Remarks by Paul Flessner and Juha Christensen
Microsoft Exchange Conference 2001
Orlando, Fla., Oct. 1, 2001
(Applause.)
PAUL FLESSNER: Thank you very much and good morning and welcome to MEC 2001.
Before we get started this morning, I do just want to make a couple of comments about the tragic events of September 11th. Im not going to try to be inspirational. Its been done many times before and it can be done much better than I. Im not going to belabor it, but I do want to make a couple of quick comments.
First of all, for any of you who may have lost loved ones, family, friends, coworkers, you have our deepest sympathy.
The real thing I want to say as well is thanks to all of you. Many, many of you have contributed to the relief efforts. The tech industry has contributed over $30 million to the relief, and many more of you have contributed time, hardware and much needed expertise to help our customers recover, and thats incredible, and thats the community that I am absolutely proud to be a part of.
We fought hard and long about whether we should have this conference today. We talked to many customers and many people around the world. And the resounding response to that request was yes, we should go ahead. It is time that we try to work hard to get the economy back on track. President Bush said that last week to do what we can to get our local economies and our national economy back on track.
So for all of you who have helped in the relief efforts, thank you very much. For all of you who may have been personally affected by the tragedy, our deepest sympathy. And thats it. With that point, Id like to move on and start MEC 2001.
So, this is my first MEC. Ive been with Microsoft seven years. For 13 years before that I was on the customer side in large enterprise IT, so I am very familiar with the enterprise experience. But it is exciting to be here today. The product conferences, the conferences where we are able to work very closely with the customers, are the most exciting for me. Its fun for all the Microsoft developers to get close to the customers, to feel their enthusiasm for the product, but also to feel their pain, talk about areas where we need to improve the product. It is absolutely our goal to exceed your expectations in every way with our products. Were not always able to do that, but believe me, we work incredibly hard to make that happen.
So in terms of listening to what you need and what you want in the products, for Exchange 2000 you told us that you wanted some improvements around TCO and server. You like the fact that Exchange servers can scale out and we partition by mailbox and that allows you great flexibility in terms of scalability, but some of you have very large installations and it was getting very unruly having so many Exchange servers. So you wanted more users per server, larger storage, faster recovery time. We worked incredibly hard to do that with Exchange 2000, and weve achieved some great results.
Dell has been able to reduce their implementation of servers by 2X. Microsoft has been able to reduce by 3X and more customers are coming to us every day on great savings in terms of management and scalability on their servers.
In terms of connectivity and migration, many of you have said, “Look, weve got too many mail systems. Exchange is our premier system. I mean, we really want to push Exchange, but we need some help in converting these systems.” So we worked hard to bring the richest and most robust set of connectivity and migration tools in the industry, and that didnt stop with Exchange 2000. Weve continued to push with SP1 to deliver more functionality, free/busy for notes, free/busy for group wide and you can see in the bottom right were going to continue on to migration tools for SP1 and SP2.
In terms of a migration kit, theres a CD in your bag for the conference that youll find that youll be able to see and get some white papers and case studies about how to get some of these migrations to take place, and were going to have a video in just a second about Marathon Ashland in terms of the big consolidation efforts that they have underway.
Windows Server integration: You didnt want two directories and try to maintain two directories. You didnt want multiple security mechanisms. You wanted all that interconnected, lower cost of ownership. Youre going to see a great video from Korea.com in terms of their ability to deploy the product very quickly to market and massive scale.
In addition, you wanted improvements to the client. A lot of your customers are on the road, PC anywhere in the world, you want to be able to walk up, if you can get a browser, I want my mail. We worked hard and delivered that and we havent stopped. SP1 has improvements and youre going to see a demonstration today of a bunch of improvements weve made in SP2 that were very proud of.
And partner solutions: This has been a big push for us this year. Exchange survived because its a good solution out of the box for mail, messaging, calendaring, contacts, but its also an important platform for collaboration. And many of you, customers and partners, have really stepped up to help us demonstrate the capabilities, and youre going to see a couple of different demonstrations of that today.
So we are listening. Were certainly not done. Weve got a heck of a lot more work to do. But we do hear what youre saying and we appreciate you attending this conference. We very much appreciate that, and we want your feedback, so please be vocal in bringing it forward to us.
Now were going to roll a couple of videos. I said before Marathon Ashland has a huge project and have converted their mail systems. Were going to take a look at that. And then Korea.com, an incredibly scalable application and a very rapid time to market.
Please roll the video.
(Videotape presentation.)
PAUL FLESSNER: Excellent. So one of the big things I want to do this morning is say thanks. The adoption rate of 2000 has surprised Microsoft. Weve worked hard to make it an easy migration, but migrations are never easy in the enterprise. You have large enterprises. You have demanding customers. They dont want “hiccups.” But the feature sets both in terms of infrastructure cost savings and in terms of OWA, OWA keeps coming back to us over and over again as an important reason for the rapid adoption rate. You can see the numbers there.
Again, were bragging a little bit because we are very proud of our work against our competitors and also very proud in terms of the number of installed seats, which really enables you to move forward. But mostly this slide is just to say thanks very much and we appreciate your business. We know deeply how important Exchange is to your business and we take the responsibility of your business very seriously and well continue to work hard to bring you great solutions.
So next is org winners. Weve done this contest for a couple of years in terms of challenging customers to come forward, partners and customers to build great solutions around Exchange. So this year the contest went kind of to the next level. We had hundreds actually of entries this year, up over 60 percent from last year. It was the same kind of format. We had ten different categories and we had four judges, who worked their tails off in looking at these various categories. You can see all the categories up there in front of you, and last night we had a very nice award dinner where the field had been narrowed to four finalists for each of the categories. We had a little dinner over in the Peabody and we were able to announce all the winners.
So Im just going to pop the winners up there, get them all filled in. You can take kind of a quick look. Now, you can find more information about the solutions that these folks put forward in the market and won the contest with and also about a heck of a lot of other partners in the solution guide thats in your bags as well. That bag must be awful heavy, because this is a pretty heavy book. But theres an awful lot of information in here, and there are additional case studies as well.
So for all the award winners, lets give them a big hand for all the work theyve put into it. I appreciate it.
(Applause.)
And on stage today were going to get to see a couple of these, the Ascendant and the IT Factory later on.
And right now we actually are going to get a look at the Ascendant business process framework, and Ernie and Mark are going to come out here and run us through it. Guys? Well, welcome.
ERNIE: Hi, Paul.
PAUL FLESSNER: How are you?
ERNIE: Good.
PAUL FLESSNER: Got everything ready to go.
ERNIE: We do. Were ready. Ascendant has built a business process framework that lets them go through and manage, using Exchange and Exchange Workflow, manage processing content. So for things like merger and acquisitions, for example, would be one use.
So we have a merger and acquisition sample of that up here, and Id like to take a look at one of these. Here is a deal tracker that can track all my deals, different types of deals. I can filter these. I can see my statuses.
And youll notice theres a yellow light up there, Paul. Theres something that needs some help and it happens to be an acquisition of a company called Deep Water Drilling. If I click on Deep Water Drilling, I will see stages come up in the status console. And we notice that an acquisition for this company has eight stages. Ive completed — indicated by the purple lights here — six of the stages, and in stage seven I need help, and that stage is called company integration. Clicking on that stage will help me find out where the help is needed, and it shows me the workgroups who are involved in this stage of the acquisition.
