Chris Capossela: Tech•Ed 2006

ANNOUNCER: And now episode four of four, the fourth episode of the series we call Four.

MARY LYNN RAJSKUB: Okay, wait a minute, wait a minute.

ANNOUNCER: Yes?

MARY LYNN RAJSKUB: Well, that wasn’t much of an introduction.

ANNOUNCER: Well, it’s the fourth show; the audience knows the drill by now.

MARY LYNN RAJSKUB: But this is the four series finale, and the fourth promise. I mean, we’re in Boston, let’s really do it. Put a little Hollywood into it, will you?

ANNOUNCER: Okay.

Don’t lean back in your seat, because you’re only going to need the edge!

MARY LYNN RAJSKUB: Nice.

ANNOUNCER: Thanks.

And now the fourth promise and the final episode of Four!

(Video segment.)

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Information Worker PMG, Chris Capossela. (Applause.)

CHRIS CAPOSSELA: Well, good evening, everyone. It’s great to be here and to close the show with the last promise. I wanted to talk a little bit about the things we’re doing to help you amplify the impact of your people, so let’s jump right in. I want to make sure Bob keeps his promise of finishing on time.

When we think about the things that we can do to help you amplify the impact of your people, we’re basically focusing on three key capabilities. The first one is around unified communications and collaboration. This is all about helping teams work together more easily by providing one infrastructure that allows you to bring together lots of different communication technologies and communication channels into one server with a very simple to use desktop set of applications to interact with that server.

When it comes to enterprise content management, we think there’s a lot that we can do through our servers to make it easier for you to protect and control your content while still letting people use the tools that they know and love on the desktop to create content and have that content flow through the company by using custom defined workflows that you can build for certain business processes.

And the last capability that we’re investing heavily in is what we call business intelligence. We talked about this a little bit earlier on. When we think about how it can amplify the impact of your people, we think search is an incredibly important part of this, and then helping you not just find the information that you need but get the insights from that information and take action on it, and that’s something we’re very focused on.

So when you think about amplifying the impact of your people, you should think about a single set of servers that are easy to manage, with a single set of desktop applications that your users can use to get a lot more out of the investments that you’ve made in your infrastructure.

One of the key ways that we’ll deliver this to you is through the 2007 Microsoft Office System. As many people hopefully know, Office is a lot more than just the desktop applications; in fact, it’s about 30 to 35 desktop applications, servers, and services that make up the system itself.

I only wanted to talk about the four core products that make up the Office System that we think are the products that you’ll want to consider for every single one of your users to have access to.

So first and foremost is something Ray mentioned earlier tonight, and that’s Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007. This is a new enterprise suite that in addition to Word and Excel and Outlook and PowerPoint also includes things like InfoPath so that people can create easy to use forms, Office Communicator as the client application that people can use for secure instant messaging, for videoconferencing, for Web conferencing, et cetera. It also includes OneNote for digital note-taking, and, of course, Microsoft Office Groove, which we’re incredibly excited to be bringing out as part of an Office suite.

So this Office Enterprise suite really forms what we consider to be the ultimate collaboration desktop, one suite that you roll out to a set of people, it interacts with a whole bunch of different servers in your organization, and makes people incredibly collaborative and hopefully very efficient.

Now, there are three core servers that make up the Office System. Of course, there are more than three, but I just wanted to touch on the ones that are incredibly broad and that most customers tell us they want to have some solution in this space.

Number one is, of course, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. You should think about this as the collaboration and content management server, one server product that allows you to create a lot of different collaboration, workspaces, intranet sites, Internet sites, extranet sites, et cetera, and provide fantastic enterprise search capabilities. And we’ll talk about that in a little while.

Both Office Enterprise 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 we’re on track with the engineering teams to deliver those by October of 2006. We’ve just gone to a Beta 2 with those, and we have a tremendous uptake of the beta. And as always, the feedback that we get from Beta 2 will determine our ultimate ship date, but right now the engineering teams are on track to be done by October 2006.

Now, Exchange Server 2007 is another incredibly important part of the Office System. Of course, this is the e-mail, calendar and now the unified messaging server that gives you one piece of infrastructure to manage unified messages, voice, fax, et cetera.

