Category: Events

#mvp10 Don’t Tell Anyone This …

… I can’t share any of the content from the Microsoft MVP Summit 😉

We’ve been encouraged to let people know about the experience but all content, be it technical, strategy, marketing, jokes, etc are all under our MVP Non Disclosure Agreements (NDA) and MS went to great lengths yesterday to reinforce that.

Yesterday was a sort of introductory day to get the ball rolling.  We had some generic sessions and some keynotes.  I attended one session where senior managers from a division worked as a panel and MVP’s brought their own questions/feedback, and those from their employers, customers and colleagues.  I think it was educational for both sides of the conversation.  And as expected, MVP’s don’t have questions -  they have comments with question marks on the end.

At the end of the day there was a reception.  I was selected to be one of the MVP’s to video record a question for an executive keynote on Friday.  I cannot share anything about it, other than it’s a question I think everyone would have on their top 5 list.  It’ll be cool if it gets played and answered.

We might now be able to tell people now about what we learn (not even our employers) but we will be able to work better (without telling you why) and be in a better position to share information when MS releases us on those specifics.  We’re also bringing feedback that we have gathered, hopefully helping MS to give their customers a product that you want.

Another part of the summit is networking.  It was nice to meet some of my American fellow virtualisation MVP’s for the first time.  I also got to meet Mike Sterling, one of the guys behind Hyper-V, that you may know through blogging and Twitter.  He’s a cool guy and really got me excited about these next 2 days, giving us a hint of the hard work they’ve been doing to prepare.  I also got to meet up again with fellow STEP & TechEd Springboard booth staff members Justin Rodino and Miklos Cari.  There were lots of the familiar UK/Ireland MVP’s.  At least 5 of the Irish MVP’s are here in town covering virtualisation, unified communications, XNA and SQL.  And of course, there’s a good representation from the Minasi forum which has a unusually high number of MVP’s in the ranks.  We hung out at the reception last night and chatted about things from writing, books, the upcoming Minasi conference, and what we’ve been up to since we last met.

Later this morning we head out to the Redmond Campus and split up to meet the product teams in person.  These will be the deep-dive, uber-secret technical sessions that everyone wants to know about :)  I’m quite excited about these two days, because these two days of the year are the biggest of the benefits we get as MVP’s.  Not even our fellow MVP’s who couldn’t make it here this week get access to this information.  It’s an amazing privilege and one we have to take very seriously.

Starting from 7am, 1,400 MVP’s will be leaving 4 hotels and getting on the Microsoft shuttles to head out to a number of buildings in Redmond.  There we take on our role of playing secret agents once again, keeping secrets and hopefully representing you … but also hopefully having a lot of fun in the process.

Microsoft Ireland Partner Event: Virtualisation & Management

This is a follow on from my post earlier today on the 2010 Microsoft Ireland Partner event.  This post will focus on the virtualisation track.

Ronan Geraghty (owner of the Server business in Ireland, former DPE) introduces the session.  Wilbour Craddock (partner technical sales) takes over to talk about Windows Server 2008 R2.

The story for Windows Server 2008 R2 is:

  • Streamlined management
  • Robust web platform
  • “Better Together” with Windows 7
  • Virtualisation with Hyper-V

It’s an evolution of Windows Server 2008, not an entirely new operating system.  However, there is a lot more stuff in there.  Read the stuff on that link; it’ll save me typing a bunch of stuff.

The key to the MS platform is System Center. OpsMgr for fault/performance/audit collection, VMM for virtualisation, DPM for backup and ConfigMgr for deployment, auditing and reporting.  Service Desk will be a complete helpdesk solution implementing MOF/ITIL.

Liam Cronin (Compete Lead) takes over to talk about the compete message.  MS Ireland is big on competing with VMware.

VMware

Strategy:

  • 100% of Fortune 100 and 96% of Fortune 1000
  • Win the desktop through VDI
  • Win the cloud

Evolution:

  • Rich virtualisation portfolio
  • Acquiring a lot of technology through company take over

Partners:

  • 700+ tech partners
  • 65% of partner revenue through OEM’s
  • Rich virtual appliance market

MS Differentiators

  • MS is a platform company.  VMware is a product company, not a platform one.
  • MS is competitive with Windows Server 2008 R2 – claims by Liam that MS is ahead on features … I’m as pro Hyper-V as it gets and I disagree.  MS has the core stuff and it works excellently but does not have the same set of features as VMware.
  • MS is more cost effective
  • Management & security (very true)

Why pay a “vTax” to VMware when virtualisation is built into Windows?

