The WWPS Keynote

These are my notes from Steve Balmer’s keynote.

• People Ready is not a marketing campaign it is the driving mission statement.
• Vista is a block buster release- never again will MS do such a release- count on it.
• Massive launch for Vista and Office 07 – Consumer based campaigns.
  •  If consumer launch is big then then this will drive business take up
  •  Office "Better results faster" – The biggest Office release ever.

• Vista Desktop Search and Office 2007 Both use the same index

• Sharepoint – The next big thing ™
  • Search – There is a big drive to getting a unified search across desktop, Sharepoint, Back Office Solutions and the Internet
  • Sharepoint can now handle 50 million docs in its index
• Business data catalogue – search back office systems
  • Connectors for MS  CRM, SAP and  Seibel when it is RTM
  • Custom actions – Bi-Directional interactions
• People ready – Sharepoint can create  links of people across the organization. think of it as a "MySpace" for business. People who are friends  of friends. This is auto built from  contacts, AD, email etc
  • It shows the Degrees of separation
• Windows Live Search
  • Beta July
  • Rich results live preview
  • Join results from Desktop, Live.com and Sharepoint
• Unified Communications
  • Heard another bastardized word "Coopatition"!!!
  • Round Table peripheral A video conference peripheral
  •  Consistent interface – IM VoIP Email
  • Brings together all forms of comms in one UI
  • Outlook web Exchange now has rich web access with access to voice messaging
  • Can add meta data about can have voice mail forwarding to a phone as well as play in media player
  • Big on presence information.
  • One click contact  IM Messages have context put in as well as a form of meta data
  • multi party video and audio 
    • Video auto switches to speaker – Active Something or other
  • Call management. Solution
• Security – Forefront
  • Move beyond just security – Firewall anti virus anti spyware
  • Server protection