ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Microsoft’s Senior Vice President for the Windows Server System Division, Paul Flessner. (Applause.)

PAUL FLESSNER: Good morning. All right, when you fill out those evals, remember I wasn’t the guy that made you do “Tech” “Ed.” (Laughter.) I didn’t do that.

Well, thanks for coming. And it’s so exciting; I love Tech•Ed. It’s great to see so many people here this morning. I know it’s tough for you to get time out of your busy schedule, but we very much appreciate all of you taking time out to come to Dallas today and learn more about Microsoft’s suite of products.

We’ve got a lot to do. We’re going to work hard to make it worth your while, and hopefully you can take a lot of good information back and do some important things for your businesses.

The talk this morning is about the potential of IT. I travel all over the world, talk to lots of customers and press and analysts, and lately this topic has been coming up, the potential of IT. The first time somebody asked me, you know, “What’s the potential of IT,” I thought they were kidding. I honestly didn’t get the question; help me understand.

In my mind, the potential of IT is unlimited. It’s always been unlimited. It will always be unlimited. Think about what you do. You’re able to sit and take your ideas, your thoughts, your IQ, you enter them into a machine. That machine turns them into instructions and can execute them flawlessly — flawlessly, billions and billions of times every day.

Think about what that means, right? It sends planes through the sky. It sends boats across the ocean, turns raw materials into finished goods, sends finished goods propelling around the world. It’s an amazing thing that we’re a part of. I honestly feel lucky to be a part of this industry every day.

Think of the rate of change that we’ve created. I saw a statistic the other day. The S & P 500, you know this index for the stock market? It started in 1920. No company has changed on that for about the first 60 years; it was just the same, every company the same. About the mid ’80s the life expectancy on the S & P 500 was about ten years. Today, just a few years later, about 5 to 7 percent of those companies turn over each year. So the rate of change, our ability to make the marketplace incredibly competitive and dynamic, is a large part in what you do every day.

Technology: All of the equipment, the computer equipment, purchased between 1950 and 1965, all of that computing power at a cost of $10 billion at that time can now be purchased in a $1,000 home PC. The rate of change is unbelievable.

So the potential of IT, in my mind and I know all of yours, it is unlimited and unbounded.

So people have been asking the question, you know, what is the potential of IT. Honestly, this is something that you’re starting to read about and see about. It all started, I think, with this article in the HPR. Nicholas Carr’s premise in this article — if you read it, it’s not a bad article; challenging in some ways. I certainly disagree with most of it. But his premise is, look, if everybody has access to this technology and it’s relatively low cost now and every person in the world is going to have access to it, how can you get competitive advantage? So if you all have access to the same thing, how can you get competitive advantage?

I thought, “What is this guy saying?” I have access to golf clubs, but I’m not Tiger Woods, right? Tennis rackets, not Serena Williams. Every retailer in the world has access to computers; they’re not Wal-Mart.

There’s a big dynamic that they’re really missing here. The dynamic is you. You are the power of what powers IT. It’s your ideas, your creativity, your thoughts, your ability to push; that’s what makes this a dynamic environment. It’s the idea that, compare the information technology to a railroad in terms of dynamics. Come on, I mean, I just don’t understand him.

Of course, then the commercial guys pick it up, right. The Economist jumps on, New York Times, and they’re starting to say innovation is dead, where is this thing going, can it continue to grow — limited only by our ability to do and think new things and new ideas, and believe me I see it every day. The power is unlimited.

I think the one that blew me away the most was this one — not to pick on IBM: “The industry has entered its post-technology period.” What in the heck does that mean? Where is this guy? I hope this guy’s not in charge of your software business. Maybe it is a services guy. I don’t know — but I honestly haven’t figured this out.

I could not disagree more with what’s said on this slide. IT has the potential. The potential is you. Every day our job together is to propel IT forward, is to drive business to competitive advantage, and let’s talk about that for a minute.

Peter Drucker, famous management guru, if any of you have been through B-school you’ve listened or read books from Drucker. There are four levers in any business: people, process, information and relationships. Those four processes are ubiquitous in every business. And unless you can use one or more of them, alone or in conjunction, you won’t have competitive advantage. And in this marketplace, without competitive advantage, you will perish.

Software, a key enabler in taking those rules, the IQ, encoding them and making them run flawless every day — that’s competitive advantage. Can you stay still? No. If you stagnate you die in this environment, and that’s part of the value of IT. It’s taking that IQ, that intellectual property, automating it and make it propel those goods and services around the world every day.

Now, I’m willing to surrender this. We do have a crisis of complexity in play. Microsoft is a big part of this. Any vendor that’s been in the ecosystem for a while is a part of this. You guys live it every day. Seventy percent — depends on who you read, 60 to 80 percent — of a given IT budget is consumed by the ongoing cost of operations. This must change. It’s no fun. I was in IT for 13 years before coming to Microsoft. You don’t succeed long as an IT director, manager, CIO saying no every time a new capability is requested. Worse than saying no is “Yes, but I need lots more money.” We have to figure out a way from the inception to the development to the deployment and operations on how we can be more cost effective. We have to think about our ecosystem end-to-end. We have to think about our systems end-to-end. It is a continuous flow of information and service that we provide, and we have to figure out ways up front when we design systems so that we can run them at a lower cost of operation.

I’ll tell you, one of the most popular things you can do as an IT manager is figure out a way to take costs out of the ongoing operations every year and give some of that money back. You’ll start to see your budgets grow because the business thinks and understands that you get it and what you can do is help the business move forward.

So I started trying to think an analogy for how things have evolved and didn’t pay attention to kind of infrastructure at first and did over time, and I came up with this one: the evolution of cities. If you think about it, years and years ago — you see this more in Europe because you see buildings that are hundreds of years old — there wasn’t really a lot of attention paid: when you build a building, you just built it. There wasn’t any infrastructure to hook into, no toilet, no water, nothing. You built your building and it was a stand-alone entity. And over time, new services became available: infrastructure, plumbing, water systems, sewage systems. More sophisticated things came: gas, electricity and then blown away with telecommunications. But all these things, these infrastructures were renovated and retrofitted into old buildings that were standalone entities to bring them forward and save that investment that’s so important — some of them critically important to history — and making sure that they continued to exist, so renovating them, updating them: electricity, plumbing, all of the things we need to bring and make them more modern.

You ever walk in and see them develop a new subdivision? I’m sure you all have. They wipe the thing clean. And what’s the first thing they do? Put down the infrastructure, put down the road, put down all the sewer, gas, cable, put down the sidewalk. Get everything ready, and the houses, the buildings, pop right in, all ready to go and ready to plug into that infrastructure.

