PDC 2008: Microsoft Unveils the Windows Azure Cloud OS

What a carcrash of a demo, and all the speakers (except ray) were pretty awful. When Im being told to trust Microsoft with my enterprise data I really dont expect to be greeted by red shoes and disastrous jokes. Still, Azure initself looks v important and potentially huge

"Will the internet/cloud portion run on anything other than Windows and IE?" Silverlight is part of it, and it's multi-platform. Then there's also this: "built from the ground up to be consistent with Microsoft’s commitment to openness and interoperability"

For those of us who've had to deal with global level apps, this was (as Ed Bott put it about one section) the holy grail.

While the signup and SDK download aren't live yet, there is a lot of information already up at http://www.azure.com

This sounds pretty cool. If Microsoft can avoid the temptation to make features windows/IE-only this could really be awesome for everyone. I'd love to see Microsoft competing aggressively my business as a mac user with these tools.

Another FYI: David Chappell put together a nice White Paper for Microsoft on Azure that you can download at http://download.microsoft.com/download/e/4/3/e43bb484-3b52-4fa8-a9f9-ec6...

chuck, Even then you're talking about only 4 of 17 feature areas not working and that's on a version that came out five years ago. Now, whether Apple will update their dev tools to support Azure is a different issue but there's nothing in the protocols to block people from doing just that (or doing apps for Azure with Linux or Unix or any other modern, Internet aware platform)

From an internal/intranet standpoint, why would I want to support FF for OWA? Good grief! Well ok, why can't I use some other music library application for my iPod? Why MUST I be forced to use iTunes with my iPod. Bettieblu: GIVE IT A REST! You don't want to use Microsoft products: DON'T. It's that easy.

"Sharepoint. While not Windows/IE "only", not everything works with OSX." But Apple doesn't market to the enterprise crowd. If Apple doesn't support it, then it must not be the intended audience.... You could always set up a document-sharing and team collaboration intranet system on Apache running on an OSX Server, *like SharePoint*.... oh, never mind.

NBC dumped Silverlight after the Olympics and went back to flash. I dont care what they use, as long as we have the option to not use Sliverlight or Flash. Flash blocker is a popular add-in for FF. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/433 Delmont you are clueless. Sure IE is just fine for internal use of OWA since I can control the browser users use. However 98% of OWA usage is external genius and since I cant control what a user has and MS basically promised it, or the Exchange team did at one point its a PERFECT example of being forced to use IE to get all of the features. Believe it or not FF is very popular on Windows, since IE is now in the %70 market share range. Also if you did a little research you would know their are alternatives to iTunes when using a iPod on Windows, OS X and Linux. The only reason you would have to use iTunes would be for firmware updates and that is only if you had to install them.

"I dont care what they use, as long as we have the option to not use Sliverlight or Flash." In many organizations, both are considered off-limits. Ask SBS MVP Of The Year, Sue Bradley what she thinks of Flash, Silverlight in Automatic Updates, or Apple Software Update (or Apple software in general), and she'll tell you they're all evil in the workplace. http://www.sbsdiva.com "However 98% of OWA usage is external genius " That's just not true. On SBS platforms, the best practice is to have users log in using RWW. SSL is just more secure than default VPN configurations, and is much cheaper to implement for the SMB. Using RWW to access all network resources externally is the best practice established by Microsoft. They designed it, after all. Besides that, most of the extra functionality in IE has to do with drag-and-drop and right-click functionality. It's the same in Firefox 2.x on Exchange 2003 SP2 aside from those features, but all of the button functionality is there so the argument is moot. Exchange 2007 even improves it. Windows SharePoint Services is designed for intranets though, aside from Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, which is designed for portal sites, and offers better standards-compliance. Much of the argument about WSS has to do with Office compatibility, and unfortunately competing browsers just don't offer the same kind of document editing plugin architecture which WSS/MOSS rely on for document collaboration.

freakyfelt Seeing how Live Mesh has always had a Mac client in the announced versions and is still in pre-beta, that's a pretty silly example. As for Linux, I'm sure somebody will clone the client at some point. Seeing how Live Mesh uses public spec protocols, it shouldn't be that difficult to come up with a 0.9 version that'll never quite come out of beta. :-)

"Deploy it and control it with a GPO" Where is the management and customization options for Firefox that are necessary for enterprise deployment? In IE, IT admins can lock down almost every setting or feature. They can also standardize settings across the board for deployment. I have yet to see where Firefox supports that.

