On Tuesday there was the first (German) Microsoft Architects Forum in Mainz. Was a lot of traveling for me, since I had to get up at 2:30 in the morning and got back around 1:00 also in the morning, but the content was well done. Interesting stuff, and since it was run out of the Enterprise and Partner Group the content and audience was a bit different from the stuff I'm used from TechEd and IT-Forum. For example there was a presentation of the Windows Server System Reference Architecture (WSSRA) which is the new version of the guides and scripts formally known as MSA (Microsoft System Architecture). We are talking about guides and scripts to create a Datacenter which is easy to deploy and scale out since it's well designed, with best practices in mind. Everything is defined, networks, routers, firewall configuration a.s.o. E.g. if a customer who's running his Datacenter as in the WSSRA described needs more storage or performance in Exchange, he'd be able to call his supplier and get a pre-configured box which fit's directly into his infrastructure.
Another good presentation was about the Dynamic System Initiative (DSI). Future Versions of Visual Studio will enable the developer to design the whole application infrastructure in VS, and control even security settings of those boxes via GPOs. Very interesting, that fit's my prediction that Developer and Administrators will need to get closer together in the near future - I've seen many developers who did not fully understand the infrastructure they are developing against, and on the other hand many Administrators who do not know the issues of the applications and how to deploy them securely. I'll have to have a look at DSI and see how well it's able to define a process which allows the Developer to do his work, but enables the Administration or Project Team to take over control before deploying to the QSU or Production.
And tomorrow (actually today) I'll be at the German MVP-Summit - and I presume another round of interesting talks. Communities are great - one of the major things of the coming year(s) I expect communities to merge better with companies and get a kind of staging in the knowledge-mapping. Does that make sense? Is that even English? However, I really believe it's essential for companies (and/or their IT-Departments) to define a internal knowledge-management and it would not hurt to connect that with countrywide or global communities. We'll see - let me know what you think.