MicrosoftinDefence

Introduction of a new blogger on Microsoft in Defence

2011-03-16T10:45:35Z

My name is Angus Lyon and I am an Enterprise Strategy Architect working with a special interest in Public Sector and Defence. I work with clients to release the business value of Microsoft technology that they have bought. In order to help a client get the most out of our technology it is important to understand the current IT and business capabilities as well as their goals and objects within their “business” environment. I hope to be contributing to this blog from a “business before technology” perspective

Main Building Summit

2011-03-14T11:54:00Z

Hi all,

Well the Main Building summit went very well, with everyone I spoke to finding it very useful. There was a great presentation on the Logistics use of Project, a scary presentation from one of our senior security team member from the US on the threat landscape from the internet, and splendid keynotes from Maj-Gen Tim Inshaw of DE&S and Mark Ferrar, CTO of Microsoft. On the second day we had tracks on security, information management and cloud.

Overall people reported themselves more favourable towards Microsoft afterwards, so a great session from our point of view. Anecdotally, some MoD people thought it was the best ever (it's our 8th you know) so all in all, we're very pleased.

In fact, we're going to run a 'digest' of the session on 5th May in the new Corsham facility, so if you're in that neck of the woods, please apply when we're ready to take invitation requests (I'll let you know here when that happens). Of course, it's up to the MoD who gets in though.

if you're there, I'll see you then!

All the best

pdb

p.s. You'll have noticed a new face on the blog, Angus. He's very interested in cloud, so I look forward to some excellent posts from him. And no, I'm not going away either :-)

Check out the US site

2011-02-23T12:33:43Z

Hi everyone, again a long time between posts, but this time I thought I'd draw your attention to our US brethren, who have an interesting site here

http://www.microsoft.com/industry/publicsector/government/defense/default.aspx

which describes a number of areas of defence business areas such as Logistics, Intelligence, Secure Communications, and Situational Awareness, and describes solutions built on Microsoft technologies in those areas, and who's using them. There are pages on partners, news and events as well. Well worth a read in a quiet moment.

Talking of events, the Microsoft/MoD summit is in Main Building next week (March 1st/2nd) so I hope to see you there!

All the best

pdb

Microsoft Summit, March 1st/2nd, MoD Main Building

2010-12-08T11:42:56Z

HI all,

Been very busy lately so sorry for the paucity of posts. However, a quick note to say that we are now putting together the agenda for the Microsoft Summit that we and MoD hold every year in Main Building, this time on the 1st and 2nd March 2011, on the subjects of security, Microsoft technology, and its use in defence in the UK and around the world.

We tend to organise it so that the first day is a business led day, with technology overviews, and the second day is a more detailed look at some of the areas we want to discuss.

The audience is almost all MoD, but there are often some representatives from elsewhere in UK Government such as the police forces.

Obviously we and the CIO's office (who are the event sponsors) have some things we'd like to see on the agenda, but if you have a burning desire to see a subject addressed we'd like to hear from you. No promises of course, but please do get in touch.

All the best

pdb

SDSR - saving money on infrastructure AND applications

2010-11-02T09:57:47Z

Hi all,

Well the SDSR is out and I suppose while it’s not good news in budgetary terms it’s not as bad as it might have been. But in the spirit of saving money let me reaffirm one of my earlier posts – use what you already have. The DII estate has access to most of our capability, so from the point of view of saving money this should really be the first port of call for any IT project.

One capability that isn’t included in the DII Enterprise Agreement however (though of course its supporting technologies Windows Server and SQL Server are) is our Dynamics application suite. One of these packages is Dynamics CRM, and it is particularly relevant to the defence marketplace. How so, you cry, as defence organisation typically don’t have customers? Not in the regular sense anyway :-). Well, Dynamics CRM is built on a technology called xRM, which succeeds in the abstracting away from the application creator any of the infrastructure or desktop gubbins that usually accompanies the building of an application. In xRM, you define your ‘entities’ (such as people, contracts, tasks, whatever you want – many of them are already predefined for you), describe the relationships between them (that’s where xRM comes from – anything relationship management), and describe the workflow which surrounds them, and xRM does the rest. It generates schemas, forms, processing, and everything else. You don’t have to manage the database, and if you change anything, xRM automatically regenerates anything that needs regenerating. It is already integrated with SharePoint and Office, is completely web based (though there is an Outlook client if you wish), and is extensible with .net though in most cases you won’t need that. Ah but isn’t this just another application platform? Well that’s the point – why build another application with a different UI, different infrastructure, and then try to integrate it into your document management, collaboration, workflow, and office processes, when you could use a scalable, consistent platform that’s already integrated into everything else you have?

Have a look at this:

http://www.microsoft.com/industry/government/solutions/task_management/default.aspx

Here you can see how the USAF have built a ‘request for forces’ application on xRM much more quickly and cheaply than their alternatives. In the UK many government departments, including the MoD are using xRM for a wide cariety of tasks – case management, tasking, scheduling, call centre, compensation, well you can read the case studies for yourselves, and if you need pointers let me know. I really feel it’s time to move away from the ‘army of developers building bespoke code on a bespoke architecture’ style of development, and towards a common infrastructure, common platform approach. As one customer recently said to me, if you can build an Microsoft Access application, you can use xRM, and this has to be the way forward.

