Transcript of Remarks by Kevin Turner, Microsoft Chief Operating Officer
Launch Event for Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008
Toronto, Canada
Feb. 27, 2008
KEVIN TURNER: Thank you very much. Well, good morning! It’s great to be here. I’m excited to be here. Anytime we can get around IT professionals and developers, it energizes all of us at Microsoft.
And I’ll tell you what, today is the largest launch in the history of Microsoft for IT pros and developers around the world, and it’s an exciting day, and it’s a great day, and we’re going to share what we’ve been working on, and what our developers have been working on to really launch something we call Dynamic IT, and you’ll hear us talk a lot about that. But it is great to be here and thank you for your time and certainly thank you for your partnership at Microsoft.
You know, today is about celebrating you. The title of our launch is “Heroes Happen Here”. The heroes are the people like you who do heroic things with technology. That’s what we’re going to celebrate today. So, this is going to be a celebration, we’re going to talk about examples, we’re going to talk about what’s going on in the world and what are the products that we’re going to bring to the marketplace to really enable and showcase some heroic efforts by IT pros and developers around the world.
We recognize the amazing work that you do every day; that many of you in the IT business are unsung heroes, and I think that’s important.
That was one of the lightning rods from our own developers that said, hey, let’s make this a celebration. It doesn’t have to be just the normal product launch; let’s celebrate what IT pros and developers do around the world, and the great things that they do to bring technology to life to solve real problems, both in society, and to create business value.
So, today we’re launching three of our most important products in all the Microsoft portfolio, and certainly our most important in our commercial business, in our enterprise business as well; products that enable you to be more productive, more agile, save time, simplicity, simplify. Those are the key cornerstones of what we mean when we say Dynamic IT, is how do we help you become simpler and be able to, as we’re going to talk about in a moment, reduce the time that it takes for maintenance and support and increase the time that you can spend on innovating and creating business value in the marketplace.
Now, let me tell you a story. I want to tell you about a couple of heroes, just to bring this theme of this launch to life. And I want to start by telling you imagine it’s November 12th, 1999, and you’re in Istanbul, Turkey. And it’s the middle of the night, and an earthquake hits, 7.2 on the Richter scale. So you get in a doorway with all your family, buildings are shaking and collapsing around you, and all of a sudden all the lights go out and it’s completely dark. After several hours, the shaking and the crumbling stops. You somehow find a way to make it outside. When you finally get outside, you look around and it’s total devastation all around you.
Now, most of us can only imagine this, but this was the reality for Omer Celik. Along with everyone else in the region, they had to live and eat in the streets for five days before help arrived.
This challenging time, that five-day period, sparked an idea, an idea that Omer said, you know what, there’s got to be something we can do with technology.
So, he wanted to create something that could help tell rescue crews what was going on in the areas that they couldn’t reach or get to, somehow create a tool that would allow them to see just what they were facing and where help was needed right away.
So, over the next 24 months he and a friend partnered, and it’s his childhood friend, Oguz they’ve been friends since they were 10 years old, they partnered and using Microsoft Robotics Studio, Visual Studio 2008, which we’re going to talk about, Virtual Earth, Windows Server 2008, with IIS 7.0 and Silverlight, they’ve created something called RoboTurk a robotic helicopter used in disaster situations to fly into areas that are so badly damaged so that you can stream video back to the rescue crews, so that rescue crews can get real time feedback on who and where they need to provide help.
Now, Omer and Oguz are two developers, but they’re also two developers who decided to make a difference, and they’re heroes, and we’re celebrating them today, because today the Turkish government and Microsoft are investing with Omer and Oguz to bring this technology mainstream.
And that’s what today is about, celebrating people like Omer and Oguz, people like you, and people around the world that utilize technology to help enable people and businesses to realize their full potential and to make a difference. So, Heroes Happen Here is the theme that we’re going to talk about today.
Now, when you think about it, the opportunity in IT has never been greater. There’s never been a better time to be in IT or to be a developer. And IT touches every aspect of the business; you all know that. Everything has to go through IT.
Today, I’m also proud to be standing up here to tell you I’m in charge of IT at Microsoft. That’s a fun job. We have quite a few — we have one official CIO, and quite a few unofficial CIOs at times at Microsoft.
When you think about it, no matter where I go, including in our own IT shop, every customer I talk to the story is the same. They tell us they want to focus more on driving new innovation and reduce the time spent on maintenance.
So, how do we help shift the balance? And regardless of the percentage that you spend on support and maintenance, how do we increase the time where we can create business value and really drive new innovation in the marketplace?
And you know what, it’s time, because the grade card of the CIO has changed. CEOs are requiring that the IT department deliver that business value and help give them the competitive advantage that they so desperately need in businesses.
So, later this morning I want to tell you about a Canadian company, about how the Bank of Montreal’s IT team is adding strategic value to their business, utilizing technology. But again the opportunity has never been greater.
Dynamic IT
A few years ago, we introduced this premise of Dynamic IT. After aligning IT resources to support the changing needs of your business, we had to think about what promises can we make to help you on that journey.