Youll notice that most of these have completed. They have dates and they have purple lights. One of them has a yellow “help needed” light. It happens to be the integration workgroup.
Clicking on the integration workgroup will show me in this space, the team space, all the activities, issues, documents, discussions, calendars and team members, powered by Exchange, using things like reusable OWA. So heres an example of a calendar.
If I take and drill down and open this up, Ill see the sub workgroups. Most of these have completed their work and it looks like the issue lies under the IT sub workgroup.
So I come over here then and look at the activities, click on status to sort this. I see theres one help needed item and its assigned to Mark Adcock. So, Mark, would you take a look at that and see whats happening for us, please.
MARK: Sure. Now, one of the applications that I primarily work in is Outlook, so we want to switch over and show my Outlook inbox. I dont necessarily want to work inside of the M & A advisor all the time, so I want to be notified when theres activity thats coming for me as a result of Exchange Workflows. So we can see I have a message here that has a hotlink; it has a summary. And when I click on the hotlink, of course it jumps me right into the application so I can take a look and see what activity I need to perform.
And I get a review of it, so again Deep Water Drilling. I can look at related issues down here or even related documents, and I can see that these folks are primarily making a decision here to use Exchange 2000.
My activity here is really to clear this at the executive level, so Ill go ahead and manage that. Ill get the approval that I need and then go ahead and move this to a completed status. And when I save it, then it will go ahead and shunt the information back to the application.
So Ill pass it back to you, Ernie.
ERNIE: Thanks, Mark.
Now that Mark has completed that work, I will get notified that thats happened, and were seeing now my inbox. And youll notice that item has popped up here thats showing from the M & A advisor. Let me open that, and it says this has been completed.
So Ive been notified that that stage has completed. If I open up the M & A advisor at this point, were going to see the status has changed. Exchange Workflow is kicking on the back end and what its done is it says Deep Water Drilling is now on track, and in those stages, stage seven, which had a yellow light before, now has the completed light with the date.
And if I go to the next stage, governance and measurement, Exchange Workflow has kicked in, moved us to the next stage and assigned some work items to a variety of different groups that need to deal with something in this stage, and they have been notified as well.
So there you have it. Thats business process framework with Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2000 Workflow powering.
PAUL FLESSNER: Outstanding. Excellent. Thanks very much.
ERNIE: Youre welcome. Thank you.
(Applause.)
PAUL FLESSNER: Its a great piece of work, nice clean interface, very practical certainly for the business solution.
Im announcing — its always fun to do a few announcements — the Application Management Pack. This is for a product called Microsoft Operations Manager, fondly known as MOM. And MOM is a relatively new product for the Microsoft line. It was launched earlier this summer. And again in an effort to continue to improve Exchange, weve worked hard to develop whats called an Application Management Pack. This is an Application Management Pack that fits inside the MOM framework, so you have to be a MOM customer first, but then if you do own MOM and buy this Application Management Pack, which works for SQL Server, but also as a specific installation just for Exchange, youll gain a huge amount of information about your ability to monitor and manage service levels for Exchange.
I think the really interesting thing about the application pack is the fact that whats put inside this is a huge amount of information that the Exchange development team has garnered from supporting customers for a number of years. So all of our effort, all of our IP, if you will, in supporting customers, what kinds of problems they have, our own IT people, you as customers, all that information about the kinds of things that go wrong, disk full, mail not sending, directory unavailable, all the things that we bump our heads on in terms of PSS, a lot of that IP has been put into this application pack and is now available to you. If you install that, youll see things pre-set up in terms of how to monitor and do a good job.
So theres a lot of out-of-the-box alerting and monitoring, as I just talked about, ability to manage and monitor system wide whats happening with your mail, is it getting to the location, are you able to touch the directory, as I said before, and just enables you to do a much better job of managing to service levels.
You can get more information about the product out on the Web site, and in addition to that, were going to give you a demo here this morning. And first again there are a couple things new in Exchange 2000 here. Were going to talk about the management pack first and then were going to talk about the Outlook. And were going to bring Mark back out to do both of those. So, Mark?
MARK: Thanks. Okay, so today, as Paul said, I want to show you a couple different things. The first one is the Microsoft Operations Manager, and today specifically I want to drill in a little bit around the Application Management Pack. So that’s the first thing on our screen here.
The whole thing about MOM is that it really allows you to proactively manage your servers and really meet the service level agreements that you might have established. You really want to be able to resolve and identify those issues early before they become issues for your users.
And just on the first screen here, I want to drill into this area, I want to show you more of the interface, but you can see we can look at alerts, events and even performance data.
So Im going to expand the monitors area here on the left and drill into a couple of alert areas that Ive bubbled up for you. The first one is what we call the consolidated server view and thats just what it sounds like. It allows me to take a look at each of the servers. Now, since this is a demo, I only have two servers. You would probably have much more in your enterprise. But I can see on a server-by-server basis what the status is, so I can see I have no alerts on one. I have a server unavailable on another.
Im going to deal with that in a second, but in the meantime I want to show you this other view, which is a consolidated alert view. And so what this allows me to do is look at all alerts across my entire enterprise for all my Exchange servers. So for those of you that run like an operations center, any alert that comes in you probably want to deal with each alert on an individual basis, one by one.
So lets actually dive in and take a look at whats going on on this server. First of all, we have a critical error showing up, and Im going to look at these in the order that they came in. So the alert is generated by an event and MOM is smart enough to be able to look at events and group them together, which basically bubble up to the alert.
So if I look at one of these error conditions, we can see whats happening is Im running out of disk space. Okay, so this is really a pretty simple issue to fix. MOM provides us with the ability to use some help desk functionality, so on this state tab what I can do is I can acknowledge it or assign it a priority level. So since again this is easy to fix, what Im going to do is Im going to assign this to you, Paul, to take care of, and when I apply that, I can close that, and youll see that the information here, the resolution status changed and now the owner has been notified.
So the important thing is when these alerts come in, you can have notifications sent to you, so typical things like youd expect — e-mail, pager, those kinds of things, or even your own custom application. Then you can assign them out to be resolved.
Taking a look at the next error, what would happen normally is Paul would have added more disk space or cleaned it up, but that makes for a real short demo, so were going to let that one go and kind of see what happens.
So you can see here that the next thing that occurs is theres an error when writing to the database. So were running out of disk space again and you can pretty much guess what the next one is going to be. The service is going to be unavailable, primarily because were going to unmount all of the databases.
So again you never really want to get to that point, and we would have never had to because we would have resolved it very much earlier.
Now, for an issue that is critical or something like this, theres built-in knowledge base capability. So you can see we have the knowledge base tab, and I can take a look at a summary of whats going wrong, the cause, some resolutions, and even jump to external knowledge resources. So here I have a direct link to the Microsoft knowledge base.
And the important thing here is weve done a lot of the work for you at the Microsoft group level by associating the errors with the resolution so you can resolve those issues much more quickly, get on less training effort. Weve really done a lot of that helping for you to get your servers back on track much easier.
Now, you also have a tremendous amount of information in your arsenal of operations, and so theres a company knowledge base here as well. In that area you can pretty much type in anything that you find that helps your company resolve these kinds of issues as well.
Now, each of these alerts is really generated off of a rule that MOM has, and the rules are already predefined, and thats what makes MOM so easy to deploy. So you dont have to deploy it and then define all of your custom rules and thresholds. But one of the great things that you can do is modify those or even add additional ones. So you can see here in the Application Management Pack all the different apps that we will monitor, and you can see Exchange 2000 Server and Exchange 5.5. Obviously we monitor different things there. And you can drill down a little bit into the different areas. You can see I do server availability and a couple of things.
