Speech Transcript – Bob Muglia, Tech Ed ’98

Remarks by Bob Muglia, Vice President of server applications, Microsoft Corporation

Tech Ed ’98

MR. Muglia: Good morning.On behalf of our sponsors, Compaq and Elemental, I would like to welcome you to Web Tech Ed.Now, this whole conference is really about building business solutions, and for all three days, all of the talks will have lots of drill down and lots of information about creating solutions for the Internet.But what is really the underlying theme, the underlying capability underneath this, is to open up and create business opportunity for you and your customers.

When we think about the Internet and we look at where we’re going, it’s interesting to look at this as a perspective of what’s happened before.If you look at technology that’s shaped our lives during the 20th Century, they’ve had a long curve It’s taken a long time for that technology to actually reach fruition.If you look, for example, at things like the telephone, it’s taken really over 100 years for that to penetrate into a large number of American homes.This chart is a chart that shows the technology penetration over time in the United States.And, of course, if you actually took that and went out to other parts of the world, it’s even further behind.

Some more recent things, some technology that’s come around in recent years like VCRs and microwaves have become adopted at a much, much faster pace.And if we look at where we are on the adoption cycle of the personal computer and of the Internet, you can see we’re still at the early stages.Now, in some ways this seems surprising.It’s like we have been working with the Internet for a few years.The PC has been around for a while.But, in fact, the Internet dates back a fair ways into the ’70s, and when you look at what’s happened just in the last few years, the adoption curve has just started driving way, way up.We’re seeing a huge increase in adoption, but an interesting point is that we’re really less than halfway there for both the Internet and PCs in homes in the U.S.And, of course, this means that if you look internationally, we’re even further

— there’s even more adoption opportunity.

Thinking about this opportunity and translating it into what can happen when you create business solutions, a key is how Windows and the Internet are coming together.a few years ago, Windows and the Internet were pretty disconnected.They were separated.Some users were using Windows to get to the Internet.But, in fact, the Internet phenomena and the Windows phenomena were really pretty different things.

Over the last few years, though, something has happened, and those two things have come closer together.And the process of that has spurred a cycle that’s very beneficial to business users.That cycle is one of innovations that begins with innovation.Not just Microsoft innovation, but the industry innovation.Theseinclude things that are being done by companies all around the world to generate great solutions, innovation that generates solutions for customers, and those solutions drive demand.And there’s the fact that every year we go forward, every single year there’s more and more technology out there to improve people’s lives, and to build better business solutions.

The bottom line of this is this cycle.This cycle of combination of the Internet together with Windows, this cycle of innovation and solutions generating demand for more innovation and more solutions is the key to unlocking and creating business opportunity.

It would be useful to take one example of this and take a look at where we are in the adoption cycle of a very important technology.Electronic commerce is one of the things that is driving business as we enter the 21st Century.Where are we with this?

This is an incredible opportunity because business commerce is a key that businesses will use in working and getting data directly to consumers as well as in doing business-to-business, or transactions that involve multiple businesses.Yet where we are today is really just at the beginning of this cycle.Companies are spending just a few tens of millions.This year it will approach $100 million, but over the next few years this is expected to grow to be over $3 billion of expenditures on business-to-business commerce using Internet technologies.

If you look at the overall business-to-business market, the opportunity is huge.The total amount of expenditure for companies that are building mainframe and electronic data interchange systems is an $8 billion business today, and that’s expected to grow to over $300 billion by the year 2002.So the potential for growthis enormous.These numbers are about software sales.And, again, that’s very much analogous to the opportunity that you have in terms of building solutions.

But I want to just divert for just a quick second and talk about an experience I had recently on an international trip where I met the president of a company that builds the back-end systems for Visa charges.These are the charge centers where all the calls go into and aggregate together,then get sent on to the individual banks.I talked to this gentleman about his business and what he’s doing.I asked him if he’s doing any business-to-business commerce using the Internet.While he said that’s a very interesting business, and he knows it’s something that he’s going to be getting into in the next couple of years, right now the stage of purchasing for consumers using Internet commerce is so much in its infancy that in comparison to the retail sales that are going on, it’s just miniscule.The total amount of money that’s being spent by consumers buying things on the Internet isa few billion dollars today.

But if you look at the total retail sales market in the credit card industry, it’s hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars.The amount of money that’s the actual worldwide economyand that’s actually being done by the Internet today is just a small percentage of the retail sales market.But the technology is certainly there to make it possible to go out and capture a much, much larger percentage of that market.A purpose of this conference isto go out and talk about some of the new things that are coming andsome of the solutions that can be created to actually make that possible.

One of the problems we face, however, is that there are challenges to getting there.We’re still at a point that if end-users, corporations and developers are going to actually realize the potential of the Internet, we are just at the beginning and there are lots of obstacles ahead.From an end-user perspective, it really comes down to one basic thing.It’s just too darned hard getting onto the Internet, of having a common paradigm, having a common way of viewing information, and setting up and configuring a PC.All of these things are too difficult for a large number of people, and those challenges need to be overcome in order to reach that next 60 percent of U.S. homes andthe 90-plus percent of homes around the world that are capable of getting onto the Internet.

Obviously, there needs to be rich and compelling content.That’s where you come in, and your customers.I’m very confident that you will solve those problems. Over the last year we’ve seen tremendous improvements in the content and the compelling nature of that content in Internet sites, and I only expect with the new technologies that are coming , and the incredibly creative things that are you doingthat this will get much, much better.

One real challenge we face right now is adequate bandwidth to the home, and this has been a huge problem because people have been constrained by that old 28.8 modem going to 56K. But even that’s really not fast enough to do many of the things you want to do with the Internet.Now, fortunately there are a number of initiatives coming out, cable modems, ADSL, and Microsoft is working with partners like Intel and on the Telcos to help to get and drive that technology into the home.While this is a huge problem today, getting data from the home into the overall Internet, I expect to see this problemtremendously helped over the next couple of years as companies like TCI and the phone companies drive out and sell higher bandwidth connectivity to awider variety of American homes.

We see some places in the world where, interestingly enough, because the infrastructure is not established there — the phone infrastructure and cable infrastructure was behind the U.S.–they’re able to take a leap forward.In some countries around the world

— Singapore is a really good example– having high speed connectivity to every home is something that can be achieved at a very fast rate.It will still take a while in the U.S., but it’s going to happen.And when it happens, the opportunities are tremendous.

The problems are somewhat different in a corporation.Corporations have an infrastructure, an existing infrastructure, and it’s really important that as we drive new solutions into corporations and corporations adopt new technology, that that technology integrate in with their existing line of business systems, and their existing infrastructure.It doesn’t do companies much good unless they can get at the existing data they have.So interoperability and integration is a key thing.

A key problem corporations have isthat they have so much information that users have created and it’s in so many different forms, that taking that information and making it useful, making it easy to find documents that have been created and turn the document into useful knowledgeor a knowledge base, that’s a major, major challenge.And it’s something that technology can make a big difference with.Scalability is key because corporations — big corporations in particular– need to be able to deploy worldwide systems on a great scale.But I’m very confident that the technology that we’re talking about today, the technology that the industry is creating, is technology– which will scale and work worldwide.

Cost of ownership is always a critical thing. Being able to manage these systems and reduce cost is a key part of corporations lives and IT managers lives, and this is an inhibitor of adoption.If corporations can’t easily, effectively and inexpensively deploy solutions, it will slow adoption.So fixing that is a critical thing.

The third area is developers, and many of the people here are developers.There’s, of course, millions of developers in the United States that are building solutions, many of which are adopting Internet technology.Developers face the challenges of understanding what platforms to support, and what browsers to support. A key part of what we’re doing is trying to make that task simpler so that, in fact, you can go out and build an application which targets both Internet Explorer and Netscape.You can build a solution that uses Windows-NT Server and gets that data on a mainframe or a UNIX system and integrates that together.And, in fact, you can build solutions that are based on UNIX as well as with the combination of NT while targeting this wide variety of browsers.This compatibility and understanding and explaining the challenges associated with multi-platform development is a key thing, and it’s certainly one of the themes of this conference.

One of the attributes about Internet technology is that because it’s so new in the marketplace, because it is such a new thing, the tools to build solutions are two or three steps behind the client server tools that have been around for several years.Up to now it’s been pretty difficult to build solutions because the quality of the underlying tools that developers use is so much lower thanwhat you could do with a tool like Visual Basic to build a more client server oriented system.That’s changing quickly, and one of the key focuses of the conference is to talk about some of the new technologies and tools that will go out and make life a lot easier to build solutions.

The final point is that in this world, the Internet world, time is everything. Getting solutions out there, getting feedback from your customers, understanding what to do next– those are all keys to being successful in your business field, in a corporation, in being a software developer that’s building the underlying infrastructure and vertical applications or if you’re a solution provider or consultant helping other companies deploy solutions.Knowing what technology to adopt and knowing how to get it out there in an effective way is critical to the success of any business application whether it be Internet technology or not.But it’s especially critical with Internet technology because the technology changes so quickly.

Microsoft’s goal through this, and our core goal in this conference, is to help supply you with information, supply you with information about the underlying platforms, application services, and tools to make it easier for you to build solutions and, thus, create business advantage. In thinking about these solutions, an attribute that’s very much in common across almost all of the solution types that we’re going to talk about is that these things are distributed The services and the solution is distributed in some way.There’s a client piece. There’s a server piece.

In fact when you think about this, thinking in terms of a three-tier architecture is really critical.We have the user interface on the client, separated from the business logic or application logic, which is separated from the data.Being able to build solutions which pull together all three of those things in a common way is the focus of what we’re talking about here. The core things that this [solution] is built upon are the services that we’re providing in Windows and Windows-NT Server in as integrated a way as we can possibly make it with these core standards-based Internet technologies.

That’s the foundation. those are the pieces that form the foundation of solutions, but if all you had to was write to Windows directly to Internet protocols your lives would be pretty difficult.On top of that are a set of application services and tools, some from Microsoft, many, many from third parties which, together, integrate and create the basis upon which you can build solutions.The combination of Microsoft’s facilities, such as Office, BackOffice, and Visual Studio, together with the wide variety of tools available from third party vendors, as well as vertical-oriented solutions that target specific industries to make it easier to create applications that a corporation can buy and minimize the amount of customization work they have to do–that’s really the infrastructure upon which these solutions are created.

In thinking about the different solutions, what we’ve decided to do as a part of this conference is make it a very solutions focused conference.One of the things we’ve tried to do is split up the solutions in a reasonable way, and talk about the different kind of problems that you face in building applications that use Internet technology.

