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At the end of August, we’re holding the Microsoft Australian Partner Conference (APC) and the Australian Tech·Ed Conference. They are both key ways to keep up to date with what’s going on today, and what’s coming up - APC is perfect for non-technical staff whereas Tech·Ed is the perfect geek fest.
There will be a big focus on the Private Cloud at Tech·Ed this year, as well as some of the product launches just around the corner - such as the new version of SQL Server.
As the demand for technical professionals who understand Private Cloud, including cloud implementation and development grows, it’s important to stay on top of the latest advancements – and nothing equips you to do this like Tech·Ed 2011.
A recent Gartner report identified Microsoft as a leader in the Virtualisation market, and at Tech·Ed 2011, you’ll learn Microsoft’s overall Virtualisation strategy, key strengths and where the future is headed.
However, Virtualisation is just the start on the journey to Cloud Computing. Tech·Ed will help you to discover how Microsoft offers the simplest path to building a Private Cloud, using the infrastructure you are already familiar with.
You could also walk away from Tech·Ed 2011 with new industry certifications in Virtualisation – the key skills you need to help your organisation and your customers build a Private Cloud and to help yourself, by increasing your professional value.
Last year Tech·Ed sold out – so I’d recommend that you don’t delay.
Last week ago I shared my list of “10 of the best school websites on Sharepoint”. And the opinion around the office was that the Twynham School Sixth Form website was the most astonishing one (in fact, half a dozen times I was asked by Microsoft colleagues “Are you sure that was done in SharePoint?”).
My colleague, Ben Nunney, who’s an ex-teacher, paid it a massive compliment when he said on Twitter “I know I'm too old to go back to school, but if I could I'd go here - PURELY based on their amazing website”
Mike Herrity from Twynham School talks on his SharePoint in Education blog about all of the things that they’re doing with ICT in his school, and it makes a useful resource if you’re thinking of doing some SharePoint work yourself.
He also wrote a series of short articles about how they have created the Sixth Form site, which were published on his blog. The series actually walks through the whole process, and describes the challenges (including the need to convince the Leadership Team in the school that you can make a good looking site in SharePoint).
If you are in any way involved in using SharePoint in a school, I think it is a must read series, either for you, or for whoever is providing/developing your SharePoint.
The whole series, and a lot of extra detail, is also available in the Twynham School Learning Gateway 2007-2010 ebook
Business Intelligence (BI) in education is going to become an interesting topic over the next couple of years in Australia. Although there has always been a discussion about the use of data, and various projects that have looked at ways to analyse and use student learning data more effectively, I predict that learning analysis is going to move up the priority list for every education leadership team across Australia.
Within schools, the discussion of BI in education, and its use for learning analysis, is going to be driven by a ‘perfect storm’ of circumstances:
In some ways it is wrong to talk about BI in Education in the future tense, as there have been so many projects already which have used learning analysis data to improve student performance. But I think there is still a lot of change to come. The 2011 Horizon Report identified Learning Analysis as a key technology to watch - in four to five year’s time (I think they got the timescale wrong - it’s going to happen a lot quicker than that, and is already in many parts of the world).
There’s already some work going on within Australia. For example StrataDB have designed a project with Warren Armitage, the CIO of Brisbane Catholic Education, to deliver more detailed analysis of the learning data that’s being collected by schools and the data that comes back down from government - for example, the outcomes of formal assessments, like NAPLAN, for both their own students and other national data. The case study video below gives a good overview of the work so far.
Read more 'BI in Education' stories on this blog
OneNote, which is part of the Microsoft Office Suite, is one of the best tools for teachers and students in the Office suite. It’s also a bit of a hidden asset, because many people haven’t used it before as it wasn’t in many of the earlier versions of Office installed on classroom computers. I’ve seen it used for all kinds of learning activities - student notes, teacher lesson plans, student record files, ePortfolio, revision notes - all kinds of different things.