And I wont go into all of these, but you can see like theres one very powerful one called MAPI logon check, which allows MOM to logon to the server and verify that connectivity, and if that cant happen, then you definitely know that theres an issue that you need to resolve. Those are all reported up through the alerts and allow you to take care of those issues much before your users even know that anything is going on.
PAUL FLESSNER: Outstanding. Thats a great way to keep those service levels up.
MARK: Absolutely.
PAUL FLESSNER: Thanks very much, Mark.
MARK: Now Im actually going to jump over and show you some things that weve done in Outlook and Outlook Web Access. Im going to show you some Outlook 2002.
So the first thing I want to show you are some great things weve done in the preview pane area. So if youre like me and you like to use the preview pane a lot, weve extended that area to include some additional information.
So you see here I have in my inbox a calendar request thats come in from Stan and now I have the ability to do things like accept, decline or reply tentative to this. Weve extended that as well with information, so I can see immediately that the time Stan is requesting for a meeting conflicts already with an appointment thats on my calendar. So I can use another great feature, called “propose new time” and you see your standard time grid that youre pretty comfortable with. I can drag whatever I need to, or I can use another featured called “auto pick next,” which will jump to the next time that everybody in the meeting is available for. And when I click “propose new time” then I will be able to send this back to Stan and Stan will be able to adjust his meeting times appropriately.
Another thing that weve done in that preview pane area is extended it with some instant messenger integration. So you can see here that it says Stan is online, because I have an e-mail item highlighted. And so one click and I can automatically pop up instant message. And I sent Stan an overnight package, so I can say, “Did you receive my overnight?”
So this is a great way to do ad hoc communication without having to pick up the phone or clutter Stans inbox with another e-mail.
So Stan has told me yes hes received it and hes ready for tomorrow, because thats when our meeting is scheduled, so again very easy to do those ad hoc quick communications.
Now, another area I want to show you is some work weve done particularly for the mobile user, and one of those is what we call Send and Receive Groups, which you may think of also as synchronize, so weve had a little terminology change between previous versions of Outlook and Outlook 2002.
What Send and Receive Groups allow me to do is identify the amount of mail that I want to synchronize with my laptop when Im either on the road, in the office or in various places, and usually you do that based on your bandwidth. So you can see here that I have three groups defined: One for work, which is my high-speed; home DSL, which is moderate; and then hotel dial-up, which is pretty slow.
So if I drill in and take a look at the profile for each of those, if Im looking at the work one where Im on a high-speed LAN, you can see I want to synchronize all of my folders, as much information as I possibly can. I also want to do things like synch my forms and download the offline address book, which for some companies can be pretty big. I mean, we have 60,000 people on the Microsoft list.
The other one, lets take a look just to compare, would be the hotel dial-up and you can see significantly different, right, so Im only synchronizing my inbox and my outbox, and I can even do things like limit the message size, so very powerful there so I dont have to pull down data I dont want.
PAUL FLESSNER: This is a great feature. Im always the one fumbling around the hotel room at 11:00 at night trying to figure out where the heck those settings went.
MARK: All you need is that sign for that synchronization.
Now, there are a couple of features I really cant show you that we did around the performance area, so we did a lot of work to make sure that Outlook is a lot faster, that we do less round trips to the server with e-mail and things like that. So you will see a pretty significant improvement in the performance there.
PAUL FLESSNER: So this is Outlook and now youre going to talk about Outlook Web Access.
MARK: Absolutely. But before I do, I have one quick thing I want to show you. You all know the pain of going off on vacation, coming back after two weeks and you open up Outlook and what happens?
PAUL FLESSNER: Three thousand —
MARK: Right, youve got about 3,000 alerts, and guess what, theyre all individual, so you have to say accept, dismiss, dismiss, dismiss, right?
So what we did in Outlook 2002 we combine all those into a consolidated window. So how do you guys like that?
(Applause.)
So here with this one I can pretty much accept/dismiss my calendar items. I can snooze them for a certain amount of time. And this is a great segue for me to jump over here and show you this other machine that Im going to be running Outlook Web Access on.
Now, Im going to show you some more of the features that we have included in our service pack 2, which is coming out by the end of the year, and you can see, and it is difficult to tell almost, right, that I have the same multi-item reminder pane right there. So I have the ability to dismiss and do all of those things.
So Im just going to close that out, and lets talk a little bit more about some Outlook Web Access features. Youll be able to see that there is some pretty good parity between the UI. I have the Outlook bar down in the left hand side, messages across the top, and the preview pane down below; right, gives me the rich information.
Another feature that Ill show you somewhere in my demo here is the new mail notification. So we now have the ability to pop up a notification window when new mail arrives. And so were going to do that and well just talk about it when it shows up.
Some other features in the meantime, one of the things we have, and Ill go right over now to just pure Outlook Web Access, so we dont need our Outlook anymore, is a message find window. So now you have the ability to search in any of your folders. So lets say Im looking for some sales projections and obviously I can open the item here, but very quickly allows me to search.
Theres our new mail notification. So it pops up not only here for a few seconds and allows me to see it, very much like IM pops up when theres information down there, but I also get a button here that allows me to jump to that new mail as well. So we can see that Stan send me something that theres a lunch tomorrow, so there we go.
Another feature that you may have already used is our ability to sort column, so now you can do sort by columns. Youve been able to do that for a while, but weve added something in thats type-down search. So as I type characters, Outlook Web Access will narrow the search down for me; okay, very powerful.
And not to be left out of the loop, we have a few features that we have in calendar. So drag and drop has been in for a while. Hopefully most of you know about that. Anything with Internet Explorer 5 or above you can just drag the bottom of times and move them, or you can even drag a whole appointment and move that.
And one of the things weve added in for Outlook Web Access with service pack 2 is the ability to do a multi-date text. So you see I have the first selected. I can select the second. And this is totally cool. I can now do discontiguous days, so you can see Ive done the first, second and fourth. Ive actually just bypassed the third altogether.
(Applause.)
So you can see that weve got a lot of features coming in service pack 2, so now you guys know exactly what to do when it comes out, and we hope you like all those and look for your feedback on the next one.
PAUL FLESSNER: Excellent. Thanks a lot, Mark.
(Applause.)
PAUL FLESSNER: Im a big OWA user and the performance, you cant really tell in this situation, but the performance improvements that theyve made in SP2 are phenomenal and it really makes the entire experience much, much better.
So in terms of a roadmap, one of the things that youve come to this conference for is to see whats going on with the product going forward. For the next few years, the rest of this year and all of 02 were going to work hard to make continuous improvement to the product, and that will kind of come across the board. Were always working on the abilities. Were always going to continue to work on quality and well always work on nice little features that we can put in. OWA is a great example of that, the management pack, and any kind of add-on that we can really work hard on to enhance.
In the 2002 timeframe weve got Windows .NET, which again will have a much more, we think get a lot of improvements in the Active Directory. Were going to do a lot in our service pack 2 to give more resilience in terms of any kind of directory hiccoughs or failures that might occur in your network. Exchange will be a bit more isolated. Were going to be more prudent in our accesses to the directory. Were going to continue always, always, always to work on the abilities and hammer home quality. Thats something that we just absolutely live by in the server group. More OWA enhancements; you saw a great demonstration of that, and well continue to push on that. And more hosting support; the Outlook team is working hard on the ability to tunnel MAPI through HTTP so we can get kind of this always offline experience for Outlook, which I believe is a very important improvement to the firewall for the Outlook user and it will give us a much better position in the broad kind of hosting environment.