And I started thinking, what can we do to build our systems like this? How can we think more long-term about how to keep our systems going forward and yet keep them vital and important part of the ecosystem?

So our evolution of business applications, whether it’s horizontal apps, the big ones you buy, CRM, ERP; vertical apps that are specific to your industry; or proprietary applications where you really throw in your own intellectual property to gain competitive advantage. Think about how we’ve built those for years and years and years.

Sure, we’ve had systems talking to one another, and ten years ago, 15 years ago, we had EDI where we talked and tried to wire things together, and as long as you knew who you were going to be talking to and you understood the APIs they were calling and how to be called and what parameter looked to pass, things worked. But it was fragile. Systems were synchronous. They didn’t always expand and go over a broad network. They really didn’t have the thinking about how to plug into the infrastructure when we built them, and that’s where things have to change.

There’s been this big movement — Microsoft has been a big part of it — defining standards so that we can program and really get the advantage out of the Internet. A lot of hype on the Internet a few years back. That bubble is gone. Now it’s down to business: how do we make this thing work for us, the IT professional? How do I use it to make my business plug in?

You have to think about your apps in terms of longevity and being connected, and that’s what Web services are about. We’ve been on this bandwagon for three or four years. We’re hitting it hard and I’m compelled and more excited about it today than I’ve ever been. It’s the right thing to do, the right thing for our industry. It’s the right way to make our applications relevant for a longer period of time so that we can leverage that investment. It will help us lower the total cost of ownership if we do it correctly, and that’s something that we’re super excited about and focused on at Microsoft.

So what do you need with Web services? Lots of things. What are the bunch of common services that are going to have to be built in to make sure this thing works properly?

Federated identity: You’re not going to be able to pop up each time you send a transaction across to identify yourself. If I don’t know who you are, I’m not allowing you in.

Security: Systems are going to have to talk to each other. We understand that in a world of Web services, not everything is going to be built on Windows. That’s not a nave dream of Microsoft. We certainly want to win business but we know the world is heterogeneous, and things have to plug in so our security systems have to talk to each other.

Naming and directory: Understanding where services are located.

Hardware devices: How to find things.

All of this has to be more dynamic, right, because information will be flowing. It gets to messages and data. We have to move from old API-based work — difficult and fragile programming, synchronous programming models — to a much more message-based system where we have the XML message with good context, good schema so we understand what we get when it’s sent to us.

Process and workflow. Language definition. Our ability to take workflow and move it across platforms and still be able to know what task to play in the overall workflow and what information to pass back.

And then, something as an industry we’ve just failed at, we manage systems today, by systems I mean machines. What about applications management, end-to-end applications management? Think about how complicated the world gets as you start to route messages around the world to different vendors, maybe to unknown people at some future point. How are you going to manage that as an application? How are you going to know when a transaction got lost and went away? We really have to think more deeply about each and every one of these services to build what we need to make sure that this infrastructure, this plumbing — Web services — works.

At Microsoft, we’re building the Windows Server System. It’s an integrated platform. It’s a product that you know and are familiar with. We’re paying much, much more attention to the design point and integration point so that we can do two things: We can make it integrate well so that it works well, and that means simple, easy to use, simplicity, which brings lower total cost of ownership.

I’m not declaring victory. We haven’t won all the battles we need to win in terms of low cost of operations. We’ve focused on it, we think about it, we don’t have a services arm that comes and cleans up our mess. We’ve focused hard on making sure that we take the services people that you value and put those in the business of adding value to the business writing business applications, not having to be the systems integrator. And that’s what the Windows Server System is all about.

The foundation is a server platform, Windows Server 2003, and then you can see the products in the area of operations infrastructure, managing the application through its lifetime, applications infrastructure, data management SQL Server, e-business infrastructure for professional management of Web pages, portals and so on, and the all-important information worker, and how we blend the world of the information worker with applications infrastructure.

Patterns and practices: an important part of what we need to do, which is explain to you how all this myriad of technology can work together and how you need to use it. A lot of feedback that you’ve given us over the years is we simply don’t know which choice to make. You have so much technology, so many different ways to build it, tell me what to do, and that’s what patterns and practices are about, prescriptive guidance to help you know what to use when and why.

And, of course, it’s all about providing a platform for applications, making sure that those applications can be built and plugged in. And you can’t do that if you don’t have a great set of tools, Visual Studio .NET.

The point I’m trying to make here is that this platform is focused on being the platform, the best integrated platform, for lower total cost of ownership and Web services functionality built in.

So those common services that we talked about in terms of what we do inside Windows, Active Directory and Passport. Remember that federated identity, the ability to know. Passport is on its way, and doing it today — by far and away the most deployed federated identity system in the world today.

Security, an incredibly complex array of technology. Lots done inside Windows, and also trust bridge technology to help integrate with other security systems: certificates and other technology being utilized, as well as new Web services being defined so this stuff will plug together in a secure way.

UDDI and Active Directory, for naming and identity so that you know where to find services — Web services — in UDDI, and also Active Directory, so that you can find information about your environment and also start to put in specific partners external to your world that you’d like to list as well.

This message-based environment, XML. We all know about XML working hard to plummet deeply into all of our infrastructure. Hopefully, all of you are starting now to work very hard on putting it into your applications, whether as wrappers or deep investments.

BizTalk Server, for process and workflow integration: It’s critical that we can use BizTalk to integrate existing systems as well as use it for orchestration and workflow for systems that we build going forward, take some of that out of the code and the application and let that be more isolated into a workflow service that can be provided to you by BizTalk.

DSI, the Dynamic Systems Initiative that you’ll hear a lot about from Microsoft: our ability to really start working hard on managing applications instead of just individual systems, and I’m going to talk more about Systems Center, our integrated offering, in a moment.

So that’s really what we’re talking about in terms of Windows Server System.

I said an integrated platform focused on simplicity and lower total cost of ownership. The way that happens is across that family of products, they look and feel and act like they were built to work together. It’s not always been the case at Microsoft, but we’re working hard with the Windows Server System to make sure those things integrate more easily: common programming model built into Windows Server 2003, the .NET Framework, the Common Language Runtime, a common execution environment allowing a multitude of choice of language but a common execution environment to keep this ability inside your operations.

And you can read down the list, all of this focused on trying to make sure that we can provide an environment that’s familiar to you as a developer or systems administrator or network administrator. These things fit together and install and work together in a way that is consistent and makes sense to you.