We’ve split the solutions into five different categories.What I want to do with the rest of the talk is go through the solutions and some of the technologies that enable these solutions, on a category by category basis.We’ll talk about data-driven solutions.We’ll talk about publishing solutions.We’ll talk about commerce, a corporate Web presence site, as well as advanced media solutions.

Let’s start with data driven [solutions].In many ways this is the core solutions category for many applications.If you look at the successful Web sites that are out in the marketplace today, the most successful Web sites are ones that involve use of the data or a database.It’s not surprising, because people want to use Internet technology to find information that’s very relevant to them. They want to be able to take information that’s associated with a line of business systems that corporations are running, and make that available to a wider variety of people, both within a corporation, as well as the customers.People want to be able to take [data], and order things on the Internet, and use the services and the products that a company has. All of those things in general are going to be stored in a database.It doesn’t make sense to drive these things, in most cases, statically.It makes sense to put these them into a database.So building a data-driven solution is a core part.

Although this is a very common solution on the Internet, there are some challenges associated with it now.Probably the first one that most companies hit is, how do you get your data?Your data might be in an Oracle database or maybe it’s Informix, DB-2. Wherever it might be in your corporate line of business system, or your existing customer oriented system, how do you get that data out to the user? That’s a key challenge.How do you make it easy to build that solution, take that data from multiple places, bring it together in a cohesive way, and present a great solution to the customer?And how do you do this reliably? How do you do this in a way that serves multiple client types, because particularly if you’re dealing with consumers, you need to work with both Netscape and Internet Explorer as well as potentially other browsers.How do you solve those sets of problems in a way, while you’re reducing your cost and building a solution, that’s timely and meets the business needs?

One of the things I’m going to talk about is some of the enabling technologies that Microsoft is providing to help make this easier.The key enabling technologies are Visual InterDev, which we have a new version of; and we’ll talk about Windows NT Server, with its integrated services to make it easier to build business applications–that’s the Internet Information Server, the Microsoft Transaction Server, and the Message Cue. All of those services put together provide a strong underpinning for building business solutions that are data-driven.And finally, of course, the client, Internet Explorer 4, which has some very rich new services for building database applications, including XML and data binding.

The first new product I want to talk about today–there will be a number of product announcements this morning–but the first new product I want to talk about is Visual InterDev 2.0.Some of you may be familiar with the first version of Visual InterDev, and it was a big step forward, in building data-driven solutions, because it was a good tool to take and write applications that drive the server side scripting of the Internet Information Server.It pulled a lot of things together.It made it easy to connect to a database and to create solutions.But, there were a lot of things about that tool that could be improved, and it was very much first generation.One of the key things that we’ve done is made it a a tool that’s much more suited for rapid application development. So some of the techniques from Visual Basic have been incorporated into Visual InterDev.

Like the 1.0 version, broad reach is still a key theme for this tool, and, like the 1.0 version, again, building solutions in teams is a key thing.So with that, I’d like to welcome Garth Fort.

MR. FORT :Thank you very much.

MR. MUGLIA:We’re going to take a look at a data-driven solution that uses Visual InterDev.

MR. FORT:Data-driven Web solutions. As we know, traditional client-server applications have a database, usually, at the heart of them.And for businesses, databases are really where they keep their mission critical information about their customers, their products, and their employees.The Web, in the last couple of years, has burst on the scene, and really offers a tremendous opportunity for extending those existing applications by providing a broad reach, Web-based front end into those existing legacy or large end databases.What I want to do is take a look at a sample of a data-driven Web application that we’ve got here, and then show how some of the Microsoft technologies that are out there address some of the key challenges in building these [applications].

This first solutionis an on-line auction demo, and this basically has two parts to it: a public site, where I can log on, and users can come in, and place bids on items that they might be interested in acquiring from my Web site; and the other side is the secure side, a management site, that allows administrators to come on and perform some basic configuration activities on the site.Before I get into this site, I just want to preface it by saying thatthis is a fully acronym compliant demonstration. We have a whole alphabet soup for data access. We’re using ADO in the server, and RDS on the client.We’re using dynamic HTML, CSS, XML all over the place.This is a fantastic ap [application], and that will be the last acronym I use, hopefully.

MR. MUGLIA:One of the interesting things about this is that these are many of the same technologies that are going into the other Visual Studio tools.One of the things that’s important to realize is that database access across all of the Microsoft technologies and Microsoft tools, as well as a large number of third parties, is being done in a common way, with technologies like ADO.

MR. FORT:Exactly. Let’s actually log on to this public site and take a look at this.What I’m seeing here is actually an active server page The developer here has created, essentially, a template. Then I’m pulling data live from a SQL Server database, and then putting that content into the page when the user requests it.The benefit here is that I’m actually able to design a page that is dynamically refreshed whenever the database information is updated, and it becomes much less of a headache for maintaining these pages and having to change them every time the underlying data might change.

Let’s come back out and take a look at the management site.The management site actually is a showcase of some direct examples that shows the various methods I can use to take data out of a database and then bind it to the browser.This first page, for example, is just a pure active server page where I’m taking that data out of the database, and I’m formatting it in a table, and sending it down in raw HTML that can be viewed by any browser.This is actually some pretty flat data.I can’t do much with it when it gets down there.

The second page is where I’m taking that exact same set of data, but I’m actually pulling it out of the database. Then [I’m] formatting it in a dynamic HTML page, so that when it gets down to Internet Explorer 4.0, I can take advantage of some of the data-binding functionality of Internet Explorer 4.0.For example, I can click on the description column here, or the name column here, and instantly re-sort my record set.I’m doing this without having to round trip to the server.

MR. MUGLIA:That’s really an example of some of the powerful capabilities in I.E. 4, with data binding and dynamic HTML.In this case, the data is being bound directly on the client, delivered in a record set down to the client, and then manipulated there.But, for many situations you probably just build a record set and then resubmit it. Becauseup on the server, that [record set] certainly will work with any type of browser.

MR. FORT:Exactly. But for standard browsing of a record set, which constitutes the bulk of traditional database activities by taking advantage of the browser, you actually make your server a lot more scalable and it can support a larger number of users.

MR. MUGLIA:Plus, you get a better client experience.

MR.FORT :Yes, [you get a ] a much richer client experience.The last thing I’m going to do is open up

a standard HTML form that I’ve actually bound to a data set. I can scroll through this record set, and actually make updates to this page directly.One of the problems with building data-driven Web applications like this is that it’s too difficult today.–TheWeb has actually evolved in the last three years into a very, very rich programming platform, but it’s still too difficult.The best tool out there for building these tools, right now at least, seems to be Visual InterDev, and then Notepad, of course.

MR. MUGLIA:Yes, and if you look at building these systems on UNIX, quite often to do that sort of data binding, you’d build a CGI application that’s a hand-coded CGI application, and create

— do all the data binding by hand, and write the code.

MR. FORT:Exactly.What I want to show you now is a new tool that I’m very proud to introduce.Let’s switch over to machine G.Perfect.This is the newest version of Visual InterDev.What this does is that it brings together all of the functionality I need to build these data-driven Web applications, very rich ones, including support for RDS and dynamic HTML, and I.E. 4.It brings them together into one integrated development environment.One of the first things you’ll notice about the shell is that it looks very familiar to our big brother, Visual Basic.

MR. MUGLIA:One of the key things is that with Visual InterDev we’ve modeled a lot of the technology on Visual Basic, so that people who are familiar with that tool will find Visual InterDev very easy to use.This tool is going into beta shortly.It will be going into beta in the March time frame, and everybody here will get a copy of it as it enters beta.

MR. FORT:Just to set up this demo, this is a build that I pulled

— it’s sort of hot off the presses, if you will.Me and these 2,000 people are here actually on a journey of discovery together, and we’ll see whether or not we can make it through this demo.Let me go ahead and open up [Visual InterDev]. One of the new features in Visual InterDev is a site diagramming tool, and this is actually based on the work that the Front Page ’98 team did with their navigation view. This technology, in fact, is 100 percent compatible with that technology.It allows me to actually design very large, visually consistent Web sites very quickly.

MR. MUGLIA:That’s a key theme of Visual InterDev because team development is important and one of the things that we tried to do is provide a set of different tools for different sorts of people.Content creators and content developers can create the site, make it look really nice, and provide all those great visual effects that make for a compelling site from the visual perspective.And they can work hand in hand with the developer using a tool like Visual InterDev to data-enhance that site and make it data-driven.

MR.FORT :Absolutely.Team development is one of the key themes in this version. Here’s that public site that we looked at, and you can see that I could come down and see the active server page here that’s showing me a list of available auctions.Then on the administration site we see those three pages that we saw before.In this case, [we see] the edit one [page], which is the HTML form that we saw, and then the list one, which we can do in either dynamic HTML or in standard active server page-based broad reach HTML.I’m going to actually double click on a page here to open up my home page and begin editing it.

One of the things you’ll notice is that this is an integrated WYSIWYG page editor that we build into InterDev. We’re very proud of this.It has cutting edge support for the latest Internet and WC3 approved standards.There’s HTML 4.0 cascading style sheets, including the ability to do absolute positioning, et cetera.

MR. MUGLIA:That’s a huge new feature of Visual InterDev because the original version really had only built into it an add-on for the Front Page editor and then HTML

source editor.

MR. FORT:Yes, and we did have a source editor, but that was essentially Notepad on steroids. Our source editor this time is much richer.The design environment: on the left we actually have a tool box which is a set of palettes that actually expose to me reusable objectsthat I can use to drag and drop and to assemble my page very quickly.We also have an HTML outline view that allows me to actually see a hierarchical outline of the structure of my HTML document and then drill down and find any

[object]– sections are navigable, so I can find any object that I want, and select it instantly there.

In the WYSIWYG side of it, of course, we can do all the great stuff that I would expect to be able to do. I can make that font italic. I can make it bold. I can adjust the color, et cetera.This really is one of the best editors that we’ve ever created.For a little bit of WYSIWYGness, I’m going to actually start moving this object around on the page and cascading style sheets The latest specification actually includes support for something called absolute positioning It allows me to actually move my objects around on the page, and get per pixel exact control over the layout of my site.This is the kind of which I would expect only in a high end desktop publishing system.

And, of course, we’re going to come over

and see a tool that’s designed for developers We, of course, have a great source editor, and it color codes both my HTML, and my script.What’s nice about this one is that our source editor was designed to be fully integrated with our WYSIWYG editor, and not munge any of your hand written ASP code, or HTML code.So [we have] source code preservation.

