First report from your MCT reporter at the MCT (Microsoft Certified Trainer) Community Summit 2008 in Berlin. We are here with about 400 MCT’s, 400 people that spend their time in training other people on Microsoft technologies. Everybody in this conference is on daily basis active with getting the most in and out of their students ( or with the words of “top speaker” Richard Klees RIO: Result – Input – Output).
Our MCT efforts seem to have great effect on the efficiency of IT teams. Nearly 70% of all managers acknowledge the productivity increase because of certification and certified IT-teams are nearly 30% more efficient and productive than non-certified IT teams. Imagine that in a Dynamics implementation…who doesn’t want to have that increase in his project?
Something that I didn’t know is that in Belgium we have 83 MCT’s for all Microsoft technologies. I really thought we were with much more. The Dutch have 311 MCT’s. Knowing that at Plataan we have nearly 4 MCT’s means that we have about 5% of all Belgium MCT’s working with us.
This first day started with a 45 minutes session on the Microsoft Global Product Vision by Frank Fisher.
The session started with a broad overview on the history of IT. Web 1.0 wave was discussed to get us to the point that we saw the difference with the current web 2.0 wave. Things like cheap technology, globalization and the internet were discussed. This leaded the session towards “green-it” (less power consuming IT infrastructure), Google (a corporate company founded on advertisement business model) and user generated content.
On his blog Frank Fisher writes this:
“In my opinion the definition of software platform is changing. While in the past software platform was first a collection of libraries, it evolved and added baseline service providers like databases or communication services. Today a software platform extends itself into the cloud (as Microsoft calls it). To all what we already have new services are added and extend what we have. Services like storage but also services like monetarization or a global identification system. Services that need extreme amounts of regularly updated data like mapping. Services that take the operation of common things like email into a central datacenter.”
Frank then headed towards the "Mashup" trend. He talked about it as a federation of enterprise and cloud services. You can have a server A generating specific services an a server B generating other services, a server C ... etc. A client can now take someting from the service from server A, passing it to server B, transforming it to server C etc.
As example he mentionned Popfly . Popfly is actually a showcase for silverlight but illustrates the mashup really well.
You can view a small funny video on what a mashup is actually doiing (and so for what you can use popfly).
Once you have discovered this, imagine what you can do with this as a front-end for sharepoint ...
Frank also positionned office as a "door in the cloud".
During this session became clear that Microsoft's vision on software is : S + S: Software + Services.
S+S is the strategy for MS.
More reports about this convention to come.
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