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 Day Zero of Tech Mela yesterday was Invite Only and for Enterprise and CIO audience. My expectation for the event was low and I was looking forward to hours of neck deep PPT Gyan. Though there were enough PPTs presented, overall the day was good. I enjoyed the profound speech by Mr.Sam Pitroda.
Mr.Ravi Venkatesan (Chairman Microsoft India):
As usual Ravi’s Talk was brief (10 minutes) but was precise and thought-provoking – I admire this person for this everytime, he manages to make a boring Biz talk so interesting and that too without exciting with new product announcements, etc. He talked on how Microsoft came to solving a problem for an Association of Tirupur Garment (export) Houses. The problem was that the goods in production travels 15 Kms over 90 days at various stages (Colouring done by a vendor, etc.), and these are small houses who don’t have the awareness and the money for in-house IT Solutions. So Microsoft came out with a Hosted solution which the small houses can connect with the now cheap Broadband connections and they pay for it as they Go – No CAPEX. It also solves Piracy!. The solution reduced the production time by 20 days (25% saving). The Top 20 Million (Earning) Households in India only 40% have PCs, but Indian households overall spend over Rs.7000 Crores for competitive exams, so Education is a big driver. Addressing this market, Microsoft India is planning to introduce a Family PC which will have in-build latest updated content for Education & Competitive Exams – some exclusive deals.
Mr.Steven Guggenheimer (General Manager, App. Platform and Developer Marketing, Microsoft):
He talked about the vision of Ray Ozzie of Software + Service and not of Software / Service. He highlighted the point that worldwide enterprises spend 70% of the money on running existing systems and only 30% gets spent on new initiatives.
Microsoft breaks Service into three:
He showed a video of a business application that uses Building Block Services like Live Local for BP where they can see the location of all employees worldwide (including in remote oil riggs) visually on a map interface which was build by a partner IDV Solutions. Steven was joined by MS Dev Evangelist to demo: WPF (Seattle Post Intelligence, NY Times), Silverlight (for upcmoming Jhoom Bharabar Jhoom movie), Microsoft Live Labs Relay Service (Queue). I was interested on the Dynamic CRM Live demo by Mark Linton and the service is expected to ship by Dec ’07. Currently it supports only Windows Live ID (Passport) but by release they will support Active Directory Federated Service so that corporate wide single sign-on will work.
Mr.Sam Pitroda (Chairman – National Knowledge Commission):
- The NKC he heads is about Knowledged as opposed to Education, which other government departments are focussing. Knowledge is key because India today is a power house in Knowledge economy. They have industry stalwards like Mr.Nandan Nilekani and others who meet every other month.
- Idea is to function as a think-tank (I remembered Singapore Government equivalent once, wish ours could deliver impact like theirs)
- They are working on some 10-30 ideas over all, but at any time not more than few. They have submitted like 9 or 10 to Prime Minister (as a final few page recommendation) but the entire report is available in their website.
- Key is how do you have information and knowledge accessible to our masses. We have 54,000 libraries – how do you improve them using technology, public private partnership for a sustainable model and build a community around libraries.
- Sam was very critical of current e-governance iniatives, where each state doing the same thing, reinventing the wheel but in their own way and wasting money. He wants to see a unified federal standard and system which are web based; and states fill in data. They look and function the same but in different languages. So birth/death certificate, land records look the same across the country. Basically we need to have standards for the major processes across country
- Demography in India has 550 Million People who are less than 25 years. What future are we leaving for them, the type of jobs. We need to invest and plant the seeds now so that we can harvest them over next 20-30 years. It is like what happened in Telecom where we plannted during Rajiv Gandhi times’ that we are harvesting now.
- The best of brains in the world work for the riches – who really have no problems. To solve it you have to think from the heart and not from the mind. So the question is how do we create more best brains.