MR. MUGLIA:Finally

— finally

MR. FORT :On the left you can see that I’m exposing a little tree view that’s showing me all the client side objects and events that I’ve got as well as all the server side objectsI can actually go through and begin. We’re exposing all the document object model events for each of those different objects on the page.It makes it very easy for me to write code.

MR. MUGLIA:Again, very Visual Basic like.

MR.FORT :Let me go ahead, I’m going to abandon those changes.What I want to do now is actually get to the meat of creating a data-bound page.This is the traditional part that’s pretty difficult.The first thing we’ve got is the data view window, which shipped in version 1.0, but it allows me to actually connect to multiple database sources Then I can drill in and I can see the different objects in my database, in this case a simple database that shows me my auctions, my bids, and the number of items in there.

Let me go ahead and close on that. I’ve got the data view; we have this new thing called the data environment. What this allows me to do from a programming standpoint is to pull out objects from my database, so I can table the view, a storage procedure, or even a custom query that I’ve written and then create a reusable repository of those objects which I can then drag and drop to bind them to my page.For example, this is an active server page. There’s no database code in here. There’s no smoke and mirrors, and I want to walk you through the process of actually binding that to the data.

Here’s my SQL query that’s actually pulling out a list of all my available auctions. To bind that to the page, all I have to do is drag and drop it out, and it’s going to use one of our new design time controls to automatically bind that page to the record set.What’s nice about this is the page actually has a set of properties on it, and these controls are actually very intelligent. They’re aware of their environment.One of the properties that I can set on the page is the target platform.If I want to do pure broad reach applications, I simply target all the data binding to occur on the server, in an active server page, and if I want to target I.E. dynamic HTML, supported in I.E. 4.0, I can just flip that switch there.Then all the controls are actually intelligent enough, on the page, to reconfigure themselves and output the appropriate code to do RDS data-binding on the client.

MR. MUGLIA:That makes it pretty simple to either use the rich new capabilities of Internet Explorer 4, or to be able to target every browser out there and do all the workon the server.Instead of having to make a lot of hard decisions, it’s really gotten down to a checkbox item in Visual InterDev.

MR. FORT:It is, and the whole point of a RAD tool is that we expose the capabilities of the platform in a way that makes it very easy for developers to take advantage of them.Let’s go ahead and take a couple of the fields from this record set, and I’m going to drag those out.I’m now going to bind those, and those are automatically bound to the record set on the page.The last thing, of course, I want to be able to do is to add a navigation bar to this page.Let me make one change.Very much like VB, I have a set of

— this control here, I can just right click, set the properties, wire that up to the particular record set on the page, and apply that change.

MR. MUGLIA:For those of you who are familiar with Visual InterDev, you saw in the first version a pretty rich set of database development tools, things to create schemas and create queries.Those are all there in the next version of Visual InterDev, and in fact are quite significantly enhanced.But, we’ve also gone a step beyond with the data environment, to make it easy once you’ve actually created a query, to save that query out, and then be able to drag and drop that onto multiple forms.

MR. FORT:Exactly, faster data binding.

Let’s go and close this data and see what it would look like in the browser.There’s our page. I can navigate through this record set.It’s going to be a little difficult for you guys to see in the back, but I’m actually moving through the record set, one record at a time, very easily.

MR. MUGLIA:In about a minute-and-a-half, we created a data form with Visual InterDev.

MR. FORT:Right.You guys feel free to applaud.

(Applause.)

MR.FORT :There we go.Thank you.

I’m going to go ahead, and the last thing I want to do is actually start working on a page where, as users submit their bids, I want to be able to take that information and then write that to my database.One of the big challenges that users face

— there’s a couple of big challenges.First of all is, how do I get that data out of the http header?

How do I pull that data out of the database form and bind that to my page?And then, once I’ve got it there, how do I get it into the database in a way that makes sense?

In a lot of cases, what I want to be able to do is pull that data out, and then maybe scrub it a little bit to make sure that it adheres to my business rules or my database rules before I try to commit that change to the database.I’ve actually got a little blank ASP page that will receive the submission of the bid on the server. The first thing I’m going to do is actually use my reusable palette of components here and actually write a little bit of code ahead of time, just to save you guys from having to watch my typing.

What I’m doing is that I’m extracting the data out of the request object, the query string, and I’m putting it into local variables on the page.All right.I want to start doing that.I have one more to do.And when I start hitting

(Applause.)

MR.FORT :What we’re doing is–we’ve got intellisense, code completion, and statement completion working all the intrinsic objects on both the client side objects and in the server side objects.Let me start typing here.Okay.The next thing I want to do is, now that I’ve got this information in variables, I need to do that scrubbing of the data, right? Essentially, I could write out all of that code here in my ASP page, but that doesn’t make much sense because I wouldn’t have it available for reuse in other applications or in other pages.What I’ve done is I’ve used this great tool called Visual Basic which is a fantastic tool for creating COM objects, and I’ve encapsulated my business rules in an object which I can then reuse in this application.To use that all I have to do is drag and drop that little object tag out, and now I have access to that custom business component.

When I start typing on it, I’m going to instantly see that that statement completion, that intellisense stuff, is also exposing to me the method of my custom business objects, my custom COM objects here.I’m going to say, process the bid.

MR. MUGLIA:This is an important thing, because one of the things that we’ve come to realize is that script code is really good for manipulating and working with the user interface.But it’s really important too, for most applications, to separate out the creation of that user interface, whether it is done and generated on the server or be it primarily driven on the client with things like dynamic HTML. [It is important] to separate out the user interface code from the business logic, because the business logic is really what encapsulates the core part of the application, the core business. Quite often you want to take that logic and reuse it in a number of different places.Building things as a part of business logic as a component, a COM-based component, that can run on the server and be transacted through the Microsoft Transaction Server—this is probably the right way to go.

And what you’re seeing here, what Garth showed, is the integration between these COM objects, regardless of what language it was written in.In this case, it was written in VB, but it could just as easily have been written in Java, C++ or other COM capable languages. And then that logic is encapsulated in an object running on the server Then it can be displayed through script code running either on the server or on the client.

MR. FORT:Exactly. As you mentioned, this is an MTS, a transaction aware component that I’m using in Visual Basic. What Internet Explorer 4.0 added was a feature that allowed active server pages to participate in transactions as well.What we’ve done is that we’ve exposed that simply as a property on the page, where I can say,
“I want to make this page transactional,”
and then instantly

it hasn’t done all that much, but it stuck in a little bit of transaction=required.We have the appropriate syntax to now make sure that the active server page itself can participate in this MTS transaction.

MR. MUGLIA:It’s interesting. The tool didn’t do very much there.What the tool just had to do was mark that this was a transactional, that this ASP page, this script page, would participate in a transaction.But underneath the cover, Windows-NT Server and the Microsoft Transaction Server is doing an awful lot.For a long time we’ve been used to databases that can give forth a transaction, have multiple steps and either do a commit or a rollback.But those things were all encapsulated within a single session to a given database. Oracle, or DB2 or Informix could always do that.But what MTS does, in a very integrated way, in a seamless way, it allows you to coordinate transactions between multiple databases and, in fact, business logic objects that are running the server, and even script objectsthat are part of the Internet Information Server.

MR.FORT :Exactly.

MR. MUGLIA:The kind of things that are possible with this–because we have the ability with MTS to interoperate and work with mainframe systems, and complete transactions against DB2 or CICS as well as Oracle and, of course, SQL Server–you can do things like create a transaction that does a debit from DB2 and a credit to Oracle, and coordinate that in a way that is either completely committed or completely rolled back consistently.

MR. FORT:Exactly.The last thing I want to be able to do is take a little bit of boilerplate text that I’ve got here that’s just going to basically write out a function to the browser to tell it whether or not that transaction was actually committed or, in fact, rolled back.And the last thing, now that I’ve got all this code done, I want to be able to make sure that this is actually working.I want to be able to test and debug this code, and that traditionally has been fairly difficult.But in Visual InterDev, this next version, we’ve actually got a full featured professional debugger that lets me come in and I can

(Applause.)

MR.FORT :Thank you.I can set break points on my active server page code executing on a Web server, either on my same workstation or on a remote Web server.I can set break points on client side script, server side script, move seamlessly between them, I have a local Windows watches, the threads, the call stacks, et cetera.It’s the full environment that I would expect to have in a tool like Visual Basic.

MR. MUGLIA:Full script level debugging isa reallyimportant point.This is really the first solid example of a tool providing integrate debugging between client and server.We’re just still at the early stages of this technology, but what you can do with Visual InterDev is, you can have an application that includes script code running on the client, and script code running on the server, and actually get from the client to the server seamlessly.

MR. FORT:If we’ve done our job right, and I’ve done my demo, I should have demonstrated how this next version of Visual InterDev really makes it easy to design, build, debug and deploy data driven Web applications faster than ever before.

MR. MUGLIA:Great.Thanks a lot, Garth.

MR. FORT :You’re welcome.

(Applause.)

MR. MUGLIA:So, just as a quick recap, Visual InterDev 2.0 will go into beta in March.You’ll get a copy of that when it’s available.The key new features are the built in WYSIWYG editing, support for dynamic HTML and data binding on the client and server, some great new features to make it easy to build data driven applications.And support really

it’s a tool that makes it easy to build applications which can target the broadest set of clients because it can work with any browser.

Now, a key thing, as I mentioned, was that Visual InterDev did some simple things to do some very complex underlying things.And the reason this is possible is because some of the new services and capabilities in Windows-NT 4.0.What we’ve done over the last month is, we’ve enhanced NT 4, and pulled into it a whole set of new technologies to make it easier to build solutions, particularly Web-based solutions.So, a new set of application services, a new version of IIF which really dramatically improved the creation of these data driven applications, enhanced Web services, enhanced transactioning services.The transaction server is now built into Windows-NT Server, so you can coordinate these transactions as we’ve described in the demo.

And, finally, the underlying hosting technology has dramatically improved.NT Server with IIF is scaling to some of the largest Web

sites on the Internet today, and with some of the new hosting features, it makes it easier to support multiple domain names and host multiple applications on a single server.Another really interesting feature, a new feature in NT Server 4 is onethat allows a relationship between a corporation and an ISP.An ISP is an Internet service provider, where users can have an account with the ISP and they can roam, potentially, all over the United States through some roaming alliances that have been created, and then they can use the Internet to do remote access dialing to their corporate sites.Instead of having a dedicated raft of servers in a corporation, and dedicated 800 numbers and phone lines that have to be maintained, use the Internet for this technology, allow the ISP to build and maintain the infrastructure and the user gets much broader access to their corporate data.Corporations can deploy that very efficiently.