A lot of the analogies that I’ve talked about today, and a lot more definitions of the Windows Server System, could be found a little bit later today at the URL you see below. You’ll be able to get in and learn more about the Windows Server System and also more about the things that we’ve talked about today in more detail, in a lot of detail around that city analogy so I hope you find that interesting.

So the foundation for the Windows Server System is Windows Server 2003, an exciting release for Microsoft. We’ve just gotten it into the marketplace a few weeks ago. There’s a lot of effort that’s gone into this product, starting with a larger, more aggressive quality assurance cycle: over 10,000 production servers deployed before we shipped Windows Server 2003; our new security stand-down process where we took all of our developers and trained them in the security initiatives and got them very focused on how to write secure code, how to think about penetration, how to think about vulnerabilities. We did things like put up honey pot servers where if people were attacking our code we could see how they were attacking it. These were just nameless servers that you put up so if anybody is found in that server they’re of dubious intent, most likely, and you can watch and understand how they do things and what they’re doing and how they think.

I’m not declaring that we’re perfect yet in security; it’s something we’ve invested a huge amount of money. It’s been a huge awakening for the entire industry. We’ve all got more work to do, but a huge amount of effort has gone into this initiative as well as a lot of material for all of you to learn about how to write your own code in a secure way.

On the application side, the framework is built in to Windows Server 2003.

Also the Common Language Runtime: a lot of work is going into again making that a good platform. IIS rewritten in essence — kernel mode caching much faster, process recycling — the ability to really make IIS super performant and much, much more reliable.

In terms of the information workers, we’ll ship Windows SharePoint Services a little later as an add-on: your ability to build Web sites or collaboration team sites, if you will, very easily and dynamically without having to write a lot of code.

Managing clients: You know that in the U.S. alone last year, over $12 billion was spent trying to restore documents that were lost off of desktops. Most of the world’s storage — over 60 percent of the world’s data — resides on a desktop. Much easier features to kind of redirect my documents in the new version of Office to point to a server, and then with that volume, shadow copy and restore if you ever do that faux pas where you do Save instead of Save As, you don’t have to call anybody in operations to get a document back; you can quickly and easily restore the pervious version.

Operations management: Server consolidation is on a lot of people’s minds. The Resource Allocation Manager gives you the ability to understand the resources that are on that machine, to prioritize them and to partition them, if you will, by workload so that you can do server consolidation and multiple workloads to the same machine.

Automatic Deployment Services, so that you can instantiate a machine quickly and easily, remotely with a new image exactly the way you set it up, a long-standing request by many, many customers.

Role-based setup and configuration: I believe there are 11 new roles defined that makes it very easy for you to get in and define and configure the Windows Server, whether you want it to be a Web server, a DHTP server whatever you need it to be you can configure it and know that you have the most secure and the most correct way, if you will, to set up that server.

So a lot of work has gone into the Windows Server 2003 product to make it a lower cost of ownership product and much easier to use.

Our extensive JDP program has shown from customer feedback — it’s always hard to make these things exact. Some customers are upgrading from NT 4, some from 2000, but on the average, the experience was about 30 percent reduction in overall cost of operations by moving to Windows Server 2003 so we hope to see a pretty significant upgrade cycle for our customers today. The NT 4 base especially is an install base that we’re excited to work with and help all of you to move forward to a more secure, more robust platform.

The information worker: again, a critical part of everything we do as knowledge workers, keeping that information flowing. The desktop tools have been very productive, but we need to get them plugged in. People want to collaborate, and Exchange is certainly a big step in that direction. Now Windows SharePoint Services: it’s easy to build collaboration sites, but more, more, more is always requested of us to really try to pull the information worker together.

And also the ability to use Office as a landing pad, an integration between the information worker and the line of business applications. That’s a very exciting capability that we get pushed a lot by customers, and there’s been a lot of work both in the new release of Windows Server and also in the upcoming release of Office 2003.

And to give you a bit more insight on how that works we’re going to bring out Jon Rauschenberger, who is from Clarity Consulting and is going to give us a demonstration of an integrated and interoperable platform looking at the innovations around the information worker technology and also our line of business stuff. John, how are you?

JON RAUSCHENBERGER: Good, Paul. Good to be here this morning.

PAUL FLESSNER: What have you got for us?

JON RAUSCHENBERGER: What we’re going to talk about this morning is one of the challenges that I’m constantly faced with as someone who’s running an IT services organization in today’s environment, and that challenge is figuring out which platform we can use to develop solutions and deliver them to our clients in the shortest time possible at lowest cost possible, which, coming from someone who runs an organization that bills by the hour, might sound like kind of an odd requirement. But the reality we’re faced with today in taking solutions to our customers is that if we can’t give them a solution that we can deliver quickly and cost effectively, either we’re not going to get the work or the project is not going to be done.

So what we’re constantly doing is evaluating the available platforms to determine which one is going to allow us to build that solution most quickly and most cost effectively.

Now, to that end, I’ve spent the last three weeks working with one of our engineers to build a complete end-to-end business solution that takes full advantage of the Office system, the Windows Server System, as well as Visual Studio .NET.

Now, the scenario we’re going to walk through today is a healthcare solution for a fictitious company called Kontoso, and what Kontoso does is they provide end-to-end business solutions for healthcare providers to manage data all the way from patient exams through the process of submitting claims out to the insurance company and receiving payments back for their customers.

Now, the first piece of the solution we’re going to take a look at is a tablet PC application that the physician uses to take notes during an actually patient exam. So when the physician is collecting information during that exam they save that information back to Kontoso via a secure XML Web service.

So let’s take a look at that application now. What I’m going to do is go over here to the Tablet and launch the patient note application in Visual Studio .NET. This is a C# Win Form application that is built and targeted specifically for the Tablet PC platform.

And when the application loads up, the first thing that we’ll see is a logon screen where I can select the physician that I want to logon as and enter the physician’s password. And here we see the first example of how we were able to integrate the functionality of the Tablet PC directly into our application to allow the user to enter their password and get into the application.

So now that I’ve got the application up and running, the first thing I’m presented with are the lists of appointments that Dr. Brown has scheduled for today. We see your first appointment is with Mr. Joe White, who unfortunately has suffered a blow to the head. I can bring up his chart, and here we’ve pulled back information from Kontosa over that secure Web service. We can see his history of visits. We can also see images associated with this patient.