2003 is where things get interesting. Last year about this time I made a very difficult decision and caused some pain and confusion in a few peoples lives and I want to talk a little bit about that. Last year about this time we had MEC and we were releasing 2000 and I made a very hard decision to not ship the local store. Some of you were mad at me about that. You know, they depended on that local store. It was important for offline access and you had a lot of exciting things that you wanted to do with it.
So we were taking a hard look at the mail business and a hard look at the collaboration business and a hard look at the .NET strategy, which Im going to talk a bit more about in a few minutes, and we realized that we needed to make some fundamental changes, changes that we thought would bring better cost of ownership for all of you, higher rate of innovation and I think long term can really kind of reinvent the mail business and the messaging and collaboration business.
So if you look at kind of the history of the Exchange product, the Exchange development team used to have to spend a huge amount of time building what I call plumbing. Every time we have to build plumbing in the Exchange team it reduces the number of end user benefited features. We used to have a huge number of people working on protocols, because there were so many. There was a protocol war that went on for many years. That really has largely gone away through the standardization of Internet protocols.
We used to have a whole bunch of people working on our directory. Remember, we had our own directory and we had to build that. In Exchange 2000 we got rid of that technology and went with Active Directory, which is a benefit for you in terms of administration and it was a huge savings to us in terms of manpower.
That last one that sits there is storage. A year ago we had a very large team in Exchange working on storage. We were never going to get that storage to the rate of innovation that we were investing in the SQL Server product. So we took the Exchange store team and we merged them with the SQL Server team and that team has been working for over one year on what we call the next generation store.
And in the 2003 kind of beyond timeframe is when well start to roll out that product with Exchange built on top of this new store. We think its an incredibly powerful vision and we think it will give you an unprecedented new platform for development, new development tools, industrial strength database kind of administration and support tools that your DBA and other people in your shops are used to.
So we really believe this is our ability to really give you a platform where you can develop web services, which again Im going to talk about in a few minutes, to plug your mail system, your messaging, your Exchange system into line of business applications of all kinds. We believe this will give you unprecedented opportunities to do that.
Again, this is Exchange. Its not a new product. Its just Exchange as we evolve that product forward. Weve always done a good job of migrating our customers. Youve seen that, and in the first slide I put up. Connectivity and migration we know is key in the enterprise, but we also believe we needed to innovate. And the way to innovate is to get your developers back on innovation and get them out of the plumbing business. So instead of a team of 50 Exchange developers working on storage, now Ive got 600 working on that in SQL Server. Well take the Exchange team and get them 100 percent focused on end user value, so that our rate of innovation goes up and all that plumbing that kind of comes with it will be integrated in terms of the platform of .NET, Web services and all kinds of new tools that well have available to you. Again, I think this will open up a huge opportunity going forward.
(Applause.)
So, thanks. I appreciate the one guy who likes to hear this. (Laughter.) I think if you had time to think about it, and well be talking a lot more about it, it opens up a huge number of opportunities going forward.
In terms of what is .NET and what are the enterprise servers, Im actually going to talk about that a lot more in a few minutes, but there are some important points to kind of note in terms of the product line.
Covering your customer base, end customers, partners and employees, is a very difficult thing for you. It takes a very wide and large platform to cover all that space. And weve got an incredibly diverse platform to focus on that and were going to talk more about the products. But I thought Id put up this slide just to show you what the .NET Enterprise Server family is. You certainly see Exchange as a proud member of that family right here, SharePoint Portal Server and Exchange Server working closely to keep employees connected and well versed in collaboration and that sort of thing; BizTalk, enabling B2B scenarios through the firewall and within your enterprise; and certainly Commerce Server allowing you to connect your systems inside the firewall, outside for any kind of a retail site.
And there are lots of new members of the family: Weve got Content Management Server that allows you to stage content into production on your Web site and manage it; Host Integration Server, allowing you to connect to your legacy systems; SQL Server, which you know has been a great product for us, over a billion dollars in revenue for SQL Server last year, over a million servers installed, so thats a very comfortable space in terms of the database market today.
Mobile Information Server is the one were going to talk about next. Its very important in the Exchange experience in extending yourselves out to the next level in terms of wireless.
And the tried and true Windows 2000 and family application center, allowing you to view a distributed application from a single management console; Internet Security and Acceleration Server, a certified firewall with caching both forward and reverse; and we just saw a demonstration of Microsoft Operations Manager.
So this is a broad platform of products that we believe offers the customer the rich experience for building applications and specifically Web-based services, and were going to talk more about that.
So Mobile Information Server, we get to do another announcement, and were going to get a little more information about this in a second. But the wireless experience is an incredibly important part of what you do with Exchange. The customers are constantly putting more pressure on you to extend the reach of mail out to handheld devices, Pocket PCs and so on, and also to phones, WAP phones and more. And Microsoft Information Server is a product that really allows us to take mail and extend it out, and its not only mail, its also the other servers.
Some of the innovations in this release, you might be asking, “This seems like a pretty quick turn,” because we just shipped this product last spring, but this market is moving incredibly fast and were going to have to keep up with it at a rate of innovation that is really pushing us and again just to keep up with the changes in the industry.
Microsoft ActiveSync, the ability with Pocket PC 2002, which youre going to see a demonstration of in a minute, the ability to synchronize with your desktop and also with the server if you dont want to go to the desktop is very important. You can make changes at either end and get those changes reflected on your device.
New administration and provisioning so you can set up a sales force automation project, for instance, and provision all users of phones and devices in your enterprise from a single Web Site so they could come in and get the new password and go on, that theyd be ready to go against the application.
Enhanced security, IP SEC and now SSL security end to end, if the carrier is using Microsoft Information Server Carrier edition.
Additional device support: Were up to 24 different devices now and five different gateways. And that really is one of the key things thats driving us to continue to get a high rate of turns in terms of releases, because we want to keep supporting more devices and more gateways out there in the environment. This is a pretty wild industry and evolving very quickly.
And improved performance is something we work on hard every day in all of the products.
In terms of partnerships, again this is something that you have to continue to work on. Youll see several partnerships up there in terms of services organization, people who are enabling your Exchange platform and other servers through wireless by building good solutions and were working hard with those partners to train them.
And one partnership that I want to highlight this morning, MobileSys is a service aggregator. One of the key things is you want to be able to deploy an application and know that your customers worldwide can get access. In order to do that, you might have to implement services contracts with multiple carriers. Mobile Sys, as a carrier aggregator, gives us access to virtually 100 percent of the globe, 350 different carriers, so you can with comfort and confidence now build wireless applications on MIS 2002 and know that you will be 100 percent connected around the globe.
So with that, Im going to bring out Juha Christensen, the vice president of the Mobility Group, and hes going to give you a lot more information about our device strategy and about our wireless strategy. Juha?
(Applause.)
JUHA CHRISTENSEN: Thanks. Thank you, Paul.
Good morning. Im excited to be here today. Im glad to see such a large audience here. What Id like to share with you today is some of the progress that weve made within the Microsoft Mobility Group here over the last year. We have a lot of exciting things to show you here today, and we have a fairly high-paced tempo here in the next 15 or 20 minutes. Some of that will be demos. So Ill try and get over some of the talking so we can get to the exciting demos very quickly.
