Monday, February 14, 2005 - Posts
Checkout the live webcast @ http://www.microsoft.com/seminar/shared/asp/view.asp?url=/seminar/en/20050204_bgateskeynote/manifest.xml&rate=1 ...somewhere past the 55 minute mark.
A question from Mark Moore (formerly of KPMG and an early SPS 2001 adopter)...
AUDIENCE QUESTION: A number of us have been on the collaboration path with Microsoft for a long time starting with Outlook and Exchange. A couple of us probably remember a team productivity update. Then SharePoint 2001, SharePoint 2003, Digital Dashboard was in there. In going from point- milestone to milestone on this path, there hasn't been a lot to leverage moving from one point to the other. Today, in the Whidbey talk I was gratified to hear that the Whidbey Web Parts were going to be backward compatible. I'm hoping that you can assure us that those of us who have been on the path with you for a while, that this cycle of creative destruction is coming to an end.
STEVE SINOFSKY: Well, that's our other one-on-one topic.
BILL GATES: Well, we're building on SharePoint. And-
AUDIENCE QUESTION: 2001 or 2003?
BILL GATES: 2003.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Okay.
BILL GATES: And SharePoint 2003 has a very tight relationship with our ASP.NET and SQL Server. The main thing you're going to see in terms of evolution is the relationship between SharePoint and ASP become closer, and the relationship between SharePoint and SQL become closer. SharePoint today exposes some database capabilities. In the future, we want to expose virtually all the database capabilities in a very direct sense. Likewise, ASP.NET parts work in SharePoint, we want all parts to be ASP.NET parts. Bringing that layering so you don't even think of that as two layers. That's the general direction, while at the same time the workflow, document management, digital rights, and the breadth of the templates that we put in at the Office SharePoint level, those get to be quite a bit broader. I'd say of the cool new things that we're doing in Office, a very substantial percentage focus on where SharePoint either is the scenario or is a big part of the scenario.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Can I follow up on the SQL point, because when those of us who saw the Web Store in SharePoint 2001, I sort of thought wow, that sounds a lot like what KIRO was going to be. Now, looking at WinFS, WinFS has sort of vague echoes of what the Web Store was going to be. Is SQL really the underlying storage that's going to be in the SharePoint of the future?
BILL GATES: Yes. What's happened is that there's this dream of unified storage, which is the world of files, mail, records, all these things, coming together in a very rich store. That's a dream that we've been investing in for a long, long time. What that basically is, it's about taking a very enhanced version of SQL that can deal with XML, it can deal with streams, and putting a very high-level data model, sort of a- you'd almost call it an entity-relationship data model on top of SQL so it can deal with all these things. That's the path we're going down. WinFS is merely the client implementation of that strategy. What SharePoint's going to sit on top of is the database engine and what WinFS, which is just a framework on top of this thing, is going to sit on top of is a database engine, those are one in the same thing. It's the next big iteration of SQL that gives us all of those powers. It's perfectly symmetric, client to server, WinFS to SharePoint. You'll think- you won't- it's not even clear the term WinFS and SharePoint are necessary, because what you're going to see is they're exactly the same thing. SharePoint just evolves up on the server. WinFS evolves down on the client.
STEVE SINOFSKY: Just to build on that, the- we put a lot of energy and a lot of effort to build the Web Part Framework that you saw in Windows SharePoint Services 2003. We pulled those- that structure into the base classes into the Whidbey product. Moving forward, you'll just expect us to build on that even more. We were kind of- we got started, we're aligned, and we're going to stay aligned for quite some. I can promise you that the next release of all these things we're working on are built on top of all of these same parts. The upgrade path is all designed to not even be an upgrade path. You could just keep running. You run it side-by-side. You could add the new features. It'll all be very, very smooth. Your investment in the Web Part side, in writing to the Web Service API for Windows SharePoint Services, both of those are very secure right now.
BILL GATES: Yes. Part of it we have a big installed base now.
STEVE SINOFSKY: Yes.
BILL GATES: With the older- some of those older things, we didn't get much of an installed base.