Certs on 2008 and Exchange 2007 are way more complex than 2003. I never used the SBS wizard with SBS2003, it was fine, but the normal IIS 6.0 2003 server Wizard which is part of SBS2003 as well worked just fine. Drop the cert at the top and its one click on the lower options, ActiveSync for WinMO, OWA, RPC for Outlook Anywhere. With Exchange 2007 you have UCC certs 6 point certs as some call them, because of the Autodiscovery service. A typical Exchange 2007 cert is at least the webmail URL (webmail.mycompany.com) the autodiscovery name (autodiscovery.mycompany.com) the actual host name for internal users (mail1.corp.mycompany.com) and the then the main domain name for TLS encryption to a smart host like Postini (mycompany.com). Prior to SP1 for you had to install them all with Powershell commands. They now have a certificate manager. 2008 takes it further and they have 15 point certs, or so my instructor for 2008 told us. I have a 3 day IIS 7.0 class coming up next month so I am sure I will find out how all that works. 2003 seems so simple in comparison.

Yeah clueless is such a horrible name, how will you recover?? Did I address your 70 year mother about iTunes alternatives? Wow you have graduated from the school of Mikey spin/logic. Honestly I dont even know if you have a mother, and I would not really care if you did or how old she was or what she uses to listen to music with.....totally OT for the love of Pete. You had the complaint about iTunes how that has anything to do with MS forcing you to use IE for full Exchange and Sharepoint functionality??? Oh I know Mikey , rule #2 when you cant answer the direct complaint, bring Apple into the conversation and bash them. Again you dont like iTunes, there are alternatives for your iPod, Google is your friend. Or buy a Zune, neither of which have any link to MS forcing you to use IE for some of their products. Back on topic. I said.... "Sure IE is just fine for internal use of OWA since I can control the browser users use." As in in a corporation PC are locked down and I know that my users will have IE and not something else. Standard corporate image, users are not Admins, everything gets pushed via SMS/SCCM or other competing products, pretty standard stuff, for any company with more than 50 users, 10 IMHO. So my point was the other 98% of people that use OWA from a NON corporate PC over the internet. Those people you CANT control the browser they use (did I not just say this?). MS could make FF (on Windows we are not talking Apple products here) fully compatible with their products. Why dont they? My bank is. In fact I can use FF for every other site I got to, just fine. I personally think they do it to force IE on people, but that is my opinion. I mean how hard would it be to make the Vista Hardware compatibility list work with FF or other browsers. I go there now with FF on Windows I get....... http://winqual.microsoft.com/HCL/BrowserNotSupported.html "The Windows Logo'd Products List is currently only compatible with Internet Explorer 6 and above. We apologize for the inconvenience." Its a only list, my PS3 browser should be able to read it. Your Nissan comment is the EXACT opposite of what I would like to see. Using your example MS would force Nissan to use IE even if they wanted to use FF. My point is make it work with all browsers, especially with a web based product. Banks do it, governments do it. The whole WWW works with FF, Safari, Opera. I am not asking MS to make IE not work, just work with more than their product. If MS is going to create a cloud OS or apps in the cloud and they end up requiring IE only they will fail at that endeavor.

Our software is not supported on any browser but IE. Our 5000+ clients haven't complained so far. MS hasn't forced us to use IE, yet we do. We are also switching from Adobe SVG viewer, which is not supported anymore to Silverlight. So, there you go. By the way, the Vista hardware compatibility site works in Chrome. Go figure.

bettie Hard to see why you're laughing, there are quite a few compatibility differences between Chrome and Safari despite being based on similar engines and few of those are that funny (at least not to people stuck using them)

bettie You were the one laughing out loud at the possibility that Safari and Chrome might be different despite both using (different versions of) Webkit. If it wasn't that you were showing contempt for someone presenting facts you disliked, what was so funny about that? (Your statement of said hilarity was "Lol works with chrome which is Webkit (safari engine) but not in Safari??"

Bettie, Again you're priceless with your comments. One last time, it's all about support. And it's all about supporting and providing a service to your customer. You ever have a customer? See I have. And you don't go to your customer and tell them to screw off and use some other piece of software just cause you want to, just cause you think it's cool or for any other reasons of caprice. See in business, it's about being productive, saving money and thus generating revenue. And you don't do that by worrying, spending time, resouces on about supporting non standard software. Pure and simple.