Because it uses underlying technology called PPTP, which is a tunneling protocol that encrypts all the information, your sensitive corporate data can go across the Internet, and you can be confident that it will not

be intercepted by anyone.So, all of those are new features, they’re now built into Windows-NT Server.If you go out to the store, or go to a distributor and buy a copy, all of these features are integrated into it, and so they’re available to your customers, and they’re available to you to build solutions.

Now, another key technology is obviously Internet Explorer 4.IE 4 has been on the market for several months.It’s doing quite well.It’s won a lot of reviews.So, it’s really a technology which is being adopted very, very widely.The focus of IE 4 is to provide deep integration and improve the user experience and, at the same time, make it possible for you to develop much more compelling content.Features like dynamic HTML

— and very interestingly, the data binding capabilities of dynamic HTML make it possible for you to create very compelling Web sites.Now, we’ve already released the versions of Internet Explorer for all the different variants of Windows, Win 3.1 and up and up.And we’ve also released the MAC.And we’re now in the last stages of beta on a number of different UNIX versions.So IE is going

is very much a cross-platform solution that can be used to build very sophisticated business applications.

Now, one of the important things about IE is that it is avery standard base technology.We’ve focused and worked very closely with some various standards efforts to make sure that IE incorporates the latest standards-based technology really across the board.It’s a browser which provides great support for standards.I want to particularly highlight the great work that the W3C has done in driving HTML forward, and we’re very proud to support their effort in building standards-based technology into Internet Explorer.

What I want to do now is sort of shift gears for just a couple of minutes and talk about some underlying architecture and some underlying technology.Now, this architecture that I’ll talk about actually applies to all of the different solutions.So it’s not just data-driven specific, but for the data-driven case it’s particularly tied, because of this importance in data-driven solutions of separating the user interface code from the business logic, from the underlying data.Now, a few months ago Microsoft announced an initiative called Windows DNA, which is really an overall architecture for building business applications of all types.It certainly includes Web applications, but it also goes beyond that.And really, the key part of Windows DNA is to have this three-tier architecture and make it simple to build multi-tier, three-tier solutions, UI, business logic and data.

But, in order to do that effectively, that technology needs to be built upon a rich set of distributed system services, and the first levels of that technology are available today with things like Windows-NT 4.0, and the new capabilities that are built into Windows-NT 4.0.And that, of course, will get enhanced later this year with the introduction of Windows-NT 5.0 and some of the more advanced distributed capabilities.

And, meanwhile, all of these things, in order

these are the underlying technologies, but in order to be effective in building solutions, tools and application technology to make it easy to create these solutions is key.So that’s the overall architecture of Windows DNA.But I want to highlight that the glue, the thing that ties it all together is COM.COM is an object model that is the most widely used object model in the world, and millions of developers around the world every day create components that are used to build business applications in COM.And COM underlies and is a part of all of the technology that we will be talking about at this conference over the next three days.It is the glue that ties things together.

Now, depending on the kind of solution you’re trying to build, you may be very aware of COM, or you may not be very aware.If you’re working in Visual C++ and you’re writing to the metal and building an underlying platform service, you’re probably pretty aware that you’re building a COM compatible component.On the other hand, if you’re doing things like using the higher level tools like Visual InterDev, Visual Basic, or even content creation tools like Front Page, you’re still using and creating and consuming COM objects, but it’s not as apparent to you.What’s apparent to you is the way it makes your job easier because it does things like it’s the foundation upon which that statement completion that Garth showed a couple of minutes ago is based.Without COM, we couldn’t have done that.And it’s the fact that all of these services and tools build objects which are fully compatible that makes that possible.It’s the fact that all of these things can work together.

Now, I’m pleased to say there’s a couple of very significant announcements surrounding COM that I’d like to take this morning.The first of which is that Microsoft is really stepping up our effort to make COM available on a multiple platform.So, today I’m announcing that in the next few months, COM will be available on several other platforms, non-Microsoft platforms, supported directly from Microsoft, sold and supported directly from Microsoft.So what that means is that if you’ve got a business solution that needs to encapsulate and work with objects that are running on a UNIX platform, Solaris, HPUX, Digital UNIX, or AIX, that that application can have its business logic encapsulated in a COM component, and that can work seamlessly with other business objects running on Windows and Windows-NT.And that means that technology on all these other platforms is opened up and can be interfaced and developed against using those tools like Visual InterDev and Visual Basic to make it very easy to improve and improve developer productivity.

Now, in doing this, in working with multiple platforms, the reality is that there’s a lot of existing code, existing solutions that customers have on those platforms.And so building COM objects on Solaris, for example, it really is very much a custom job.So, we’re partnering with a number of key third party integration firms and consulting firms to make it easy for you to get services to encapsulate those objects in COM. Andersen Consulting, KPMG, EDS, BandStar, key names in the integration business are all standing up today and saying they’re going to support customers building COM-based solutions on UNIX platforms.

Now, I want to emphasize that this announcement builds upon and extends the relationship that we already have in place with the open group, which is driving a process to help multiple vendors work together and coordinate on COM, as well as Software AG who has been a great development partner of ours for a number of years and, in fact, we’re going to continue to work with to develop great cross-platform COM solutions.

Now, we’re announcing that we’re doing this today.In February, we’ll announce pricing and support and how we’ll support this.But the key point is, Microsoft is standing up and saying that we’re going to provide this technology on UNIX directly, and we’re going to support you and your customers.

(Applause.)

MR. MUGLIA:The next announcement surrounding COM is also really important.For a long time, the COM world and the CORBA world have been totally separated, and corporations have been building solutions on COM, they’ve been building solutions on CORBA, and there’s been no way to really bridge those two gaps.It’s been left in the customers’ hands.So, today we’re announcing, in conjunction with Iona (sp), that Iona, which is a leading vendor of CORBA-based solutions, and in fact is probably the vendor that both widely deployed solutions exist for,is licensing COM from Microsoft and will begin integrating COM into their CORBA-based solution, so that you can, if you have a CORBA application running on UNIX or on the mainframe, that those things can be pulled together and COM and CORBA is bridged.This is a huge step forward because the services, the underlying services that we showed for the transaction capabilities, those will be available to coordinate with CORBA-based applications, and COM is the basis for this, DCOM is the basis for this.

So, for those of you who have customers or have internal systems that use CORBA in some way, this is a key announcement because it marks the beginning of the end of the gap between COM and CORBA, and Microsoft is teaming up with a leading vendor to make that happen.

(Applause.)

MR. MUGLIA:Continuing on with that, we have a number of other partners that we’re working with to provide COM on a wider variety of platforms.Silicon Graphics is announcing today that they’re going to take and make COM available on their IRIX (sp) system.That’s a key step for people who have SGI-based systems.In addition to things like Digital and Solaris and HPUX, Silicon Graphics will make COM available on their system.And, likewise, Digital has announced that in addition to the work that they’ve done for a number of years in building COM on their UNIX system, that they have entered early field testing with customers for COM on DMS.So we now see COM in, you know, one swoop, COM is expanded out to a wide variety of platforms, and we’ve begun to bridge that gap with CORBA.

Thatends the data-driven part of today’s talk.Obviously it’s a centerpiece for a lot of the other technologies to come.And in many cases, I think what you’ll find is applications that will be built that are data-driven, but also have other aspects to it, like key publishing, or rich media.There’s other pieces that are built into an app.

So what I’d like to do now is switch gears and talk a little bit about a solution that’s probably primarily an Intranet solution, rather than an Internet solution, and that’s publishing information within a corporation.And here the key challenge is how can you take information and make it available, file that information, and have it stored in a way that it can easily be found by end users.

There is a tremendous amount of potential for this document and information to become a key asset for a corporation, if in fact that can be simplified and made available to end users.There’s a lot of potential cost savings associated with that.But, there also are a lot of challenges.It’s hard to do this.There’s not been a lot of good tools to make it easy to publish information in a way that I can be found.

So the process of creating an Intranet site

— almost all corporations have moved and adopted Intranets in some way, within their corporation, but the process to put these together is time consuming and expensive.And Web masters wind up as a central point, where this information needs to funnel through.And it would be a lot better if this overall thing could be more effective, and less expensive to create.I mean, the final thing I’m going to say, it’s just very hard to find this information.So if there’s anything we can do to simplify the process of users actually getting the information they want is a huge step forward.So there aretwo technologies that I want to talk about today, Site Server, and Front Page ’98.

In addition to Visual InterDev as a new product announcement, today I’m announcing a new version of Site Server. Site Server 3.0,is focused on making it easy to publish information within an Intranet, to be able to find that information, and then to deliver it across an overall company, to make it available across an entire company.

Site Server 3 is just entering beta, and in fact, you are the first ones to get it.If you want to take a look underneath your chair is taped a CD of Site Server 3, so you’re welcome to take that and load it on your lap top and start using it here at the conference.With that, what I’d like to do is go through a publishing solution, a demo of a publishing solution, with Ken Goto (sp) and Mike Tuchen (sp).

Ken.

MR. GOTO:Well, what I want to do here is show you how Site Server can help you publish.Well, I’m a hiring manager at Zentech Corporation.And Mike is going to actually be playing an end user, who is going to be browsing for information on their Web site.So one of the things that they’re involved with is all of this really cool new fusion technology.And they’re working on this fusion powered car.Well, one of the problems they’ve got is that their current design engineer is leaving to go to another group.So what I’m tasked with doing is creating a job posting for a new design engineer and getting that on to the Zentech Intranet site, where I can get some leads, and hopefully we can get that position filled as soon as possible.

So I’ve got this particular document I’ve been working on in Word.Now, if I wanted to publish this to the Web site today, what I’d probably do is pop this Word document into an email message, and send it to my site administrator,saying, can you please link this off the job postings area of the site.That administrator would do that, once they’re done with other activities, such as keeping the Web servers up and running in the first place, and other activities.So it’s not the most efficient process.And certainly, as additional content providers come online, it makes it even worse.

So let me show you how Site Server can help.I’ll go ahead and close out my Word document I’ve been working on.And open up the Zentech Intranet site.Now I’m going to click on the add content link, okay.By reading the instructions ,it looks like I can either click on this particular icon to upload a file, or I can go ahead and drag and drop onto it.Let me go ahead and click on it.And I can see that the design engineer document that I’ve been working on in Word is on my list here, so I’m going to go ahead and choose open.

