Ian's Blog

Another wonderful day at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference. Day 3 started with the keynote address and a glimpse of some emerging and intriguing technologies that Microsoft is working on. This video was shown and the interesting thing is every bit of technology shown is being actively worked on by Microsoft. This video is not a pie in the sky idea. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiqgmAYrd3c

Microsoft Surface was demoed a lot during the keynote and the fun part is there are dozens of them around the conference area available for use to use/try and play with. To see what Surface is check this out... http://www.microsoft.com/surface/.

I spent some time with Ben from TenDigits learning about MobileAccess, a tool allowing people with mobile devices like Windows Mobile phones or Blackberries, to use Dynamics CRM. If you are a Dynamics CRM user imaging having access to any of the data in your CRM system anytime from you phone. Log sales call notes, look up client information, initiate workflows or processes on the road from your phone. Pretty powerful stuff.

I spent some more time exploring the social media side of things again. There is such an opportunity for businesses to communicate and connect with customers and potential customers through social media sites like Twitter or LinkedIn. Watch out for our tweets coming soon.

Day 2 of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans. I attended a focus group session in the morning on how businesses are using social media tools to help market their products and brands. Blogging (like this), Twitter and YouTube really are becoming mainstream marketing methods and mediums. You don’t have to use them, but then you don’t have to market too. The questions is do you want to hold onto or grow your market share. If yes then you need to look at the marketing mediums you have at your disposal. You will likely see more from us in the future in this area.

The keynote address was great. Saw some great previews of upcoming technologies. Of note was the demonstration of the new Microsoft Office Excel 2010 and how you can use it as a data analytics tool. Some companies spend a lot of money having dashboards built or one-off reports built by the IT staff. The new Excel (coming out in the new year likely) lets you work with millions of rows of data and save the file to a SharePoint site so it can be used as a dashboard right from the web browser. So users will be able to create their own spreadsheets with data slicing and dicing capabilities and use them and publish them for the whole company to take advantage of. You don’t even need Excel on your computer, you can edit and work with the data right from the browsers. AND two people can edit and update the same file at the same time. Talk about collaboration.

I sat in on a session reviewing the new Windows 7. This should be the version of Windows that breaks the will of people to hold onto Windows XP. Not that you have to upgrade but currently people are making a conscious effort to not use Windows Vista and paying extra for it. Windows 7 and its features, ease of use and support for existing software will hopefully break that barrier.

So it was a long day. Not sure I will have the energy to take a walk along Bourbon Street, but then again maybe I will!