Microsoft builds bridges, forms teams at TechEd

SAN DIEGO — Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer admitted he borrowed heavily from Redmond’s new ad tagline — Do More With Less — for the theme of the of Tech Ed 2004 opening keynote address Monday.

The mantra “”amplifies the

pressure we think you’re under,”” Ballmer told a packed house at the converntion centre here. While there’s a growing application backlog, there is still pessure to keep IT costs down. Ballmer laid the blame for that at the feet of the Y2K ramp-up and the dot-com bubble — two costly exercises for which the business side of the enterprise felt they got nothing. Growth in IT spending is stabilizing, but pressure for new projects is still outstripping that growth.

Microsoft is taking a lifecycle approach to the development value proposition, and that will be manifested in Microsoft’s release next year of Visual Studio 2005 Team System, he said. The new VS is a suite of tools aimed at better integrating the development and deployment/management functions of the IT organization. This includes process management tools, point-and-click validation that code will work in a deployment, static analysis and load-testing tools.

“”Writing applications today is more than just writing code,”” said Prashant Sridharan, Microsoft’s product manager for Visual C#.

Paulla Bennett, manager of the IT services department for the York Region Board of Education in Ontario, found the integration compelling.

“”School boards are at the mercy of whatever funding envelope comes down,”” she said. With no guarantee of resources on the IT side, students and teachers come first — infratructure development isn’t a funding priority.

Having the disciplines of coding and validating integrated is “”a very powerful tool,”” she said. “”We can wear different hats at different stages of the project.””

Kieron Quigley, an applications environment specialist at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology in Edmonton, said he was focused on Ballmer’s announcement of The Microsoft Office Information Bridge Framework. IBF uses XML and Web services to allow Office applications to draw on enterprise data — “”a fantastic conduit”” for pulling in data from SQL and database servers, Quigley said.

“”Being able to pull that into the workflow is going to be a challenge,”” he said.

IBF is part of Microsoft’s strategy to build a general-purpose framework on top of .Net to make the platform and its applications extensible, Ballmer said — for example, using Exchange to build a collaborative backbone. He positioned it as a unified development platform for the entire application life cycle: a strong, interoperable platform for developers, scalable management and deployment tools and end-user accessibility, mobility and collaboration.

IBF will be available in July.

Ballmer also announced the availability of Web Services Enhancements 2.0, an add-on to Visual Studio .Net to ease development of applications that draw upon or provide Web services. In conjunction with IBF, it makes Office a smart-client front end for access to XML Web services, he said.

For example, a smart tag in an e-mail header could link the sender’s address to related account information, said Rebecca Dias, Web services product manager for Microsoft,

IT managers are going to see more of this cross-application integration in Longhorn, with common data access across SQL Server, Exchange and other server applications. If you think that means a more closed environment, Ballmer said, think again.

“”Question any conventional wisdom”” on that front, he said, bemoaning the fact that Microsoft doesn’t get the credit it deserves for commitment to — and investment in — interoperable standards like XML, a “”lingua franca”” of computing.

“”People ask, ‘Are you really committed to those things (XML and Web services) as open standards?’ Absolutely, yes,”” Ballmer said.

TechEd continues until Friday.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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Dave Webb
Dave Webb
Dave Webb is a technology journalist with more than 15 years' experience. He has edited numerous technology publications including Network World Canada, ComputerWorld Canada, Computing Canada and eBusiness Journal. He now runs content development shop Dweeb Media.

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