We’re going Beta 2 next month. Anyone who is an MSDN or TechNet subscriber will have access to that Beta 2. Everybody here who goes to our booth will be able to actually sign up to get Beta 2 for Exchange Server 2007. We’re hoping to be done with that product by the end of this year, but again that Beta 2 feedback will be incredibly important to give us the green light to be done with that product.

And then the third server that I wanted to mention is what we call Office Live Communications Server. We’ll formally announce the name for this product for the sort of 12 wave in couple of months, but this is what you should consider as our real time communication server. It’s the piece of infrastructure you need to provide instant messaging, videoconferencing, et cetera, for all of your users. And that new version will be available sometime in 2007.

So again the real value proposition we have to all of you is to provide three very broad horizontal servers that you can manage in a very similar way and one desktop suite that when you’re using these in conjunction with each other you’re really amplifying the impact of your people.

I wanted to really follow the leadership with demos, so that’s essentially it for me for slides. I want to use the rest of my time here to basically give you a demo of Windows Vista, the Office System and, of course, Exchange Server 2007. So let’s go ahead and take a look at that right now.

You’ll see as we switch over our screen that I’m running on a Windows Vista machine. This is Beta 2. Of course, you can see the sidebar with a picture slide library here, my clock, my RSS feed watcher, a little game, et cetera.

Let me jump right into Office, and I’m actually going to show you Outlook. I mentioned that we think we have an opportunity to really unify communications. You’ll see in Outlook right here as I’m looking at this mail I can take a look at all the different people that are on this mail and see that he’s left me a voicemail, I can take some actions there from here.

One of the things I might want to do is to send a quick instant message to one of these people. Today, when you do an instant message, the history of that instant message is literally gone. With Outlook 2007 we give you the ability to track the history of all your IMs. So we just add a new folder right there and now here are all the IMs that I’ve done. I can right-click and choose to sort this just like in e-mail and see all the IMs by who I’ve sent them to or by who it was created by or by the date or by the conversation; so one place to manage my e-mail, my calendar, my tasks, as well as my instant messages.

And you’ll also notice that we’re making Outlook an RSS reader. So here when I expand the RSS feed folder, here are all my RSS subscriptions showing up right here inside of Outlook itself. Any time of browsing something in IE and I subscribe to an RSS feed, it will literally just show up right here. And we’re storing these in Exchange, so if I’m using Outlook Web Access, or if I move to a different machine, these RSS feeds follow me, and I don’t need a separate piece of software to do RSS reading. I literally have it built right into Outlook itself.

Now, when I click back in here, we’ll take a look at what’s happening, and you’ll notice that one of the things that we’re doing is using Exchange Server 2007 to introduce unified messaging capabilities. So, right away, you see that I’ve got a voice mail right here from somebody, and I get to it right inside of Outlook itself. You notice I can take audio notes right here, if I would like to do that. Let me go ahead and click on play, and see if we can and you’ll notice as I play that back, I actually can take some notes on this. So, now this is searchable, and I know what this call is all about. I can close this down, and off I go. I can save the changes to it, and we’re off and running. So, one piece of infrastructure with Exchange Server to unify not just your e-mail and your calendars and your tasks, but also voice mails and fax. That’s all managed right here from inside the Outlook user interface.

If you couldn’t hear that actual voice mail in this big room, I was asked to help work on a presentation. So, I’m going to switch over to that. But before I do that, not only are we introducing unified messaging in Exchange Server, and letting you have access to that from your mobile device, from Outlook Web Access, or for Outlook, but we’re also introducing what we call Outlook Voice Access, where you can literally use any phone, it doesn’t have to be a smart phone, you can literally dial in to your Exchange Server, and get access to your calendar, your e-mail, et cetera, just using your voice. So, if you’re running late, you can literally talk to your Exchange Server, tell it to cancel your next meeting, or tell it to let everybody know that you’re going to be late to that next meeting. A great way to access all this information that Exchange Server brings together in one place.