Now, when I travel around in Europe, Asia and the Americas a lot of people ask me, “What is Microsofts vision for mobility.” And some people also ask, you know, Microsoft extending into a very, very new market for Microsoft, and actually if we look at our renewed vision that we announced about a year ago, youll realize that mobility is really a very, very integral part of Microsofts new vision, especially the part about any device, which is something Ill touch on here today, but really mobility is a key part of everything were doing with both servers, services, devices going forward.
Now, that translates directly into a number of product assets that weve been working on. Paul talked about Mobile Information Server and were on a very, very rapid turnaround on building new versions of that as the market progresses, as new WAP gateways become available, as new wireless standards get implemented, and we participate in a lot of the wireless standards bodies to progress this universe very quickly.
And really the mission with Mobile Information Server is to give you as enterprises an ability to take all the information resources that sit behind the firewall and get them out to your mobile worker.
So because of that, we also believe its very important that we offer a number of device platforms, both obviously the platforms that we enable ourselves — smart phones, feature phones, Pocket PCs, PCs, et cetera — but also support for devices that are not necessarily Microsoft devices — browser phones, WAP phones, even phones that just do short messaging.
So we believe its very important to both offer flexibility up in the server and in the device sense. And one of the very important things that you know we continue to invest in is our tools to enable you to seamlessly integrate solutions end to end between multiple clients and multiple servers.
Now, Ill talk a little bit more about the tools later in my talk here today, but seeing this from an enterprise point of view its really all about delivering information, and we enable you to manage all this information in the various .NET servers, let your users create applications and tools and documents using Office applications and Web tools. You can integrate information from different data sources, even data sources that might not come from a Microsoft product originally; and deliver all of that out to your clients in the enterprise.
We strive to make all this carrier and air interface independent, so whether you use 802.11, Bluetooth, GPRS or some of the new 3G standards, we will support the delivery of all this information down to this wide range of devices.
Now, the device that weve been leading with here over the last couple of years is Pocket PC. Thats the first mobile device that we have really worked hard to get into the enterprise. And we have a great engineering team, who has just continued to improve this product. And as a matter of fact, just over the last year weve come a really long way. Our good friend Ken Delaney from Gartner Group said about a year ago that, “Microsoft is certainly down right now about as far as it can go,” and that was a very depressing time for all of us, as you can imagine. Just recently, Ken came out with a new statement, which was, “Palm devices have to get closer to offering what Pocket PC devices can do now,” which was great news for all of us.
And in the last year weve had over 100 very substantial large enterprise wins in the market. We have now 15 OEMs. As a matter of fact, were going to announce a number of OEMs here later this week in our worldwide announcement of the new Pocket PC software. We have won over the last year 90 percent of the reviews on Pocket PC against Palm. Last quarter Compaq became the worlds largest supplier of PDAs in revenue terms and in profit terms. Palm is now number two in this market. A study in the UK by Forsyth said that 91 percent of large organizations are planning to implement Pocket PCs in their organization. Only 38 percent are planning to do the same with Palm devices. And our market share is growing up as well. In Europe in the last quarter, according to Context, we moved to 42 percent market share, and thats very, very substantial.
So we are making great progress with the device, and we keep getting good PR. One of the latest things we got out of this is something that actually from my group is almost an unusual thing, because we have actually been the underdog for a while and all of a sudden were seeing our biggest competitor being seen as the underdog. So theres great momentum, a large number of companies implementing solutions for Pocket PC.
Now, obviously all this information Ive been telling you is about what on Thursday will be known as the old version of Pocket PC, because on Thursday were actually making a very, very substantial announcement in both Europe and the U.S. Were launching our Pocket PC 2002, and we decided here today that we would give you a little sneak preview of some of the main things that are going to be shown on Thursday. But keep an eye out on Thursday and Friday for the press as well, because we have a lot of really interesting things.
But to show you some of this, I would like to invite out on the stage Stan Elsen, one of my colleagues, who will be giving a demo of some of the things we can see from Pocket PC 2002. Stan?
STAN: Great. Well, thank you, Juha.
Im very excited to be here today to give you a quick look at some of the new features of the Pocket PC 2002. The Pocket PC 2002 is really a better Pocket PC. If youre familiar with the current one, its a great product, but weve made this one better. Weve innovated. We have some new connectivity options. And weve made this the best device for the enterprise.
So Im going to start off by showing you the Pocket Outlook inbox here, and lets see if we can get that on. And the Pocket PC Inbox has some great functionality. It has industry standard support for IMAP and POP, but its also the best mobile client for synching with Exchange. It has rich support for attachments, so I can open up Word documents, Excel spreadsheets that come attached to my e-mail. And if you have unified messaging in your organization, you can receive your voice messages right inside your Pocket Outlook inbox.
So Im going to go ahead and open an item here. I have an external caller voice mail message. And we have an attachment down here. And if I click that —
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Good morning. Welcome to Orlando. Hope you have a great stay here and enjoy the MEC.
JUHA CHRISTENSEN: And I assure you this wasnt some guy with a mike out backstage. That was actually synchronized down from Mobile Information Server onto this device. (Laughter.)
STAN: All right! The next feature Id like to show you is one that weve got a lot of customer feedback on. Customers say these are enterprise devices and we need enterprise features. So weve now added a network redirector to the Pocket PC so I can go out and get file shares and grab files.
So if we take a look here, Ive got a connection to the IR3, and if I go to the MEC share —
JUHA CHRISTENSEN: All this is working on 802.11 connection, so just like it could be in your own enterprise. And obviously most of these devices that were seeing today come with a slot so you can plug in a GPRS card and Bluetooth card, so you can work all these across various channels.
How are we doing on the refresh, Stan?
STAN: Lets see if we can grab that one more time. It looks like were having some challenges here. Well, sometimes those things happen.
Had we done that, we would have been able to open up a document here, and with some luck that will happen here in a minute. (Laughter.) So well try one more time here.
JUHA CHRISTENSEN: Maybe we should move on to the next demo then and come back to this.
STAN: Lets move on to the next demo. (Laughter.) I hate when that happens.
The next demo is an application from a Microsoft partner called Entrada Technologies and Entrada has built an application using a Windows SQL Server for CE on the Pocket PC and that ties into a back-end SQL Server. At the beginning of the day this is used by route drivers — its a sales force automation tool — and they synchronize their data from the enterprise SQL Server down to their device and then they go out and drive their route.
So when the driver gets to a store, he clicks on the route book application here and thats going to go ahead and launch the product that that particular store has. Now, this happens to be a beer route theyre driving on — one of my favorite products, very popular — and we can go in and order some new beer here. So were going to order five units of beer and then well go out and return to the screen and well complete that order.
JUHA CHRISTENSEN: Thats a much smaller order than you normally order though.
STAN: I know. (Laughter.) Im trying to cut back.
JUHA CHRISTENSEN: My budget is going out of control, in the morale budget.
STAN: So we get a total for that. Well click Save. Because these people are driving trucks, they need to capture mileage, so well say 78 miles. It will go ahead and save that. And then well go back and we can leave that customer and it provides us with a list of the other customers that we need to go out and take a look at.
JUHA CHRISTENSEN: Good. So thats a lot of really serious stuff. Now, a lot of people take these devices home when they go home in the evening. Do we have something for them as well, something that appeals more to the fun side of things?