Objection Handling

Made a commitment to VMware already: Don’t need to rip/replace.  You can use System Center to manage, maybe use Hyper-V for newer stuff.  The virtualisation platform isn’t as important as the management of it.

4 questions to ask VMware customers:

  • Why does VMware have a mandatory support contract that doesn’t include upgrades?
  • Why do they have to pay more money for VMotion?  Live Migration is in the free Hyper-V Server 2008 R2.
  • How does VMware provide management for operating systems and applications running on their hypervisor?
  • Ask VMware what their virtualised desktop solution is for roaming or remote users who are disconnected.

Citrix V-Alliance

Matthew Brenchley – Strategic Alliances Manager from the UK.

Citrix has 21 years of partnership with Microsoft. 

Essentials For Hyper-V

OK – I want a Citrix person to say exactly what this is.  I have yet to see a clear explanation.  Where is the comic book store guy when you need him …. oh … “Worst Marketing Ever”.  We get the pitch on VDI and how Citrix can work on the MS platform.  Not much meat on these bones; the trend continues unfortunately.  I guess I’ll have to wait until PubForum to hear technical information on the Citrix side of things.

Over to marketing person, Karen Reilly.  This is a pitch for recruiting members into the V-Alliance.  Focus appears to be on desktop virtualisation.  Lead generation support and POC funding.  I’m glad I have guest wifi access.  Seriously, VDI is an expensive model and is a very niche solution.

Afterwards

I chat with Will and he tells me what Citrix Essentials is about.  (a) It allows block level and de-duplicated replication of VM’s between sites.  You can use different storage systems that don’t have replication engines and you do not need dark fibre – unlike controller based replication systems (b) It provides a lab/development deployment solution where the MS solution is purely developer driven in Visual Studio 2010.

Microsoft Ireland Partner Community Expert Event

I’m attending this day long event and will try to blog as I go along.

Morning Introduction

Conor Whickam, Partner Manager at Microsoft Ireland, opens the day to introduce the agenda.  This is meant to be an interactive session.  I was a bold boy at one of these this time last year so I’m shutting up.  I can hear sighs of relief.

Paul Rellis

Paul Rellis, the GM of Microsoft Ireland takes over with a keynote.  The theme is Microsoft = Productivity.  I guess this is a Business Intelligence year.  He starts talking about a famous human cannon ball called Armando?  The ringmaster was asked why he wasn’t replaced after he died.  It’s because he could find a person of the right calibre.  *Boom Boom*  MS invests in their people and “in their partners”.  MS wants partners to invest in their own staff as MS develops their staff.

The message about Azure/BPOS comes out.  Your two options are to install on premise or to install on Azure.  It’s a partner event but the hosting partners have already been had their ankles slashed.  MS needs to rethink that message.  Plenty of hosters are already pushing Linux more than Windows.  MS jacks up SPLA licensing costs (going up this year, at the end of each annual contract) while competing with their partners with aggressive sales.  CentOS and LAMP will continue to dominate the online market.

State of the Irish Market

Richard Moore now takes over to talk about the state of the Irish Market.  The opportunities include upgrade projects and end of life projects.

On the PC side:

  • 2010 will continue to see a decline until the second half of the year.  The low will be at 2005 levels.
  • Retail is continuing to take market share, growing by 10%
  • Up to 10% of national PC sales will be through the National Educational PC deal
  • Netbooks have not been as successful as predicted.  That’s because notebooks and netbooks do not have a great price differential.  However Telco’s may offer them at discount prices in combination with mobile broadband contracts.

Servers:

  • Sales down from 40,000 to 30,000
  • IDC predicts another decline in 2010.  This may level out in 2011.
  • A spike in sales (to Dell, not HP!) in 2009 was caused by the MS data centre.

Software:

  • 2009 saw a massive slowdown with 4% drop.
  • 2010 predicting a .7% increase.
  • 2011 expected to be around 3.4%

The overall levels are back to 2005 numbers.  2010 will see small decrease or a levelling out.

New opportunities

  • Exchange 2010, Office 2010, SharePoint 2010
  • Server: upgrades and low end (continuing to sell)
  • Cloud computing

Exchange:

  • Lots of old deployments still out there.  70% of E2003 or older.
  • E2010 “offers cost savings” and productivity improvements.
  • Easier to support and maintain.
  • Access anywhere is a mature solution.
  • €15m in upgrade business out there.