Now, at this point I’m being asked to categorize the type of content I’m placing onto the server, so I’ve got choices like data sheets, awards, et cetera.And my administrator has set these up for me ahead of time.In this case I’m going to choose a job posting.

MR. MUGLIA:So the key thing here is that, instead of having to have everything go through a centralized Web master process, it’s possible to set up Intranet sites, so that end users can actually submit and publish content into that site.

MR. GOTO:Absolutely.

MR. MUGLIA:And that content can really be of any type.It can be an HTML document created through any tool.It can be an Office document. -It really doesn’t make any difference.

MR. GOTO:Correct, we’re format agnostic, so we can add value to any type of content you submit.So now I’m being asked for a number of different properties on my content, that will help me describe it further, things such as job type, description, et cetera.

MR. TUCHEN:While Ken goes ahead and builds out that form, let me drill into this what we call meta data a little bit more.Meta data is extra information that we add to both content and user, so that we can do things like more powerful content management, a much more precise search, use it for navigation, for category style of browsing, and use it for more powerful and richer analysis, to figure out what actually happened on the Web site, after the fact.

So, for example, he just called this document a job posting.And he said that the job type was engineer.And now, we could also, on a user side, categorize that user as having the job type of engineer.And that brings up a really important point, that having a common foundation for this meta data that you can use for not only all the users in your company, but also across all these different types of users and content, as well as throughout the document life cycle, from publishing, through search, through navigation and analysis.That’s a really important foundation to have.We call that the site vocabulary.And you’ll be hearing a lot more about that in the document publishing session.

MR. MUGLIA:So this meta data that’s entered through the process of authoring, actually can simplify the back end of a user finding information.And with Site Server 3, we can enforce that for a given site, that the meta data, which is based on a very site particular vocabulary, gets entered and categorized.

MR. GOTO:Okay.So let’s go ahead and submit this piece of content, now that I’ve filled out the form.Now, normally, this piece of content would immediately be available on the site, and I could go up to the job postings area, and locate that content.But, in this particular case, what’s happened is that the site administration has made job postings require approval, and they might want to do that for a variety of reasons, but in general, they want to ensure that the content is of an appropriate quality, and someone gets an opportunity to review it before it goes out to the rest of the world.

So let me switch gears here, and kind of play that HR manager who gets to approve this job posting.So I’m going to go back, and let me go to the editorial view.Now, in there I can see the particular document that I had uploaded a few moments ago, fusion car design engineer.doc.And I can look at its properties and make modifications, and make sure everything is appropriate.When I’m ready I can go ahead and select it, and click on approve.

Just to recap what we’ve seen here with publishing, I’ve been able to distribute my publishing out to my content providers, and allow them to submit content easily.There has been no site administrator involved in the middle of this process, so I’ve made things much more efficient.I’ve applied meta data to the information that I’ve submitted, and Mike will talk a little bit more about exactly how valuable that is. I’ve also enforced the structure approval process, which canensure the quality of my content, before it gets out to the rest of the world.

So if we go back up to the Intranet site, and we go to where job postings would appear– now that I’ve approved the content–I’ll go ahead and click on that, and you can see my fusion car design engineer document is now there and available on the site.This is a much, much easier process than the manual way of emailing There are also a number of different ways we can deliver this information to the user.

MR. TUCHEN: Now, that Ken has shown you what our solution for publishing information is, let me show you the other side of that process, how you actually get that information out to the right users.I’m a user right now, I’m actually an engineer on the fusion car project.And I’m unhappy with my job.I found out that fusion is actually a little bit further off than I thought I was when I took the job, and so what I need to do is look for a job in another group which I’ve heard about, which is the personal rocket launcher.

And so what I’ll do is go to , the Microsoft Knowledge Manager, which is a Web-based sample application that we’ve put into Site Server.I’ll look for anything that has the word rocket in it. what I’ve found here are a number of different documents in different places.For instance, thisis a Web page, on a Web server, about the requirements for that project.The next link is actually on a file share.It’s a word document.The next link down is actually in a database, in a SQL database of press releases.And finally, at the bottom of the page, I have some postings from an exchange public folder.I’ve donea single search, and we’ve gone out and reached into all of the data where it actually lives in your company, and produced a single set of results across all of that information.

MR. MUGLIA:One of the key things that Site Server 3 provides is very advanced search capabilities that allow you to search across multiple servers per corporation, so you can have, in an Intranet, set up a centralized query center and search center, that touches all the different servers in a corporation.And it can actually search across and find information aboutWeb servers and standard file servers, regardless of the type of file server.It can go into SQL databases, relational databases, as well as exchange public folders.So this is a search across multiple different types of information, across distributed servers.

MR. TUCHEN:Now that I’ve found what I’m looking for in the rocket project, let me look for a job there.So naturally I’ll search for rocket and jobs.Now, look what I’ve actuallyreceived.I’ve received a result here, which is back in that exchange public folder, saying great job, on the rocket product announcement.That’s not what I’m looking for.I’m not looking for a document that has the word
“job”
, and has the word
“rocket”
in it. I’m looking for a document that is a job posting.this is where that meta data becomes really important.Instead of looking for just documents with those two words in it, let me browse through categories, through human resources to job postings.And here I look for only job postings, and sure enough, I see that fusion car job posting, that Ken just submitted.

Now, given that this is my job that I’m leaving, so this is not what I’m looking for.What instead I want to do is say, search in this category, for something on the rocket project.There are no results for it right now, but this is clearly something that I’m going to be interested in for the next several weeks. What I’d like to be able to do is register for that, and have the results delivered to me, when a document actually gets published that matches my query.I’m not going to show you how to do that right here.You can go to the solutions session to see that, but

— I know, it’s a shameless free plug.I’ll be there at 10:15, over in Room 2.But, I will show you the results.What I will get then is, when that document gets posted, an email that says, I’ve found a hit for rocket engineering, and here it is.

MR. MUGLIA:With Site Server, in addition to these advanced search capabilities that can span multiple different servers, and crawls up different machines, you also can structure it so that the query can be executed on a scheduled basis.And so users can say, hey, I’d like to find out about this later.And get a piece of email sent to them.

MR. TUCHEN:That’s right.So what we’ve tried to do is to give you a solution that searches across your data, no matter where it resides in your corporation.We tryto give you a solution that will allow you to meet the needs of users, whether they need information immediately, by a full text search across the content, by the meta data, searching by the category, or in one of these profile based searches, saying this is something that I care about for the next several weeks, and have that delivered to me when the document actually arrives.

MR. MUGLIA:Thanks.

MR. TOUCAN:Thanks, Bob.

MR. MUGLIA:We’re introducing a new product today, Site Server 3.It offers some very advanced capabilities, to actually make it easy to publish information on an Intranet.To be able to categorize that information with meta data, and then use that information later, for users to retrieve it.Site Server 3 also has some great features for distributing content around the world, and making it easy to publish this on multiple sites, regardless of its location.It’s an important new product, and there’s a lot to hear about it, here at the conference.

Another key product that’s been out for a little while, that simplifies the process of creating and designing compelling content is Front Page ’98.The focus here is to make it easy,to set up a Web site, so that end users can easily createvery compelling content.A key thing about it is that it’s a very holistic product.–It makes it straightforward to manage the overall process of authoring content.A great editor is built in– the ability to manipulate the back end, and do link fix up and fix problems that exist in a Web site– and a very neatthing about Front Page ’98 is you can developcompelling content, without any coding required.

Equally important, in a team case, users of Front Page can work with tools like Visual InterDev, or other third party tools for that matter, to create data-driven applications, that have this combination of compelling content, and a database side as well. That all can be coordinated as a team, with check ins and check outs.The overall process can be managed.So it’s a product that many people are using today already, to build very compelling content, and the key thing is that it works so well with solutions that include other elements, such as databases.

I want to talk about commerce.I mentioned earlier how important e-commerce is for the future, and the opportunities that exist for doing business on the Internet.The opportunities are indeed vast. It’s importantto recognize that they fall into two major categories.A
“business to consumer”
relationship, where there is online buying and selling, and this is classically stores that are set up to actually deliver products or services to consumers on the Internet.

Equally important and a very major category, where earlier in the adoption cycle in this category, but very important is
“business to business”
scenarios.This meansinterchange of information and interchange of purchasing data can flow between businesses.A relationship between a supplier and a corporation that consumes those supplies is a great example of this.While those things have traditionally been done either through manual systems or things like EDI, new Internet technologies are emerging to make that a very, very common scenario.

The challenges that exist here is that, almost all of these commerce-based systems have to integrate with existing solutions.Getting at and working with data, in an existing database, in an existing line of business solution is critical.These things tend to be expensive to deploy, and the returns are one of those things you have to measure.So making it easy to build solutions that can then open up new business opportunities is critical.

Some of the enabling technology is the basic foundation that’s built into Windows NT-Server, and particularly the Internet Information Server, and the Transaction Server, as well as the Commerce Edition of Site Server, which we’ll talk about in a second.On the client side, there’s some important technology, a wallet that runs with both Netscape and Internet Explorer, to make it easy for users to enter purchasing information.

MR. MUGLIA:So what I’d like to do right now is announce the next version of Site Server Commerce Edition.This is a new update to Site Server that takes all of the base features that are in Site Server 3 that we just showed and adds a set of capabilities to make it easy to build commerce-based solutions on the Internet, regardless of whether they’re business-to-consumer or business-to-business.The key is to be able to engage customers, to make it straightforward to bill transactions, and then to analyze that data.Analysis is very important in commerce solutions, because building compelling sites, getting users back, understanding what’s selling and what’s not, doing this analysis is key.And Site

Server Commerce Edition has the features combined in an integrated way to do all those things.

So, with that, I’d like to welcome Josh Axelrod to show the commerce solutions.

MR. AXELROD:Hi, Bob.Thanks.

There area number of companies out there already using commerce solutions from Microsoft, but we’re pretty excited about our 3.0 version.We think we’ve made it more comprehensive and easier to deploy sites.What we’ve done here is build a Cartopia (sp) site, which is a fictitious car site for car parts.And what we’ve done is commerce-enabled it using Site Server Commerce Edition.

First I’d like to show you a little bit about the site from the view of a shopper.

MR. MUGLIA:This is an example of a business-to-consumer site?