STAN: Oh, definitely. The Pocket PC 2002 has been designed to be personalized. So we can put what we call skins on the front page. So if you want to put corporate branding on your device, you can do that. If youd like to show some patriotism, we can do that. Or if youre excited about the new Xbox, Ive got Xbox. All right, pretty cool.
And while were here we will go back to our file explorer, and Ive now got the ability to hit that share. Im going to copy a file.
JUHA CHRISTENSEN: That’s this area you tried going into earlier?
STAN: Thats the share I tried to get earlier.
JUHA CHRISTENSEN: The 802.11 is up and with us again?
STAN: It is. Im going to go back to my Pocket PC here and Im going to paste that document on. So Ive copied that document from a back-end server down to my device over 802.11. Im now going to open up that doc. It says, “Welcome to the MEC 2001.” And Im going to edit this document. The Pocket PC has a version of Pocket Word. So I can highlight the title. I can bold it. I can underline it. And I can center it, just like I would with regular Word.
I can also do some edits. So were going to hop in here and Im going to use the handwriting recognition on the Pocket PC, and weve added some edits that took the highlight there. So were going to go back, unbold it, un-underline it and were done with that. So its pretty cool functionality.
(Applause.)
JUHA CHRISTENSEN: Now, messaging is one of the really big things obviously and most of us are extremely enthusiastic about e-mail, no doubt about that. Otherwise, we wouldnt be at this conference here. But how about instant messaging? Will you be able to start doing instant messaging on this device as well?
STAN: Yeah, the Pocket PC 2002 has an instant messaging client, and with that instant messaging client I can do MSN Instant Messenger, or we can do internal instant messaging with Exchange instant messaging, so we support both protocols.
So Im going to tap to sign in. It prompts me for my Hotmail account. Well click Sign In. And I have the same contacts that I would as if Id logged onto my desktop. I see that Ive got a friend online here, so I will tap to create a new instant message.
Pocket PC also supports whats called My Text. This is editable text that you can use to quickly enter information. So Im going to say, “I love my Pocket PC,” click Send and lets see if we have a friend back there.
JUHA CHRISTENSEN: Thats great.
STAN: Oh, Wynn is typing a message.
JUHA CHRISTENSEN: Weve been using this internally in Microsoft for a while, and I can tell you the attention span seems to decline as more and more people use this in meetings. (Laughter.) But its great, you know, you have meetings with 12, 14 people and theyre all instant messaging each other. It gets pretty chaotic. It really adds a completely new dimension to these meetings.
STAN: It does. Its pretty neat stuff.
JUHA CHRISTENSEN: I tell you, one area where its great is during a conference call where you have multiple people from your own company in the same call. You can quickly instant message to each other. Its a great tool.
So I wanted to move on and talk a little bit about another product that we are going to be talking a lot more about in the next month. Its our smart phone solution. And Ive actually brought one of these devices here. This is our smart phone, which will start shipping early next year.
As opposed to the Pocket PC, which is a two-hand operating device, this is a one-hand operation device. So if youre running through an airport or youre in a meeting where youre writing with the other hand or whatever, you can actually operate this just like you would with a normal phone.
So this device here is first and foremost a great phone with added information processing and management capabilities. So its your Mobile Outlook phone. Its your Mobile Web phone, as well as being a phone.
Because of the server synchronization that Paul talked about earlier, this device will always be up to date with your information. So with a great color screen youre able to bring your information with you everywhere, seamlessly have it in your pocket.
One of the things that we are striving to in the wireless devices that we are bringing out with our OEM partners is to make sure that the out-of-the-box experience is extremely good. I think thats very important particularly in an enterprise. If youre going to issue thousands of people with a Stinger device, you want to be able to provision these devices very, very quickly. So we have some tests internally where we said we have to get under five minutes from you take this out of your box until its fully provisioned with all your e-mails, contacts, everything on, so that this device has the identity of you, and weve been able to achieve that.
Obviously the device is also extremely extensible. We have strived to make sure that we merged the code bases of Pocket PC and our smart phones, so applications that are developed for Pocket PC will also be available on the smart phone. So that instantly makes thousands, if not tens of thousands of applications available on the smart phones.
So its a device that were expecting a lot from and were extremely excited to work with a number of our OEM partners on making this product a reality.
So the next step from a mobility point of view, we think there are great benefits from standardizing on the Pocket PC. One of our partners, Compaq, as a matter of fact, who as I mentioned before has now become the biggest PDA company in the world based on revenue, is in the process of offering upgrades to their existing iPaq customers, and thats something that youll see more and more from the OEMs. You can upgrade your PDA, which is something that has been pretty unusual in the past. And today actually if you go to Compaq.com and wiggle your way into the iPaq section, you will actually be able to purchase a very, very reasonable priced upgrade to your Pocket PC.
We have a number of case studies and testimonials on our Web Site that can help you get started, and a lot of solutions, give you some inspiration. So Ill invite you to go and look at the developer side of our Web site.
We also have people ready to assist you and help you both in the sales force and in the mobility group, who can be an inspiration to these things.
So with that, Id like to hand it back over to Paul. Thank you very much for today and hopefully well see you with a Pocket PC and a Stinger phone in your hands very soon. Thank you.
(Applause.)
PAUL FLESSNER: Thanks, Juha.
So for the next few minutes were going to talk a little bit more about Microsoft .NET. Theres always a lot of conversation when this comes up: Is it a floor wax? Is it a desert topping? (Laughter.) What the heck is Microsoft .NET? And we want to put kind of that to rest, because it does address some of the key challenges in the enterprise, and we want to make sure that you understand that and kind of help you understand what to expect in the future, this year, next year and beyond. Again, Ill get to a roadmap in a few minutes.
I was an IT guy before I came to Microsoft seven years ago, and I built a lot of applications. Building apps is hard. Its hard enough keeping up with the technology, but keeping up with the business is an incredibly dizzying thing to do. It changes rapidly, lot of demands, cost pressures every day.
So every IT guy dreams that at some point in their career theyre going to be able to storm into the CEOs office and say, “Hey, done. I got it. The customers are totally connected. The catalogue is up, 100 percent searchable, ordering products, everybodys happy, revenue is way up. The supply chain is not a problem, completely integrated, real time manufacturing, lower cost of real materials; were in great shape. Employees are 100 percent online. Benefit selection, valuation, check stubs are all done, all built on a common infrastructure and all built on a common data model. Veni, vidi, vici, I came, I saw, I conquered. Im done. Whats the next problem?” It never happens. At least it never happened in my 13 years, and I tried awful hard.
It looks more like this. Its a mess. You get new systems every day: ERP, human resource, financial. Maybe human resource is PeopleSoft. Maybe ERP is SAP, financial is Oracle, who knows. The systems arent built to think outside of their own box. The APIs are fragile. Potentially the APIs are synchronous so they dont scale outside the firewall. So you create all this fragile plumbing to get these things trying to talk to each other, but in the end its very frustrating because each time you do an upgrade the vendor doesnt think too much about it and you can break the interfaces. You guys know this very well. If youve been trying to plumb Exchange into some of these things and enable workflow, theyre just not very programmable and its very frustrating.
So what is a Web service? A Web service really tries to address this problem. It tries to get people to think about new applications or taking existing applications and wrapping them in a way that you can extend. Programmers are simple people. I love developers because all they really want in the world to be happy is to write code that people use, people use every day and they can extend it and it gets a richer life as it goes on. Thats really what developers want.