Okay. I want to get started on this presentation, so I’m going to go ahead and minimize Outlook. Right away, I’m going to start by searching. I’m going to search for a sales phrase, and when I start searching on Vista, you’ll see it will look inside of My Favorites, and my different files, and my communications. I can also just say I want to search the entire computer. It will bring up my search window here. Of course, I can navigate through different live previews of my icons, which is great. I can scroll down here and get a sense for what might be in any one of these particular files. Let’s go one more. Here’s actually a thumbnail of the content of an Office document, here’s a PowerPoint presentation, and I see the actual first slide right in the thumbnail. When I click on it inside of Vista, we’ll preview this document on the right-hand side, and I can actually click right here inside of Vista without opening up PowerPoint, and make sure this is actually the PowerPoint presentation I want to open. Notice the metadata I see at the bottom. There’s a lot I can do with this file right inside of Vista itself.

I’m going to double click to open this up inside of PowerPoint. I’m going to quickly close down that search window, and here we are inside of PowerPoint itself. We’re doing a lot to make these documents far more beautiful right out of the box, where people will be able to create these richer presentations without needing graphic support from a graphic designer. That’s a key design element to the new Office product.

You notice here I want to maybe finish off this presentation. I’ve got an empty box up here where this describes our product cycle. So, I’m going to say that we take customer feedback, we spell that correctly, we take in marketing input, and of course we do R&D. Typically you’d stop here in most PowerPoint presentations, but with the new user interface in Office, we think we can help people create much more beautiful documents, and get people to see the power right inside the product. You’ll notice when I hover over this, it says that I can convert this photo list to smart art. I’ll just click on that and drop down a really rich gallery of built-in artwork into the product. I’ll convert those three bullets into a picture, and let’s just dismiss the bulleted list, and if I want I can browse through the gallery of built in templates to make this product cycle look the way I want.

I’ll click on this one. And from here I might want to change the actual design. Notice as I’m hovering over each one of these things, you can see a live preview of what’s happening on the slide itself. I’ll go ahead and pick this one. And I might want to change the colors, and we’ll load in the work that I’ve done here, and you can see, again, the live preview showing me live feedback. Maybe I’ll choose this one right here.

And, very quickly, using the new ribbon, which is part of our user interface, we feel like we’re going to give people far more access to the power inside of each one of these Office applications. I’ve worked on this slide right here, but what I would like to do is actually add a new slide that I know exists somewhere inside my company, but I’m not sure where. I’ve showed you searching for information on your desktop PC in Vista, now what I would like to do is to switch over to our intranet site and show you our enterprise search capabilities. I’ll use Alt-Tab, and you’ll see the new Vista Alt-Tab, which makes it very easy for me to pick the thing I want, and we automatically add a desktop item. A lot to people have a hard time getting to their desktop, we add that to the list.

I’m going to switch over to SharePoint, which we’re using to run our intranet, and I’m going to start searching for Orion 2007, which is a brand new product that we’re working on. And this is actually going to run a SharePoint search for us. And search is a really interesting thing for us to work on with SharePoint, because searching inside your company is a lot different than searching on the Internet. As I mentioned, Internet searches today are typically something that are much more successful than searches inside your own company. We can do far better in the new release with our relevance ranking, getting far, far better, and the other thing is, we can find things inside a company that you typically wouldn’t be able to find on the Internet. So, not only are we going to be able to search all the unstructured data that SharePoint is going to go out and call, but through a new capability in SharePoint, we actually let you point at structured data, SAP, Siebel, CRM systems, your custom apps that you’ve written yourself, and we can find information from the structured apps and bring it back in one unified view.

Here we see the results. I can subscribe to an alert. I can subscribe to an RSS feed right from this search. But you’ll also notice, this is all unstructured data that just lives inside our organization. Right here, I can click on people, and now we’re going to show you all the people in our company who are experts on this particular product, in this case sorted by social distance from me. So, using Active Directory to tell us who are the people close to me in org structure who know about this product, put them at the top, they are my colleagues. Who are the people who are my colleagues’ colleagues, put them next, and then put everybody else. Notice I might want to sort by relevance, so instead of social distance to me, I just want to know who is the expert on this product. Notice the little presence icon that’s integrated right into this view. This is using Live Communication Server to tell us who this person is, whether or not they’re online. Notice, I can view her My Site. So, Tami is supposed to be the expert here. I’m going to just click on the presence icon, and I’m going to choose to view her My Site, which is her personal site on the intranet, and from here I can see all kinds of things that are interesting about me and Tami. I can see who the manager is that we have in common. I can see colleagues that we both know in the company. I can see SharePoint sites that we’re both members of. Exchange distribution lists that we’re both members of. I can see links that Tami thinks are interesting for me to go to, including a couple of wikis she’s participating in provided just by Office SharePoint Server inside our company.