When I bring this up, this is a head x-ray that was taken earlier in the day and we have an example here of how we’re able to use the Tablet PC platform to capture structured as well as unstructured data. So we’ve got some handwritten notes on the image here that were actually made by Dr. Jeff Smith. You can see when I select him the ink teller represents his notes on the x-ray and he’s indicated that he sees a possible fracture here. I can go ahead and add some additional notes and these will be stored off in SQL Server as ink data, which is available to us to build applications on as well as store off into databases.

So now that we’ve reviewed the x-ray, the next step is to go in and actually meet with the patient, and here the physician needs to enter in some structured data, specifically the vital signs and the diagnosis that the physician comes to after reviewing the patient.

So I’ll go ahead and write in the vital signs here and what we’ve done is taken advantage of the handwriting recognition capabilities built into the platform to allow the physician to write directly on the application. We can actually also bring up an ink collector if we want to let them enter some more information and after taking a look at Mr. White, Dr. Brown concludes that he does have a concussion, so I’ll go ahead and write that in, let the recognition go through, and again we’ve pulled this directly into our custom application.

The next step is for me to specify the services that were performed so we know how much to bill the patient’s insurance company. So we did a physical exam, we did an x-ray and then finally we’ll just let the patient know that they should get some rest. And again this will just be collected as ink and stored off into the back-end database.

Now, when I click Save here, that calls that Web service, stores off the patient information and begins the next step in the process, which is the claim processing requirements.

So once the patient has completed their exam and the physician has entered in their information, the claims administrator at Dr. Brown’s healthcare provider office needs to pick up, take a look at the services that were performed, and then submit a claim to Kontoso, and ultimately that will get directed off to the insurance company for payment.

We’re managing those claims as XML documents that were generated automatically by the system and that we’re managing in a Windows SharePoint Services extranet Web site. So those XML documents are actually XML forms that the claims administrator needs to open and complete.

Now, the forms process is actually managed in SharePoint on the server, and on the client side we’re using a new member of the Office family called InfoPath, which is an XML forms management application.

So let’s take a look at how the claims administrator works with this piece of the application. What we’re looking at here is the Kontoso extranet Web site, and I’ll go ahead and log in. And once I log into the site, I’m presented with a couple of choices. I can view some reports, or I can view the claims that are out there for me to work with. When I click on View Claims here what we’re going to view is that extranet site that was built using Windows SharePoint Services and that’s managing the XML claims documents that we’re going to work with here.

Now, as I mentioned, those documents are actually XML forms, and SharePoint understands that this XML document is a form, so it actually gives me the ability to preview the form directly within the browser. I can scroll through here, take a look at the form before actually opening it to work with it. This is indeed the form I want to work with. We’ll go ahead and open that by clicking on the icon, which launches InfoPath and a couple of interesting things happened here. The document is downloaded, along with the form project.

So if you’ll see down here in the lower left hand side, it says that the template was downloaded from http://Kontoso server. SharePoint also understands how to manage the actual form project, and InfoPath pulls all of that down dynamically so you don’t have any deployment problems associated with managing these forms.

Now, as a claims administrator, I just need to do a couple of things here. Particularly, I need to select the insurance company that we want to submit this claim to on behalf of Mr. White.

So when I click here to select payer we make a Web service call to download the insurance company that Mr. White has set up. I can click on Fabricam and that will pre-populate all of the fields in the InfoPath form. We can scroll down here and take a look at the services that were provided so we have a total claim of $550 for the x-ray and the physical exam.

I can go ahead now and submit that claim, which is going to make a Web service call, post the XML document to Kontoso and begin the claim processing piece.

So what hopefully I’ve been able to show here in the first part of the demo is how we’ve been able to build applications that information workers can use to collect and manage information in a very rich, robust way that takes full advantage of the platform as well as the integration between Office system and the Windows Server System.

PAUL FLESSNER: All right, Jon, thanks. We’ve got the form filed. In just a few minutes you’re going to come back and we’re going to hopefully see if we can get paid for that form.

JON RAUSCHENBERGER: Absolutely. I’ll be back.

PAUL FLESSNER: All right. Thank you. (Applause.)

So some announcements, just one here, Exchange Server 2003, the next release of the Exchange product, release candidate one available to all of you today. A lot of work has gone into this release, built-in mobility, your ability to just get connected to your wireless devices, which continue to proliferate and become a core part of the knowledge worker value proposition, built in and ready to go with Exchange Server 2003.

OA you won’t recognize, built to the new Outlook 2003 view format, if you will, looks exactly like Outlook 2003, spellchecker for all you spelling-challenged, like me, built in finally. So Exchange is doing a great job in that space.

A lot of tuning in the protocol, in the MAPI protocol to make it a more efficient conversation between the client and server. At Microsoft we have about 144 mail sites around the world. Over the next year we plan to try to consolidate those from 144 sites into a single site with eight servers; a big opportunity, I’ll call it site consolidation, to get a more cost-effective ownership and manageability proposition for your Exchange environment.

A lot more work and a lot of great benefits with Office 2003. This cache mode that you’ll hear more about from the Office team, the ability to download kind of in the background and cache all of your mail locally and have the server to be constantly kind of refreshing and updating that in the background so you get many, many, many fewer synchronous blocks.

Your ability to just kind of be mobile with the wireless technology; with this feature to do RPC over HTTP so you no longer have to use VPN to get in and get access to your mail, you can do that directly over HTTP; a lot of work, thank you, that was a big requested feature from all of you. (Applause.)

So a lot of work has gone into this product, a lot better integration with Windows Server 2003. I hope you get a chance to get your hands on it with the Release Candidate, and have some fun with it and see if it’s going to be an interesting one for your business.

The all important applications infrastructure, how you get these applications built, deployed and managed, we’ll talk about the managed in a minute, but it’s a big complicated process to build and integrate applications and you’ve got to have a broad platform. We talked about the features and functionality, our Web server or applications server has been built into Windows forever and ever, and always will be to provide you with an app server built in. We don’t believe you should have to go buy more technology to be able to run the applications that you’ve written.

SQL Server database, now by far and away the most popular database on the Windows platform in the world, the fastest and most scalable in terms of the benchmarking of all platforms and all databases in the world.

Our e-business servers, BizTalk Server, ability to integrate applications and participate in workflow without having to go in and mess with the code, so you can get a higher resilience, if you will, of your existing investment with minimal change putting in some scripting through BizTalk,

Content Management Server, the ability to professionally manage sites and build portals for customers and partners.

And our Commerce Server technology for building commercial sites, catalogue, relationship management, all of that work.

And still by far and away the most popular development environment in the world, as I said, over 50 percent of developers coming to work each day use Visual Studio as their workbench, if you will.