----------------------------------------
An interesting observation.... Checkout one of my old blog postings about WinFS @ http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/mwherman2000/archive/2003/11/21/3826.aspx.
Notice all of the blog SPAM about “texas hold'em” in the comments ....then note which Google ads appear at the bottom of the page ...an interesting dynamic.
Cheers,
Michael.
Checkout the live webcast @ http://www.microsoft.com/seminar/shared/asp/view.asp?url=/seminar/en/20050204_bgateskeynote/manifest.xml&rate=1 and skip ahead to minute 52:00 (exactly ;-).
Here's a transcript:
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Michael Herman, from Parallelspace Corporation. It's nice to see Microsoft consolidating around a smaller set of core technologies. But, when it comes to electronic forms, Word and Excel have their own point solution. Outlook has its own point solution. InfoPath has its own point solution. Access has its own point solution. In the developer platform, you have ASP.NET and WinForms. We're constantly in a situation we're trying to guess which ones are strategic. Can you give us some insight?
BILL GATES: You can start on that.
STEVE SINOFSKY: Do you want to beat me up? Or- I think that was-
BILL GATES: There's some truth in that question.
STEVE SINOFSKY: Well, I think it was- I'm thinking in that short period of time, he summarized the last 10 or 12- one- ones that we've had talking about this issue.
BILL GATES: Well, he didn't get Avalon though. But [unintelligible]
STEVE SINOFSKY: I think it's a- that's a very good summary. I honestly think it's a very fair assessment, and a very fair critique of the challenge that we face. For me, I think back the slide that you used, Bill, about rich client and thin client, and the trade-offs that you have to make. I think for us in the forms space, we're constantly battling these kinds of trade-offs, but probably a little higher up the stack. Do we want the calculations behind Excel? Do we want the rich editing in Word? Do we want the thin deployment of ASP.NET? There- all of these trade-offs. We just struggle with trying to have the one that solves all of the problems. I think that that leads to this well, depending on the audience and the timing, this seems to be the most important one at the time.
What I can say is, for sure all of the ones you mentioned, we're going to continue to support for a very long time. It's really important to understand that we're behind. Even if we release something and you see another presentation that points out something else might be new and improved, we do continue to support them for a very long time. That said, it's a- where we are now in the Office System, in particular, I think you're seeing us on the Web-based side focusing on SharePoint Products and Technologies, and on the Client-based side focusing on InfoPath and that level of integration. For me, InfoPath pulls together all of the elements that Bill talked about today in terms of it has the rich-client interface. It has improvements in deployability and management. It's XML-based, and it has all the connectivity to Web Services.
I think I'll take a risk. Have many of you looked at InfoPath, and investigated InfoPath, and thought about it at all? Because those of you that have, you're probably asking us about where's the thin-client element of it so we kind of hit that right away. That's clearly some feedback that we've got and some things that we need to work on. Then maybe you could add a longer-term view, or more.
BILL GATES: No, I think that hits it. They- today, a little bit you have to think of HTML, and then our rich forms where InfoPath is the one that's definitely on the rise there. What we want to get to is where InfoPath's at the high-level, then we have all these rich controls you can use, and underneath we have the Avalon runtime. We have a roadmap for InfoPath where it gets richer and richer, embraces our rich controls, and sits on the latest presentation system. We also have some ways that if you do your work in InfoPath in future versions, we'll be able to project that onto classic HTML, although today you have to think, do you want to be pure HTML or be able to assume InfoPath? That's the one that will rise in usage even as we're compatible with everything we've got.
As Chief Software Architect, drawing these roadmaps and making them clear is a pretty important thing. Forms is the one that it's taken us a long time to get a clear message out.
----------------------------------------
[Note: I have no official relationship with the MS WinFS team.]
Note the *K* in SRBK.
The previous SRB 2.1 version was achievable using any modern day Windows application that exposed a rich object model. How do I think WinFS will differ? It's the piece about relationships and WinFS's ability (as of the 2004 PDC) to represent arbitrary objects and arbitrary relationships and hence, arbitrary knowledge networks ...opening the door for new categories of every day applications that will use reasoning engines, etc.
Click here for this version of the diagram.