One of the smart things that it does is allow you to sync your notebooks with the internet, so that you can have files synced across different computers (it uses the Windows Live services to do this, so you don’t have to have all of your devices online at the same time). And you can also share your notebooks with others in the same way (so, for example, a teacher can share revision notes with students) - which they can see on any device running OneNote. Which means they can see it in OneNote for Windows, OneNote for Mac, or in OneNote on their Windows Phone.
We’ve just announced that OneNote for iPhone is now available in Australia. Which means that you can sync, edit and create new notes on your iPhone too.
And because this is a newer release, we’ve added to the list of things that it can do on the iPhone - including allowing you to search all of your notes, sync shared notebooks and choose which notebooks to sync.
Of all the improvements listed, the one that got my attention is that this new version is free on the iTunes store for a limited time period.
Read more about the announcement here (and for links in other countries), or if you’re in Australia just click below to go and get the free app in the iTunes store:
Sometimes it is difficult to imagine what the ‘Cloud’ looks like. We know it means that the data is somewhere out there in ‘the Cloud’, and that means a data centre somewhere is looking after it. And we use those Cloud services all the time - whether that’s to check our email, search the web, use a social networking site, or even just a plain web site. And they run services like Windows Live, Windows Azure, Xbox Live, Office 365, etc. Somewhere, up ‘in the Cloud’, there’s a data centre running all of this…
The Microsoft Global Foundation Services team have just released a video which looks at today’s data centres, and the construction model behind them - for example, how they are cooled, and their physical configuration works. These cloud data centres support over 200 online services, and serve more than a billion customers and 20m businesses in over 70 countries every year - and you’ve definitely used them today. But very few people actually get to see inside our data centres, so the video is a chance to see it for yourself.
Building these Cloud data centres isn’t just about the conventional ‘IT’ aspect - there’s a also a huge amount of work that goes into the efficiency of the building, and especially the power usage. Data centres can be huge power-hogs, with as much data used for cooling and lighting as for running the servers. The video talks about PUE (Power User Efficiency - the measure of data centre efficiency), and how they are now building data centres which are made from recyclable materials, with a low PUE of 1.15 (about 85% more efficient than today’s ‘average’ data centre). So, although I’ve focused on what a cloud data centre looks like, what is more important is the design features that have been built in to improve energy usage, and maximise flexibility (and as you can see, to my uninformed eye, the answer to ‘What does a Cloud data centre look like’ is ‘Quite ugly’).
So, hopefully, the next time you login to Xbox live, or a student completes an online assessment, you have a better idea what’s going in the ‘Cloud’.
I’ve mentioned the Australian Partner Conference before, but it’s now less than a month away (it runs for three days in the Gold Coast from 23 - 25 August 2011). If you haven’t yet booked your place (or if you have and want to make the best of it), then here are some additional thoughts on specific opportunities for our partners in the Education market.
During the three days, you’ll be able to meet up with some of the key individuals that work in our Education business, including our brand new Microsoft Australia Education Director. It will be possible to arrange meetings with them - just drop me an email to let me know you’d like to schedule a time
George Stavrakakis is the Microsoft Australia Education Director, having replaced Craig Foster at the beginning of July (Craig moved up to become Microsoft Australia’s Enterprise and Partner Director). George has overall responsibility for all of our education business and programmes, including both our sales team and our educational programmes such as the Partners in Learning initiative. Mark Kenny is our National Sales manager for our large education customers - including all of our state education business (with each of the 8 key states) for 6,752 schools and 60 TAFEs within the government sector, and the university sector. Of course, Mark doesn’t do this all himself - his team covers individual states, plus a team that cover the 42 universities nationally. Ken Rankins is our National Sales manager for all 2,815 private and Catholic schools. His team work with the larger schools individually, as well as with the peak bodies for the Catholic schools.
As well as the general sessions, there are two specific sessions covering the education market in depth, on Thursday 25 August.