So, there are four promises that we’re working hard every single day at Microsoft to really help manage and help you with these four things. One is manage complexity and achieve agility. To drive down operating costs, to help you and your company become more agile is a promise that we’re making.
Number two, protect and control assets, from threat mitigation to how do we have proactive business enablement. That is what we’re striving to do.
Number three, advancing the business with IT solutions. Specifically there it’s how do we have agile application development and how do we have more IT and development collaboration. What can we do to enable that?
And four, amplify the impact of your people. Our People-Ready Business philosophy that we have at Microsoft is at the center, putting people at the center, giving them the tools that they need to help create business value and to be successful.
So, those are the four promises that we’re making to help you on your journey to Dynamic IT.
The opportunity that we have is for everyone in this room to help your organization achieve the end goal of Dynamic IT.
Now, when you look at it, there are two parts to break it down. First let’s talk about the infrastructure, because it’s important as we recognize the different types of infrastructure within any organization, there’s a core infrastructure, the plumbing I’ll call it, and the applications that are built on it.
Technology advancements are bringing new capabilities across both of these categories, literally transforming the way that work is done today. So, this is really at the heart of the product launches that we’re going to talk about on this journey to Dynamic IT.
The technology advancements, again, for example, in the core infrastructure, when you think about the move from physical to logical, we’re going to talk about virtualization today. We’re going to talk about resources managed and configured by policy rather than human intervention. And then when you look at the application space, we’re going to talk about reusing components to more quickly build service-based applications. We’re going to talk about fewer lines of code. We’re going to talk about building applications with flexibility of running on-premise or off-premise or hosted by someone. And we’re going to show you these later today. But leveraging the advancements in technology is at the beginning of where we’re headed from a Dynamic IT.
So, today, we’re proud to launch Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008. Today’s launch fits into the vision of enabling this Dynamic IT aspiration that we have by delivering this seamless access to information and computing capabilities that we need exactly when we need them, on the device that is most convenient, and in the form that is most effective. This is the technology that helps you operationalize your Dynamic IT strategy.
Windows Server 2008 is the most customer-driven and tested server product that we’ve ever released into the marketplace.
You know, as I told you all, I have responsibility for IT at Microsoft, and we’re building a lot of datacenters. Almost 100 percent of what we’re putting in those datacenters is virtualized using Windows Server 2008. So, we eat what we cook as it relates to the testing and the rigor and the cadence that goes along with these products that we’re bringing into the marketplace today.
Secure and Trusted Foundation
These products deliver on four pillars that I think are important to talk to you about, secure and trusted foundation: These are the things that you’ve told us. Continuing our focus on enterprise security is very important. Virtualization, transforming how we use and provision IT resources, is also equally important. Web development, bringing rich experiences to the Web faster with more scalability, that’s what our end users are requiring, and we’re going to talk about how we’re enabling that. And then business intelligence; you know, building on SharePoint, our whole collaboration strategy, and Office in this past year has been an incredible acceptance in the marketplace, and we want to share some of that with you.
But let’s start by showing you what I mean by secure and trusted foundation. A secure and trusted foundation gets into the ability for us to continue to make it a top priority at Microsoft. You’ve told us before, this is something that we absolutely have to build into the product, not something that we get in a service pack or in a bolt-on or at a later time. In Windows Server 2008 we make it possible to customize your installation so that you only have to install what you need with Server Core. It gives you more control.
You’ve also told us that you’ve said that servers have to be more affordable, and more affordably available, and in Windows Server 2008 we introduce something called Geo Clustering that says no matter where the server is located, we can recognize them in the pool, and that you can cluster them in a thoughtful and intelligent way.
We all have compliance and governance requirements. To that end we’ve introduced built-in auditing and encryption capabilities in SQL Server 2008, Network Access Protection to allow you to manage device compliance by policy. This will really help save a lot of time and certainly reduce a lot of risk.
Interoperability continues to be a top priority for all of us. We’ve introduced PHP support in IIS 7, and provides rock solid hosting support for PHP and Windows.
Virtualization
Now let’s talk about one of the most exciting things in all of IT. Let’s talk about virtualization.
From the datacenter to the desktop, what is Microsoft going to do in the virtualization space? Virtualization is a hot buzz right now. Why? Because virtualization, when it’s implemented well, helps customers save time, helps them save money, and helps them more effectively manage their assets. So, what is Microsoft going to do in the virtualization space?
Virtualization is a core capability across multiple platforms with this announcement today. We take a broad view when it comes to providing virtualization capabilities to meet the broad needs of our customers. We’re going to provide virtualization from the desktop all the way through the datacenter. Of course, we’re going to start with server virtualization in Hyper-V, and then we’re going to go to application virtualization in SoftGrid, all the way through desktop virtualization with the Virtual PC, presentation virtualization in Terminal Services, and the profile virtualization with Virtual Folders.
When you think about it, there are a couple of things that I want you to make note on. We’re going to provide cross-platform support. We will support Windows virtualized on other virtualization engines.
At the center of our virtualization strategy is the ability for us to manage virtual and physical technologies from within one single console, our Microsoft System Center.
