Azure News & Articles

Softeng Portal Builder is a SaaS solution that will help you build portal and web projects for your enterprise, hosting them within the Microsoft Azure cloud.

For a company that is known primarily for the desktop, new comments by CEO Steve Ballmer that 70% of Microsoft's employees are doing something "cloud-based or cloud-inspired" seems an odd shift in focus. But then, everyone is in a rush to the cloud these days. Why would Microsoft (news, site) be any different.

Visual Studio 2010 (news, site) is now out as a Release Candidate and available to everyone to try out. Keep in mind it will still have issues and if you want to do Azure or MVC development, there a few things you need to do.

The official launch of the Windows Azure (news, site) cloud is now upon us. It's been in the works for a few years, and well tested -- even if Microsoft does not fully utilize it themselves.

Everyone, it seems, is questioning the future of the Web Content Management market. But question they may, Web CMS vendors across the global are still working hard to advance their solutions, and Bulgaria based Telerik (news, site) is no exception.

They have recently announced their Q3 Release lineup and it's packed with new features that include support for SQL Azure, User Interface testing and ASP.NET MVC and much more.

First Microsoft's Interoperability Team announced a PHP Toolkit, then we saw Microsoft throw their support behind the CodePlex.org Foundation, and we hear rumors of a new open source content management system. So now what?

Well the Microsoft Interoperability Team has announced support for the open source IDE Eclipse. At the Eclipse Summit Europe, they offered up a few new solutions in partnership with open source companies Tasktop Technologies and Soyatec:

• An Enhanced Developer Experience for Eclipse on Windows 7
• Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse
• Windows Azure Software Developer Kit (SDK) for Java
• Eclipse Tools for Silverlight

Microsoft provides funding and architectural guidance on the projects.

According to Microsoft, the goal here is to "help developers using the Eclipse platform take advantage of the new features in Windows 7 and Window Server 2008 R2, and reinforce Java and PHP interoperability with Windows Azure and Microsoft Silverlight."

You can get all the details on these four projects on Microsoft's Interoperability blog.

And while these projects sound interesting, there's another one underway that caught our attention: Microsoft has joined up with IBM, Zend Technologies, and others to work on a new open source, cloud interoperability project.

Called Simple API for Cloud Application Services, this project is designed to help create basic cloud applications that will run in all of the major cloud platforms. This would include the Amazon Web Services, even though Amazon is not part of the project. 

Beta 2 is now out for Visual Studio 2010 and along with it comes the announcement of a new product lineup designed to make purchasing decisions just a little bit easier.

Web Content Management and Customer Relationship Management go hand-in-hand. At the least they are complementary. So says ADXSTUDIO. Their latest release of ADXSTUDIO xRM Extensions v2.1 includes a complete web content management system for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Although many might question the true nature of the newly announced CodePlex Foundation, they can't deny that Microsoft is coming out with solutions that demonstrate their ability to interoperate with open source technologies.

We told you about their new PHP Toolkit that helps PHP developers access ADO.NET Data Services. Now Microsoft demonstrates a cloud interoperability scenario where data stored in the cloud can be accessed via PHP using that toolkit.

This Azure cloud scenario was demonstrated at Gov 2.0 Summit last week to "explore how technology can enable transparency, collaboration and efficiency in government". So how does it work?

Microsoft loaded publicly available government data into an Azure cloud storage. An OGDI application was then built to expose the data, and then this data was made available via a REST interface using ADO.NET Data Services.

Data Interoperability Scenario in the Cloud
 

This scenario is not only a good example of how the PHP Toolkit works, but also the OGDI interactive SDK.

You can read a little more about this scenario here and get links to the applications to give it try yourself.

Got an Amazon S3 account? Why not back up your data to it? That's the premise of CloudBerry's (news, site) S3 Backup tool that enters a new beta phase as it gets closer to primetime.

At this year’s Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft (news, site) confirmed the upcoming commercial availability of their cloud services platform, Azure. Then they slapped a price tag on it.

Microsoft's cloud computing platform was initially released last fall and offers an operating system and developer services that can be used individually or together. The whole shebang will hit the virtual shelves at the Professional Developer Conference in November of this year.

Once available, Azure will be offered through a consumption-based pricing model. This method will allow partners and customers to pay for the services that they consume, and nothing more. Exact pricing for Azure’s OS will reportedly be US$ 0.12 per hour for computing, and US$ 0.15 per Gigabyte per month for storage. Plans include a basic US$ 9.99 per month basic edition and a US$ 99.99 per month business edition which comes with a 10 Gig database.

Cloud Computing is kind of a huge thing right now so naturally, at the initial release of Microsoft's platform, we considered the possibility that the company was "betting the farm on Azure." Do we still think that's the case? Perhaps. Earlier this year we saw upgrades aimed to woo developers and the pending commercial availability certainly speaks to the needed openness. It looks like these collective baby steps lead in one direction: up!

Follow us as we follow them and let's see how they do.

With Beta 1 of Visual Studio 2010 (news, site) out for review, Microsoft is also releasing some extensions to keep us all excited about developing .NET applications. One of these extensions is the The Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio and the latest version is out as a technology preview.

As you may remember, Windows Azure got some serious play late last year when Open Text announced their records management and archiving capabilities designed specifically for the cloud-based operating system.

Continuing on the path to clear (cloudy) skies, and perhaps in order to attract even more big names from the enterprise content management world, Microsoft recently announced some upgrades to the platform.

Revealed alongside Silverlight 3 beta at the MIX09 conference, Azure’s new capabilities include non-.NET language support via FastCGI, and geolocation. The new features are aimed directly at the hearts of developers who dream of being able to host data and code across more than one US-based center.

Gartner predicted cloud computing to be one of the top 10 strategic technologies for 2009, and so far it looks like they were right. Besides appealing to developers, the Cloud route means customers too can store data in multiple locations without IT involvement, and for significantly less money. And as much as we’d hate to see ECM trampled into oblivion, we must admit that benefits like that are hard to beat.

Follow Open Text’s continued efforts to stay afloat here, or check out more details on Azure here.

According to Chris Petersen, APAC director of channels at Open Text, it is unlikely that enterprise data will ever go to the cloud due to regulatory issues and bandwidth costs.

In a recent interview with ZDNet Asia, Petersen gave his outlook on the enterprise future in the cloud.

Despite the fact that many and many more companies warm up towards cloud computing, Petersen insists the organizations will continue to store a large part of data in-house and demand on-premise software. He attributes his reasoning to regulatory compliance and the higher bandwidth costs associated with moving data offsite as substantial barriers to mainstream enterprise adoption of cloud computing technology.

The funny thing is that Petersen’s employer tends to think otherwise, judging by Open Text’s recent move into the Windows Azure cloud by offering a “first-of-its-kind” records management and archiving capability for Microsoft’s new cloud-based operating system Windows Azure. Open Text will incorporate these cloud-based capabilities into its Enterprise Library Services offering early next year.

Records management is a pretty extensive part of any enterprise, often taking up massive amounts of server space. Petersen is making his point only to prove that cloud computing is not a threat to the Enterprise CMS industry players like Open Text because the need to keep thorough records of in-house data will persist, he said.

But we all know his attempt is a futile one. Gartner predicts cloud computing to be one of the top 10 strategic technologies for 2009 for enterprise-level businesses. SaaS is thriving, CMS market included, as predicted earlier this year.

If anything, today’s customers with tight IT budgets, especially in the SMB sector, will look beyond such expensive solutions as Open Text and explore cloud- or SaaS-based alternatives.