Quick Wins in the $3BN Education IT market in Australia Education is a deep user of technology, with a huge installed base, and a large investment plan for technology-supported learning. In this session, we will hear from education customers about their investment priorities. We’ll also map Microsoft’s products and solutions into this, to see where the revenue, profitability and services effectiveness potential is. We’ll also look at case studies to forecast future market opportunities within the Australian market. 11AM - Thursday 25 August From desktop to Cloud – the changing face of your future education business Analysts highlight education as one of the early adopters of Cloud services, and the Australian market is leading the changes worldwide. We’ll look at the changes of ICT use in education – at the desktop, on students’ devices and in the infrastructure. What does that mean for you? And what is the impact upon your revenue, profitability and sales model? This session will help you to understand how it affects your business, and what opportunities it opens. 12PM - Thursday 25 August
Education is a deep user of technology, with a huge installed base, and a large investment plan for technology-supported learning. In this session, we will hear from education customers about their investment priorities. We’ll also map Microsoft’s products and solutions into this, to see where the revenue, profitability and services effectiveness potential is. We’ll also look at case studies to forecast future market opportunities within the Australian market. 11AM - Thursday 25 August
Analysts highlight education as one of the early adopters of Cloud services, and the Australian market is leading the changes worldwide. We’ll look at the changes of ICT use in education – at the desktop, on students’ devices and in the infrastructure. What does that mean for you? And what is the impact upon your revenue, profitability and sales model? This session will help you to understand how it affects your business, and what opportunities it opens. 12PM - Thursday 25 August
When you book your APC places on the registration site, you’ll be able to reserve these sessions, so that you can plan the rest of your schedule around them. For the full APC agenda, download the full detail of the APC 2011 Track Sessions here.
Find out more on the rest of the APC 2011 agenda, and how to register
Don’t forget if you’re a Gold or Silver Competency Partner, then you get your first ticket free, saving you up to $1,496.
Reading last week’s Campus Review, there’s an article about the cost of energy, the impact on Australian universities and the fact that computing is a large element of their university electricity usage:
Power bills to force an IT re-think
If electricity prices surge post-carbon tax, universities could face huge extra cost burdens because computing is a prime suspect when it comes to sucking up power.
The article quoted some statistics - like 7.1% of electricity consumption in Australia is by computers - and then went on to say that up to half of universities’ power bills might be for IT. This is because of the large fleets of computers on campus, and their associated datacentres. The other statistic that caught my eye was that the average Australian university data centre has a PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) rating of 1.9 - which means that for nearly every $1 spent on running the servers, there’s another $1 spent on electricity that’s ‘lost’ - in cooling, inefficient energy design, lighting etc.
The lower the PUE, the more effective data centre is (a PUE of 1.5 means you’re only ‘wasting’ an additional 50 cents for every $1 of computer power). So, if we’re building data centres in the Cloud to run services like Windows Azure, how can anybody afford to keep them running?
We have a team, called Microsoft Global Foundation Services, who have the job of building clouds. Or at least, building ‘the Cloud’ – they design, build, run and support our global data centres which are at the hub of all of our cloud services. Our nearest datacentre to Australia is in Singapore. I don’t know about the Singapore one, but the Chicago one is 65,000 square metres - about 10 football fields.
Obviously, at the rate we’re building these data centres, and the huge cost involved, there’s a constant journey to work out how to make the data centres increasingly efficient – especially because of their energy usage, which is a huge part of the cost of running a data centre.
Now, some of the lessons we’ve learnt aren’t things you can apply in your university server rooms easily (like cleaning the roof and painting it white, which reduces cooling cost), and playing around with the wall positioning to improve air flow. Having said they aren’t things you could easily do, that’s probably wrong - you could paint the roof white if you could cost justify it?