So, this virtualization story that I’m telling you today is something that we’re getting into this business in a huge way.
Now, here’s a quote from Tom Bittman from Gartner: “Virtualization without good management is more dangerous than not using virtualization in the first place.
In fact, we agree with that. That’s exactly why we think we have to protect and ensure management tools that manage your physical and logical environment make the best sense. And for Hyper-V and System Center we will deliver, as I said, a cross-platform, single management solution for both the physical world and the virtual environment.
Virtualization and System Management Demo
But you know what; nothing really explains it like a great demo. So, help me bring up Rick Claus, and I want him to show you about what are we doing with security, and what are we doing in virtualization. Rick.
RICK CLAUS: Good to see you.
KEVIN TURNER: You, too.
So, Rick, what are you going to show us today? Are you going to start with security?
RICK CLAUS: Well, I’m basically going to be playing the role of an IT administrator for a company called Fourth Coffee. I’m going to show you exactly what we’re going to be doing to provision some new servers, standardize our Web servers, do some SQL standardization as well, and as well deploy some applications.
So, Fourth Coffee is a Canadian coffee retailer that is going to be playing in the global marketplace. It needs to do some new regional campaigns in order to support this. So, as the IT guy, I need to go off and provision some new infrastructure.
So, as you can see over here, we’ve got Windows Server 2008 running Windows new technology of Hyper-V hypervisor technology. We can see here that I’ve got my Hyper-V system up and running. I’m going to go off and provision a new system.
So, basically I’m just going to go off and start off my file server, file server number three, and that’s going to be my new file server infrastructure that’s going to support this new acquisition.
Now, we’re using virtualization, as you mentioned, as a quick way to go off and provision new servers, and this particular system is going to be part of our file server cluster.
So, our file server cluster currently is running with two different systems right now. They’re both running Server 2008 as a core install. Core is a minimal install option that allows us to only put the components on that we need for the roles that we choose. So, in this case, as you can see here, it’s just a console with a command line, and it’s going to be going off and doing our file server shares.
Now, in addition to this, I’m going to have to go off and add in that server that I just spun up as part of my cluster, and to do this I’m going to go off and use our Cluster Manager.
Now, on our Cluster Manager I can see here that I’m going to go off and add in a new node, and that new file server node is called File Three. Very simple here, there we go. It’s going to go off and make that attachment, it’s going to go off and connect up to it and make sure we have proper administrative rights. And the neat thing with our cluster solution now is we’ve had clustering for a while, but it’s really simple with 2008. In addition to that, it’s also going to go off and validate that we actually hit all of our 100 different criteria that make it so it’s going to be a successful file cluster, to make it a more secure and trusted platform.
So, it’s going through and doing its validation right now to ensure that we’ve got all the stuff and all online and ready to go, and it should come back with a report and actually tell me that now that I’ve added a third server into our two-node cluster, that we have some disk changes that have to go off and take place.
So, I’m going to go off and add in that new disk change. You can see here that it’s telling me that the quorum disk is now redundant; we should go off and make a change to that configuration.
With this console it’s very simple to do. I simply go in here and say more actions, and change the quorum settings. And I’m going to change it from the old way of doing it to the way that it recommends, which is called a node majority. Very simple to make that change; I’ve now gone off and made it so that we now have a three-node geo cluster using Server 2008, in this case on core installs.
KEVIN TURNER: So, this all looks pretty simple. Is this just something you did special for the demo? Because generally some of the things we’ve perhaps put in the marketplace in the past aren’t quite this intuitive. Is this exactly what we’re going to be putting in the marketplace this time?
RICK CLAUS: This is out in the marketplace for 2008. I used to do clusters with 2003. It used to be like a 27-page wizard, and it was actually very complex. We’ve put all of our expertise into this one wizard interface to make sure that it works successfully each time.
KEVIN TURNER: Excellent.
RICK CLAUS: Now, in addition to supporting that new file system infrastructure, I need to go off and deploy some new Web servers to support that marketing campaign. So, I’m going to go off and use our new IIS 7 install.
Now, again this is still a Hyper-V machine that I’m using. I want to point out that it’s a 64-bit Web server that I’m running. It’s got quad core inside of it as far as the virtualization guest is concerned. I now have access to 32 gigs of RAM within each virtual guest system. So, we’re no longer constrained with what we had for resources before.
But the neat thing with IIS 7, which is on 2008, is the fact that in 2003 and previous versions the Web Service used to have this thing called a meta-base that you had to make sure was replicated across all your file servers for Web serving, and you can see here that we no longer use the meta-base. All we do for our configuration is a file called Web Config. I store it on that file cluster. It’s diversified across all my file clusters. I can access it. I’m sure that all my systems for IIS 7 are configured exactly the same way, reducing my management costs, simplifying my infrastructure, very easy to rapidly deploy that new server into our server farm for the Web farm.
Now, the next thing that I want to do is I need to support that Web farm by being able to go off and make sure our databases on the back-end are performing adequately.
