Innovation for Partners in the UK : development

Free technical seminars for ISVs wanting to know more about the Microsoft Office 2007 Open XML document format

ukpartner — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 20:07:00 GMT

The Microsoft Developer and Platform Group will be hosting two half day technical sessions aimed at Microsoft partners, especially ISVs, focusing on Microsoft Office Open XML, the new document format for Microsoft Office 2007. Theses sessions will cover the new format, and explore how they can be used within applications and systems.

Some potential scenarios include:

Creating multiple, customised documents without automating Microsoft Word
Drop custom data packets direct into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets from a database feed
Swap style and images and text in documents by injecting XML
Archive documents

If you have looked at working with Microsoft Office documents in previous releases, you will be pleased to discover that, based on partner feedback, the new Office XML Formats are compact, robust file formats that enable better data integration between documents and back-end systems. This new format is designed to make it easy for applications to create and manipulate documents, opening up a whole variety of opportunities for applications to integrate document production, archiving, etc.

This session is aimed at Architects, Senior developers and System Designers, and some familiarity with .NET framework is desirable to obtain the most from this event. The day will be a mixture of presentations, demos and discussions, and to keep a small informal atmosphere, the event is constrained to a maximum of 20 people (2 per company), to ensure lots of opportunity for discussion.

To Book

This event is being run twice

20th March 2007, 1pm – 4pm. Microsoft Campus, Thames Valley Park, Reading, Berkshire, RG6 1WG.

To book: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032331093&Culture=en-GB

22nd March 2007. 9:30am – 1pm. Microsoft Campus, Thames Valley Park, Reading, Berkshire, RG6 1WG.

To book: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032331106&Culture=en-GB

- David

SaaS is not a software revolution

ukpartner — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 23:49:54 GMT

That's right - SaaS (Software as a Service) is not a software revolution. Someone from a large Internet company recently referred to Microsoft's software as "old school" because it runs on the desktop. Heck, even some of our own executives have implied SaaS is the future. It's not. Service-based software is not the sole vision of the future at Microsoft.

SaaS is a very real thing and every company should think about the implications. It creates new business models and opens up the door for some interesting B2C and B2B opportunities. It in no way negates the need for desktop (or server) software.

If I were to give up local software for software that was only available when connected, I'd lose anywhere from 50 - 75% of my working day. I travel a lot to and from work and spend a large amount of time on airplanes, but even for the most connected individuals with fancy little 3G cards would lose a significant amount of productivity if they had to be online to run software.

But it's early days, right? No - it's not. Broadband access is becoming more and more ubiquitous but to think it will someday in the near future (next 5 years) be anywhere and everywhere with 100% uptime at affordable prices is too idealistic for my tastes.

The only analogy I can think of is equating SaaS to airplanes and traditional software as trains / cars / metros. The airplane is a fantastic invention - without it the world would be much different but we probably shouldn't get rid of cars and other local transportation options just yet.

So how would I look at SaaS?

A good option is to think about it as Software + Services. Some chatter about this surfaced on a few of our internal aliases at Microsoft and I really like the way one person described it. Services are software and require a platform to run.

The platform, in some instances, can be a simple AJAX-friendly browser (Firefox or Internet Explorer), it can be a slightly richer application that requires connectivity (AJAX + WPFe or .NET or Flash), or it can be a premium desktop experience (C++, WPF/.NET, Java) that exposes additional functionality when the user is connected to the Internet but is perfectly accessible offline.

There's a need for each of these scenarios now and the foreseeable future. There's a reason Adobe is working so hard to bring Flash to the desktop and Microsoft continues to invest a significant amount of R&D in desktop technologies in conjunction with services.

Now don't get me wrong - we get the concept of services. XBox Live was the fastest growing subscription service in history. We're making huge investments in other aspects of our Live platform (Search, Office Live, Windows Live, Live Messenger, Spaces, Live Local, etc.) but our services are not a bet on the future. Those services have fantastic potential because of their ability to operate online while integrating with other powerful software.

- Paul

Technorati tags: SaaS, S+S, WPF, WPFe, AJAX, Live

Real World WPF videos

ukpartner — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 18:25:00 GMT

If you are developing with Windows Presentation Foundation, check out our new series of screencasts and videos on Channel9, known as Real World WPF. The UK MCS User Experience Team and a number of UK partners have been working on WPF for over 12 months and this Real World WPF series is intended to show some of their work and capture/share some of their learnings. We hope you find them useful and there will be more to follow.

post by Nick Page

5-minute guides to AJAX, Expression, Live, WPF, and WPF/e

ukpartner — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 12:05:17 GMT

About 3 months ago our team made a great acquisition - Andrew Shorten.