Office 2010:

 

Current installation figures are:

  • Office 2007 (and Office 2010 Beta/RC) is at 30.1% of the Irish market
  • Office 2003 at 29.4%
  • Office 2000 is at 12.0%
  • Office XP 23.3%
  • Office 2000: 12%
  • Office 95/97: 1.4%
  • Other MS Office 1.2%
  • Non-MS products: 1.6%

Office and SharePoint go hand in hand and drive each others sales.

Server opportunities:

  • Windows 2000 end of life on July 13th
  • Virtualisation with Hyper-V very attractive

Server 2008 R2 Foundation:

The Irish market is dominated by small companies.  Server 2008 R2 Foundation would appear to fit in.  However, I don’t know about the fit.  The Irish SME is very happy with SBS.  EBS has been a flop here.

We now get the pitch on Forefront and how it is a future investment for partners.  Again, the Irish SME is stuck in yellow-box land.

Windows 7 Plans: 41% will be running Windows 7 by end of 2011

Now we get the BPOS talk.  See my previous posts on the Patriot Act.  Many are using BPOS as a complimentary add-on to their onsite installation.  For example, some users will use online service, IM will be used, etc.

He reckons there is a niche market for SAM (software asset management).  This is related to auditing and licensing compliance.  You’ll be as popular as a taxation auditor with IT on the customer site but you might make some money.

Partner Sales + Strategy

Karl O’Leary (Partner Sales) and Colin Cassidy (Partner Strategy and Program) now take over.

Colin says that their forecasts are usually pretty accurate.  Again, I’m asking that MS Ireland takes over running the country.  Paul Rellis does more for Irish business than our glorious leader, Brian Cowen.  And anyone who can crunch numbers anyway accurately is better than the Department of Finance. 

Some boring stuff now.  Taking a breather.

MS focusing on virtualisation and Exchange this year when it comes to the partner campaigns:

When you talk about Exchange leads to a conversation about the desktop.  That’s Office 2010.  That leads to Windows 7 and IE8.  Exchange will run on Server 2008/2008 R2.  It might be virtualised and that leads to Hyper-V.  This all needs security: ForeFront.  ForeFront is developed hand-in-hand with Exchange.  Then System Center is used to manage everything.  Don’t stop there.  Push productivity: Then you have Unified Communications (OCS) and SharePoint.  When you do OCS/Exchange then you talk about mobility, e.g. Smart Phones running Windows Mobile.  BTW, there’s something happening with Ballmer next week. 

MS Ireland going after VMware compete business with everything they have.  There is a pincer movement including HP and Dell.  Partners can choose the Bush principle: “You’re either with us or against us”.

4,000 Exchange upgrades are out there in Ireland now.  176,000 XP installations with support ending.  14,583 Windows 2000 installations with support ending.  That’s business to be had.

Partners Presenting

Gerry Kerr from CDsoft, Hyper-V and UC are their things.  Scott from Nitech are an infrastructure/dev partner working in BI.  A dude, Frasier, from Ergo as well.  They are field engineers who also say they do BI.  Oh boy, flashbacks of an awful part of the TechEd 2010 keynote.  I’m watching the doors to see if people are leaving … oh there we go 🙂

Gerry says something that I’ve been saying for over a year.  Hyper-V wins against VMware when you sell System Center, not virtualisation.  It’s the manageability that wins.

Louise Connaughton, EMEA Partner Support Group

Some stuff about what services you get as a partner.  That led into a coffee break which was sorely needed.

The Office / SharePoint Launch Wave

The 3 pillars of the combined solution are:

  • Best user experience: desktop, VDI, terminal services, phone, etc.  Office will also be online.  You can “round trip” between online Office and on-site office with document fidelity.
  • IT Choice: on site or online
  • Business Platform: Office, SharePoint, Dynamics, SQL, partners like Siebel and SAP

MS claims the ribbon is responsible for users using 4 times more features in Office 2007 than they did in 2003.  The ribbon is fully deployed in Office 2010.

2010 Launch

  • Partner readiness day (sales and marketing)
  • Partner IT road show in Dublin, Belfast, Shannon and Cork – similar to the Windows 7/Server 2008 R2/Exchange 2010 launch tour
  • A v-Launch

2010 PR:

  • nWOW microsite release
  • eBook with production quality video

Patrick Herlihy Demo

Patrick is the Exchange/BI techie in MS Ireland partner sales.  He’s now doing a demo of XP/Office 2003 VS Windows 7/Office 2010.