MR. AXELROD:Exactly.I’m going to come in here as a consumer and just take a look at the online store.All these pages are going to be dynamically generated with data out of the database using commerce objects ASP code.I just bought a new car, so what I think I really need now is

The Club” to keep my car safe.Let me go ahead and add that to my shopping basket. A shopping basket is a place where we can store purchases before buyingthem.That way I canbuild up my purchases and at the end buy everything Iwant.

MR. MUGLIA:The shopping basket is something that Commerce Server makes very easy to deploy for consumer-oriented sites.It’s really a server side cache of the items that a user is looking at purchasing.

MR. AXELROD:The Cartopia site uses deferred registration, which is one of the registration models we support in Commerce Server.You can either register upfront, shop anonymously, orregister when you actually put something in the basket.If I do this, it will identify me to the site, allowingme to get some great bargains, and allowing the site to track who I am.

MR. MUGLIA:This is an important themeabout consumer relationships, and one of the key things that Site Server provides is, making it very easy to build personalized relationships with your consumers.And that’s important in a lot of cases.We’ll talk about it in a minute, in the next scenario, but it’s clearly important in commerce as well.

MR. AXELROD:Now, I see
“The Club”
in the basket here, but it is a little bit expensive.So, let me take the role of the actual online merchant and do a little bit of work to increase sales.I’m going to shift over at this point and pretend I’m the Cartopia store manager and try to increase sales of
“The Club”
, maybe by lowering the price.

MR. MUGLIA:So what we’re really seeingis an example of two things: an Internet-based commerce application that is the consumer experience, and then what Josh is going to show now, which is the other side of that commerce application, which is an intranet app that can be used by a manager.

MR. AXELROD:Right.All these pages are generated by our server wizard, both for the shopping experience and for the management experience.So, you’re all ready to put up your site and manage it.

MR. MUGLIA:This is a hugely important point, because actually creating and deploying commerce-oriented sites on the Internet is a very expensive thing, and up to now it’s been pretty much a custom development effort.With the underlying services that Site Server Commerce Edition provides, on top of that we’ve built a wizard that makes it very straightforward.The wizard runs and creates the basic template of the site, and it makes it very, very easy to customize that site for a given company.In addition to providing the end-user templates that people see, it also builds that Intranet site which Josh is doing now.

MR. AXELROD:Exactly.Now, one thing we notice by looking at our analyst reports is that
“The Club”
wasn’t selling.So maybe even lowering the price isn’t enough.Let me add a price promotion, the Commerce Edition has a lot of great promotional features, and we can simply go in and take a look at one that’s added here for The Club.I see that if I buy one of The Clubs, I go ahead and get a book at 50 percent off.So, by having this promotion, I can further entice shoppers to go ahead and purchase from the site.

Finally, I’ve got my promotional added here.The last thing I’d like to do is modify the order process pipeline, especially the tax stage because I understand that the Washington tax rate has gone down.

MR. MUGLIA:What Josh is bringing up now is very, important in addition to the commerce application of the Site

Server solution, and this is an order process pipeline which really codifies the multiple steps that are involved in commerce solutions.And, because all of these things are already structured as discrete steps, it’s very easy to go in and customize those independent steps to meet the needs of a given business.It’s also really important to note that each of these steps are represented individually as COM components that can be transacted as appropriate using the transaction server.So the reliability things that a transactioning system would provide is built into the Commerce Edition because it’s built on top of NT Server and can take advantage of MTS.

It’s also critical to realize that at each point in the order process pipeline in some cases it may make sense for a third party solution to built in, and here’s an example where it’s very straightforward to extend the application with third party, vertical-oriented, and specific solutions.He’s going to change tax as an example.What we’re showing here is a very simple tax calculation on componentsMicrosoft provides, but tax calculation is actually a pretty complex thing, and in many cases you might want to have a more complex tax-oriented solution provided by a third party.

MR. AXELROD:Yes.There’s a great bunch of components, third party components for the pipeline.We’ll be talking about a lot of those in the solution session and in a number of the breakout sessions.Let me just quickly modify the tax rate Let’s say it went down to 7-1/2 percent.This is one of the tools we have to edit the order process pipeline that actually runs through a browser.I’ll save that.And now I’ve gone ahead and done all my maintenance on the site.So, let’s go back and look at the shopper experience now and complete this purchase.

As I come back into the site, I’d like to also point out that we have some online ads here.This is an ad for The Club.So, in commerce, it is also important to be able to attract customers to your site, and advertising is a new feature in the 3.0 version that we have that will really leverage you to bring in new customers and drive sales.This particular ad right here is what we call a buy now ad.So the person can click on it and bring up a quick wizard and do a purchase without even leaving the page.

MR. MUGLIA:This is important because ad generation is a key part of many Internet sites, and in particular it’s very interesting for commerce-oriented sites.This is an interesting example because the ad is actually associated with the site itself, so it’s not some other party advertising on this site, it’s actually a way to generate promotions, in a sense, within a site, and it’s very straightforward with that ad to go and click on that, and what comes up is an opportunity for the user to buy that immediately.

MR. AXELROD:Absolutely.And if you’re a content site, it’s great to put ads on your site to drive sales to retailers that you’re in partnership with.

So, let’s go ahead and finish my purchase, go back to the store, grab that book.I believe it was one of the auto manuals that I can get.So I add that to my shopping basket.And I have my new price here, dynamically updated for The Club, and I see that I got my discount for my auto repair manual.So, I’m pretty excited.Now, let me complete this purchase.In completing the purchase here, I have the Microsoft wallet, which is a secure way for me to transmit my information, and also makes it very simple and efficient for me to complete my purchases.

MR. MUGLIA:So this

the wallet allows the user to enter their personal information, like their credit card numbers once, and then use that as they go from site to site.We have versions of the wallet that run in both Navigator as well as Internet Explorer, so regardless of what kind of browser a user uses, you can use the wallet.Of course, if the user hasn’t filled out a wallet, Commerce Server makes it easy to put up a Web page to actually enter that information manually.

MR. AXELROD:Right.And if you generate stores with the wizard, they’re already enabled to use the wallet.So, here’s my final purchase step.I’m going to go ahead and transmit my credit card information securely with my password.Great.I’ve completed my purchase.

So, let’s take a look at the receipt that was generated in this case.

MR. MUGLIA:This is a receipt that the user can use.It’s actually stored up on the site.Since they have membership associated with this site, they can come back later and look at past purchases.Again, this is all set up by the Commerce Server as a part of that wizard, and then the receipt can also be used within the site by people that are working at the company.

MR. AXELROD:Absolutely.You can cut down your calls if you can have your customers come back and take a look at what they’ve bought in the past.Thatcompletes the online buying and selling part of it.

The other part I’d like to show you isthe view of a Cartopia employee.Take a look at the corporate purchasing system that we’ve set up for Cartopia.

MR. MUGLIA:We’re switching gears now.The first example was a business-to-consumer example.This is more of a business-to-business purchasing scenario.

MR. AXELROD:Okay.So, now I’m a Cartopia employee, and I understand that the parts department needs a little bit more toner. Let me go ahead and log into the corporate purchasing system and identify myself.The system sets up my requisition limits andmy email approval chain.So, here’s our purchasing system.Let me go ahead down to office supplies here, and find some toner for that parts department.Let’s see, I think we need to charge it to them, so let me make sure the cost center is correct.Great.So I have my requisition filled out here.I’m submitting it, and the approval email alias is me also.This isn’t too likely, more likely Bob would be the approver.Let me fill out my required TJs.

So, in this case I’m not going to do a credit card transaction.I’m actually going to submit the order and via the commerce interchange pipeline, this order can be transmitted to the toner manufacturer, and we can go ahead and complete the whole thing in a paperless manner.

MR. MUGLIA:It’s important to realize that Commerce Server has been designed to work with existing EDI-based systems, so that if, in fact, you have a relationship that’s EDI-based, you can use and bring that forward into an intranet case with Commerce Server.It can also work with the new emerging Internet standard protocols for doing commerce and business-to-business interchange.

MR. AXELROD: We can transmit EDI andXMLover a variety of formats, like EDI over the Internet, or even over traditional bands.So, we’ll talk a lot more about commerce interchange pipeline in the commerce solutions session which is right after this and there’s a number of breakout sessions that cover both our store builder wizard and all of our solutions for business-to-consumer and business-to-business scenarios.

MR. MUGLIA:Great.Thanks a lot, Josh.

MR. AXELROD:Thanks, Bob.

(Applause.)

MR. MUGLIA:A very important scenario, commerce is a very important scenario, and with the new Commerce Edition of Site Server, we’ve taken a big step forward in making it easier for you to build these solutions.

Some specifics of the new features there, we talked about the interchange pipeline is a key thing, the store builder wizard making it easy to author and create sites, integration with the rest of Site Server is a key theme, and we’ll talk a little bit about that in the next scenario, and see how you can pull some of these pieces together, the ad server, the ability to work with existing databases, as well as with existing EDI-based commerce and transaction interchanges.

The next scenario that I want to talk about is an important one for many companies.In many ways, it’s been the defining scenario for a lot of companies on the Internet, which is their corporate presence Web site, the Web site that provides information to their customers about who they are, what they do, what their products are, their sales and support policies.

There’s a huge opportunity in corporate Web presence because it’s a way that you can create relationships with your customers, identifying new customers, improve your sales and support, profile the information, be able to get some information about what your customers are doing, how they’re using your product, what they think is most important.So personalization is key.

This type of site is really all about relationships between you and your customers, and it also has some tremendous opportunities to actually reduce your cost by providing more and more information about your products, about your services, making information to reduce your back-end support costs, as well as to open up new business opportunities.

Now, there are some challenges.I think companies who put up presence Web sites sort of thought they could

in many cases thought they could put it up, and the maintenance cost would be pretty low.But, in fact, because of the dynamic nature of the Web, keeping and bringing forward new content is a key thing.Making it easy to get that content up there and, again, to personalize that content, to make it more and more applicable to your actual customers.Things like security is really important here, being able to sign-up users, understand who they are, but maintain privacy associated with that.And, again, simplifying the publishing process.

So, the enabling technologies for the corporate Web presence is NT Server again with the Internet Information Server and Site Server 3.

Jeff Teper will go through a demo on corporate Web presence.Jeff.

MR. TEPER:Thanks, Bob.We’re going to take a different look at Cartopia than what Josh showed you.We’re going to drill a little bit more into the marketing site.And here we’re really going to talk about building that user information asset.How we infer behavior information based on what users do on the site, get them to register, and build that asset to make a much more relevant experience for that user and do a much more effective job targeting them.