So think about architecting your code in a way thats fundamentally discoverable and the UDDI standard helps that. Think about writing in a way thats self-describing with WSDL and SOAP in terms of service interaction. And think about making it programmable, utilizing XML and a core set of interfaces that make that routine available to a broader range of people.
So if I can go out and I can find services, I can understand what they do programmatically and I can actually program to them, you start to see that this thing could get pretty exciting.
You also need to have broadest possible reach. Again, you dont want to think just inside your firewall, you want to think beyond your firewall. Thats what all of you are being challenged to do, not just with wireless and devices but beyond your customers and your partners. So standard protocols are key.
The ability to aggregate, so you think about building a Web service that does password certification and building one that does customer verification and one that does credit card authentication. Think about those services being built to scale, loosely coupled, nicely built, so that you can plug them together and pretty soon your application modules can become levels of abstraction that you never thought about before. It could be very tiny routines, like a simple pricing routine, or it could be a huge complex pricing routine, or it could your ERP systems.
Loosely coupled is fundamentally key. You cant have tightly coupled, synchronous, two-faced kind of things going on if, in fact, what youre trying to do is scale beyond the firewall or scale to huge transaction volumes.
And Web services do not discriminate. They dont care what the OS is. They dont care what your programming model is. They dont care what your language is. They just run. Follow these steps and you can talk to any platform in the world, as long as theyre following the same basic steps.
So what does that do for you as a customer? It enables you to build on the platform that you want to build on, the platform that youre most comfortable with, the platform that has the richest toolset, and it allows you to plug into any platform in the world.
Exchange has already faced this, right? Remember the standards wars of e-mail of five or six, eight, ten years ago, dont remember exactly when? The battle was thought to be fought and won based on standards between, you know, Microsoft was in, Lotus was in. We were all battling over that and there was a lot of brouhaha about it.
You know what, the customers spoke and they said Internet standard is what I want. You guys go compete and see who can built the best mail system.
Were happy to compete in that space. We love that space. We feel very confident about our Exchange position in the market today, given the fact that weve been able to compete at that level, and I believe this initiative, XML Web services and Microsoft .NET just takes that to the next level.
Microsoft is not afraid of open standards. Were embracing them. Were pushing them hard into the community. We want to work with our competitors and make sure, because in essence we know that the enterprise is not homogeneous. It never will be. Oracle is kind of playing that strategy today and its incredibly na
ë
ve from my perspective of being an enterprise customer. Customers arent going to have homogeneous systems. They have heterogeneous systems. They have heterogeneous vendors, and they want those systems to communicate.
So were just trying to take that to the next level and we want to win your business by having the best platform for XML Web services.
So now were actually going to take a look at a video for what the world might look like if XML Web services were broadly deployed today. Please go to the video.
(Videotape presentation.)
PAUL FLESSNER: A tough day for Steve Masters.
You can see the world could be an exciting place if we were all connected. So .NET is a broad vision, but its a broad vision because it has to be a broad vision. You want to connect your clients — clients of all kinds, whether theyre a rich client on your desktop, whether its a browser device anywhere that you might be connected to or a handheld device. Those devices are becoming an everyday part of what we do.
You want to be able to plug those devices into services, services in the Internet that are out there today and we believe a rapid proliferation of services. Weve announced a bunch under the My Services initiative, Passport today, and youll see many, many more — mail, calendaring and others — that well continue to propagate into the market.
And those services have to be built on a solid platform, and that platform is the foundation of all this, and thats these .NET Enterprise Servers from Microsoft. Were very proud of those servers, and again youve been a good customer of one of them for a long time, Exchange.
And end to end you must have a consistent programming model and a consistent toolset. The developer is the key to this thing and getting this wave of services out into the market. VisualStudio.net, which will be launched essentially early next year, is the key to making all this a reality for us.
In terms of what you can do with Exchange today for XML web services, you can build web services on Exchange today and were going to do a demonstration of that in a minute. Document-centric workflow; you saw mergers and acquisitions earlier as a possibility. Integrating collaboration into the line of business application is something that you desperately want to do and youve told us you want to do. That capability exists today and it just gets better. You saw the roadmap; again in 2003 another major step forward. Resource scheduling, conference center, education facilities and so on; front end to other systems theres a lot you can do.
So right now were going to bring out Ernie again and demonstrate some technology from one our MEC award winners, IT Factory. Ernie? Oh, Marks coming, too. All right. Thanks, guys.
ERNIE: All right, Paul, we asked IT Factory to develop for us a business to consumer and business-to-business .NET solution using several of the .NET Enterprise Servers, including Exchange, and integrating those with XML Web services. What you see here on the screen is a Web page built with Commerce Server. Its got BizTalk orchestration in the background thats taking care of orchestrating business processes.
This is for Dynamic Azimuth. They sell satellite systems and they sell these to individuals and small apartment complex owners.
Mark is a small apartment complex owner and he is going to place an order. Go ahead, Mark.
MARK: Okay, so Ive changed my job and now Im managing apartments. So here Im going to order and Im basically in the middle of a remodel of a 12-unit apartment complex, and I want to go a little more upscale, a little more luxury, so I wanted to deploy Ultimate TV. So Im going to go ahead and add that into my cart, pretty straightforward Web ordering. Im going to increase the units to 12 because I have obviously 12 units. I also want the apartment kit, so Im going to add that in, so that gives me all the hardware I need to install it throughout the apartment.
And since this a pretty complex job I dont want to do it myself, so Im going to go ahead and see what installation options are available. So I can see there are single, dual or distributed, which is more of what I want. Ill go ahead and add that into the cart, do a quick review and then move on to checkout. And since Im a previous customer, all the information is already filled in for me and so Ill just do a quick review of that and go ahead and request a date for my installation to be processed.
And then well go back to Ernie.
ERNIE: Thanks, Mark.
BizTalk will kick in, in the background now, and make sure the fulfillment occurs, that this goes to my warehouse, it gets picked, it gets shipped, and I dont do these installs. Dynamic Azimuth doesnt install these things directly. They subcontract out the installation to another company. So lets take a look at that company, Orbitrons Fancy Electronic Installations: This is the dispatchers console, where Im going to dispatch and get someone to come and install this thing for Mark.
This got handed over to this system. This is an ASP paging into SQL Server. If I look at unassigned dispatches, well notice that Ive got an unassigned dispatch for Mark Adcock. New customer requests, heres Marks request. Lets take a look at that.
If I want to look here and go ahead and schedule this up, I would call him typically and say, “Mark, I need some information from you.” Based on his responses to a few questions, I would look and see what he needs to have done, choose a few other things here and now I need to find someone to install this.
Now, Orbitrons Fancy Electronic Installations happen to be a consolidator for installers. They actually dont do the installation. They subcontract these out to several companies that provide qualified technicians who can go out and do this installation.
So I need to find a technician who has this skill set, represented by the answers to these questions, whos in the location Mark is in — my database knows where that is — and whos available at a time thats convenient for Mark.
Well, that company happens to use Exchange and in their system internally they have a couple things. They have their Exchange normal data, calendar, mail, et cetera and the technicians calendar is there. They also have this little solution here, a resource exchange that says heres a technician — this is a whole bunch of them. Lets look at Robert Ginsburg. Theres a technical named Robert Ginsburg who has a certain skill set. He happens to pretty much be able to handle any kind of install that we have coming our way. So he obviously would be qualified, and if we go back and look, he is in Orlando, which is where Mark happens to be.
