Archive for the ‘Cloud’ Category

Get your Azure ideas out (and vote for Mini-Azure)

The Azure team launched a new product feedback site, and I’m lobbying for one idea on it: Give me mini-sites at a mini-price.
www.mygreatwindowsazureidea.com
A few days ago the director of Windows Azure Planning, Mike Wickstrand, posted about the launch of a new feedback site with a slightly odd name but with quite a decent purpose: www.mygreatwindowsazureidea.com. [...]

November 27, 2009  Tags: ,   Posted in: Cloud, Web  3 Comments

Too early to talk about Office 2010 “missing the online boat”

In his VentureBeat column, the SlideRocket CEO Chuck Dietrich is ready to bury Office 2010 as a dinosaur incapable of extending to the online world. Given his perspective as the chief of perhaps the most credible PowerPoint competitor, it’s no surprise he attacks PowerPoint. But does he have a point?
Dietrich's message is that the Office [...]

November 20, 2009  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Cloud, Information Worker  2 Comments

Live Framework’s next steps are fuzzy, at best

The last session slot of PDC held an item of personal interest for me: CL26 “The Audience API: Live Framework Present and Future”. Unfortunately, after finishing my conference experience with that session, I’m not much wiser about the Live Framework’s future. Here’s a recap.
First of all, a short backgrounder: In PDC 2008, Live Framework was [...]

November 20, 2009  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Cloud  No Comments

Summary of PDC09 announcements

The two keynote days of PDC09 are behind, and the crowd has mixed reactions. At any rate, the most substantial launches seem to be over now, so it’s a safe time to write up some quick notes. Later on, it’ll be time to delve into each of these in more detail. The following list is [...]

November 19, 2009  Tags: , , , , , , ,   Posted in: .NET, Cloud, Web, Windows IT  2 Comments

Windows Azure Content Delivery Network announced

Of the recent cloud news, I want to pick one item to highlight: The Windows Azure Content Delivery Network as announced by the Azure team on Thursday.
I recently blogged about the Microsoft Ajax CDN being able to handle the distribution of your JavaScript. Microsoft certainly didn’t setup all that CDN infrastructure with no plan for [...]

November 9, 2009  Tags: ,   Posted in: Cloud  No Comments

SharePoint Conference 2009 Keynote Highlights

It was as we expected. Put Steve Ballmer on the stage, and you have lots of Supers and other traditional Microspeak expressions. But also, you got a surprisingly solid, clear vision of where Microsoft is going with SharePoint. Jeff Teper then went on to discuss some of the new end-user features with no less passion. [...]

October 19, 2009  Tags: ,   Posted in: Cloud, Information Worker, Web  One Comment

The death of Live Services – what to expect?

By now the Windows Live oriented people have probably heard the news: the Live Services infrastructure, including Live Framework, is shutting down on next Tuesday. Live Mesh will stay online, but the developer CTP version will be discontinued – until it is merged with the Windows Live offering.

A short history
Announced in PDC 2008, Live Framework [...]

September 4, 2009  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Cloud  4 Comments

Windows Azure vs. Amazon cloud pricing

Day 2 keynote of WPC wasn’t as thrilling as the first one, but we got what we wanted: Windows Azure pricing. Plus a free few months, starting now. How’s that?
The most important things first: The prices are available in Windows Azure team blog. There are also a few words on the Service Level Agreement (in [...]

July 14, 2009  Tags: ,   Posted in: Cloud  8 Comments

Backing up cloud data (and the cost of mistakes)

Backups are useful for two major purposes: full recovery of everything lost in a hardware failure and partial recovery of something lost due to an user – or developer – error. Cloud providers have strong incentive to do everything to eliminate the first kind of problem, but I fear the second case more.
From what one [...]

June 5, 2009  Tags: ,   Posted in: Cloud, Windows IT  One Comment