So, on our SQL Server 2008 system we actually have two different application pools running right now, one of them internally and one of them externally. I thought I’d pull up a performance reliability chart here, and you can see they’re both fighting for resources. You’ll actually see that this machine that I’m running right now gets a little bit slow because it’s so constrained for what’s going on. So, that’s not going to be a good experience for our external Web site. The external is red, in case you’re wondering, and the internal is blue.
So, there’s a new feature in SQL 2008 that allows me to go and use what’s called a Resource Governor. Now, a Resource Governor is going to allow me to prioritize and limit the amount of CPU time that each app is allowed to do. So, I’m going to go in and change my prioritization to say my internal Web site, which is the executive Web site — no offense — and give it less resources. I’m going to go down here and —
KEVIN TURNER: So, what you’re basically saying is Bill, Steve, and myself’s e-mail and everything is going to get a lot slower? We might want to pick one of these other resources on here, but that’s a good start.
RICK CLAUS: The neat thing is that as soon as I make that change, you can see I just changed it down to 20 instead of 70, and we actually should see this take effect immediately back over here. We’ll see that the red guy externally to our customers for buying our products, in this case coffee, are going to be going off and having a much better experience on that new system.
KEVIN TURNER: And being able to thoughtfully plan the resource utilization and the priority of that resource utilization across that server farm is very strategic for the IT professional and developer in being able to provide the right customer service, as well as the response times that enterprises and businesses require, right?
RICK CLAUS: Definitely. And we can even go one step further. Because we now have SQL 2008, and it has this thing called a Distributed Management Framework, so we can enforce policies across all of our SQL Servers if we want to.
So, we have this Fourth Coffee best practices policy that is part of our internal testing that’s gone off and said these are the best things we should do to make sure our databases are performing well.
Unfortunately, you can see here we’re not adhering to that best policy with that new marketing database, but I can drill into the details and find out where we’re a little bit deficient. And it looks like here it’s actually just the encryption part that seems to be the problem right there.
So, all I’m going to do is simply close this guy off and turn on what’s known as Transparent Database Encryption. It’s a new feature with SQL Server 2008. I’m just going to go off and choose this database in question, and I’m going to manage its encryption.
I’m using an internal key to do the encryption, and it’s going to be happening — remember, everything is still all running in the background. I’m going to drop this down, use the key, and turn on encryption, hit okay, and in the background it’s now gone off and started the encryption process to make sure that all our customer data is safe and secure, no one can get access to it except for application servers.
And remember that was also still going on in the background; didn’t affect performance at all for the last little bit that’s there.
KEVIN TURNER: Now, when you think about system management, and let’s say somebody else’s virtualization technology on their raised floor, and I know that their system management tools don’t allow the management of other virtualization competitors, will our tools and systems management tools cross platform, will it help you manage let’s say VMware or someone else’s hardware?
RICK CLAUS: I’m very excited about that actually. I’m very passionate about virtualization, and System Center current version and actually the next version, called R2, release two, is going to actually be able to manage VM infrastructure as well as our own infrastructure, be able to convert and import machines back and forth just as well, and when you tie that in with MOM for Operations Manager 2007, you’ve got the ability to manage both physical and virtual from one console. It’s going to be very, very sweet.
KEVIN TURNER: Awesome.
RICK CLAUS: Now, the last part that I have to do to support this acquisition is I’ve got to go off and deploy some new tools for our sales force in the field; very simple sort of stuff to do. I’m going to use, as you mentioned, presentation virtualization to do that.
So, to do presentation virtualization we have this little gateway box, which allows us to make these apps available in the other side of the Internet securely, and I’ve got what’s called TS Remote Application.
Now, I’m going to make a Dynamics application available on the outside world for our mobile sales force; very simple to go through here, choose the Dynamics AX Role Center, and then publish it out to my sales force.
It’s actually that fast, because it just simply puts the file on their externally facing SharePoint for them to be able to launch that off.
And just to show you what that actually looks like, I’m just going to go off, here’s our sales portal, click on Dynamics, and this guy has to authenticate first. Once he’s authenticated, we’ll actually see the Dynamics AX console come up.
I just want to point out while this guy is actually rolling and coming out right now is that we’re running all this virtual infrastructure off of this one server over here. It’s a very nice dual quad core box, 32 gigs of RAM, a bunch of drives, enough to give you some good performance.
I have to show off the task bar just to show you that. It’s a beautiful thing to see 27 gigs of RAM being used in a demo; a very, very nice thing.
And that’s really about it. I’ll see if that gateway app comes up. There it is right there. Our sales force now has it. They’re all set.
You’ve seen clustering with Server Core install to make our file system more stable and more fault tolerant. We’ve seen some new Web server being applied consistently across the board using IIS 7 and share config. I went ahead and standardized our databases, protected them with transparent encryption; and finally went off and deployed a new application as well.
KEVIN TURNER: So, it’s fair to say Microsoft is getting in the virtualization business.
RICK CLAUS: In a big way.
KEVIN TURNER: In a big way.
Thank you very much, Rick, appreciate it.
RICK CLAUS: Thanks a lot.