So if I could just hook up this system and the calendar information that goes along with it with Exchange I could find this technician. Thats exactly what we do. Were going to use XML web service to expose that Exchange data to that dispatch solution, and Im going to go ahead and click List Resources.
When I do, this is going to go out via UDDI that Paul mentioned to find a web service, do a SOAP contract with it, make an exchange of data, get that XML data back, and then display it down here below, where it says no resources listed right now. Let me click List Resources.
Were going to go out and find those technicians and one of those happens to be that Robert Ginsburg guy we looked at just a moment ago. And Im going to go ahead and schedule Robert for this 2:00 time slot on the 4th.
Now, when I click Assign Dispatch, the same web service is going to go back the other direction and say heres the data. Heres the guy, heres the address, heres the job that needs to be done. Its going to put him on Robert Ginsburgs calendar and then well have that assigned to him.
Let me click Assign Dispatch and youll notice now its been assigned. So thats now going to our technician at the other company via the web service, and Id like to bring out Robert Ginsburg now, the technician, and realize Robert is the CTO of IT Factory. Today hes our technician. Hi, Robert.
ROBERT: Hi, Ernie.
ERNIE: So we have on one screen, heres that item, Palm Tree apartments. Thats the little item we just did, 2:00. Robert had his Pocket PC up here. His company uses that wirelessly enabled Pocket PC for all the technicians. Hes out in the field right now. He doesnt know he has this job to do yet. Im going to ask Robert to go ahead and do an ActiveSync using the Server Access Sync with Mobile Information Server 2002 that got announced here earlier. Go ahead and do that. That will bring the item down to his calendar. It will show now on his calendar he has a dispatch. Hes going to go out and work on that.
This application, this Pocket PC also has an application that this company uses that lets Robert go out and talk to the same Web service the dispatcher did and find an expert. So if Robert gets on a job and says, “You know, I need to find someone who has some skills in certain areas that Im not quite as good in,” he can do that. He can click Find an Expert. It will talk via SOAP to the Web service and bring back the expert information, again coming out of the Exchange thing we saw a while ago, and he can work with that.
If he gets on the job, so hes going to go do Marks apartment complex, and he says, “You know, this is going to take me longer than I thought it would, and I really cant do the service call later in the day, that number 219 there for some guy named Larry Ellison at 4:00, Im not going to be able to deal with it, because Im going to be here dealing with this other one for a little bit longer,” so hes going to release that back to the dispatch center. And when he does release it back to the dispatch center, its going to take it off his calendar. Its going to talk to the web service. And if we come now to unassigned dispatches, well find that we have a dispatch assigned to a guy named Larry Ellison and well just have to deal with that in a little bit.
So weve got now this great .NET solution bringing these things together with XML Web services.
Thank you, Paul.
PAUL FLESSNER: Thanks, Ernie. Thanks, Mark. Thank you very much. (Applause.)
So theres an SDK in your package as well. Again, that must be a big pack. Theres an SDK in your sack to get started today building XML Web services for Exchange.
Now, in terms of the .NET Enterprise Server roadmap, with again Exchange as a strong, proud member of, weve got a lot going over the next three years. This year I think the tag line is XML Web services are real. You should be educating yourselves. You should be starting to be talking about it to your customers and to your management team and IT what is a Web service, how do we begin to prepare, how do we architect ourselves for this, what are these standards and start to understand them and start to think of ways that Exchange, already an established factor into your enterprise, how can it plug in and enrich that experience for other businesses or other business systems in your enterprise.
In 2002, ASP.NET, a new programming model in our application server, will be a much higher level of productivity and we believe much richer programming environment. That ships with Windows.NET Server, which has a new version of IIS thats more reliable, more scalable, more performance.
Overall, new application services; again part of the Windows.NET ship.
Language runtime: This is a very important innovation for Microsoft and ships in the .NET, Windows.NET timeframe. Today people have liked the fact that youve got language runtime. Java has a language runtime, which kind of protects you from any kind of memory overrun. It also gives you just this sandbox protection and security, but it only runs with Java. And Java and J2EE are very tightly bound together.
Our runtime is not bound with single language. It supports — I believe it shipped almost 20 different languages. It might be over 20, including Java. But Java was not the first in language innovation and it certainly will not be the last. Its a very powerful concept to think that your developers will be able to keep up with language innovation, but you will not have to do any kind of rip and replace on the infrastructure below that, the same transaction model, the same .NET Enterprise Server model. All that can stay the same while you again evolve forward with language innovation. Its not the case with Java. Java is tightly bound, the only language for J2EE, so thats something that we believe will bring a lot of delight both to the developer and to the IT pro whos managing the data center.
And some products start 64-bit on the Windows platform. Certainly Windows and SQL Server in the 2002 timeframe, and Exchange, look for that in the 2003 timeframe.
2003 is where a lot of the things that weve been working hard kick in. Ive had my job, responsible for the .NET Enterprise Servers, about a year. The first year you really try to get your strategy correct and get the products on ship cycles and get those kinds of things done. A couple years out what you really have to do is be building that vision in what the products need to be.
2003 is where we really start to bring that together. I talked about the work were doing in the area of storage for Exchange. Were going to do more work across caching, more work across diagnostics. Wouldnt it be nice even in your Exchange environment that if you had slow response time you could quickly try to isolate where that was. It is on the IIS server? Is it hitting the Active Directory? Is it back on the store? We want to do more to give you richer integration across the entire implementation around diagnostics. And a lot of things that were going to continue to do in this timeframe to just make it a better platform for XML Web services.
So in summary, Exchange is alive and well. Deploy Exchange 2000 now. Its a brand that were 100 percent behind and we continue to invest hard not only as mail system messaging, but also as a collaboration system where were working hard to take it to the next level. I think weve articulated a pretty clear vision about that today.
The customer shift to Web services is real. Its not something to be ignored. Its not a fad. Its not just marketing. Of course, it is marketing, but theres a lot of product behind it as well, and its something that we feel is very important to the industry.
The .NET Enterprise Servers are plumbed from the base, from the very design points of those products going forward to be a great platform from XML Web services.
Start building XML Web services today. Pick up the SDKs. Read about your partner guy. Read the solutions that are out there and learn. Spend time at MEC learning about web services.
And absolutely our commitment to you, and we take this incredibly serious, we are very proud to have you as customers. Well continue to improve the abilities, all of them — reliability, availability, serviceability, predictability, manageability. I know them all, can say them in my sleep I think. Ive lived them for a long time and were very proud to work hard on that and give that to you in terms of the feature set.
Total cost of ownership: We know that as you get the infrastructure in place you are squeezed every year in your budget in terms of making it run better and more efficient for your customers. Yes, they ask unfair things of you. “I want my service levels increased and I want my cost to come down. Dont tell me your problems; just get it done.” We understand thats whats happening and were working hard to make it easier for you. The MOM Application Management Pack is certainly an example of that.
And .NET is the marriage of client, server and service. We believe thats where the market is going. The Masters video is funny, but in a lot of ways that is the enterprise that your customers ask for and what we want to bring.
In the final comments a call to action: Take advantage of MEC. We very much appreciate you coming here. We know that was a little stressful, but it is time to get out there and help our economy move forward, and we appreciate you taking time out from your busy schedules and coming. Build those Web services. Deploy Exchange 2000. And always, always, always give us your feedback and comments. Theres a lot on there.
Thats all I have for today. Thank you very much and we appreciate your business.
(Applause.)