I can also see documents that Tami is working on. If I click on this marketing link, this is nothing more than a SharePoint site that Tami and I are both working on. And in a minute, this will bring up all the documents that Tami is working on on that My Site that I have access to. So, we’re doing site aggregations across the different SharePoint sites, and listing all of that right here. Much easier for me to interact with Tami. I notice Tami also has a blog as part of her My Site. Sure enough, I can go ahead and work with this blog right here, and SharePoint provides the capability to do blogs inside your company. It looks like she has a slide library for working with the product.

I want to talk about how slide libraries let you manage your content. What Tami has done is to take a bunch of PowerPoint files, put them up in this slide library, and now I see the individual slides, and I can see who has the slide checked out, when the last time it was changed, I can filter by author. These are all living in a SharePoint site, not on people’s hard drives. From here, I can grab a single slide that I want to add to our presentation, send it over to my presentation, I’m going to add it to the one we’re working on. Most importantly, I want SharePoint and PowerPoint to tell me any time the slide in the central SharePoint location changes. I’ll hit send, and in a moment we’ll bring that slide down from SharePoint, add it to PowerPoint, give this a second, and if things are working correctly for me, it will pick up all of the style formatting that we have inside the PowerPoint presentation itself.

Great, there it is, there’s that presentation, and it picked up, again, the graphic formatting. I’ve already done that same thing by adding this slide from the SharePoint library right here on slide four, and I’m going to show you what this looks like when somebody has changed it on the central location.

I can just right click on this little icon and say, check this slide for changes. We query SharePoint and we say, yes, the one you have is older than the one up on the SharePoint site. Notice the red text that’s down here. I’m going to update the one I have by bringing down the later copy that exists on the SharePoint site, click back and there’s the red text. So a very, very easy way for you to manage your content centrally, add your rights protection to that central repository of slides, and let everybody work at it inside of PowerPoint itself.

The last thing I want to do here before this presentation is final is to really scrub it, and to protect the data that I might have in here, and make sure all of these little comments and annotations aren’t in the PowerPoint presentation when I share it with other people. We see a lot of people trying to do work to finish their documents, so we’ve added a whole bunch of capabilities, like marking documents final, or restricting permission with the rights management built into Windows Server or inspecting the documents.

Let’s just inspect it, save the changes, and it’s going to inspect the document for comments and annotations, for invisible, on-slide content, et cetera. And it quickly sees that we do have comments and annotations, keep your eyes, I guess, right here at this comment, and I’ll go ahead and hit remove all. That will delete that. Notice, we’ve got some presentation notes here, when I click remove all it will delete those, as well. And now I know that all of that content has been removed from my document, Word, Excel, PowerPoint across the entire document itself, and now I’m essentially ready to share this with someone else.

So there’s a lot that we can do with protecting your content through SharePoint and the Office applications, but Vista does a lot to protect your content, as well. Someone earlier mentioned the BitLocker encryption, which you can use on all your Vista machines, over 600,000 laptops are lost every single year. Now with BitLocker encryption you know that the third party tools that are used to basically break into machines aren’t going to work, it’s much more secure. The other thing I wanted to point out is that we’re doing things to help you secure information against devices like this, a USB stick. This is nothing more than a USB hard drive, and we know of a lot of companies that are actually putting glue in the USB drive, or in those USB ports to stop people from being able to use these USB drives, because they’re so terrified of data walking out.

What we’re doing here is using group policy, so that when I plug in one of these USB drives, you’ll see this is going to start to install the device driver software, it’s going to do the group policy check, and in a minute it’s going to say, hey, this device installation was prevented by policy. In this case this is an unencrypted USB stick. You can allow encrypted ones, but not unencrypted ones, you can allow mice, but not any USB drives. It’s group policy, you get to set it, you get to protect the information that’s in your infrastructure right there, which is great.