- Broadband is not about fast video downloads etc, it is about how we can have the best professor in IIT, Mumbai speak to a remote college in India
- Answering questions:
- On telecom, Sam: “I care little about Telecom now, it is on its own and can take care of it”
- On mobile, Sam: “I consider all the cellphones initiatives today as Gimmicks. They don’t have any real world real value applications, applications should have an utility”
- On a Single Data Repository for India, Sam: “Don’t expect a Single Data Repository for a country like India. We have vast amount of knowledge in India that are diverse and does’t fit into one repository. This could include age old wisdoms like Ayurveda, etc. So don’t expect any quick fixes”
- Finally Sam closed by saying a thought-provoking issue – Why do we still follow the old processes British left us 60 years back, why is that something done someway by some british officer is being followed till date and which got perfected over the years by our babus. For example: Why are we still filling 5 copies of an admission form in schools. So unless we use IT as a chance to think through and come up with new processes, there is no point in doing e-governancen, waste of money. We need to use e-governance as an oppoprtunity for change.
The only boring session was the Connected Experience – Windows Mobile/Embedded session. The speaker had tons of TV ads and that’s about it.
Management Technologies in Windows Server 2008 – by Ranjana Jain (IT Pro Evangelist, MS India)
- Session talked briefly on Power-Shell, Server Manager, Windows Server 2008 Core, Windows Remote Management (WinRMI)
- Server Manager allows you to manage everything in one Window:
- Event Viewer has a collector service to get events from other servers and bring them in one place. Also tasks can be activated when an event happens.
- Task manager with more features is integrated with server manager
- Reliability Manager is integrated with service manager, which tells what happened / how reliable was the server on a time scale.
- Windows Server core – only a Command Prompt (The WOW stops here). Four core services – DNS/DHCP/Active Directory/File Services and I suppose she missed to mention the recently added IIS.
- Just Starts the Command Line
- To Set an IP adddress
- See the Interfaces: NetSh Interface ipv4 show interfaces
- netsh interfaces ipv4 set address name=4 address …
- To add to a domain: NetDom Join /domain:contoso /user:Administrator *
- WinRMI – how to do things remotely including remote machines’ IP address.
- Power Shell
- Create and access process like Notepad as a .NET Variable
- Access Registry store as a drive like HKLM:
- Winrm command to execute remote commands
- WinRS command to create a remote shell
- Instead of asking all the questions before installing, it takes a different approach, it takes default and then after reboot presents with a list of activities where it asks questions
- Once setup, then the only window opens up - Server Manager. it presents everything including PerfMon.
- Now Active Directory service can be stopped and started
What’s new in Windows Mobile 6.0 by Loke Uei
- .NET Compact Framework 2.0 SP2 installed in ROM
- 20% Performance improvement
- Easy to send and receive SMS
- SQL Compact Edition installed in ROM
- Support for AJAX in Pocket IE
- New native APIs – allow you to play WMA/MP3, Ink Platform
- WISP Lite ported from Tablet PC
- New Windows Mobile 6 SDK, One tool for developing native and managed code – VS 2008
- A good session to check from MEDC DVD – ILL303: Data Replication Session on how to repliace between thousands of clients with SQL CE with SQL Server
- Windows Mobile 6.0 has 3 editions – Standard (Smartphone with no touch screen), Professional (Pocket PC with touch Screen) & Classic. Also in Pro, all applications run in priveleged mode (One-tier), Standard has multiple tiers
- You can use Security Configuration Manager to setup security and install parameters
- You have a FakeGPS, Cellular Emulator (Fake Voice Calls), FakeServer (If you need to call a Web Service but right now not connected to the server), Hopper in the SDK Tools
- Cellular Emulator allows you to do calls to the emulator, fake reject calls, send SMS etc from PC to emulator
- An interesting point was of his boss doing Elbow testing, where by he asks you to be away and pushes his elbow on the keyboards. Similarly Hopper is a great random testing tool
