My SQL Azure book is published

My latest book, Microsoft SQL Azure Enterprise Application Development was published today.

Writing this book was a great learning experience both in terms of understanding the technology and trying to put it across for others with whom I would share this experience.

Many people made this happen. Packt publishing offered me this third chance and the folks at Packt were great. I could not have written without the help of my participation in the Windows Azure, SQL Azure and SQL Server forums. The MSDN and TechNet resources; the Microsoft and Neudesic boot camps; the evaluation software etc. a great deal of which I used provided the necessary momentum.

The third party Windows Azure vendors I have tried to introduce were most helpful in providing trial software. I might not have covered all of them but surely many more must be out there.

Now I anxiously wait to see how it is going to be received... Get a free copy entering a raffle , follow this link:

http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2011/01/do-you-want-free-copies-of-my-latest.html

Holiday greetings from Sybase

Very nice and thanks,

PaaS, IaaS, SaaS and now DaaS

Salesforce.com will be adding DaaS to the already overcrowded 4 letter acronyms for everything that is offered in the Cloud. With Database.com in place Salesforce.com will be in direct competition with Microsoft, Amazon, Google and others. What is very interesting is the per transaction pricing. OK, it is not relational DB (Sorry, my mistake, it is indeed relational ) but can it compete with relational data? Interesting questions,
How these vendors are going to divide up the market?
How Microsoft,Amazon and others are going to respond?
Need to consider though that Salesforce.com has been in this business for a while.Price war may be in the offing.

Lync lassos a lot of Microsoft stuff

Microsoft most recently released Lync (17 Nov, 2010). Download a free version here (http://www.lync.com). It's a communication software consisting of Servers and Clients that helps users to connect and stay connected in new ways wherever they are with a single client interface. It is managed quite simply integrated with Active Directory.

Some major features from Microsoft documentation reproduced here:

Secure IM Messaging:

(MSN,Yahoo,WindowsLive,AOL). Presence Status such  as available/busy supported.

Conferencing:
IM Conferencing: Audio and Web Conferencing; Application Sharing; Impromptu as well as scheduling. Dial-in is also OK through PSTN. Automatic scaling (from few users to thousands) very much like a cloud service.

VOIP also known as Enterprise Voice:
IM, Collaboration etc. Full service including call answer, hold, forward, transfer etc

Remote users support:
Remote users outside company firewalls supported with Edge Servers. This also helps federation with partners and vendors

Integration:
Integration with other Microsoft products such as Outlook 2010,Exchange, Office and SharePoint 2010. Outlook will have a hear audio message button.

Easy deployment: 
Wizard driven Planning tool(Prelease version) and Topology builder

Simply Managed:
Active Directory Managed;
Control Panel Management GUI;
Command line support leveraging Windows Powershell

Servers and Clients alike need recommneded 64-Bit CPU