Microsoft kicked off Tech Ed, its annual European
developer’s conference in Amsterdam this week, with a promise to
reduce complexity in IT departments.
Addressing 6,000 delegates, Andrew Lees, corporate vice
president responsible for servers and tools at Microsoft, said his
goal was to make it easier to create connected systems using
service-oriented architecture.
Microsoft aims to make its applications central to linking
together web services. The Visual Studio 2005 development platform
and the SQL Server 2005 database are the main components of its SOA
strategy, with Microsoft now focusing on making software
development teams work more efficiently, through the Team System
version of Visual Studio.
It will also provide a version of Visual Studio for developing
interactive Office documents, called Visual Studio 2005 Tools for
the MS Office Suite (VSTO). SQL Server will include the common
language runtime component of Visual Studio, allowing users to
programme the database using Visual Basic and C# in order to run
tasks that would be too complex to achieve using SQL.
But the strategy also relies on Microsoft’s Trustworthy security
initiative covering federated security and network access control,
to ensure devices connecting to a network are patched and running
the latest anti-virus signatures.
Lees stressed the importance of the Active Directory. He said:
“Granular access to applications will be achieved via the Active
Directory and two-factor authentication.” Microsoft aims to give
end users full access to IT systems without the need for IT support
staff to get involved.
He said users will need to start building federated identity
management to enable access to applications though a single user
login and that biometrics will be required, to boost security.
Microsoft also anticipates users will need to make changes to
their networks to support its vision of connected systems. Users
will need to switch to IPv6, the next version of the IP networking
protocol, in order to cope with the potential for large numbers of
devices connecting into the corporate network. IPsec should also be
used inside the corporate network, Lees said, to improve security
further.
Microsoft’s strategy also pulls in its Dynamic Systems
Initiative (DSI), designed to make IT systems more
self-managing.
Using the WS-Management web services standard, Microsoft is
planning to provide a way to manage PCs and servers, even when no
operating system is installed. This will require the hardware to
use a dedicated service processor.