Nice job Microsoft…no really!

Posted by Dr. Rob Rennie Thu, October 20, 2011 11:00 am EDT

The college technology leadership team and I recently had a couple of days of extremely valuable meetings with senior Microsoft folks.

We always go into briefings like these with very low expectations. Executive briefings usually prove to be rehashes of roadmaps we already know or product announcements that don’t really provide any material improvement for our technology environment. This one was very different.

The first thing was that product and market managers, executives and managers who attended were the most informed senior Microsoft staff for the topic, no posers. Second, we had real give and take, not just presentations, so we had the opportunity to challenge products and perspectives and hone the topics on the fly to our unique needs. Third, they were truly transparent with us on timelines and realistic expectations, and finally there was no selling.

So what did we learn? Well we discovered that Microsoft’s products and services really are headed in the right, from our perspective anyway, direction. Major software upgrades and rewrites will emphasize cloud capability and better integration. The systems software “stack” is being re-conceptualized for a seamless enterprise deployment.

In our case that means our systems architecture plans will serve us very well with: BizTalk serving as the workflow and rules engine, SharePoint as the portal framework and foundation for collaboration, Active Directory for authentication and access management, .Net as the common application development environment, SQL Server and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) as the primary reporting tool, Azure as a cloud development option and prototyping space, Exchange for email and calendaring, the Office (and Office 365) suite for productivity, xRM for entity and resource relationship management, and Live@edu for student accounts. As you probably already know, many of these products have been part of the college’s environment for a long time, however, the products are being re-developed to work better as a suite of solutions. This stack provides a robust and well-integrated software solutions infrastructure that will serve us well for years to come.

The re-developed Dynamics ERP (currently AX 2012) products have considerable potential to replace many of the older modules in our Orion ERP with the option of local hosting or, our preference, as a true cloud-based solution.

It isn’t very often that we see everything we had hoped for in briefings, this was a very nice exception. Well-done Microsoft.