This week I am in Seattle, WA at the Educause 2007 Annual Conference. I am really looking forward to the week starting with a train ride from Vancouver, BC to Seattle, WA on the Amtrak Cascades route.
Today, I spent the day with peers and colleagues at the Microsoft Redmond Campus at the Higher Education Technology Symposium. The day started early … 7:30am pickup in downtown Seattle and did not finish until after 6pm.
The first session talked about shifting Microsoft to:
- customer driven innovation
- global commitment to education
- relevance in programs, products and policies
Saw a familiar graphic with a vendor twist …
Instead of the standard EA and IT “people, process and technology”, we saw a de-emphasis (I hope that is a word!) of technology and got “people, process and preparedness“. I was pleased to see a common theme of “Scalability” all day long.
Collaboration was a big focus with Sharepoint Platform Services – deployed as hosted services as well as installed as local software. Hosted services will continue to be a challenge for Canadian (and non US) Higher Ed Institutions as long as we have to deal with the US Patriot Act. There was a great talk on Campus Infrastructure Platform that is very informative in a discussion of building a solid base infrastructure for future delivery of technology.
Other topics included Windows Server Hardening – in particular defense in depth and only installing the component services that are needed using “server roles”, BitLocker Drive Encryption, Network Access Protection and Virtualization of presentation, desktop, applications, server and storage.
Lots more to come … I will try to get a blog entry in each night during the conference. Stay tuned …
Related posts:
Leo de Sousa
[...] the rest of this great post here [...]
[...] Read the rest of this great post here [...]
[...] is an update to my earlier post about the Higher Education Technology Symposium at Microsoft on Oct 22nd … I received the link to the presentations from the day … [...]