I attended an informative overview yesterday of the competitive outlook in the business intelligence market, given by Visual Studio Magazine columnist
Andrew Brust
. With Microsoft having refreshed and reordered its BI stack around the trifecta of SQL Server 2008 R2, SharePoint 2010 and Office/Excel 2010, Brust's presentation offered valuable insight into how Redmond's BI pitch lines up against competitors like IBM, Oracle, SAP and numerous pure play and open source BI providers.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 06/09/20100 comments
Ted Kummert, senior vice president of the Business Platform Division at Microsoft keynoted the second day of the Microsoft Tech Ed North America 2010 Conference in New Orleans today. Kummert's keynote no doubt was also designed to appeal to attendees of the Microsoft BI Conference 2010, which is co-located with the Tech Ed event.
Kummert didn't come to unveil any exciting new technologies or strategies. In fact, he opened his address by saying: "We are not committing to a future roadmap. We are not talking about specific features."
Instead, he provided a broad overview of Microsoft's value proposition in the BI space, and showed how maturing tools -- specifically Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2 -- are enabling increasingly rich opportunities for effective data visualization, manipulation and analysis. Kummert showed off the rich integration among the applications, showing how data surfaced in a browser via SharePoint could be directly manipulated in Excel.
But his core message boiled down to this: The best kind of BI is the BI that people are actually able to use and manage on their own. Kummert cited analyst figures that found that only 20 percent of potential BI consumers actually are in a position to use BI today. Kummert emphasized familiar application interfaces, intuitive interaction and viable self-service and management as the keys to bringing BI to the other 80 percent.
"We are very, very committed to continue to move forward the technologies and tools we are giving to you, the BI professionals," Kummert told the audience. "But we see a tremendous opportunity to enable the 80 percent. You'll see more impact from your solutions. People will be able to build on them on their own. You'll have [fewer] interruptions. You'll be able to spend your time with strategic applications in your building."
What was your impression of what Microsoft has put in front of the industry? Has Microsoft done enough to really reach the other 80 percent, or does the BI model enabled by SharePoint, Excel, SQL Server and PowerPivot remain too complex and difficult to manage to fulfill Kummert's vision?
Posted by Michael Desmond on 06/08/20101 comments
Dave Mendlen really, really thinks more developers should be using Microsoft's Expression Blend 4 Web and application design application to create more visually compelling and effective application interfaces. The senior director of Developer Marketing at Microsoft called Expression Blend a "great secret weapon that most developers don't know about," noting that there are "a lot of applications out there that are the battleship gray, ugly, default Visual Studio applications."
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 06/07/20100 comments
If you are like me, you may be planning to spend most of next week in New Orleans, where Microsoft is holding its
Tech Ed North America 2010
conference and co-located
Business Intelligence Conference 2010
. But you may want to pay attention to what's going on in New York, where Microsoft on Monday June 7 is kicking off the official launch of Microsoft Expression Studio 4.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 06/04/20101 comments
Microsoft today announced that it had released the final version of its Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010. Silverlight 4 offers extensive new features, including support for out-of-browser execution, local file system access and improved performance over Silverlight 3. The shipping version of Silverlight 4 was released on May 13, at the Visual Studio 2010 launch event in Las Vegas.
Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 included a beta version of the Silverlight 4 tooling, but the pre-release tooling was removed from the release candidate and shipping versions of the IDE. The delivery of Silverlight 4 Tooling for Visual Studio 2010 completes the platform development support story for Visual Studio 2010, which also saw significant updates to tooling for platforms like Windows Azure and SharePoint.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/17/20100 comments
If you've been following the pre-release trajectory of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, you probably aren't surprised to hear that the latest version of Microsoft's evolving knowledge and collaboration platform is gaining a lot of dev-centric capabilities. Throughout its decade-long (more or less) run, SharePoint has consistently outgrown its mission. What started as a content management and portal platform grew rapidly into a knowledge sharing and collaboration center, and from there morphed into a platform for application development.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/04/20103 comments
Having worked in IT publishing for nearly 20 years now, I've long subscribed to the remora-and-shark metaphor when it comes to describing the Microsoft ecosystem. Often that's been cast as a bad thing, especially when you look at the sad histories of bygone companies like DoubleSpace.
But the relationship can and does work for a lot of firms, with perhaps no better example than PreEmptive Solutions. PreEmptive got its start as a player on the Visual Studio platform back in 2003, when the company solved a real problem with applications on the new .NET Framework -- that managed applications could be easily reverse engineered to reveal underlying IP.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 04/13/20100 comments
Speaking with developers and software vendors following the Visual Studio 2010 launch keynote this morning and it's clear the community has been busy keeping pace with Microsoft. Case in point is JetBrains. The company is releasing ReSharper 5, a significantly updated and improved version of its refactoring and productivity plug-in for Visual Studio.
JetBrains worked closely with Microsoft throughout the Visual Studio 2010 development cycle to ensure ReSharper would be ready to plug into the updated IDE at its launch. For instance, JetBrains engineers faced a real challenge tying into the redesigned, WPF-based user interface of Visual Studio 2010. The company also spent a great deal of effort fully optimizing ReSharper to preserve responsiveness.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 04/12/20102 comments
There wasn't much new to talk about at the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 launch keynote at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas this morning, and Microsoft President of the Server and Tools Business, Bob Muglia, was first to admit it.
"Today is a celebration. We get to talk about all the great things that are here now with Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4," Muglia said early in his comments to the audience. "There are not a lot of surprises in terms of what Visual Studio 2010 does. We've had it in test, our CTP test program, for quite some time."
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 04/12/20100 comments
When Visual Studio 2010 officially launches next week, it will do more than advance the state of the art in .NET development. It will mark an important change of strategy for Microsoft in the arena of application lifecycle management (ALM).
Gone under VS2010 are the sundry Visual Studio Team System products, which sought to slice and dice ALM tooling for specific roles, such as database, architect and test. As Microsoft Senior Director of Developer Marketing Dave Mendlen tells it, the company learned that professionals in development organizations often wear multiple hats. Forcing them to purchase a mission-specific version of Visual Studio did not work well.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 04/07/20100 comments
By now you no doubt noticed that the VisualStudioMagazine.com site is sporting a new look. The visual makeover goes hand-in-hand with a refresh of Visual Studio Magazine, which features a redesigned cover and some new directions with the editorial content.
Starting with the April issue, Visual Studio Magazine editors are working with the Visual Studio team at Microsoft to bring unique and targeted how-to features and coverage to readers of Visual Studio Magazine and our Web site. You'll find two features in the April issue authored by members of the Microsoft Visual Studio team: Cloud Development in Visual Studio 2010 and The Evolution of Visual C++ in Visual Studio 2010.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 04/01/20100 comments
Microsoft has been pursuing a strategy of increasingly open and interoperable systems for a few years now, a strategy that got its start in the Developer Division under Corporate Vice President Scott Guthrie.
So I guess we shouldn't be surprised that this year's MIX event is actively pushing the openness effort at Redmond to new extremes.
Consider today's keynote session, which included a dive into Microsoft's Open Data Protocol (OData), a technology that promises to throw open the doors to all sorts of privately and publicly accessible data and information. Or look at Guthrie's announcement about Microsoft's support for the open source jQuery JavaScript Library, to which Redmond will be actively contributing code and resources. Or consider Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer (IE), and his focus standards (namely, HTML 5) in the upcoming IE9 Web browser.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 03/16/20100 comments