Originally published on Cloud Avenue.

About a month ago, Microsoft rolled out its previously announced 3rd wave of Windows Live Services refresh.

The purpose of the release was to position the Live Services as the central hub for everything you do online – the new Live Home shows input from your various services (Hotmail, SkyDrive, etc.) as well as an activity stream composed of your friends’ activities on both Live Services as well as other external services such as Twitter, Flickr and blogs…

Tags: Cloud Avenue, Live Home, Microsoft, Microsoft Windows Live, social network, Windows Live Wave, Windows Live Wave 3

  It’s the end of the year, and like most bloggers I decided to take a look at my blog’s performance over the last year…

My Top Posts (According to Google Analytics)

Here’s are my top 10 posts from 2008, as ranked by Google Analytics:

1. The Dark Side of LINQ
2. 99 Ways to Become a Better Developer
3. Wordpress – 10 Tips and Recommendations
4. Scaling Web Applications – Recommended Readings
5. Developing a Robust Data Driven UI Using WPF – The DataModel
6. Developing a Robust Data Driven UI Using WPF – Introduction
7. Microsoft’s Next Killer OS is… SharePoint?
8. WPF Screen Saver Template for Visual Studio 2008
9. Google Applications for your Domain – Does it Measure Up to Expectations?
10. How Do You Define "Good Code"?

Personal Favorites

The following are a couple of my personal, somewhat overlooked, favorites:

• Looking For New Adventures – On May of this year I left my (pretty cool) job with the Duet team at SAP to face the unknown…
• Google Chrome is a Failure… Surprised? – Originally published on Cloud Avenue and triggered an interesting discussion worth going through.
• Are You Designing for Bigfoot?
• Is Google Replacing My OS Again?! which was followed by On Google’s Chrome and The Future of Cloud Computing.
• Introducing Kampyle – The Next Generation of Online Feedback. Just because I got to be the first to write about my friends company and I think this post written a lot better than the many posts that followed on TechCrunch etc.

That’s it. All wrapped up and ready for 2009!

Tags: Blog, Blogging, Cloud Avenue, DeveloperZen, ekampf, Eran Kampf, erankampf

(Originally posted at Cloud Avenue)

This year’s Microsoft Profesional Developers Conference is full of announcements and surprises. The next big announcement besides Windows Azure (and Windows 7?) is the new “Office Web Applications” live service. The Office team will be delivering the five most popular Office applications as light weight browser based versions that include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.

Here are some of the demo screenshots available:

The applications will be offered in both a simple HTML/AJAX version and a rich-client Silverlight version.
Office Web Applications are not planned to replace Microsoft’s traditional desktop offering but rather complete it, together with Mobile Office for mobile devices, allowing users to seamlessly work on their documents across all environments.

Providing such a reach collaboration environment isn’t a simple task as you can see in the following interview of Antoine Leblond, Senior VP of Office Productivity Apps and Chris Bryant, General Program Manager:

Although its not meant to replace its Desktop Office offering, one of Microsoft’s biggest cash cows, one has got to wonder about the risk these new services to cannibalize their big desktop brother’s profits. Windows and Office, which are Microsoft’s core business, are likely to stay its core moneymakers for at least the next 2-3 years, maybe even longer.
This move clearly shows that Microsoft is starting to think beyond that and along with its other platform announcements (Azure, Live Mesh…) we can clearly see a trend away from desktop software to rich clients installed from the web….

Office Web Applications will be released to a limited set of partners and customers at the end of this year. The release date will closely align with Office 14 and Windows 7 which will be sometime in late 2009 or early 2010.
Microsoft plans to make Office Web Applications available as a service through its Live platform supporting both an ad-funded and a paid-subscription models.
Business users that require an on-premise will be able to do so through Sharepoint via its traditional volume licensing program.

Tags: Cloud Avenue, Cloud Computing, Desktop Office, Microsoft, Microsoft Office, Mobile Office, Office, Office 14, Office Live, Office Productivity Apps, Office Suites, Office Web Applications, PDC 2008, Web Applications, Windows, Windows 7

(Originally posted at Cloud Avenue)

Windows Live™Microsoft’s Windows Live ID team just announced their support for OpenID calling it a “de facto standard Web protocol for user authentication.”

Beginning today, Windows Live™ ID is publicly committing to support the OpenID digital identity framework with the announcement of the public availability of a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Windows Live ID OpenID Provider.

You will soon be able to use your Windows Live ID account to sign in to any OpenID Web site!

What does it means for users?

OpenID allows users to maintain their identity information (Name, E-Mail, address, etc.) on a single provider and use that information to register and login to any website that supports OpenID. This relieves the user from having to fill out registration form and maintaining multiple different user names and passwords and profiles on different sites add provides a simplified online experience while increasing security.

Over 400 million LiveID users will soon be able to use their LiveID to do just that – login and provide identity information to any site supporting OpenID without the hassles of filling out registration forms and saving user\password information and with the user experience common to all OpenId sites (or, maybe even common to their familiar LiveID user interface?)

