Second Architect meeting in Seattle
There we are, after a second packed day in Seattle. Whilst yesterday was with the EMEA Architects, today we had the pleasure to meet with the World Wide Architect community at Microsoft.
We had very famous names such as:
Michael Platt who came an talked to us about Web 2.0 - What it is; how to look at it from a business perspective and from an IT perspective. This was quite an informative session. Later in the day, I spent some time with Brendon Webster who workd in Mike's team.
Simon Guest who has taken over the responsibility of Content delivery for the Architects. In this responsibility, he also has become owner of the Architect Journal. BTW, if you feel like publishing content in the Architect Journal, feel free to send an e-mail to Simon. He also works on "User Experience (UX)". UX goes way beyond User Interface. It's actually how the user interacts with a system. Talking about UX, see what those guys have done! Absolutely fabulous this "Play Anywhere" concept and this ... Starbucks pointer! That's UX! :-)
We had also the visit of Gianpaolo Carraro. He went into his study of Software as a Service and the consequences of that at many level: The consumer, le ISV, the Hoster, the Developer, etc. Gianpaolo is preparing a book on SaaS et tons of content (Video, whitepaper, code samples, sample app, etc).
We met with Vijay Rajagopalan who is responsible for ensuring that, inside Microsoft, everything we do is interoperable. Vijay and his team are working on recommendations and guidance on the following topics:
- Open XML Translators that my readers know about already
- Cross-platform aspect of CardSpace
- Data interoperability
- Web Service Interoperability (Huh, I thought it was ... by design! ;-) )
- Active Directory and OpenLDAP
- Infopath
- Sharepoint
He has lots of things on his plate and I wish his lots of success. The work he's doing is instrumental to the future perception of Microsoft.
We had the visit of a couple of other guys but mainly for internal stuff that I won't elaborate here.
That's it for today ... Stay tuned for tomorrow's 3 architect day: The day of the Special Interest Group on Enterprise Search! :-)
