Softwaremaker

Microsoft Surface Computing

I have seen this in the labs in _MSFT_ Redmond at the Centre of Information Work for some time. I am so glad that it is finally out and will be available to the public.

What is even more cool is that the user interface of Surface is done in _WPF_. How about that ?

PDC 2007 will be postponed

Postponed. Why ?

Microsoft PopFly

I had talked about Yahoo! Pipes here. It didnt take long (well, maybe longer than some of us would like ..) before _MSFT_ came up with something even better ... AND I mean real better with Silverlight and the works.

I have played around with it and I am IMPRESSED and HOOKED. Upsize my mashups, please.

While Microsoft Popfly is still in alpha, you can still check it out here. To find out what it actually is, there is a good demo-ONLY video here.

Welcome to the Social.

MOSS without Marketing

I have spent the last couple of months getting up-to-speed on Microsoft Sharepoint Portal Server (MOSS) 2007 and I must say - I AM IMPRESSED.

A recent article in Wall Street Journal by By ROBERT A. GUTH on the April 24, 2007; Page B1 sums it up really nicely and I quote a couple of sentences from there:

Microsoft Embeds Sleeper in Business Software (I, personally, think the 'Business Software' bit is a bit of a misnomer)

 SharePoint is now Microsoft's contender in an emerging battle over collaboration software with companies from a cross section of the technology industry ...

To date, largely unheralded, Microsoft has sold 85 million licenses to the enhanced version of SharePoint across 17,000 companies. No marketing campaigns are in the works

Read the full article here.

I say it takes a lot, besides features and functionality, to be able to sell without any marketing blitz. Really, what today comes free (pre-installed) that offers Web 2.0 features and functionality (RSS, Blogs, Wikis, Suverys, Sites, Discussion Forums, Document Library), right-out-of-the-box ?

And - We are not done. MOSS 2007 SP1 will come with additional features and functionality that will anchor it as probably one of the best-kept secrets and sleeper Microsoft products of all time that will really make it hard for anyone (customers, partners, communities, alike) to ignore.

Watch out in the blogsphere or here for those announcements.

Microsoft OFONE

Now, aint this cute ?

Video: Microsoft's oPhone

OASIS and the WS-Federation Specifications

Finally, _OASIS_ announced last week that it is calling for participation for Web Services Federation. The formation of the WS-Federation Technical Committee is announced here.

WS-Fed is an important addition to the WS-* protocol suite that enables users to sign-in seamlessly to systems outside of their own organization without requiring (more) new usernames and passwords using Single-Sign-On (SSO) between separate organizations with an established trust relationship.

WS-Fed builds upon and composes with other WS-* protocols:

• WS-Fed extends WS-Trust
• WS-Fed composes with WS-Security and WS-SecureConversation to ensure data integrity and privacy
• WS-Fed composes with WS-MetadataExchange and WS-Policy to enable simple provisioning and trust relationship configuration

Does WS-Fed compete with Liberty SAML?

• Both SAML and WS-Fed enable browser-based identity federation (Passive-Mode)
• However, WS-Fed enables a superset of scenarios, including:
  • Seamless federation with Web Services and/or Rick-Client applications
  • Separation of identities, token types, protocols and encodings
  • Multi-purpose Security Token Service (STS) that can return tokens stating different assertions based upon the scenario
    

WS-Fed adds identity federation capabilities to the existing WS-* suite of protocols resulting in:

• A single protocol stack that supports the majority of your needs and scenarios
• Simplified development, deployment, management and control

The formation of the Technical Committee to drive the standardization of the WS-Fed is an important step in evolution of the industry-wide effort to create a single, comprehensive communication protocol suite that enables many current and new scenarios most effectively.