However, some of the things that have been learnt could be of use to you, and help you to reduce your carbon emissions and running costs – like making a trade-off in processor performance to achieve the most efficient Performance per Watt per dollar (which is one reflection of the true cost of providing a server service). We’ve also made adjustments to the temperature servers are cooled to – and switching to using more free air cooling to replace air conditioning. And we’ve even experimented by operating servers outside under a tent. The Microsoft data centres were quoted as already hitting a PUE of 1.22 in 2008.
The good news is that as we do this work, we publish it in a consumable format. If you’re interested in how to help reduce your server running costs, or in what we’re doing when we’re building massive data centres, then I can recommend “A Holistic Approach to Energy Efficiency in Datacentres” from the Microsoft Global Foundation Services team.
There is also a lot of detail about different projects going on to look at energy efficient computing, within data centres and elsewhere, on our www.microsoft.com/environment website. Some of the research up there is around Cloud Computing futures, data centre monitoring and optimisation, reducing disk energy consumption, universal parallel computing and power aware developer tools.
And finally, if your interest knows no boundaries, then you might be interested in the MS Datacenters blog, which tells the story of how we’ve grown our data centres around the world over the last few years, and shares some more of the lessons we’ve learnt.
Hopefully, there are some lessons which will help you to deliver more energy efficiency - and save money - in an Australian university data centre.
I had to update the Top Ten University websites build on SharePoint over the weekend, as one of the websites I’d listed wasn’t actually built on SharePoint
(Whoops - turned out their internal sites run on SharePoint but they’d used something else for their external site . And because I’d chosen to only look at external websites, that ruled it out).
Anyway, there’s now a new entrant in the list of the Top Ten University SharePoint sites, which is the Olin Business School, at the Washington University in St Louis - with a nice website that puts all of the key information in the right place - making it easy for prospective students and their parents to get a good idea of the Business School’s offerings:
Read the original blog post - Ten of the best - University SharePoint websites'
As I mentioned on Friday, I’m currently reading “School performance in Australia: results from analyses of school effectiveness”, a research report published in 2004.
When the report starts to take a look at the comparisons between secondary schools, using the main data sets that they have available for school-level analysis, there are five factors which they isolate as being key ones. In the statistical analysis, they call these the ‘control variables’, but they key message is that these are the five things external which have a big impact on the attainment of students. If you remove the influence of these from school-level analysis, you can then analyse the difference in performance between secondary schools more effectively.
By taking these factors into account when looking at school performance, you are able to get a better idea of how each school is performing compared to other schools, and a better idea of the ‘value added’ to individual students. (You can read much more about this from page 28 of the report. You’ll also see on Page 29, that they used a different set of factors for primary schools, which included density of indigenous students and transient families).
The question I have in my mind now is:
If you are a school leader in Australia, do you have the right performance data available, in your analysis systems, to allow for these 5 key factors? Do the reports that you receive help you to allow for these factors?
Read the full 'School Performance in Australia' report
NB I know that there will be readers who will see this as an over-simplification of the analysis. My aim isn’t to reinterpret it, but simply to share what I’m understanding as I’m reading it. And I’m sure you’ll correct me if I’m wrong - either by adding a comment below or hitting the ‘Email Blog Author’ link at the top right.
I am halfway through reading “School performance in Australia: results from analyses of school effectiveness”, a research report published in 2004. It looked at the performance of Victorian schools, as part of the Shared Future project. Although the report dates from 2004, almost all of the data and findings are still absolutely relevant today.
As I’ve been reading it, I’ve been looking for snippets of information that would be relevant and useful for a leader/teacher in an individual school. Here’s some of those:
So, if you want to raise standards in your school, the data says that having more satisfied teachers, with innovative teaching practice, and extra-curriculum programmes will make a difference. And that is even more critical to do if you are from a small school.
The other thing that surprised me is that students’ socio-economic status has a direct link to school absence (Page 20), which is interesting, but perhaps something that individual school leaders can do much about directly?
The Executive Summary has a list of key findings which are interesting at a system level, but probably less useful to an individual school seeking to improve learning (mainly because they are factors which they have little control over), but here they are, for completeness: