization aficionado” he is willing to wait.

“I'd rather they make it really, really well and we wait a few months or a few quarters,” he says.

Microsoft plans to release Hyper-V this year in the third quarter.

Cowper says Server 2008 users can expect a "consolidated services" approach that will save them a lot of time on IT tasks, offer greater access control, and more flexible Web management features.

Microsoft's wizard approach to accomplishing complex tasks starts at install, he says.

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