Let’s go ahead and take a look at Cartopia’s Web site, and you can see it’s got a number of links to different areas, and notice in the center of the screen there’s a message about Cartopia’s history.They’ve been around 50 years or so, and we’ll see that change as we progress through the site.

I’m going to go into an area of the site called the Garage, and into the Mechanic’s

Corner.I’m browsing the site as a user for the very first time, going through and taking a look at different areas, the off-road vehicles area, taking a look at four-by-fours, scrolling around.

And now, when I go back to that home page for Cartopia, I get a different message.It’s now personalized.It gives me some links to four-by-four information.The site is now smarter about me based on my behavior, and it’s much more interesting to me, and I’m likely to be a better customer of Cartopia.

MR. MUGLIA:So, even though there’s no information about who you are, and they have no way of knowing what your past tastes are,the site instantly knew just by the actions that you took, where youvisited, some attributes about you, and then to personalize itself to better meet your needs?

MR. TEPER:That’s exactly right, Bob.And let’s take a look at some of the things that are going on behind the scenes here.I’m going to fire up the Microsoft management console.It’s a tool for administering the various BackOffice services, and I’m going to bring up the membership snap-in and take a look under the anonymous users.I’ve created a unique identifier and associated some attributes with that first-time user, what link they want on their home page, that they visited the Garage, and all this is taken care of automatically for us.We have this feature called Automatic Cookie Authentication.We issue cookies to a user, and we start storing information and building up that profile.

MR. MUGLIA:So, all that’s really stored on the client’s browser is a cookie, and it’s personalized information about the user, where they’ve been to, what their preferences are.That’s stored in a database on the server.

MR. TEPER:That’s exactly right, Bob.And we can get access to not only the information we store in our membership component in the box, but basically any database the customer has.

Let me tell you a little bit about how we use this information.We’ve got a personalization tool, called the rule manager, for authoring personalized content.Here’s that rule for the four by four.Basically, if the user doesn’t have a profile yet, show them the Cartopia history, that’s our first rule, and our second rule is, if they do have that profile, go ahead and select the content, about four by fours on their home page.And this lets non-programmers target personalized messages, based on the user behavior, based on the content and then we can just lob these into pages with design time controls in Visual InterDev.

MR. MUGLIA:So this is integrated into Visual InterDev, and again, a key thing here is to make it easy for users to develop personalized rules without having to write a lot of code.

MR. TEPER:That’s exactly right.Now, the site’s built up some implicit information about us.Let’s actually be a little bit more explicit and ask the user to register.So we’re going to go into the customer service area of this site.And I’m going to go ahead and create a new account.And you see, in front of the registration page, Bob, up popped a dialogue, called the profile assistant.This is the future of Internet Explorer 4.0 that supports the W3C’s privacy standard, which lets me enter user information on the client, and decide which information to allow to be synchronized up to a server.Both to protect my privacy, and to give me the convenience of not having to reenter all this information every time.

MR. MUGLIA:So this is a feature that’s supported in IE 4.It’s a W3C standard, and it makes it easy so users don’t have to reenter information.Now, of course, you could also just enter this information manually, or if a user didn’t want to have that information stored in their browser it’s totally optional.

MR. TEPER:In this case, I’m going to let the server pick up this information, and you can see the page has been filled out for me, thanks to some design time controls for building registration pages that ship with Site Server.So all I’ve got to do is go ahead and enter a password, and set some profile information, go ahead and register. Then I canlog inand get access to the customer support area of this site, including some warrantee information about me and other promotions.

MR. MUGLIA:So, as is typical, in this case we had an anonymous user, and they had access to a certain subset of the overall site.And with Site Server 3, the site was smart enough to still be able to track their preferences.Now, we have a little more information about the user.We actually know who they are, we have their email account, and we can open the site up to a broader set of services, again, tracking information.

MR. TEPER:That’s right, Bob.Now, let me show you a little bit of what happened behind the scenes there.I’ve brought up the management console again, and you can see under the anonymous users, this user with a unique identifier is gone.They’ve actually been promoted to a member status.I’ll go ahead and actually refresh that, to get to the user, and you can see I’ve increased my profile.I’ve still got the fact that I’m interested in four by fours, but I’ve also got that information synched from the client, building that profile, and this was all taken

— all implemented by this forms authentication method, we’ve put in Site Server, integrates with NT security, gives you a custom log on experience, just an HTML page, and can scale to millions of users, based on the back end capabilities in Site Server 3.0.

MR. MUGLIA:So a key thing here is it’s very integrated with the underlying services of NT server, particularly the transactioning services, and the ASP page.And it uses the NT security as an authentication mechanism.But, all of this information is typically stored in a relational database.

MR. TEPER:That’s right.And this is something that

— you know, implementing this kind of authentication, is usually something people do with custom code.We’re using native NT security services to do this.

So we’ve built this profile, partly based on asking user information, partly based on tracking their behavior.Now, we’re going to go ahead and target them with some content.So I’m going to send them a weekly newsletter.And I’m going to give it a URL, the newsletter.ast is the basis for that mailing.And I’m going to say to personalize the message for each user.What this means is I’m going to generate an email message, it could be text or MHTML, down to the client, based on an ASP that, in the user context, based on their profile, their security privileges, et cetera, is going to generate custom content for that user, really powerful capability.

MR. MUGLIA:So not only does this personalization information effect the user experience when they’re visiting the site, but it can also be used to generate direct mailings out, direct email-based mailings to the user, to give really personalized focus and bring them back to your site.

MR. TEPER:That’s right.I not only can control what gets sent to the users, but who it goes to. Instead of sending it to a static distribution list, I’m going to target users who meet a specific set of criteria.And what I’m doing here is querying the Site Server analysis capabilities for tracking user behavior.So I’m going to send a promotion to all the users who are in Washington State, which is a straightforward thing to do, but the really neat thing we’re doing here is, let’s target our frequent users, who visited any place on the site, say, more than five times, within the last month.And, again, Site Server’s analysis capability is bringing in this meta data about users, bringing all your usage logs in, and is allowing us to do very sophisticated targeting, that would be a lot of custom work, for a lot of sites.And this is a very key thing.

MR. MUGLIA:So the personalization is all tied up with the very sophisticated analysis system, to really understand the behaviors of your users, and then that can also be tied back to personalization, through things like direct mailing here.

MR. TEPER:That’s right.We can go ahead and schedule this mailing, but let me go ahead and show you what it looks like, and bring up that Cartopia personalized newsletter.You can see this is formatted in HTML, and we get some promotions, based on four by four links, and the fact that it knows we’re in Washington State.Much more relevant information to me, I’m far more likely to read it, go back to the site.And the site is going to achieve its goal of getting me interested in buying its products.So thanks, Bob.

MR. MUGLIA:Thanks a lot, Jeff.

So that’s another example of use of Site Server, this time in an Internet corporate Web presence site, where a lot of information will be brought together, again, to provide a much more compelling experience for the user.

So the last category of applications I want to talk about are advanced media solutions.Right now the Web is primarily made up of HTML pages, be they statically generated or dynamic.And this makes a lot of sense, because it’s a common paradigm of publishing of information, and it will always be the case that many pages are predominantly based on the viewing concepts of HTML.

But, as we move forward, there is also an opportunity to bring in, and integrate into that HTML richer media types.And the opportunity here is that, let’s face it, the world has been raised on television, and very interactive content, content that’s

— content that’s engaging and multimedia in its experience.And if you think about the Web, the Web can be interactive in the sense that a user can drive where they go, but it doesn’t have that same compelling nature that a video clip can have.And as we move forward, and some of the challenges that are associated with delivery of these advanced media types are resolved, bringing more compelling content with integration of sound and video into Web technology is clearly a dimension which will bring and create more compelling content.So the challenges really come to being able to use this technology and integrate it in a way that makes it more applicable and appealing to users, and getting through the bandwidth limitations.

As I said, bandwidth is a problem today.But, with some new technology, we can deliver pretty compelling video-based delivery, even at 28.8, even at slow modems. But, as speeds get faster, and ISDN, and 80XL, and cable modems become more common within the home, delivering more compelling more compelling, media-based solutions at these higher bandwidths becomes more appropriate.Also, there are many cases within an Intranet, and for dedicated applications, where higher speeds are already available.So having a solution that provides high quality video

— in fact, having a solution that provides the best quality video at all speeds, and high quality video at faster speeds, is a very compelling solution.

So the enabling technology for these more rich, multimedia-based Web solutions is a combination of IE 4, with dynamic HTML, as well as the new version of NetShow.And so, today for the final announcement I have today, I’d like to announce that we will be entering beta in the next couple of weeks, on a new version of NetShow, called NetShow 3.NetShow 3 delivers the highest quality media, at every bandwidth.So regardless of whether it’s 28.8 or 56K, or 128, like an ISDN line, or much faster speeds that would delivered by cable modem, or ADSL,or within an Intranet where there’s a dedicated network, or a high speed network, NetShow provides the highest quality.

It’s integrated in with Site Server, and the rest of our solutions, Windows NT, so you can build comprehensive solutions.And it also provides the widest variety of bandwidth.So with that I’d like to welcome Mike Beckerman to talk about some advanced media solutions.

MR. BECKERMAN:Thanks, Bob.I appreciate it.As you mentioned, there is a lot of really cool, new features in NetShow 3.0.But, I’m going to focus in on three key concepts today.The first one is quality of audio and video at every bandwidth.The second is making money using NetShow 3.0.And the third is the new Windows Media Player.So let’s go ahead and take a look.

Welcome to Back Alley, Back Alley is a demonstration, electronic commerce site, and it’s an example of using rich multimedia to really enhance your web site.What you hear in the background is just some simple background music, or sounds that are appropriate for the site.You saw us use some DHTML transition effects, to bring the graphics into play, to kind of give you a little bit more interesting feel to the site, when you start up.And there’s also an animated ad, down in the corner there.

Now, one thing I’ll point out, as you’re going through, as Bob said, is this technology spans a broad range of bandwidth.So whereas, this is particularly focused on a commerce type of application, or an entertainment application, picture this, as well, for corporate training.So using the same technologies underneath, but applying it to an Intranet type thing, where you have higher bandwidth, or later on ADSL or cable modems, or that sort of

MR. MUGLIA:That’s a great example, because even for this conference, we’re NetShowing all the sessions, and we’ll be making those available on microsoft.com, after the conference.So this is an example of not corporate training, it’s really

— it’s broad training, but also within a corporation, being able to use this technology to do announcements, to provide training about new products, new capabilities,really can reduce costs, and provide better solutions.