So this technology, and all of this technology that we have worked so hard on, to give you the best platform to build and deploy applications, and a couple of announcements today. SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services is a very exciting new feature in SQL Server. You’ve heard a lot about our business intelligence work, the data mining that went into SQL Server 2000, the platform for data warehousing with our OLAP Server integrated, our ETL technology built in. Now we’ve taken it one step further in the Reporting Services. You’re going to love this feature. We actually have had a tremendous demand for this feature. It’s simply the ability to take an answer set that you’ve extracted from the database, whether it be the relational side or OLAP, and stage that up into a report that can be delivered in HTML or viewed through a browser or viewed through Excel, however you’d like to do it, certainly integrates with SharePoint, but the reporting service has been phenomenal, if you will, phenomenally popular in the early adoption cycles and so we decided to move it up and ship it a little earlier. It’s going into public beta very soon and we plan to ship it by the end of calendar year 2003.

A couple other things on SQL Server: Our developer edition used to sell at $499. We’re lowering the price to $49, announcing basically today, and that will be embedded — (applause) — thank you — that will be embedded and picked up, we think, by other tools vendors. Borland has already announced that they’ll be picking it up and shipping it with their C# development environment.

So lots going on in the SQL Server space.

The other point I wanted to make is about “Yukon.” We’ve pushed “Yukon” back a bit. There will be a public beta, as we had originally announced, that will come on this summer. You’ll see a public beta and originally we said we’d ship in the first half of calendar year ’04. We are pushing that back into the second half of calendar year ’04, not driven by anything specifically; we just want to get the QA cycle right and more work around embedding the Common Language Runtime, which we’re super excited about, as I hope all of you are.

BizTalk Server 2004 in beta, beta available for you publicly as a part of this conference, a lot of work to integrate with Visual Studio, which John is going to come out in just a second here and demo, a lot of work to support the new standards of Web services, and also very importantly this opportunity, as I talked about before, to take your Office, you know the such familiar surroundings of Office and be able to now monitor workflow through Office utilizing Office 2003.

So with that, I’m going to bring Jon back out, and we’re going to see if we can finish our demo here and get these claims that we’ve already filed off to the payers. Are we going to be able to do it, Jon?

JON RAUSCHENBERGER: I hope so. We’ll find out. There are a lot of moving parts here.

But where we left the story is the claims administrator has submitted the claims of payment to Kontoso. Now, when that claim comes in, Kontoso needs to do a couple of things. It needs to receive the XML document in; they need to run some business rules to make sure the claim is valid, and then they need to save that claim off and ultimately get it delivered out to the insurance companies that the claim needs to be directed to.

Now, to build that claim-processing engine, we’re using a couple of products. We’re using BizTalk Server 2004 along with some Exchange integration components that we’ll take a look at in a second to receive the claim, validate it and database it. Once that’s been completed, we also use BizTalk Server 2004 to transform the XML that was sent in into the appropriate EDI format for the insurance company it’s being directed to, deliver the claim via EDI to the insurance company, and then wait patiently for the payments to come flowing back from the insurance companies and deliver them out to our customers.

So let’s take a look at how all that fits together.

Remember when we left our story, the administrator had just submitted the claim and what we’ve done with the BizTalk engine is integrate with Exchange to send e-mail notifications out to users as things are submitted into the engine.

If we come in here and log into our e-mail account and check our e-mail, we can see that we do indeed have a mail from Kontoso indicating that our claim has been submitted and has been accepted by Kontoso. So they took our claim in, they processed it, ran it through their business rules and accepted the claim.

Let’s take a look at how we’ve built those business rules though. I’ll jump over to one of Kontoso’s servers here, and we’ll take a look at first of all the BizTalk orchestration that we’re using to manage these claims.

Now, the first thing you’ll notice is that with BizTalk Server 2004 the orchestration is actually integrated directly into Visual Studio .NET so I’m able to work with the orchestration visually directly in my development tool, and if we scroll down here we see that we do indeed have a business rule that checks the balance on an inbound payment and then branches, depending on whether or not the payment met or did not meet that business rule, and in both instances we’re going to send an e-mail back to the customer. It’s just a question of whether that we’re going to accept that or we’re going to reject that claim.

Now, managing and deploying business rules was something that ideally developers don’t have to deal with. All we want to do is build the plumbing, build the foundation and then let business users deal with those types of things.

So in order to facilitate that, we have available to us with BizTalk Server a business rules management utility so the business rule composer that we’re taking a look at here where we see the check claim amount business rule and a couple of different versions of that rule. Now, the one that’s deployed here is version 3.0, and if we take a look at this we can see that the business rule very easily can be seen that if the claim amount is less than $1,000 then we take the action to go ahead and accept it.

Now, we see that version 2 is also deployed, but BizTalk will always use the most recently deployed version of a business rule, which is why this claim was accepted. It was less than $1,000, so it met our business rules and the response went back with the appropriate message to the user.

Now, the last step in the story here, once BizTalk has accepted the claim, processed it and begun the payment process of sending it out to the insurance companies is for the users to be able to log in and take a look at the status of their claims and manage their claims as they’re going through the process.

Now, to build that what we wanted to provide were some very rich reporting services out to Kontoso’s customers that they could use to run reports and share them within the organization. To do that we took advantage of SQL Server Reporting Services, which Paul just announced, to build a reporting Web site that we could take a look at here if we jump back to the administrator’s workstation, go to the Kontoso extranet page and click here on View Reports.

And what this is going to bring up is the SQL Server Reporting Services homepage, where we can drill down and take a look at the reports that have been published, and if I click on Claims by Payer here, what’s going to happen is the report will be rendered in my browser using SQL Reporting Services, so we didn’t have to write any of this; we just simply built the report and deployed it. I’ve got a document map on the left-hand side here. I’ll go ahead and close that and we can drill into this report so we can see the claims that have been submitted to Fabricam by supplier, and here we see the claim that I submitted earlier today for Joe White. I can click on this, drill through this report, and take a look at the details of that claim, all again within my browser.

So if we take a look at the development environment for building these types of reports, I’ll jump over here into Visual Studio where I’ve got the report project open, and I’ve got that Claims by Payer report that we were just looking at up on the screen here, and you can see again it’s all integrated nicely into Visual Studio, so I’m just working on my normal development environment, and I’m going to go ahead and extend this report. Well, I have a graph so that we can show you here visually how payments are going through the system.

