Samantha Bee from the Daily Show teamed with Steve Ballmer to give our keynote address.  The keynote was a great presentation complete with several announcements.  The first announcement was about a new service pack to Exchange and Windows Mobile – allowing push e-mail to remote mobile devices, including administration and security.  For example, you can set up a profile to wipe out all the personal data on the device if the password is incorrectly entered X number of times.  You can also remotely “clean” a device in case it’s lost.  We also heard about a new Microsoft Update initiative to help bring uniform security updates across various sized organizations through the appropriate tools.  Small businesses and individuals will continue to use Windows Update.  Large organizations will want to use the Microsoft Server Management stuff (I forgot the product name) but everything is based on the ubiquitous Windows Update service agent.  We saw a cool presentation where Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 was able to remotely administer and operate both Windows machines and other operating systems (the demo used a Sun Solaris server).  We saw a really slick demo of the Longhorn file system interface (Explorer with some major enhancements).  Each of the demos was accompanied with a fun video presentation and some humorous comments by Samantha Bee.  My favorite humorous sketch was where Samantha and some guy re-enacted the kinds of problems IT admins and developers have with each other – using puppets.  Good stuff…

I’m writing this entry from the back of the room while in a Biztalk presentation.  Unfortunately, I entered the presentation in the middle because the keynote ran a bit long.  The talk seems to be a good explanation of how Biztalk, Infopath, and WSE can work together to bring some really impressive flexibility and agility to business process orchestration.  Basically, we’re taking an info entry web page (generated with Infopath) and sending the messages through WSE to a Biztalk module.  We got to see the Biztalk WSE web services publishing wizard (the wizard is actually within Visual Studio!)  I sit here realizing that I don’t really know anything about Biztalk and I have a lot of studying to do. 

— Matt Ranlett

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