The wide adoption of OpenID led by Yahoo and Microsoft provides the required push for site owners to support OpenID providing the same simple and familiar login interface everywhere…

What does it mean for web developers?

With a simple integration effort that shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes, site owners can relieve themselves from taking care of authentication and registration process while providing their users with a simple familiar interface for signing up and using their services.
OpenID provides an easy and secure mechanism for authenticating and registering users, and with additional online services (like JanRain’s RPX) site owners can handover the entire care of handling their user information to the cloud – cheaper, faster, more secure.

For now, the LiveID team is testing their system’s OpenID Provider which is at a CTP (Community Technology Preview) stage. Widespread support is planned for “sometime in 2009″.

[Update: Screencast Overview]

Tags: Cloud Avenue, Cloud Computing, Federated Identity, LiveID, Microsoft, OpenID, Security, Windows Live, Yahoo

Reading Mary Jo Foley’s Microsoft 2.0 it suddenly struck me: Could Microsoft’s next killer OS be SharePoint?

Instead of being quite so blatant, Microsoft has taken a quieter back route to achieving the same ends via two related technologies:

1. Baking SharePoint reliance into more and more of its products
2. Requiring users to buy pricey client-access licenses (CALs) in order to use Microsoft’s servers

Microsoft has been basing a growing number of its products on SharePoint technologies to provide basic common services like storage, pub/sub, identity/security infrastructure, communications and collaboration functionalities.

With SharePoint’s BDC catalog and search server it is apparent that Microsoft is targeting SharePoint to serve as an integration layer on top of services and LOB applications in the organization.

With “Oslo” its much more…

In 2007, the company began to roll out Microsoft-hosted versions of three of its servers—Exchange, SharePoint Server, and Communications Server—with more planned. The next stage is a set of online services for application developers that offer OS-like functions, such as application-based data storage, and data synchronization among multiple connected devices.

Microsoft’s “Oslo” vision and roadmap to “Simplify SOA, Bridge Software Plus Services, and Take Composite Applications Mainstream” is largely built with SharePoint backing its platform.

As Microsoft expands its reach into cloud computing it’ll have to adjust its SharePoint infrastructure services, which its other server products rely on, to support this kind of environment.

We can already see signs for this transformation in Microsoft’s last year’s announcement on switching SharePoint to use claim based security.
Performing authentication and authorization using claims allows SharePoint to support federated identities across different services and applications – from integration with common identity services like Active Directory, LiveID and OpenID to service\application specific identity models.
This means SharePoint is no longer limited to using the Active Directory on premise but can integrate with remote external authentication providers enabling SharePoint hosted scenarios.

Office, OBAs and LOB Integration

On February 27th last year Microsoft shared some details on LOBi (Line of Business Interoperability), the next version of its SharePoint BDC, postponing it to be released as part of its Office 14 technology stack:

Consequently, LOBi technologies will now be delivered as a set of capabilities within the Office SharePoint Server as part of the next major set of Microsoft Office product releases (the Office 14 wave).”

LOBi, now known as OBAF (OBA Framework), allows developers to integrate LOB applications (SAP, Oracle, etc.) into SharePoint.

It provides developers with all the necessary services required to develop a composite LOB web application on top of existing systems while also supporting offline synchronization to Office clients (S+S strategy).

With the extensive support in application modeling planned as part of “Oslo” roadmap, Microsoft is positioning SharePoint as an integration platform that will run composite applications.

Dynamics and its other server products will probably leverage this platform, as well as its partners and ISVs.
An example for such an application’s is Duet 3.0, the next version of the SAP integration productivity product jointly developed with SAP, which will be developed on top of the new SharePoint technology stack.

Conclusion

By providing developers with rich set of platform services – security services, data indexing, search, synchronization services and offline capabilities – coupled with a development environment (Visual Studio 10) and modeling support, Microsoft is trying to provide all the essential capabilities required to build and run application in a hosted environment – the beginning of an OS for cloud applications?

Some more links on Microsoft’s Cloud Direction:

• Whatever happened to Microsoft LOBi?
• Here comes the “Windows Cloud”
• Windows HPC Partner- Electric Cloud
• Microsoft Research Work – TechFest Presentations and Demos
• Presentations – Democratizing The Cloud, The Cloud Data Center & The CARMEN Science Cloud & Beyond
• Cloud based Claims Authentication

Originally published on Cloud Avenue.

Tags: Cloud Avenue, Cloud Computing, Microsoft, MOSS, SharePoint, SharePoint technologies, SOA, Windows Cloud OS

Cloud Computing is the latest, hottest new buzzword in today’s information technology world. However, and much like other buzzwords such as Web x.0, it seems to be losing whatever meaning it once had as an increasing number of companies, not wanting to miss out on the latest hype, are starting to use it for their product’s PR campaigns….

Read the complete post at Cloud Avenue.

Tags: Amazon, Cloud Avenue, Cloud Computing, Oracle