Every year, vendors  from all around the globe use Microsoft's Worldwide Conference to showcase their products to a technical audience.  Like all expos, some products catch your eye, and many don't.  As well as all the latest funky laptops, hip mobile devices  and other predictable  content, here are four innovations that stood out to me :

Juniper SRX 220 - Internal SIP for Office Communication Server and other VoIP phone systems.  Sits between the internet and ISDN and your network/PBx and allows IP phones to connect.  $US 3000?

JackBe Data Mashups - great for combining data sources from a variety of sources, including public and private datasets - for example real estate  value databases  with properties for sale or over retail figures with individual store performance

HyperIP - software based WAN optimiser, especially for improving connectivity between HyperV and VMWare stacks across multiple offices

DataCore - software SAN, turning unused harddrives in virtualisation servers into a  high-performance virtualised SAN, allowing the benefits of shared storage without the cost.

I also took a quick look at a new product, codenamed "Aurora" which is a server aimed at businesses with under 25 users.   It's designed to act simply as a file server and login controller.  All the eMail and SharePoint style services come from your preferred 'cloud' (for example Microsoft Online Services).  Aurora lets you login to your PCs remotely, share files and printers locally and centrally manage your workstation.  By keeping the functionality simple, it looks to be fairly easy to manage, with a lot of similarities to Home Server.  Even licenses are simple - there's just the one software license and no need to worry about client access licenses.  This will be a welcome solution for our smaller clients when it's released, especially if our guesses about the pricing is right