- He demoed an application where by his device will send the current GPS coordinates by SMS to his wife. His wife can see where in the world he is, in a map
- You can get GPS Position, Check whether device is currently in Roaming (or not, then decide to make a call/data connection)
- You can monitor SMS and take actions based on the SMS contents
Windows Cardspace by Vineet Gupta (Microosft India)
- Talked about the basics of cryptography, WS Trust (Implemented by WCF), WS-MetadataExchange, WS Security Policy (Implemented by WCF), Security Token Service (AD and ADFS) and Consistent user experience (Implemented by Windows CardSpace)
IIS 7.0 Overview by Vinod Kumar (Microsoft India)
- Vinod started as usual brilliantly but the title came up as an Overview session – he too emphasized on that, so I got out. Sorry Vinod
High Availability in MS Exchange Server 2007 & SP1 by Rajat Choudhary (Microsoft India)
- Server roles other than Mailbox:
- Deploy multiple Hub Transport Server in each site
- Deploy multiple Edge Transport Server and use round robin DNS to load balancing
- Client Access Server – NLB or 3rd Party Load balancing
- Unified Messaging Server
- High Availability for Mailbox Server
- Local Continous Replication – Secondary copy of the mailbox on the same device. Works on Log Shipping Mechanism, async with a bit of time lag
- Cluster Continuous Replication: Stretch your subnet over VLAN. Doesn’t require Shared Storage (Reduced Cost), Automatic Recovery, Witness on Hub Transport. Can be replicated between two storage on the same machine or between two different machines
- Single copy Cluster – Shared Storage Model. Up to 8-node Active/Passive, Active/Active Cut. Only Mailbox role can be clustered, other roles can be clustered using previously technologies
- Something on Transport Dumpster being 1.5 times the size of maximum mail store, I didn’t understand it
Strategies for Disaster recovery for Exchange Server 2007 by my good friend Venkatesh Ramakrishnan (Microsoft India)
- Strategy should be Effective, Efficient, Granular
- A well defined step by step procedure for backup and restore of Exchange Server 2007 when server damaged by a disaster
- Dependent Tasks: Which data is backed up depends on which Exchange Server 2007 role you have installed; The data you decide to backup as a part of the disaster recovery strategy determines the recovery process
- Cricitical Inputs: Knowing what you may have to recover from, Consider your SLA, Understanding the way Exchange Database works and the dependency on Active Directory. For example: Exchange Server 2007 is purely a 64bit subsystem
- Backup of Exchange in your organization is a necessary operational tasks. Verify the backup and restore process in a test environment. Once in production, you should periodically check restoring the backups to the test environment
- Depending on the resources, your test environment can be a Virtual Hardware
- When do you “Repair” and when do you “Restore”. Simple rule of thumb – any component which you will like to bring it to previous state without brining back the offline copy, use “Repair”. Else “Restore”
- Planning the scenario’s : Recover a permanently deleted mail item, recover a mailbox, recover an information store, receover a server with a specific role, recover a mailbox server & finally recover from total site failure
- For brick level backup (each item level) – leverage Recovery Storage Groups, allows you to keep a second copy of the mounted exchange store
- Go for a Streaming Backup or VSS (Shadow) backup so that you have backups at a point in time
- Even if you are doing Online backup, do an Offline backup as well
Finally, the whole day kept going, even at 7PM they had last but one session in Track 1 going on and on. I decided to call it a day. Then I got stuck in Mumbai traffic for 90 minutes for the 10 mins journey from Renaissance Powai to Hotal Rodas in Powai, with rains pouring.
Tech Ed India is one of the biggest annual events by Microsoft. I have been speaking in Tech Ed from 1999 and this year Tech Ed 2007 will be my nineth. This time around I am sitting down as an invitee and relaxing, as almost all the sessions are being presented by Microsoft Full Time Employees. Anyways, this is an event I will never miss as it allows me to catch up on technology and to meet some great brains. This year around it is called “Tech Mela”, I will be here – and remember to say “Hello” to me if you see me.
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