It’s launchtime

A mere two months after the birth announcement for Windows Vista, Office 2007, and Exchange 2007 — and after I complained about the lack of fanfare — Microsoft is finally having their coming out parties. I am attending one today at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Here are my notes from the opening session. I’m afraid some of these notes may be rather meaningless — I think Microsoft employees all have prior experience as mortgage company radio commercial disclaimer readers.

Keynote: They opened with a video showing people all over the globe worrying about version control, searching for information, laptop security, remote computing, and costs of deployment. These people are “ready for a new day.” David Willis, East Region VP for Small Mid-market Solutions & Partners, delivered the welcome. I think he’s Canadian because his “abouts” sounded a lot like “aboot.” He used a word I’ve never heard before: “dogfooding.” Based on the context in which he used it, I think that has something to do with product testing.

Demo: User Experience. They showed off Vista’s new features, such as live task previews (little windows that show thumbnails of what the icons stand for). These include a new Alt-Tab feature and Windows Flip-3D. Also new search functionality that does full-text searching of e-mail and documents. Fully animated desktop: You can have movies playing in the background instead of a static picture. They showed a view from the front car on a roller coaster and a serene waterfall view. For Office 2007, they showed off the Ribbon. This replaces toolbars and menus, organizes commands into tabs. Office also has live preview functionality: hold your mouse over a style element and your selected text will immediately be shown in that style.

My take on these features: The live preview stuff is great, if you have a 30″ screen. On a 12″ ultraportable, you’re not really going to be able to see anything useful. Note that you can already get an advanced Alt-Tab view on XP using XP PowerToys. A lot of the search functionality is also available today Windows XP through Windows Desktop Search. The fully animated desktop sounds like a nightmare, to be honest. Do you really want your employees spending their time trying to decide which video they want to have playing in the background? Wouldn’t you rather have them paying attention to the documents on the screen?

Slides: Areas to help your business grow. Here’s an outline of Microsoft’s objectives with these new products.

1. Simplify how people work together
   1. Unify business communications
   2. Empower teams
   3. Connect people, process, and information
   4. Enable work anywhere (Microsoft is now buying companies but letting them stay where they are rather than move everyone to Redmond)
2. Find info and improve business insight
   1. Find what you’re looking for
   2. Integrate disparate business systems
   3. Analyze complex business information
   4. Empower decision making
3. Help protect and manage content
   1. Manage diverse content
   2. Satisfy compliance requirements
   3. Protect and recover information on PCs
   4. Reduce paper and manual processes
4. Reduce IT costs and improve security (2003 wave of products reduced Microsoft’s internal infrastructure cost per user by 33%; they are hoping for similar costs savings this time around)
   1. Simplify deployment
   2. Mitigate security threats (One guy said Vista’s real improvement is security, not user interface)
   3. Improve IT management
   4. Reduce support costs

Microsoft runs on its new products. About 70,000 people were using Vista and Office 2007 within Microsoft before the products shipped. All of Microsoft is on Exchange 2007.

Demo: Collaboration and Search. This was an extremely rapid-fire scenario of a sales manager looking for information. Showed new look of Outlook 2007. Showed integration of voicemail into e-mail. Showed instant search to find messages about that topic. Showed message flagging for follow-up with date sensitivity (e-mail messages show on calendar and task views.) Showed Windows Vista Search again, including thumnail/preview to see what the docs are before you open them. PowerPoint has been made sexier with SmartArt — richer visual effects. Showed document storage on SharePoint server. Text is searchable. Can also search for people by “social distance.” Employees have their own ”MySite”, with their profiles, blogs, slide libraries. (My take: This might be important in companies where employess don’t actually know each other, but it’s hard to see the value in a small business.) SharePoint business data catalog feature can pull information in from other business applications. Excel web services can publish data through SharePoint, accessible via web browser. Windows mobility center in Vista allows you to make all kinds of changes on your laptop to prepare for making a presentation at a new location. Can hide your personal desktop, set volume low, turn off screen saver, block IM, etc. Windows Meeting Space within Vista finds other nearby Vista machines and creates ad hoc peer to peer network for sharing your desktop.

Reports from beta testers: W.A. Wilde, Digitas. They were pleased with the new products but it was a bit hard to understand what they were talking about without context.

Demo: Protect and Manage Content. How do you keep content up to date? How do you collaborate with people inside and outside of the organization? Scenario: senior business manager taking data from customers and collaborating with external business partners. Focus on content management with SharePoint. Can make a change in customer-facing web site and initiate a request to IT to approve the change. How many people are working with InfoPath? (Nobody.) Good good good. Now what do you notice that’s different? Browser-based version rather than rich client. Shows customer survey in SharePoint. Business Performance Dashboard pulls together information from SharePoint-based surveys, including green / yellow / red indicators. New conditional formatting in Excel: color scales. Points out high and low values within a column. SharePoint libraries can contain very confidential information. You can protect individual documents with individual user permissions and can create audit trails of access and security modifications. Libraries have policies about retention, confidentiality. Can prepare documents for external consumption (get rid of revision history, comments, etc.).Groove technology: better way of sharing large files outside of firewall — can replicate from SharePoint to Groove Workspace, all protected and encrypted. Can create HTML-based calendar with subset of your data that you can e-mail to people. Can encrypt laptop hard drives with Vista’s bitlocker.

Demo: Reduce IT Costs and Improve Security. This demo focused on IT administrators. Companies are worried about USB drives taking confidential information out of the office. Vista has new group policy settings to control which devices can be installed on the system and can notify users if they are restricted. The presenter admitted that running Windows XP as a standard user can be challenging (e.g., can’t change time, modify power settings to improve battery performance, run certain applications). Vista has User Account Control. Can change time zone but not date and time. Can change power mode. Can join wireless networks. Protected mode in IE7 on Vista — can’t install malicious software without getting through Windows Defender. Also has phishing protection. (My note: But all of these antivirus and antiphishin alerts seem to give the end user the ability to ignore the warnings and view the suspicious web site or try to install the suspicious software anyway.) Will soon release application compatibility toolkit 5.0 to help with migration to new operating system. Help for the help desk: Vista has a reliability monitor that shows system stability over time and records installations and uninstallations. Microsoft Operations Manager will be doing cross-company analysis of reliability monitor.

Microsoft says that there will be $2 billion in revenue for Massachusetts IT companies from Vista, there will be 5,000 new jobs, and 18% of total IT employment in MA will be Vista related. (My question: if Vista saves so much money, why will there be all this new spending on IT people?)

Lots more to come later this year: Office Communicator 2007, IP phones, voice call management, Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 (analytics), Windows Desktop Optimization Pack (tools from Softricity and Winternals), Forefront client security, System Center Configuration and Operations Manager/Client (replacing MOM and SMS); later Longhorn server.

And that was just the first 90 minutes. Whew!