Web and Developer Productivity
KEVIN TURNER: Thank you. Keep up the great work.
All right, now let me talk to you about Web and developer productivity, the third pillar. Today’s users and end users demand more and more from our Web application and experiences. When you think about it, powerful user experiences, rich Internet applications help give the means to have great business results.
This means having tools to create immersive experiences, ensuring collaboration between development and design and production, publishers, or wherever it may go, is an important element to driving this developer productivity.
Having the best platform for running Web sites, ensuring that rich data, access Internet, and allowing that access across platform is an important part of the productivity message.
IT wants the best of Web applications, with programmatically of client, and developers and Web designers need to deliver with innovation and efficiency. This is what we’re after today, and we’ve spent a ton of time improving our Web and developer productivity aspects.
But when you think about it, the company in the world that writes the most lines of code should have the best development environment. And that’s why this area is so important for us.
And in where we’re going and how we’re going to get there, I want to bring up Christian Beauclair to help walk us through what are doing in this Web and developer productivity environment, and how can we really bring it to life. Come on out, Christian. Welcome.
Web and Developer Productivity: Visual Studio Demo
CHRISTIAN BEAUCLAIR: Good morning, Kevin. Thank you.
KEVIN TURNER: So, how are we going to make product more productive?
CHRISTIAN BEAUCLAIR: So, what I’d like to show you today is how we have a campaign that Rick mentioned earlier on the way, and I’ve just received actually the design composition from our marketing firm.
Now, this is what they want our site to look like, and it’s a pretty impressive site. There is some animation in there, so they want us to take advantage of all of our technology.
Now, a developer, when they start the day at Fourth Coffee, start with a double tall latte obviously, they start their day with that, and they start with Visual Studio 2008.
Now, Visual Studio 2008 has this new feature called Team System as well that allows us to really work collaboratively, which improves the productivity of our day. So, when I start my day, the first thing I want to do is find out what work items have been assigned to me before I start the work.
So, I can go right here into my work items, into my team queries, and you’ll see that I have this thing called My Work Items, and all I have to do is double-click on this. This will list all the things that have been assigned to me today. I have four things to do today.
So, the first thing they want is to fix a little bit of the promotion, put a promotional link on the main page. They want us to fix some background issues, new database functionality — we’ll walk through all of these things — as well as adjust some animation on the actual Web site itself.
So, we’ll go ahead with the first one here. At the bottom you’ll see that they actually provide us with a link. It’s called “cup on us”. It’s a new hyperlink that they want us to add to the main page for this promotion, where we’re going to actually give people who come to a Fourth Coffee shop a traveler mug.
So, let’s go ahead and copy this. We’re going to go to our default page.
Now, in the past developers had two choices, to work either in HTML, which was pretty complex, especially if I want to find out where I need to insert this link, or they could work visually.
With Visual Studio 2008 we’ve introduced a brand new feature called a Split View. The Split View allows you to actually now work with both views at the same time. So, I can actually see at the top my HTML, at the bottom I can see the site and how it looks.
What I can do now is I can go over here to the help, double-click on it, it will bring me right into the code, into the tag where I need to paste this, and I want to paste this just next to it. So, we’re going to actually go ahead and paste this.
Now, the system is smart enough to see that obviously now the view is out of synch, so it’s telling me all I have to do is click here, and now you can see the hyperlink right there on the main page.
Now, you’ll notice also that on the left-hand side your account actually has a dark gray background. There is something wrong with this. So, let me show you right here. So, obviously what happened is probably the developer or the designer actually overwrote the cascading style sheet.
Now with Visual Studio 2008 we have this new cascading style sheet property view that I can just click on the development right here, you’ll see right here at the bottom that we have the background step to that light gray. To remove it, right-click, remove inline style, and just like that it’s done.
So, that’s from a visual aspect now I can improve my productivity very quickly and do this.
So, let’s save that. The next thing on our list was actually our database background, the database access. So, we’re going to go to the code here, and you’ll see a lot of database code. This is pretty complex. It’s actually ADO.NET, the original one. So, it was done by a developer that unfortunately left the company recently. So, I’m going to actually just comment that code out, just like this, and go into my edit, advance and comment the selection, and I’m going to actually use a code snippet. Now, a code snippet is a cool way of doing demos, but it’s also very useful when you have lots of repetitive codes that you use often in your day job. So, I’m going to go to my toolbox, and I already have this linked to entities.
LINQ is a Language Integrated Query. It’s a new set of extensions for the language. It allows me now to map my database object to objects in my system so that when I write code, and I compile that code, I will discover the errors at that time, not when I run the application. That will boost the productivity of developers and make a lot of heroes out of you guys out there.
So, that’s done. We can save this guy.
Next I want to show you another brand new feature in Visual Studio 2008 that I’m sure will excite a lot of the developers in the audience. I can go right here into this JavaScript page, and I’m just going to hit run. Now, this is going to actually spin off a Web site in the background, as you can see there, launch the Web page, but what is even cooler now is this. It’s actually going to stop in the code. This is JavaScript debugging live, and I can even have access to my objects so I can actually look at the content of the object right inline in my code, without having to switch applications. So, that’s a very, very cool feature that’s going to improve the productivity again.