Andrew has been helping developers, partners and customers leverage the Internet as an application platform over the last 8 years; from designing & building web-based solutions for enterprise customers at Fujitsu, through to evangelising about the importance of user experience and smart client technologies at Macromedia/Adobe. Andrew believes that experience matters and nowhere is this more important than when accessing services, applications and content online – he is excited by the opportunities that “Web 2.0” and rich Internet applications present to deliver applications that people actually want to use and which deliver real business benefit.

One of the great things about having someone with this experience is they can relate first-hand the strengths, weaknesses, and unique opportunities Microsoft's client / web technologies present for custom development agencies.

In light of this, Andrew put together a series of quick 5-minute guides to several Microsoft technologies from a non-Microsoft perspective. Check them out:

- Paul

Technorati tags: AJAX, Expression, Live, WPF, WPFe, Adobe

Virtual PC 2007 - free

ukpartner — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 23:31:28 GMT

We were waiting for the announcement to go live as the folks at CrunchGear just mentioned it. You can now download Virtual PC 2007 at no cost.

Technorati tags: Virtual PC

Web 2.0 Mashup Competition

ukpartner — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 12:18:33 GMT

James has just announced a Web 2.0 mashup competition. If you're a developer looking to experiment with Web 2.0 and various complementary services - BT has built a sandboxed environment for you to give it a go, with a $25k price to boot.

www.networkmashups.com

Why Vista Matters to Developers

ukpartner — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 00:42:33 GMT

A good article on the importance of Vista for developers. I particularly like this article because you hear from customers and partners directly on what Windows Vista means to them and their business. A few good quotes:

"Perhaps even more profound, if somewhat less groundbreaking, is that the .Net Framework 2.0—on which 3.0 sits—is also included, thus making Vista the first version of Windows that ships ready-to-run .Net ClickOnce Smart Client applications and any other .Net application," Brust said. "That's big news. Since .Net apps, when shipped without the framework, can be extremely small, the release of Vista makes it possible for .Net apps to ship as casually as Visual Basic apps could years ago once the VB run-time started shipping as part of Windows."

Jim Arrowood, an enterprise architect with Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group, in Tulsa, Okla., said, "One major benefit gained out of the box from Windows Communication Foundation for Dollar Thrifty was the ability to offer different Web service endpoints built upon a single code base." Arrowood is working on a new car rental system for Dollar Rent A Car and Thrifty Car Rental that will be based on Vista.

The New York Times' Times Reader, a Vista-based beta application, is one such [killer] application, he said. "It's the visuals and the underlying capabilities made manifest in killer applications that will convince consumers to upgrade," Schadler said. "It took only one application to convince me: the Times Reader."

You can read the full article over on eWeek.

What is Innovation?

ukpartner — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 14:00:00 GMT

Technically speaking, it's the introduction of new things or methods.

Innovation is a topic I've debated with many people, including professors at Instituto de Empresa (translated), colleagues, and in my own head. It's a tough one, who innovates and who doesn't? Does innovation matter if you're profitable and forecast growth? Is innovation too risky for established companies? People often debate if Microsoft innovates and to me that question is irrelevant. Microsoft is a platform company and well over 90% of our business is done through partners. In some cases we make the call to step back and deliver the end product (XBox, Zune, etc) but most of the time we bank on partners delivering innovative products into the market.

So the real question is not does Microsoft innovate, but does Microsoft enable their partners to innovate?

You might ask, does innovation even matter? I think the FT says it best:

Innovation used to happen by chance, if it happened at all.
Not any longer. Today, the world's most forward-thinking companies see innovation as an engine for growth and, therefore, something that must be strategically managed and securely harnessed. It is the new currency of competition. It is the key to organic growth and wider profit margins. It is, in short, the Holy Grail of business in the 21st Century and companies must keep innovating if they are to keep growing. [link]

So why is our team focussed so heavily on partner innovation? We see it as the key competitive advantage to software partners and we want to do everything possible to ensure Microsoft's partners are successful today and tomorrow. To put it even more bluntly, your success is our success.

What do you think: does Microsoft enable our partners to innovate?

post by Paul Murphy

What is this blog? This will be a technical voice to the 4,000 independent software vendors (ISV's) and 6,000 custom development software (CDS) partners in the UK. The target audience for this blog will be developers and architects within those organizations and our goal is to provide you with specific resources and insight to help you and your companies succeed with innovation.