It’s Wednesday 26 March and I am lucky enough to be one of two representatives for Kinetics Group at Microsoft Launchwave 2008. Microsoft has been travelling the world giving presentations in all corners to announce the release of Windows Server 2008, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008. 

The keynote speaker John Case opened up and gave a very good run down of what to expect for the day, and what Microsoft’s vision of the future was highlighting what they call “Dynamic IT”.  This is I.T. that once installed and setup requires very little maintenance whilst encouraging and making it easier to be innovative and improve your networks. 

Once that was complete, we split into areas of interest depending on whether we were developers or IT professionals. I followed the professional path and started off with a presentation by Nathan Mercer on the core infrastructure of Server 2008. Some very interesting information on how server core will work and how the different installs of Server 2008 will work together in the networks to come. This includes core running with minimal role’s and no user interface allowing for lower resource and power usage as well as less down time due to less requirement for patching. The full version of the OS was also shown off, especially the ease with which rolls can be added and the new more flexible control of group policy.

Next up was a very good presentation by Stu Fox on virtualisation. It seems Microsoft’s vision of the future will be based strongly around virtualising everything from your servers to the desktops and applications you run on them. This allows for less hardware reliance and the ability to run applications independent of each other. The good example was the ability to run different versions of access on the same machine virtually preventing the normal conflicts that would be encountered. They did make it clear that a well planned approach is required to change to virtual platforms as ill-prepared networks will create more work than staying away from virtual networks. 

Next up was a security presentation by Ben Hunter. As Ben said himself, a full presentation on security would require a couple of days and we didn’t have that long. However he did give a very good run down on Network Access Protection (NAP) and how by default 2008 will be completely locked down with the requirement to enable and add any roles that are required. NAP will see any computer connected to the network scanned to see if it meets the security criteria of the network before being allowed to join. It can be set to disallow, allow but log, or even set to turn on any security features that have been turned off. The server product itself will come with all security enabled out of the box. This means no roles and completely locked down. Adding roles is very easy and when they are added the OS detects what needs to be unlocked for it to work and automatically does this.

The final presentation of the day was on the still to be finished product SQL 2008. Not being an expert on SQL I was surprised by how easy to understand the new product was. It seems that Microsoft have done a lot to make the programme more designer friendly. This included changing the layout of the manager application to allow for better matching of programming to database items. The big bill item of this presentation was transparent encryption of databases. This is the ability to encrypt data at the database level without the application having to be changed at all to accommodate it. This means that data can be backed up and restored as a fully encrypted file, but as far as any applications running on the server will be aware the data they are dealing with is in the standard SQL format.

Over all this was a very good day with a lot learnt and I personally am looking forward to working with the new products. If you would like to have a look at the presentations that were given on the day all power points are available at : http://www.microsoft.com/nz/events/launchwave/presentations.mspx.