MR. BECKERMAN:Right.So Back Alley has three areas to demonstrate.The first is the notary area, where you register yourself, and based on how you register, the rest of the site will be customized accordingly.The second is a private club, we call Pier 66.Once you’ve registered you can enter the club, and you can watch and listen to free previews of the featured presentation or content.And the final area is the video store.Since I’ve already registered, I’m going to go right into the club.

Now, it looks like today the featured movie is called Ocean Tribe, it’s about four kids who went to high school together.Seven years later one of them is dying from cancer so the other three go to the hospital, kidnap him right out of the bed, and take him for a last surfing trip.

So we’ll go ahead and preview that movie.Now, just before we do, let me show you here, this is a really simple DHTML effect, that you’ll learn more about if you come to the advanced media solutions session, later on today.We’ll show you how to do these types of effects.But, it’s this kind of thing that makes your site more interesting, just doing these simple things.

So let’s go ahead and watch the trailer.And now what you’re seeing is the Windows Media player.I’m playing a logical piece of content made up of two physical pieces, an ad, followed by the trailer.The Windows Media Player will read that inscription from a metafile, and transition between the two seamlessly.

MR. MUGLIA:This is interesting, because this is an example of using ads in an advanced multimedia site.And it can be integrated with the ad capability of Site Server commerce addition, as well as third party ad servers.

MR. BECKERMAN:Absolutely, and we’ll take a quick look at that in just a minute.So, as you saw, the transition just went by.Let’s pay a little bit more attention here to the player, and some of the things you can do with it.In the player here you have

— I’ve authored a set of hyperlinks in here, so that I can go ahead and click through to more information about the clip, or the show, the show is the logical content, the clip is the individual physical one that’s playing.And so, you can see, there’s a hyperlink, there’s a tool tip here, that gives more information.All these are authored really easily.I did it in Notepad.It’s a little XML syntax, like files, really straight forward.

One thing I can do is I can keep a copy of the pointer to this clip, by making a shortcut on my desktop.And if I want to come back to it, I just open it up again later, and here we go.Now, notice, I kept a shortcut to the logical content, because that’s what I, as the author intended.I have the ad, followed by the trailer, that’s the experience I intended.

MR. MUGLIA:Well, in fact, all this content is stored up on a server and it’s being streamed down to the client.

MR. BECKERMAN:Absolutely.So now, let’s go ahead and take a look at one more area of the player, this is called the banner bar.And again, this is defined in that metafile, I can specify the graphic, I can specify a tool tip again, and a click through, for purchase transactions, more information, whatever I like.They’re all independent areas.You can do what you wish with them.

Now, the Windows Media Player doesn’t just play this content, which is MPEG 4, it also plays types of content that you’re probably much more familiar with, such as an AVI, or maybe a Quicktime clip.I always liked this one.And then, of course, MPEG 1.

MR. MUGLIA:And very high quality.The Windows Media Player has been in Windows for a long time, but what we’re doing is extending it to be able to play a wide variety of common content, all the way from existing formats, like Quicktime, to new things, such as NetShow.

MR. BECKERMAN:Right.And the key thing is, it doesn’t matter if it’s local, or on the network streaming, it all works together, one consistent user experience.You don’t have to bring up 15 different players as you’re going through.So let’s go ahead and go back into the site.And I’ll show you one other aspect of the club.We can go ahead and take a look at interviews with the actors, and with the director.And so we’ll take a quick look at the interview with Will Geiger, the director of the film.Okay.Let’s switch over to the other one, so I can hear, if we can switch them back please.

There we go.Sorry about that.So, here what you’re seeing is a really great example of integrating IE 4, the Windows media player, and NetShow 3.0 altogether.So, we have streaming video and audio, the player is now embedded in the site right here, and we have a text area up above that is describing the question that he’s answering.And over on the side here, we have ancillary information about the movie and about the director.

Now, in addition to the audio and video streaming down, we also have script commands streaming down, and they’re driving the HTML so that the text in both of these boxes is synchronized with the experience.

MR. MUGLIA:So the HTML is fully synchronized with the video that’s being played.

MR. BECKERMAN:Right.

MR. MUGLIA:And this is an interesting example because the first example we saw was primarily a text-oriented example, and we used video to highlight that and focus the user in on the things we wanted them to see.This is a case where really the primary content is the video and the interview, but the overall experience has been enriched because of the capabilities of dynamic HTML in driving these questions.

MR. BECKERMAN:Exactly.And you can see down here, we can remove the standard controls from the media player put a custom one in using HTML, simple mouse over effects again.

Let’s close that outand go back in.Now, we’ll go to the video store, and we’ll just take a look for just a second, then I’ll buy it.Okay, here’s an example of using streaming media not as the feature content that you’re purchasing or previewing, but rather as part of the experience of the site.So,

here we have over on the side a talking head describing the site, and as he’s describing it, again, script commands are coming down and synchronizing what you see in conjunction with what he’s talking about, the pricing of videos, et cetera.

Let’s go ahead and take a look at some previews.Here I’ve got it set up so I can preview a different bit rate for the same clip.As we said, NetShow 3.0 scales all the way from 2.4 megabits or 2.4 kilobits audio at the low end up through 8 megabits per second plus MPEG 2 with hardware assist video, entertainment quality video like you’d get off of DirecTV or something like that.

So, let’s take a look at a 56K clip.Now, remember you could get this quality over a modem, over a 56K modem or an ISDN line into your home.

MR. MUGLIA:So, it’s really possible now with some of the new video technology in NetShow 3 to build compelling video solutions across the Internet.The really important point to note is that 56K is a very good representation of what a user with a 56K modem would see.Even if the Internet has some problems and the bandwidth has to drop down, NetShow 3 would automatically adjust to that and provide a slightly degraded experience to the user, but the video would keep going.It would also then step back up to the full bit rate at the time that the network interference cleared.

MR. BECKERMAN:Right.So, let’s take a look at the theater server level of the same clip.Now, this one is a 1.5 megabit per second clip.Again, this is entertainment broadcast quality video.And here, I’ll point out something, again, here you have that banner bar.Remember, this isn’t part of the container that the control is in, this is part of the Windows media player.I, as the author, chose to put this graphic there, et cetera.And the cool thing is, regardless of how this content is used, whether it’s used inside and embedded container, or if it’s the standalone player, I, as the author, can be assured that my experience will be the same to the end user when it comes up.

I’m going to go ahead and purchase this movie now, and you’ll see we bring up the Microsoft wallet.With this, it’s a great example of how you can do integration in commerce with NetShow 3.0 and Site Server Commerce Edition, or any other third party billing and commerce solution.

MR. MUGLIA:Again, integration is so key to most of these scenarios, and here we’re taking some very advanced media things and bringing it together with, in this case, the commerce-oriented solutions.

MR. BECKERMAN:Right.I don’t need to purchase

— or change anything here in the purchase, I’m just going to go ahead and do it.Now, instead of watching just a three to five-minute preview, I could watch the entire clip.But, of course, when I watch this thing, I really want to enjoy the experience, I want to have fun.So, we, of course, can’t do anything but watch it in full screen.

MR. MUGLIA:So this is an example of the kind of quality that’s possible with the theater server that’s part of NetShow, because we can stream very, very high bit rates.Now, this bit rate is too fast to go over the Internet today, but with new things like cable modems and ADSL, it becomes possible, and certainly for intranet-dedicated cases, it’s totally reasonable.And this quality is really the same sort of quality that you might see, for example, off of a video satellite like DirecTV.

MR. BECKERMAN:Exactly.And a key thing is, is you can do this, you can go to full screen at any bit rate, 28.8 and on up.Obviously, the higher the bit rate, the better the quality when you’re in full screen, but you can do it at any rate.You can also resize the standalone player at anytime to any size.And if you want, if you come to the advanced media solutions session later on, you’ll learn a lot more about how these types of effects with DHTML and streaming media and the Windows media player all work together to do really cool solutions for your Internet and your intranet.

MR. MUGLIA:Great.Thanks a lot, Mike.

MR. BECKERMAN:You’re welcome.

(Applause.)

MR. MUGLIA:So, this is technology we’ve been working on for some time.It’s a huge step forward for NetShow because it provides really great quality video at all speeds, and with NetShow 3, we will introduce a product that’s been in beta for some time code named Tiger, which is that high quality theater server.It’s really interesting to note that Tiger provides a fault tolerant media delivery system.For people who have deliver information at a very high quality in a fault tolerant way, Tiger is a great solution for that or NetShow 3 Theater Server.

This is a big step forward for building solutions with rich media, and a key thing is that it’s integrated in with the other capabilities of NT Server, Site Server, as well as technologies like the Commerce Edition.

So, to close now, what I want to do is briefly summarize the announcements that we’ve had today.We’ve had some major new product introductions, Visual InterDev 2, Site Server 3 and Site Server 3 Commerce Editions are some key new applications, NetShow 3, a very key set of technologies for building high quality video experiences.We’ve had some really important COM announcements associated with interoperability on multiple platforms, Microsoft support for COM on a wide variety of UNIX platforms.An important license of Iona licensing COM, and bringing the CORBA and COM worlds together, as well as some of our partners, Silicon Graphics and Digital expanding their use of COM on UNIX and VMS platforms.

So, to close, what I’d like to do isiterate our commitment to you.Microsoft is here to provide the underlying platform and set of technologies to make your jobs easier.We’re not here building the solutions — you’re going to do that, you together with your customers, together with others in the industry will build the solutions that opens up and makes the new world of the Web possible.Our job, Microsoft’s job, is to help make that simpler for you, to allow you to reach the broadest set of customers, to build this technology in an integrated way so that you can take and build a solution that is a commerce-enabled, rich Web solution, or a commerce-enabled data-driven solution.So, integration of that technology is really key.

For many, many cases, interoperability with existing applications, existing systems is important.,It doesn’t matter whether the data is in Oracle or DB2, that you’re running transactions on the mainframe with CICS, or the database is Sybase or Informix.Getting at all that information is critical and building these things together in an integrated way is a major focus.

Critical, very important to this, is that the platform is open to third parties, so that third parties can also build applications, tools, and vertical applications that make it easy for you to create solutions.We have a number of important partners, including Elemental, Frontier, Powersoft, companies that are out there helping you make it easy to create solutions.

So, the bottom line of this, it’s all about solutions, it’s all about making it easy.And the bottom line is to enable you to create business opportunity for your customers.

Thank you very much.

(Applause.)