So all I do here is drag the chart control onto my design surface and then prompt it for which dataset I want to work with. I’ll select Balance by Payer, click Okay, and now I’m dealing with an Office Web component where I can just simply take payer names and drag and drop them on the bottom, and we can throw a balance due into the data field, close this out, we’ll make the graph a little bit bigger.

And now as a developer, if I want to take a look at how this report is going to look, I can click on Preview here, and directly within Visual Studio the report viewer will come up, the report will be rendered, I can see it exactly the way the users will see it.

When I’m done, I’m happy with the way the report looks, my graph looks fine, everything looks right, I can also go ahead and deploy these reports directly from Visual Studio.

So I’ll go up to my project here, right-click, select Deploy, and now Visual Studio will automatically compile the solution for me and deploy it out to the reporting services engine, so I don’t have to do any work beyond that deploy and we can see it’s working here, it’s now deploying each of the reports in my solution out to our report server.

If we jump back now to the reporting page and take a look at that report, drill down on reports, this is the one that I just changed, the report gets rendered and we see our graph is now available to the end user.

So building and deploying reports is really that easy and it’s all integrated nicely into the development environment that we’re all used to working with.

So at the end of this process what I came away with is a very strong feeling that using the integrated platform available from Microsoft we’re able to build solutions in much less time than we can with any of the other platforms that are available. I would definitely encourage all of you to go out there and take a look and go through a similar example like this and see if you can find business needs in your organization that can also fit nicely into building solutions much more quickly using this platform, which I think will address the issue that all of us are faced with, which is building solutions in less time at lower cost and ultimately realizing the potential of IT.

PAUL FLESSNER: Excellent. Thanks, Jon. Outstanding. (Applause.)

The feedback on reporting services has been very strong. It’s one of those kind of measure of success when you give something to people and you can’t get it back, and developers so far have been that way — at least inside Microsoft — with this tool, and hopefully you’ll have the same experience as well.

So the all important operations infrastructure, and this is something that I’m extremely passionate about because as an industry we just haven’t done a good job — I mentioned this earlier. In order to do manageability right, we’re absolutely convinced that you have to back this stuff in early from the beginning. We’ve got this new effort underway called the Dynamic Systems Initiative, and one of the first core deliverables is the SDM or System Description Model. You have to very early on in the application development process, all the way back into Visual Studio, be able to describe the application to the operating system, tell me where the attributes of the description live, tell me how you want this application deployed, tell me what kind of alerting and eventing mechanisms that you want to utilize, and now very much work is underway to get this information built in to the module when it’s being built so that we can manage an application, not a system or not the bytes or a machine. Today, what do you get when something is going wrong? The CPU is hot or the network is hot or the disk is hot and all you know is there is smoke somewhere in the data center and you have no idea what’s going on.

In order to get this built much more deeply into the environment, we’re working very hard and thinking deeply about what we need to do around the Dynamic Systems Initiative and making sure that we’re managing our product moving forward.

One of the things that we’re going to do is talk about earlier in the application infrastructure how we’re taking three different products and merging them together — Content Management Server, BizTalk Server and Commerce Server — into the “Jupiter” suite, if you will. I don’t have the specific product name yet, but that’s just to really get the kind of integration customers need to build and integrate portals in their environment, again total cost of ownership, ease of use paramount in mind.

The plan is to do the same with the already announced Systems Center to take MOM and SMS and merge that technology together and, over time, components of Applications Center, and move those into the operating system. So we’re really working very hard to make sure that this becomes an end-to-end story that we can make sure that we have good total cost of ownership and simplicity around management and operations.

I’m announcing one product in this space today, the Windows Storage Server. There are two versions of this product, a version available in a box that you can buy and another version that will be OEM and built into devices.

The Windows Storage Server is a server that provides storage services, advanced file and print, advanced distributed file system features, volume shadowing so that you can get good management and professional management of back-ups with incremental restore and that sort of thing, so a very specialized server really focused on managing data and the proliferation of data, supports I-SCSI so it’s easily pluggable, again for the SAN kind of environment, so we’re working very hard to make sure that the storage aspect of your information technology center, which is a huge investment going forward, will also be well cared for with the Windows Storage Server.

The all-important roadmap is something we are asked about often. Now, 2003 and ’04, that’s pretty well baked and you’re going to see some pretty specific things around 2003 and ’04. The stuff in yellow has already shipped, so Windows Server 2003 and Visual Studio .NET simultaneously shipped together because of the number of components that were included in the operating system in terms of the Framework and the runtime.

And you can look down the list, a lot we’ve talked about, BizTalk 2004 coming up later this year, SQL Server “Yukon” coming up in the second half of 2004, Visual Studio “Whidbey”; think about that in kind of the same timeframe, and then SharePoint Portal Services, Exchange, Office and all the suites in the information worker think about those products coming out in the summer and the fall of this year.

And in operations infrastructure, again, products that are shipping: SMS 2000 this year and then MOM early next year, and the Systems Center Suite being integrated and made available again late this year, early next year.

So all of those important milestones and delivery mechanisms over the next year and a half or so.

In 2005: you’ve seen some things in the press about “Longhorn”, our “Longhorn” release, a very exciting release where we’re trying to do some breakthrough work around UI and storage and you’ll be seeing a lot more of that in the coming months as we get more, if you will, definition around that release.

At the same time you’ll have a release of the tools — the code name today for the Visual Studio product is “Orcas”, our real first integration suite around “Jupiter” where we have the true “Jupiter” vision will ship in the ’05 timeframe and then Office will sim-ship with “Longhorn” in the ’05 timeframe.

And then as you move further out, things get a little sketchier. Two years, three years is a long time to project, but you can expect another release of the server, Windows Server, about three years from now in the 2006 timeframe. We’ve really just moved the team off of the 2003 product that they just released, and now really getting focused on the definition and feature sets that we’ll put into the market in ’06 and a lot of complement certainly around the “Longhorn” product.

Exchange “Kodiak”, the much talked about version of Exchange that will be running on top of SQL Server, this will give you all of the advantages of Web services and standard toolkits built in, because once you’re sitting on top of SQL Server, all of Visual Studio automatically supports that environment, so a lot of work in the roadmap, and hopefully you can push on this more in some of your sessions, but I hope this gives you a good overview of kind of where we are.

Industry-wide support: I’ve mentioned this term a couple of times today called the ecosystem. Microsoft is a software company. That’s really all we do. We’re not confused about it. We’re not a hardware company. We make a couple of keyboards and some mice and some other silly stuff but it’s not anything that makes any money. I don’t make any money on our services organization. We have 4,000 MCS people around the world whose job is to really engage customers early and to work with partners and bring in partners to make sure that the SI — the systems integrators around the world — are helping build the applications that you need and the help you need and overall it takes all of these partners to make sure that the solutions come to market.

