So the big Educause event is on this week, and many of my team members are there waving the flag for Microsoft.  We also have the Partner Developer Conference running in parallel with this.  This year the big story is all around Software + Services, which is really our take on this whole Cloud Computing phenomenon that is currently sweeping the world of IT.  I tell education customers that Live@edu is a good concrete example of some of the things that you can roll out now as a taster for things to come.  Today, we announced a load of things that make the future tastier still.

The full press release is here: http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2008/oct08/10-28Educause08PR.mspx.  Below, I touch on some of these.

Azure - a hosted cloud computing/development platform:  Think Facebook applications for one, or think of a research department in a university that wants to spin up a bunch of computing cycles to solve some mathematical problem and they do not have the resources to do this locally...

Office Web Applications:  Use your favorite productivity applications through your browser and not have to worry about having Office installed to edit documents.  Good for students that want to work in a controlled collaborative way with their documents, or researchers working across geographical boundaries on a paper.

Geneva: Then buried a little deeper, we had the announcement that we will be supporting SAML in our forth-coming "Geneva" offering - a claims based authentication platform.  This has implications for how we may eventually work with Shibboleth - more to come here as the development unfolds.

Enjoy!

Jonny