PDC08 – The Canadian View - Choice and Flexibility. Canada Needs Both.

This is the first in a series of posts leading up to the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference at the end of October as well as TechDays across Canada.  Our team will be heading to the show, but our priority is to help you understand the announcements, the key technology trends and the impact to Canadian developers and our local IT industry.

Today Canadian businesses are demanding the ability to connect people and information across devices and user experiences and the flexibility to choose where and how their infrastructure is managed and their business data stored.  The web has fundamentally changed how applications are built.  I’m talking about the demand for Choice of user experiences and the demand for Flexibility of the their platform and infrastructure.

Choice of User Experiences

Canadians expect to be able to access their information through a growing spectrum of devices and experiences.   Let me give you a quick example that many of you can relate to today.  During the day I use Outlook 2007 to check my email.  It’s got fully featured user experience tailored to getting through emails and calendar items quickly. I have a rich experience and I can continue working when I’m disconnected from the Internet.  But what happens when I’m not at work or I’m travelling?  Like all of you, I’m able to check my email on my Smartphone or using a Rich Internet Application. This is a great example of the user experience choices that users demand for all applications – I use Twitter in my browser, on my phone, from other websites and from a RIA.  That same level of choice is being demanded for all sorts of information across a business from customer and product information to business intelligence and management.  This is an amazing trend but to make it a reality, Developers need the ability to easily provide a selection of user experiences for the solutions they build.  More on this later.

Flexibility of Infrastructure

Similar to the demand for a broad choice of user experiences, businesses are realizing that they can and want to take advantage of the Internet to support various parts of their infrastructure needs.  For example, a small business with a limited IT budget may choose to save money and host their email and web server in the cloud but decides to invest in a secure self-hosted environment for their customers confidential data or corporate IP.  A large organization may want the agility that comes from adding services and capabilities to their already rich IT infrastructure.  The fact is that businesses of all sizes need the flexibility of choosing how and where their infrastructure is managed in order to maximize the value of their IT investment.  More on this later.

In the coming weeks I want to dive deeper into these two trends. Specifically , I’m going to focus on how Microsoft is supporting Canadian Developers and IT Professionals to deliver on the promise of Choice and Flexibility.

If you’re a Canadian Developer or IT Professional, the best way to be prepared to be on top of these trends in the future is by building your skills today. If you are looking to grow your skills, then you definitely need to consider attending Microsoft TechDays (www.techdays.ca) .  If you are a need to understand the longer term roadmap of how Microsoft plans on addressing Choice & Flexibility, you might want to consider attending or following the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (www.microsoftpdc.com).

So tell me, how are these trends impacting your business?   If you’re a developer or IT Professional that’s thinking about this for your business, I want to hear from you.

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