In the lower left, you’ve got the hardware partners. You see the Windows Server System as we come up, all the other solutions that are built by the partners, large, medium, small business, SAP, all the way into the small business solutions that are in the marketplace and then all the systems integrators.

I think a couple of things to note on this slide are just the overall momentum of the Windows platform, over 9 million servers. There are only 19 million servers in the world today, and over 9 million of those are deployed today on Windows Server; 2,500 applications running in this environment for you to choose from; over 2,000 different devices supported. Think about that: 2,000 different devices that have to plug in and work and work reliably. It’s a big job. And over 2,500 certified partners that help bring our software solutions to all of you.

So we’ve worked very hard on making this ecosystem work. On the bottom right you see 250 .NET connected solutions. .NET connected means they’re utilizing the Framework and they’re also utilizing Web services, and you can get out on the Web site and see what those solutions are about and you can kind of read through the rest of the list there, but I want to emphasize that we are about making the whole ecosystem work and it’s something that we have reinvigorated at Microsoft and are investing more and more money in to try to make sure that there’s broad support.

This is a special highlight, and thank you to Dell, Veritas, HP and IBM, our platinum sponsors, that have helped put on the show today. We very much appreciate all of your support and all the work that you do to help bring great solutions to the customers.

So this is an interesting slide. Remember I talked about the rate of change and the value proposition and all of the things that we’ve done. You’ve heard of this benchmark, right, TPC? It’s a standard industry benchmark the Transaction Processing Council puts on. You have to join the council and pay dues. All the hardware companies do it, the software companies do it. And the TPC publishes a standardized benchmark. You can go out on TPC.org and find it and read all about it and understand it.

And the vendors, we do battle. We all run this benchmark and try to see if we can outdo one another and overall see how performant and scalable our application is.

Back in 1996, Windows and SQL Server, we published our first benchmarks: 3,904 transactions per minute in 1996. We thought it was a good entry into the market. But we were up against some pretty stiff competition. The RIS UNIX systems supported 64-bit already, which gives them a huge amount more of memory to have accessible, which is what you need to support the really high-end SMP machines in terms of scalability.

So we were really up against it in terms of the overall benchmark that we had to prove ourselves with. But our rate of progress in this space, if you will, has been quite dramatic as you start to compare it against the competitors. And this hasn’t been on our own; we’ve had great partners. Certainly Intel with all the advances they’ve made through Moore’s Law and continuing to push hard on the chipset.

Dell has been a fantastic partner, focusing on scale-out and making sure that you get good technology at very good prices and very reliable in terms of especially in the rack work that they’ve done.

In the space of scale-up, we’ve had Unisys and IBM with their e-servers, Unisys with the ES7000 doing scale-up, 32-bit architecture but scaling up to 32 procs and doing a great amount of work in this space to help in the scale-up story.

And this behemoth here on the end, the HP Superdome, which as of this date and time is the world record holder across all platforms, with 707,000 TPMC, the fastest benchmark ever done in the world across any and all platforms.

Now, the most exciting part about all of this, in my opinion, is look what’s happened to the cost. In just seven years, this ecosystem has taken and given 181 times the performance at just one-tenth the cost. We talk about change and talk about the value of IT. Think of what that has enabled in terms of processing power and capability and your thoughts about offloading some of your UNIX systems to maybe lower total cost of ownership, even offloading some of those mainframe systems and all that code base that you’ve got sitting there that eventually will have to move, and hopefully you can consider a lower total cost of ownership platform.

Customer and partner success is the real measure of success, right? I can talk about benchmarks all day long and you kind of believe me and you kind of don’t, but what really counts are the customer experiences.

The State of Texas is a big state, right, 21 million people, 250,000 square miles and it’s got a big court system. A few people stumble now and then and they file millions of documents each year and they have saved 40 to 70 percent in the filing and management of those forms through a Web services application provided in part by BearingPoint, one of their key partners.

Continental Airlines, all of the regulation that came out of the wake of 9/11, one of the key things is you don’t want anybody not on the airplane that has a bag on the airplane. You want to match people to their bags. Continental used the .NET platform to quickly develop their baggage matching application, and it’s given them incredible scalability and 99.99 percent up time. Again, this is a system that has to be up or the planes don’t fly, because you can’t put bags on a plane, by law, without matching it to a customer, and EDS is their partner.

And Pac Life — Pacific Life, a very longstanding and important company in the life insurance industry — has really got some exciting things to say, and I’m going to let them do it themselves, so we’re going to roll a quick video and then we’re going to bring out a couple of gentlemen and let them tell the story on their own.

(Video segment.)

PAUL FLESSNER: So those are certainly some challenges that many of us can identify with but rather than having me go through it I’m going to bring up two gentleman, Brad Sherrell from Pac Life and Tim Huckaby from InterKnowlogy and they’re going to tell us a little bit more about this in their own words. Hi, fellas.

BRAD SHERRELL: Hey, Paul.

TIM HUCKABY: Hey, Paul.

PAUL FLESSNER: Welcome. (Applause.)

BRAD SHERRELL: Good to be here.

PAUL FLESSNER: Well, it’s pretty challenging stuff there. I guess you could tell us maybe, Brad: how does IT matter at Pac Life?

BRAD SHERRELL: You know, for us at Pac Life IT is definitely a strategic asset. We have to do a lot of work to make sure that we’re meeting or exceeding the expectations of the people who sell our products and the people who buy our products. These folks have a wide number of choices in their financial services industry. IT is what enables us to bring products and services to market that make Pacific Life a key choice in our industry. And that’s not to say we don’t have problems. Like I said in the video, integration is a key challenge for us. I’m forced to be a systems integrator a lot more than I want to be. And like a lot of folks here in the audience, we struggle with cost of ownership as well.

PAUL FLESSNER: Well, that’s something we want to help you with. I heard earlier that you were talking about an old mainframe or old mainframe set of systems, four-years old. How do you keep those up to date and also keep introducing change and new things into the environment?

BRAD SHERRELL: We have decades of legacy that we have to deal with. At the same time, we have complex business processes, complex products, and you have to innovate to get ahead and stay ahead of your competition, and it’s hard. At the same time, you have to be smart about how you manage the investments you’ve already made in IT, and you have to do that cost effectively.

So we combat that really in two ways. First, I need you doing work for me, doing integration work.