The last thing I’m going to do is actually switch over to the last part of my presentation, I’m running a tiny bit long. I wanted to show you the things that we’re doing around collaboration on a device like this. I think you know a lot of the investments that we’re making with Windows Mobile. We’re shipping a lot of Office applications right on these mobile devices, so Office Word, Office Excel, recently Office PowerPoint, and Office Communicator.

Let’s take a look at the device itself, and I’ll put it right here on the little MO cam, and there you go. You can see it. This is actually running the next generation of Windows Mobile software, and you’ll see that there are a couple of things. Right there you see presence. I’m currently marked as offline. If I were to log in I’d see all of my buddies in my Office Communicator Mobile, and be able to do the same things I can do on my PC with this mobile device.

I’m going to switch into e-mail real quick. Here’s an e-mail I have from somebody, I’m going to open it up. Notice here’s a link, I get a lot of these links to SharePoint sites. In today’s world I literally cannot follow this link without VPNing in. In tomorrow’s world with Exchange Server 2007, Office SharePoint Server 2007, I literally I don’t have to VPN in, I can enter my credentials once, and I can open up this PowerPoint presentation right here on this Windows Mobile device, use it in the PowerPoint mobile application, present on it, et cetera, et cetera. So you have one set of infrastructure that not only allows access from your PCs, but is also allowing access from your mobile devices, from Internet kiosks, going through your network in the ways that you want.

So let’s switch back over to the slides and let me quickly wrap up. I hope you get a flavor for some of the things that we’re working on across Vista, Office, and of course Exchange Server. And that’s one of the big promises we have to help you amplify the impact of your people.

With that, you can see the roadmap that we’ve already talked about, and I wanted to thank you very much. Enjoy the show. (Applause.)

MARY LYNN RAJSKUB: Hi, everybody. I’ve just got to say something, in that video it would have been really nice if that big bonus went to where it was deserved, meaning you guys. (Applause.)

Yes, keep clapping, but sadly art imitates life. It sure would amplify your impact if they’d give you the budgets you need to get things done. I wish I could make that happen. I would if I could. I can’t, but there is something I can do. Next season on 24, watch the show, and when you see me make this face, like when Jack is calling me, and I’m really frustrated, and it’s really intense, I’m thinking of you guys. (Laughter and applause.)

So hang in there. (Applause.)

You have killer deadlines, and killer demands, but at least you don’t have to worry about actually getting killed like I do.

Okay. Let me check my fake watch, it looks like we’re almost done. And the good news is, it looks like there is still enough time for Bob to keep his promise to be on time. So I should go, I don’t want to get mentioned in the evals as the person who made the keynote go on too long, but I’m happy to be here. Thank you so much. It’s been an honor to be here, and to represent all of you guys on television. And while Microsoft is keeping the four promises to you, I’ll tell you my four big hopes.

I hope the four promises make your jobs a lot easier. I hope information workers get it and you guys get treated as the heroes that you are. I hope you keep watching 24, and I hope they don’t kill me any time soon. (Applause.)

Thank you so much. It really has been a great pleasure to be here. And now I’d like to bring him back one more time. You guys give him a hand, he’s the man, Bob Muglia. (Applause.)

See you later. Thanks.

BOB MUGLIA: Thanks, Chloe.

Thanks so much. So people really are the center of business, and technologies help to make people as effective as they can be. I know that your managers in your organizations demand that you bring back both short-term results, as well as think in the long-term. When you’re thinking about business projects, when you’re thinking about your next IT project, when you’re thinking about how you manage your systems, we know that that’s a close partnership, and it’s an interesting and important choice that you need to think about long-term.

That’s why we’re making these promises. That’s why we’re investing in the long run. That’s why we’re focused on being transparent, providing vision, and generating leadership to help you be successful. We need to work together to do this, across the whole industry. That’s what Tech Ed is all about, this week is about, 480 breakouts, 300 shop talks, 120 hands-on labs, all of those are opportunities for us to learn from you, and for you to learn from us, and for the whole industry to work together. It will really take that for us to deliver on the next wave of challenge that we all face in IT. With that delivery, we’re confident that we can work together to make you successful, and that’s our promise to you.

Thank you very much. Have a great time at Tech Ed.

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