KEVIN TURNER: Save a lot of time.
CHRISTIAN BEAUCLAIR: Yes, absolutely.
So, we know the code is working, so what I’m going to do here is I’m actually going to stop the code. I lost my stop here, so let’s go here, stop debugging. And I’m going to scroll down and remove this break point.
The other feature also again to improve the productivity of developers when it comes to JavaScript is we have this cool new feature called IntelliSense. Now, that wasn’t a product in the past, never worked with JavaScript; now it does. So, you can have access to all your objects, methods and properties inline in the code; very, very cool.
So, let’s save that. Now, I mentioned also there was a problem with the animation out there. Now, we’re bridging the gap again from the designers and the developers out there by having a tool called Blend. Now, Blend 2, which is the copy you’re seeing right now, is about to release. It’s going to release in the second quarter of this year. It allows a designer and a developer to work closely. How it does that, it actually loads my project, the exact same project I had in Visual Studio a second ago. I can actually click on this main scene, which is the main animation that you saw in the design composition earlier, but now it’s live, it’s actual code.
And I’m going to modify one animation. I’m going to click here on this detailed canvas, I’m going to scroll this guy a little bit here — sorry, detail and event, and I’m going to actually tab here to zoom, and you can see now a little bit better what’s happening.
Now, I’ve highlighted this event on the left-hand side, which I want to actually move to the right-hand side. So, these guys are fancy about their stuff; they want you to move it from the left to the right instead, so I might as well do it.
So, let’s go back here. I’m going to go to the properties of this, and I’m going to set its left property to 910. You’ll see it actually disappear from the screen. There we go.
And then the next thing I want to do is actually work on the animation itself. So, let’s open the timeline on our transition to detail at the one second mark. I know it’s a lot, it seems a lot complex, but that’s what designers have to do. Go here.
KEVIN TURNER: That’s why they’re heroes.
CHRISTIAN BEAUCLAIR: Yeah, that’s the reason why they’re heroes on the designing side, absolutely.
There we go, that’s it, we’re done. Let’s save this project.
And the very last thing we need to do — oh, another cool feature actually, I’ve been notified by Visual Studio 2008 that I actually modified this code outside the project, inside Blend. It notified me. All I have to do is say, yes, and it reloads the page, so I’m ready to deploy this.
KEVIN TURNER: Perfect.
CHRISTIAN BEAUCLAIR: Let’s go to Solution Explorer, right-click on Fourth Coffee, and we’re going to hit publish. Now I can publish this to my IIS 7 Web site that Rick deployed earlier for me. So, there we go, that’s done.
So, what I have just shown you is a lot of things. I’ve actually moved into the new editing feature, I’ve actually edited the site very nicely; I worked on the database, added new functionality that’s going to strengthen my code. I also did some cool animation stuff.
But the one thing I haven’t shown you yet is what the site looks like. You guys want to see it? Yes? Okay, well let’s go ahead, minimize this guy, and we’re going to launch our Fourth Coffee Web site. This is our new portal view.
So, you can see it’s actually using Silverlight. Now, Silverlight is a new cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for IE and many other browsers that allows us to actually have rich animation, rich interaction, and rich applications as well.
So, you can see here we have this animation, but I can go ahead and type a postal code right here into the postal code section, hit go, and here is our nice animation. We see actually a map of the different Fourth Coffee locations around. I can actually go ahead and drag these events, like this book, reading session, onto the event pane, and I can see what happens. I can go to different locations; very rich, very nice looking Web site.
KEVIN TURNER: Absolutely.
CHRISTIAN BEAUCLAIR: So, thank you very much.
KEVIN TURNER: Awesome; great job, thank you very much.
CHRISTIAN BEAUCLAIR: Thanks. Bye-bye.
KEVIN TURNER: We’ve got to give you more than four things.
Business Intelligence
I tell you, I’m really, really proud of the progress that we’ve made with our development tools and where we’re headed with Visual Studio 2008, .NET, and our whole framework. It is unbelievable with Silverlight and all of the things that we’ve done there the progress that’s been made over the last couple of years.
The fourth pillar I want to talk to you about is business intelligence. And when you think about unlocking the value of data, turning it into insight and knowledge, and more importantly using it to drive decisions, when you think about it, we have four pieces we want to talk about. First is the infrastructure; built on SQL and Windows Servers, scaling and controlling access to data.
SQL Server 2008 has much improved scalability, as well as the benchmarks. In fact, there are some world record benchmarks in our SQL Server 2008.
And when you think about the presentation layer, there are really three things — personal productivity, unlocking the data can now be done utilizing Office and line of business applications, and that’s important — Office an extension of making sure that it extends into the line of business applications to increase the productivity.
Second, analysis and teamwork. You know, SharePoint and collaboration have been the hottest product in all of Microsoft. In fact, it’s the fastest growing product in the history of the company. Our collaboration story right now, every company wants to figure out how do we collaborate and become more collaborative and effective across company, across division, across boundaries, and that’s very important.