Barry McMahon

Barry (a MS sales person – Application Platform Lead) now talks about SharePoint’s role in BI.  Excel is the most valuable client application – agreed. I worked in a company where over 50% of business data was in spreadsheets.

Three contexts of BI

  • Organisational BI: Built and maintained by IT, for use by the company
  • Team BI: Built by the team, for the team
  • Personal BI: Built by me, for use by me (Excel lives here)

Excel (PowerPivot) with SQL enables and empowers that last one.  It’s made easier by PowerPivot.  Now you have an application. (you can add something called a Slicer to allow data selectivity).  That application can be published to SharePoint.  Here’s where your MIS department will pull their hair out, worried about application/data accuracy.

Here’s the pitch for WPC10 July 11-15th in Washington DC.  MS wants your money.

Lunch

They broke us up into 4 groups for lunch so 4 different MS teams could come in to do Q&A sessions.  The first one was funny; I was a bold boy last year and we joked about it a bit.  I skipped the last one; the speaker’s voice goes through me like a rusty blade.

The rest of the day is being broken into different tracks.  I was going to skip the virtualisation track – there’s nothing I can learn about the MS line.  However, they have Citrix in and I’d like to learn what they’re up to.  Spoke to some person during the week from Citrix.  She wanted to hear my opinion on their message.  It’s now my stock answer: “Too much marketing; just tell me what the damned thing does because neither your site nor your presentations do”.  So here I am sat waiting for the virtualisation session.

I will do those sessions as different posts.

Call Time On The Windows User Group?

It is getting to the point where I’m considering shutting down my efforts on the Windows User Group.  A lot of time goes into arranging an event, let alone speaking at one.  Time after time, I hear people moaning that they don’t know how to do something and they aren’t given the information.  Two of those topics were how to deploy Windows and how to make legacy applications work on a new version of Windows.  The last two events we ran were focused on those topics. 

Today was application compatibility.  Vikas Sahni, a MS trained expert on the subject, took the time to prepare a presentation and give it at no cost to anyone and at great effort for himself.  4 people turned up.

That’s just pathetic.  Around 6,200 people were made aware of this event.  Now I know there are people who cannot make it to every single event.  But out of 6,200 people I would expect maybe 20 or 30 would have the time, would care enough, and would make the effort.  But no, that’s just not the Irish way.

Foreign speakers who have presented here cannot believe how bad the Irish audience is at turning up for events compared to their own and other countries.  Microsoft Ireland even knows that if 30 people register for one of their events that they only need to have catering for 12.  Someone who works here and regularly speaks here was amazed at the turnout to an event that they presented at in Iceland and wished it was like that here.

Some will say “maybe if you had the event at 14:00 or 19:00”.  It doesn’t make a difference.  I was once at a fully registered event at 14:00 and 2 people turned up.  Our last night time event (on Windows 7) in the Spring last year had a handful of people turn up.

As I said, it isn’t down to effort.  6,200+ people were notified of these events.  IT “pros” in Ireland don’t care.  I’m wondering why I do.

Suggestions other than “I’m too busy” and “Have it at X time” are welcome.

Windows User Group Event: Windows 7 Application Compatibility – Prizes For Attendees!

This is quite possibly going to be your sole chance in Ireland to attend an event that will educate you about Windows 7 application compatibility solutions.  Our speaker (a veteran trainer) will be showing you how to get legacy applications working on Windows 7 using the solutions that Microsoft provides.  Some are built into the operating system, some are free downloads and some are in MDOP.

The event is on this Friday, February 5th at 10:00 in Building 1 at Microsoft Ireland EDC in Leopardstown in south Dublin.  It is a completely free event with no strings attached and is being run by the Windows User Group (me) with help from Microsoft Ireland.  Pastries and coffee/juice will be on hand to wake you up and keep you going.

We’ll also have a few prizes to give away including a Microsoft Arc mouse (I use one and it’s fantastic), and a couple of X-Box games to give away: Forza Motorsport 3 and Halo ODST.

Registration is simple and free.

Not everyone can get out of the office or travel to Dublin.  Don’t worry; we will be performing a simultaneous live webcast of the event. Please download and install the LiveMeeting Client in advance. The web client will not support audio so we do recommend the installed version. The event will be available at this link when registration starts.

We look forward to seeing you there or seeing you on the webcast.

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MS Partner Event: Application Platform University

This is a business intelligence “road show” funded by MS Europe, presented in the Dublin office.  The speaker is Tibbs Pereira, hosted by Barry McMahon.  Barry is a good guy; I’ve worked with him in a previous job and he was great at sharing info and helping us out.

