The first service pack for Office 2010 and SharePoint will contain updates to improve stability, performance, and security. With it, Microsoft promised a better Internet Explorer 9 browsing experience, improved Office Web Apps functionality, and better SharePoint database performance. The service pack will consist of minor updates as well; including all public updates through June 2011 and all cumulative updates through April 2011, in addition to some previously unreleased fixes made specifically for this service pack. SP1 will be available for download at the end of June and will be offered as an automatic update 90 days later.
New Windows Phone 7 features include organization, security, and search enhancements in Microsoft Office Outlook Mobile. Outlook Mobile now has a conversation view, pinnable email folders, server search, and complex password support. Information Rights management is now included for email and documents as well as targeted distribution for business apps from the Windows Phone Marketplace.
Windows Phone 7 has also been updated to support Office 365. Users can access Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Lync Online. Microsoft Lync 2010 Mobile for Windows Phone, a solution to deliver unified communications to mobile workers, will be showcased for the first time at TechEd.
Robert Wahbe, corporate vice president for Microsoft Server and Tools Marketing, and Jason Zander, corporate vice president of Visual Studio, underscored Microsoft's heavy investment in the public and private cloud. The public cloud consists of Windows Azure, SQL Azure, Office 365, Dynamics CRM, and Windows Intune. Customers who want to run these products in their own private cloud can do so with Hyper-V (Microsoft's virtualization server) and System Center.
Wahbe also demonstrated how customers like HSBC and Travelocity are using Microsoft's virtualization and public and private cloud solutions. In addition, he said NetApp and Cisco Systems have joined the Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track program, designed to streamline the delivery of a private cloud. Zander focused on a new feature in the next version of Microsoft Visual Studio, the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) technologies, designed to ease application development and management for organizations.
Zander demonstrated a connector that links Microsoft System Center Operation Manager 2007 R2 and Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010. The connector enables an operations team to send application performance monitoring and diagnostic information immediately to the development team—the potential benefit being improved interaction between operations and development. ALM is available in Visual Studio 2010 with an MSDN subscription.
Other announcements include:
- Additional supported hypervisor scenarios for virtualized Exchange Server 2010, including Unified Messaging, combining Exchange's high availability solutions, Database Availability Groups (DAG) with hypervisor based clustering and failover solutions.
- An updated Exchange Server 2010 Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) program for Exchange 2010 server experts to get MCM certified.
- New license mobility options, which will be available on July 1, 2011 through Microsoft Volume License agreements with an active Software Assurance benefit. Customers will be able to deploy application services on-premise or through hosted service providers for the cloud.
- Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V will support Linux-based CentOS.
- Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) v3.5 Extension for SAML 2.0 Protocol enables .NET developers to build applications for the enterprise and government that require the SAML 2.0 (Security Assertion Markup Language) protocol.
- Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit beta 6.0 will be released on May 31. The toolkit provides data and analysis on IT infrastructure. It was designed to help ease the process of migrating existing software to a virtualized or cloud environment. Version 6.0 includes the ability to provide consolidation guidance for Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track Infrastructures, including computing power, network, and storage architectures.