PAUL FLESSNER: I’m there for you.

BRAD SHERRELL: There you go.

And secondly I need partners like Tim here at InterKnowlogy to help me innovate, and I think Microsoft has some key advantages in both those areas.

First, when you look at integration, if you look at the Microsoft platform, you look at Windows Server System, Visual Studio .NET and Office System, and you see how well those things fit together, how well they integrate together. I look out across the industry and I just don’t see anything that compares.

Now, we have some runtime with Windows Server 2003, Exchange Server 2003 and not only are you advancing the capabilities of the platform by letting me do things like real time collaboration, wireless access to data, but you’re helping me with cost of ownership because now I can do server consolidation and I have better management tools.

Now you always have to be taking advantage of new opportunities. We’ve just released a new version of the cash register application for our division that’s called Navigator. We built that with Visual Studio .NET, ASP .NET. It’s Web service enabled. We’re leveraging some common investments that we’ve made over the years. If you talk to the developers on that project, they won’t go back to the prior generation of the tools or the prior generation of the platform. We’d have a mutiny if we tried to do that.

One of these guys was so motivated by his experience with .NET, he devoted a year of his life to writing a book that teaches mainframe COBOL programmers how to migrate their skills over to .NET.

Now, when you have to something big and something new our strategy there is to reach for a partner like Tim here at InterKnowlogy. We’ve developed a pretty good relationship over the years. I’m able to reach for Tim to help me with networking, infrastructure, architecture and build. Reaching for them is like reaching for Microsoft. You guys do a great job keeping them up to speed on advancements in the platform. It’s nice to know I have somebody that can help me take that journey when you have to do something new.

PAUL FLESSNER: It warms my heart to hear a success story, thanks.

Tim, tell us about all the services you provide and how you’ve helped out at Pacific Life.

TIM HUCKABY: Love to. It was December of 1998, probably the last time I put on a suit and tie to meet with Brad — well, short of funerals, of course — to meet with Brad and his boss, Cameron Cosgrove, and they were very honest about where they were and where they wanted to go and how they were going to engage technology to get there.

Since then, we’ve built numerous systems for Pacific Life, including an enterprise role-based security system. Now, normally, if you do a search on a protected link, it renders the link and you’re denied access. Well, at Pacific Life compliance restrictions prevent that from happening. It’s illegal to even see the link. Now, that’s very complex and it’s not all about Active Directory at Pacific Life. They also have the Netscape directory service out there and the Novell directory service out there, also very complex for directory aware application development.

And let’s face it, as .NET programmers, we can’t just punch holes straight through to DB2. We have to depend on nicely-packaged interfaces that the mainframe programmers give us.

BRAD SHERRELL: And that’s really the key for us, Paul, is getting bang for the buck out of the platform and we’re getting integration and we have the ability to interoperate. We feel like we’re empowered.

TIM HUCKABY: And that, of course, is our mantra at InterKnowlogy. Between the Windows Server System platform and the Visual Studio .NET application development environment, we’ve got a one-two punch that frankly is the reason for our success.

PAUL FLESSNER: That’s outstanding. I’m sure one of the important things for Pac Life is this transfer of knowledge and how you can take all that Tim and his team knows and bring it to Pac Life. Tim, how do you facilitate that kind of knowledge transfer?

TIM HUCKABY: Well, every project we do, we integrate Pacific Life’s actually employees, so we integrate their developers and their PMs into our own team. And that’s designed all the way through putting it in production. So by the time we put things in production, they’ve lived with the system. There is no turnover. It’s a model that works and it’s a model I’m proud of.

BRAD SHERRELL: So what I’m able to do is leverage my relationship with Microsoft. I’m getting integrated infrastructure in Windows Server System. You’re also helping me with cost of ownership so I know the things I deploy I’m going to be able to sustain over a long period of time. Our developers love Visual Studio .NET. We’re getting Office System to empower the information worker. At the same time, when I have to do something big and something new, I have partners I can reach for. So at the end of the day I’m able to manage this constant struggle between sustaining and innovating.

PAUL FLESSNER: That’s certainly what we like to hear. Thanks a lot, fellas, for coming out today; appreciate you taking your time. Thank you. (Applause.)

So a big part of this is investing in you: more information, more knowledge, more technology transfer, and we’ve learned a lot over the years. There are a few things I just want to mention very quickly. We’ve dramatically improved our training in TechNet Plus and we’re making it available. Now when you get Software Assurance or prescription around Software Assurance to keep your software up to date, a new value that we’re adding into that is additional training in TechNet Plus as a part of it.

Online skills assessment: You know, Should I take that test and get certified? Do I know where I am in terms of my knowledge of the platform? Take one of our online skills assessment and find out exactly where you stand and how good you feel about your education in our technology and what more education you might need.

Community: A big thing that we really hadn’t invested in. The IT pro, all of you haven’t seen the investment that we’ve had in terms of the developer community. We’re really stepping it up: daily Web casts, a monthly newsletter, a lot more deployment workshops and development workshops. You’ll be seeing a lot more in terms of our community investments. Over $400 million will be pushed into this space to make sure that we can continue to enrich and keep the community vibrant and alive.

Free Windows Server 2003 migration seminars for partners so they can help you migrate.

And then something we’re going to try is an on-campus kind of workshop or IT tour through our own IT shop on how we become in essence a paperless company and what we’re doing around Web services, and hopefully we can share some best practices and also learn from your best practices; so just a few comments there.

The other big investment that I’m super excited about is this concept of architectural guidance, and specifically, known things you’ll always be able to know in the Windows Server System. You’re going to get a standard set of product documentation for each product. There will be solutions guidance so you’ll have the choices and know-how to make the choices, and then there will be press and extra training, all in a common taxonomy, all standardized so that you can know and find things consistently across the product. That’s responding to a lot of feedback from all of you.

So the power of IT, realizing our potential, just a few closing comments. Please get connected with Web services. I think it’s what we need to do as an industry. I hope you do it on the Microsoft platform. I hope you do it with .NET and I hope you implement with Windows Server System but please get connected to Web services. It’s how I think we can enliven our ecosystem and lower the total cost of ownership.

The Windows Server System and our platform I believe and I will work hard to make sure it’s the lowest total cost of ownership platform for Web services.

And most of all it’s us working together that keeps IT relevant, that keeps competitive advantage in our businesses and it makes sure that every business realizes the full potential of their It investment.

That’s the end of my talk. Thanks for coming to Tech•Ed. Enjoy your week. (Applause.)