They do something interesting to start out.  There’s around 20 visitors in the room.  The speakers have asked each visitor to introduce themselves, say what they want to get out of the day and list objections/fears from the field about MS BI technology.

The Business Imperatives

  • Business intelligence – usable information
  • The web – availability
  • Business applications – processing data to get information and using it to get results
  • Application lifecycle management – continuous development/improvement of functions and features

Traditional business solutions often include the user using multiple styles of non-integrated applications: green screen, installed and web.  We should try to have a unified application platform: one style of integrated interface, even if it’s multiple applications and systems at the back end.  That makes data easier to access and information easier to use.

Using an integrated backend, not a mix of all the platforms (SAP, Oracle, SQL, MySQL, etc) makes application development easier and data more reliable.  Otherwise you’re fudging data through translation services and hoping it stays consistent.  35% planning this convergence.  41% currently have this convergence underway.  24% aren’t going to converge.  According to Forrester Research in 2007.

Underlying this is the optimised infrastructure (well designed and managed).  Ideally it’ll be dynamic too, e.g. automation, and flexible, e.g. self service in VMM.

Benefits of the MS Platform

Innovation Benefits

  • Better time to value
  • Respond quickly to organisation change via flexibility
  • User experience is familiar
  • Largest partner ecosystem for packaged and customised solutions

Operations Benefits

  • High performance, scalability and reliability
  • Solutions have common management skills and tools, e.g. System Center, clustering, etc.
  • Technology investments work well with each other, MS integration, Active Directory for authorisation/authentication
  • Consistent security standards for increased compliance: take advantage of Configuration Manager to audit those policies.

An interesting point is brought up here.  Lots of MS customers already have the licensing for much of this.  For example, a desktop core CAL may include SharePoint CAL’s.  All that remains is the server licensing which is a comparatively small cost.

Customer Thinking

Customers have typically deployed lots of solutions with no standardisation.  “Legacy systems are forever”.  There’s some movement to standardisation.  Oracle, Microsoft and IBM are emerging as the 3 remaining pillars.  Customers now considering standardisation on one of these 3.  SME typically are standardised on Microsoft already because of price and availability.  Larger enterprises have the heterogeneous application platform.  The won’t ditch legacy stuff but they will integrate into a single application platform for data availability and information access and usage.

Business intelligence is the number one spend in IT.  It was in 2009 (4th year in a row, Gartner) and will be in 2010.  It’s “recession proof”, because information is more important now to understand the pains and losses.  Future compliance solutions, as a result of the recession causes, will continue this drive.

Microsoft SWOT

  • Strengths: Office, roadmap
  • Opportunity: CAL up-sell and deployment
  • Weaknesses: brand perceptions
  • Threats: Oracle

Approaches

These are the motivations of customers in BI:

  • Application Led: (SAP and Oracle) point application approach.  I need XYZ and these vendors do this
  • Infrastructure led: (IBM, Microsoft) this is a broader, integrated approach.  The idea is a store of data and access systems are built and applications are built on it.

Business Productivity Infrastructure

  • Unified Communications and collaboration
  • Business intelligence
  • Enterprise content management

These sit on:

  • Worflow
  • Search
  • Business data catalog
  • Extensible UI
  • Open XML file formats
  • Website and secure framework

In other words, think of the big picture, not just the point application.  Reports are produced but how are they stored, shared, accessed, secured, used by other solutions, etc.

And all of this needs to run on a secure, reliable, flexible, scalable and well managed IT infrastructure.  If that foundation is week then the business productivity infrastructure is weak => the business is weak.

Model

  • SQL is the data storage engine
  • SharePoint is the thin client access system
  • Office is the thick client access method.

The Next Wave of MS Products

Both SharePoint 2010 and SQL 2008 R2 are focused on business intelligence.  SP will be RTM before July.  SQL this year.  We get a demo of Excel pulling data from SQL, produces an application (a report based on pivot tables and slices) and publishes it to SharePoint so anyone can access it.  The lesson is that BI is something to sell to and use by the business, not IT. 

This is data access/sharing done by non-IT people using data managed by IT.  It’s ad-hoc self-service where the business doesn’t have to wait on IT, and IT doesn’t get distracted from engineering projects and maintenance.  IT can monitor this.  Then we go back to basic MIS and systems analysis classes from college.  IT should take over important or highly used applications to standardise them and to do QA on them.  Critical applications should be managed.