If the SDSR is to have as little impact as possible on defence deliverables, in the IT application space, xRM is going to be a key tool. Let me know what you think – peter.birch@microsoft.com

IT Academies in Defence – training opportunities

2010-10-10T12:38:22Z

Hello again all,

I was out visiting a part of the MoD lest week, and training came up in discussion. The people I was speaking to were unaware that the three forces colleges have signed up to be Microsoft IT Academies, which means they can deliver our training courses. I wondered if this was generally not well known, so here’s a link to the IT Academy program

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/education/schools/curriculum-resources/IT-academy/the-programme.aspx

and here, culled from the same site, are the addresses and contact details for further information.

MOD DCCIS AIR FORCE (Cosford)

Advanced

Technical Trade School

No 1 Radio School

ALBRIGHTON,

WV7 3EX

UNITED KINGDOM

Phone:	01258#482213
Fax:

MOD DCCIS ARMY (Blandford Camp)

Advanced

Technical Trade School

Royal School of Signals

Blandford Camp

Engineering Division

DORSET,

DT118RH

UNITED KINGDOM

Phone:	01258#482034
Fax:

MOD DCCIS NAVY (Collingwood)

Advanced

Technical Trade School

CISSTO

Malborough F2

FAREHAM,

PO14 1AS

UNITED KINGDOM

Phone:	01329 332180
Fax:

They offer a great way to get trained on Microsoft technologies and capabilities. What are you waiting for? :-)

pdb

International news!

2010-10-03T10:01:11Z

Hi again, well last time I promised a view on what’s happening around the world, and right on cue, an announcement from NATO that they and Microsoft have signed their first partnering agreement, to work together within the Framework for Collaborative Technologies, as they call it. This is good news – NATO will benefit from our technology understanding of topics like cloud computing, retention of knowledge during staff turnover, and so on, and we will benefit from their obvious understanding of defence so that we can make our offerings more relevant to the defence world.

Actually that’s not the first such agreement in the defence world, he said smugly. Some years ago we in the UK signed a Strategic Relationship Document with the MoD which described how we would collaborate, which has had many fruits including, for example, the revamped IP stack in Windows Vista and following OSes which provides better throughput over lossy networks such as satellite of radio. If there’s any interest I’ll write more about that later.

We’re always interested in getting to know our customers better, so please do get in touch if there’s an area you think we could work together on. Peter.birch@microsoft.com is the place to go.

One of our key thrusts this year is a way to build applications better, faster, cheaper than the current approaches. Next time I’ll talk a little about that, and reference some great work done in the USAF with it.

Bye for now

pdb

The DII Enterprise Agreement – what is in it?

2010-09-24T15:26:51Z

Hi everybody, I promised an entry on what the MoD has already purchased so here it is. Firstly it’s important to know the boundaries of the purchase, and that’s really the DII. If your system or users are part of the DII program, and have DII UADs then you can use the agreement, subject of course to DII approval – it is their contract after all :-). So what is in it? Well, on the desktop you have Windows, Office, Project, Visio, the Enterprise CAL, the MDOP package, the Remote Desktop Services CAL, and the SQL Server CAL. Some things in there you might not know about

- you have Rights Management, which allows you to send an email of an Office document, and specify that the recipient cannot forward it, print it, edit it, and a dozen other things.

- You have App-V our application virtualisation package, which allows an application to be streamed on demand to a client machine, and although the app is running on the machine it never installs there or interferes with other applications

- You have our full antivirus/anti-malware capability, both on servers and on clients

And a host of other capabilities. On the server side, you have virtually unlimited copies (well, up to 180,000 of each) of Windows Server, SQL Server, MOSS, BizTalk, SCCM, SCOM, TMG, Office Communication Server, and Exchange Server, all Enterprise server editions. There’s a lot of capability in there – web server, Enterprise Service Bus, management infrastructure, unified communications, voice and video conferencing, and so on. If you’re eligible to use it, you really shouldn’t be looking to spend money on any of these capabilities without examining what the Enterprise Agreement offers first. In these difficult economic times, you could easily save a six or seven figure sum.

If you have any questions drop me a line – peter.birch@microsoft.com

Next time we’ll look around the defence world at some of the uses Microsoft software is being put to.

All the best

Pdb

Welcome and Introductions

2010-09-16T10:29:20Z

Hi everybody, and welcome to the Microsoft in Defence blog. I’m Peter Birch, and I work on the MoD account here in the UK (note the ‘c’ in Defence :-). I realised a little time ago that we didn’t have an easy way of communicating directly with the majority of our customer base, which is you, MoD staff and our partner organisations. So what I hope we’ll have here is an interesting and thought-provoking short digest every now and again of useful information on what Microsoft and our partners are doing in defence in the UK, and where relevant, around the world.

Of course there are certain sensitivities in the defence business, so obviously I won’t be discussing anything not in the public domain. However, there is much we can talk about - how MS products are being used innovatively to solve defence problems, what can be used from the DII program’ Enterprise Agreement, and especially in these dire economic times, how you can save money and do more with less using our kit, and particularly our platform approach. That’ll be in a later blog as well.

I hope you’ll find something to interest you here – check back every week or so, and there should be something new. The next article will be on what the MoD have already purchased from us through the DII program, and whether you can make use of that in your own areas, so hope to see you then!

All the best

Pdb