Third is organizational performance. And we have something called PerformancePoint, which is a rich front-end tool that allows you to customize and drive specific business intelligence and turn that data into knowledge and more importantly into decisions. And today’s launch takes the next big step in business intelligence for us.
And through this I thought it would be important again to show it to you. We talk about it, but today we’re showing it to you.
So, please help me bring up Rick again, and Rick is going to give us a good demo on what is Microsoft doing with business intelligence. Hey, Rick. Welcome back.
Businss Intelligence Demo
RICK CLAUS: Great, thanks.
KEVIN TURNER: Show us what’s happening in BI.
RICK CLAUS: So, this time around I’m not a technical guy, I’m a sales guy, I’m an analyst. I want to see how our campaign is doing.
So, as with every technical person — or every salesperson and technical person actually, we live and breathe inside Outlook and e-mail.
So, from a sales perspective, the neat thing is that I actually have my Microsoft Dynamics CRM tool plugged right in there, so I can see all my contacts, my accounts, my campaigns; everything is all there.
But when I go down to my campaigns, I want to take a look specifically at this new regional campaign that we’re doing with Have A Cup On Us that you just saw from our Web team.
So, I’m just going to go in here and pull up the details of my campaign, and from that details page I can click into my dashboard, give you a little bit more information, but it’s not really all that great to take a look at. You’ve got to scroll around, but it can be enlarged.
So, let’s actually go ahead and zoom in on this guy to a full page with that quick little link there from within Outlook to get access to my information on my SharePoint portal.
Now you mentioned Performance Point, so I’ve got some Performance Point data tied in over here, and I’m sure that you’d know that a red arrow isn’t a good thing, especially when it’s pointing down.
KEVIN TURNER: Red generally means bad.
RICK CLAUS: Right. So basically we have a conversion rate issue, and that’s just the initial quick glance of what it is. But if I actually look over here at my Virtual Earth environment, so what I did is our IT staff have gone ahead and they have integrated geospatial data into our SQL Server 2008, it’s one of the new data types, and can actually plot out where those different stores are. But you can see here there are actually really only three stores that seem to be having a little bit of a problem. And I can actually go in, again, and take a look and see that Store Number 8 has a conversion rate of about 56 percent. So they’re not turning over the proper amount of sales.
Let’s actually go in and take a look at some of our SQL 2008 Reports, specifically my Campaign Sales Performance. And you can see here I have a nice little chart. It’s telling me, if I scroll down, that Store Number 8 happens to have a little bit of an issue with 56 percent, not great. A couple of the other ones are at low 70s, but we can work on those ones there later. Now the problem with this chart is that it doesn’t really give me all the information I want, because I think it probably has to do with our Web campaign, and maybe inventory levels. So let’s go ahead and modify this report. In the past, you used to have to have Visual Studio installed, which is not something you want to give your sales people, your analysts, that’s for the IT staff. And so we have this new thing which is our Report Designer.
With our Report Designer, we can actually go ahead and open up that report in question and I can take a look at the raw data right here. Now the one thing you may have noticed here is that we’ve got a nice ribbon interface, very comfortable, very easy to do. I can go in, I can change that chart type to whatever chart type that I like that makes the most sense for my environment. But what I’m going to do is, I’m actually going to change the data that’s on the page and see what that looks like.
KEVIN TURNER: Now this is the end user?
RICK CLAUS: This is an end user. This is basically someone that can understand the basics of adding a field to a cell in Excel, if you will.
KEVIN TURNER: So if we’ve done a good job in IT of defining the data elements, the end user has the ability to then tweak and customize the report based off of the business needs that they want. They don’t have to call IT up, get on a list.
RICK CLAUS: Right. Let the people that know the data use the data the way they need to, empower them to do that. So you can see over here I just added in a new column, and I’m just going to very quickly go in and choose the column that I want to do, and add in that new data type. If I can just click on the right one. There we go. In this case, the data type is a commuter mug inventory level, and that doesn’t look great from a formatting perspective, so I can even tweak the formatting, too. I’m just going to quickly go in here and change the color to match the rest of them. In this case, I want this guy here to be dark gray. I want this guy up here to be yellow, greenish yellow, actually, to match what’s already there. There we go. I also want to go in and bold this guy, and then take this guy down here and change the font color off here to white, so it should look the same.
Now that looks good, right? You can’t really see right now because we have this great thing called
KEVIN TURNER: It looks okay.
RICK CLAUS: We have preview, and the preview is going to give me the live data to see that it matches up. So this is actually pulling the live data.
KEVIN TURNER: That looks good.
RICK CLAUS: And we can see here that I’ve got all the data that’s in there, and everything is good. And the one thing that I did notice is that Store Number 8, the guy that was having the problem, he has low inventory, so maybe he doesn’t have enough cups to try to go off and to do that transitional sale with people as they come in.
KEVIN TURNER: Well, if you don’t have cups, it would be tough to sell coffee.
RICK CLAUS: Definitely. So what I’m going to do is, I’m going to go back over here into my reports library, here we go, and in my reports library I’ve got an Excel spreadsheet, because I’m comfortable using Excel, that actually has a tie in to the data, and I can see here all the different items that we sell in our stores, the different prices, and stuff like that. But I’m going to use one of our new SQL 2008 add-ins, which is a shopping basket analysis tool. It’s going to, again, tie into that live data, allow me to run a report, and it’s going to generate live data, again, from our databases as they come into the Web site, and show us some information about the types of transactions matched up with which ones does the best sale. What’s really neat is this particular one actually will go off and tell us, if you pair filters with coffee beans, you’ve got a higher chance of making that sale, and making that gift basket work. So I can give this information to Store Number 8’s vendor and have him make the educated choices he needs to to change his own marketing campaigns.
KEVIN TURNER: Data becoming information, becoming knowledge, which drives decisions and actions.
RICK CLAUS: You’ve got it.
KEVIN TURNER: Awesome. Love it. And that’s all available today.
RICK CLAUS: That’s all available today with what you’ve got right here on our demo environment.
KEVIN TURNER: Excellent. One question on the geospatial stuff that you showed us.
RICK CLAUS: Sure.
KEVIN TURNER: Is there any way to put that on people?
RICK CLAUS: Well, there is an upgrade you can get that is the chip insert in the back of the neck, but we won’t talk about that.
KEVIN TURNER: I have a few sales people, we may have to try that on, and see what’s going on.
RICK CLAUS: You could possibly tie into their cellular data records, or something.
KEVIN TURNER: There you go. All right. Take care. Thank you very much, appreciate it. Keep up the great work.
So that was the fourth pillar. Now, when you think about it, as I told you, today’s announcement is about Heroes Happen Here. And so I know that many of you have been using some of the technology we showed you today already, and based on the number of downloads we’ve had in Canada alone, over 22,000 downloads from Canada. But I thought it would be important that we hear from a local hero, from the Bank of Montreal. Dave Revell and Sorin Manta are here, along with their teams, and I want to show you a video of some of the local heroes, and in this video you’re going to see how dedicated IT professionals and developers, like yourself, have made a difference and changed the game, changed the rule, shifting from maintenance and support to new innovative, and bringing business value to their company. Let’s roll that video.
(Video segment.)
Where’s Dave and his team, are they here? Where are they at? I think they’re up right here. Thank you very much. I appreciate everything you guys are doing. Great job. Outstanding. Right over here.
Now I want to talk to you about our technology roadmap. So Microsoft as a company this year will invest about $6 billion in research and development, more than any technology company in the world. And our strategy has generally been to invent, to pour money into R&D, to bring those products and solutions to life with customer feedback and input. And when you think about the launches we had last year with Windows Vista, the 2007 Office System, and a whole bunch of products that we put out in the marketplace, this year we’ve got a whole bunch more coming into the marketplace.
We’ve talked about three or four of them today, with Visual Studio, and Windows Server, and SQL Server, and some of the Hyper-V technology that we’re going to talk about, and where we’re headed from Silverlight to the development platform, we’re just getting started. We’re committed to this journey and going on this journey with you of creating dynamic IT, and moving along that path, and that maturity model to enabling people to create business value. That’s what Heroes Happen Here is all about, it’s all the hard work that you do on a daily basis to make a difference in your company, and we’re working hard to make sure that you can spend the time on the things that add the most value to your company.
When you think about it, today we’ve got Windows Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2008 available. By the third quarter of this year we’re going to have SQL Server 2008, and our Hyper-V technology available, as well as our Small Business Server, and these are incredible products coming into the marketplace, in the near future you’re going to hear about another High Performance Compute Cluster 2008 that we’re going to put into the marketplace, as well as a new release of Silverlight. So we’re just going to keep investing, and keep innovating, and our developers are going to continue to work hard to earn your trust, and make sure that we build these products and solutions to help you create that value.
But, I do want to end today by really telling you thank you. As I said, it’s an incredible time to be in IT. We’re super-excited today about these great products, and really I hope you know we’ve listened and took your feedback to build these products, because that’s an important element of our Heroes Happen Here approach. And we’re excited, we’re super-excited about the products, but we’re absolutely in awe of what you all do on a daily basis with the technology and with the products.
And I’ll tell you what; I know there’s a lot of heroes in this room today. And I’m sure there are a lot of people that have dreams, like Omer, and those that I showed you earlier in the presentation. And I’d like to ask your challenge a little bit, what is your robot turf, what is it that you’re going to do to change the world, or change your business, or change society, because that’s the magic of software. Microsoft loves software, we’re a company that is completely immersed in the value and the power of software. And it’s a great day to be an IT pro and a developer.
Thank you all so much for coming today, and I appreciate your commitment to Microsoft. We’ll continue to work together, we’re going to keep working hard to improve, we’re going to keep working hard to listen to you, and make sure that on the next round of products, and the next launches you see even more value with the solutions that we’re bringing to the marketplace. But, remember this, ladies and gentlemen, Microsoft is just getting started. We’re going to keep bringing that innovation to the marketplace.
Have a great day. Thank you. (Applause.)