Excel 2007 can now load hundreds of millions of rows from SQL.  In the demo, the 110,000,000 rows consumed approximately 64KB of data, therefore not hammering the network.

Scalability

RyanAir booking systems runs on SQL 2005.  It was SQL 2000 until recently.  It has 54,000,000 transactions per annum.  Permanent TSB online banking runs on SQL.  Department of family and social affairs runs on SQL.  NASDQ uses it, Citibank uses it, Hotmail, MSN, etc.  So the questions about SQL scalability from the typical 300 user CIO are laughable.  Gartner counts MS SQL as one of the big 3 enterprise database systems.

SQL Reporting Services

The sales phrase being used for SQL is “beyond relational”, i.e. there’s more to MS SQL than storing data: e.g. analysis, integration and reporting.

Competing Against Oracle

Don’t try to tell them to dump Oracle.  Say it’s fine for point applications but MS stack is data/information for the masses.  Chances are, most of the infrastructure and client access licensing are already in place for the MS stack.  You’re likely looking at hybrid solutions where you sell services to merge data into a data warehouse(s) for user access.

Selling SQL Server Advanced Solutions

In BI, MS never talks about the Standard or less editions of SQL.  They always talk about Enterprise.  The same goes when comparing against Oracle. 

There is a new things called the SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse.  It’ll be sold by hardware vendors exclusively.  The idea is that you can scale out a singe data warehouse database across cheaper hardware instead of buying some big gigantic pricey piece of equipment.

There is a new Datacenter SKU as well.  This will be per processor.  Supports up to 256 physical cores.  Unlimited free virtualization on a licesned host.  Unlimited RAM.  Unlimited managed instances. 

Standard price going up by 25%.  Enterprise is going up by 15%.  Now only 4 free VM’s on a licensed host.  Max 2TB RAM.  Up to 25 managed instances.

Standard: 64Gb RAM, 4 physical processors, 1 free VM license. 

Existing Enterprise covered by Software Assurance will be upgraded to Datacenter.

*Hmm, I’d be concerned that these higher costs will further swing SME’s on the online market to MySQL.  It’s probably got over 60% of that market.

BizTalk

This was briefly talked about.  It’s the application and business integration solution from MS, based on XML translation.  Often a possibility to sell with SharePoint.

If you are in Ireland then check out the SharePoint user group and the SQL user group.

Windows User Group Event: Windows 7 Application Compatibility

This is the latest Irish Windows User Group event that we have organised.

One of the challenges of migrating to a new desktop operating system is getting those legacy applications to work. This can seem so daunting that many organisations choose not to take advantage of new technology solutions to resolve business issues because the perceived cost and time requirements to get those applications working is too much.

Good news! Migrating to Windows 7 is a whole lot easier thanks to the solutions provided by Microsoft. These vary from technology built into the operating system, a free suite of tools provided by Microsoft and tools that are included in the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP).

The available solutions were briefly talked about and demonstrated at the community launch events for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

In this session Vikas Sahni is going to walk you through using some of the solution available from Microsoft to get your legacy applications working on Windows 7. The agenda includes:

Session I – The Changes

  • Windows 7 Goals
  • Operating System Version – Compatibility Tab, Shims and Layers
  • UAC changes
  • IE changes
  • Depreciated Apps – Windows Mail, Windows Movie Maker

Session II – The Tools

  • Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) 5.5
  • LUA Tools and Solutions
  • Sysinternals Tools
  • IE Compatibility Test Tool

The Speaker

Vikas Sahni will be presenting this session. He is the CEO of Softedge Systems. Vikas is a software expert and has a history as a technical trainer.

Softedge Systems, the first European Microsoft IP Venture Partner, is a Dublin based software company. We focus on providing unique solutions for our clients and help distinguish them from their competition. We also develop and market software products that are differentiated by their ease of use. Softedge with its R&D and project management teams in Ireland and coding team in India is able to offer high quality, cost-effective software development for third parties.

Webcast

Please DO NOT REGISTER if you are going to join the webcast.

You can join the web cast by:

1) Installing the free Live Meeting Client
2) Clicking on this link

Where and When

Microsoft Ireland Building 1, South County Business Park, Leopardstown, Dublin 18, Ireland

February 5th.  Welcome at 09:30am, starting at 10:00am sharp.

Registration

Please DO NOT REGISTER if you are going to join the webcast.

You can register here.

Join The Windows User Group

You do not need to join the Irish Windows User Group to attend this event. However, the free membership will mean that you’ll be alerted about future event.