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Information Technology News Big audience catches Microsoft's 2008 wave
Information Technology News Big audience catches Microsoft's 2008 wave | Big audience catches Microsoft's 2008 wave |
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| by Stephen Withers | |
| Friday, 29 February 2008 | |
      
According to Bob Kelly, corporate vice president, infrastructure services, some two million people will participate in virtual launch events, with a further 250,000 attending the physical events that began this week in Los Angeles before moving to other cities around the world. Around 1000 were present for yesterday's Sydney leg of the tour, with another 5000 expected at the remaining Australian events, said Martin Gregory, director, server and tools business group, Microsoft Australia. Over 100 people in Australia are already fully certified on Windows Server 2008, as Microsoft has put significant effort into early training, he added. Several well-known local organisations are among the early adopters, including National Australia Bank, Westpac and Macquarie Bank, along with Telstra, Lion Nathan, Bridgestone Tyres, Mincom, LaTrobe University and the University of Canberra. Some are reporting valuable performance improvements from moving to the new system software. Richard White, CEO of CargoWise (a developer of software for the logistics and cargo industries) said moving from Windows Server 2003 to 2008 gave a 60 percent boost. Even more impressive is the 1609 percent (yes, better than 16x) gain achieved on one benchmark for Elcom's enterprise content management software. Most of that came from the enhancements to Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.0, said technical director Craig Bailey, but upgrading from .Net 2.0 to 3.5 and from SQL Server 2005 to 2008 also contributed. Other early adopters spoke of features rather then performance. Tom Townsend, Windows systems team leader at the University of Canberra said Windows Server 2008 plus Systems Center Virtual Machine Manager "really made a huge different to how we manage our environment," while Brad Moore, development manager for MineScape at Mincom spoke of the "significant productivity gains" he team derived from Visual Studio 2008 while porting an existing Unix-based application to Windows and .Net. Lion Nathan's CIO Darryl Warren was more focussed on features that would impact on end-users, highlighting the way it is now possible to put an icon on a user's desktop that actually runs the application on the server while giving the appearance of a local app, and Terminal Services' new ability to send output to a local printer without having to install the corresponding driver on the server. THe latter capability is especially useful for remote workers, he suggested. |
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