News

Microsoft kicks off Barcelona TechEd - focus on XML, mobile

Jean-Philippe Courtois gave his seminar keynote against the background of Oracle's attempt to take over PeopleSoft - but his focus was XML. This year's tech sessions focus more on corporate infrastructure software - CRM and so on - as the Server 20003 platform rolls out, and Microsoft starts to challenge the Unix universe.

The message for corporate software developers was: "What's the point of rolling out applications like customer relationship management (CRM) packages, if people don't use them?"

Courtois gave away the prizes to a software competition for Universities, while talking enthusiastically about "the potential of IT."

He was followed by Sanjay Parthasarathy who is is responsible for Microsoft Corp.'s .NET platform strategy, who said that the future would be a move "away from server-oriented applications."

To illustrate just how users can be "pulled in" to corporate software, Microsoft has rolled out an ambitious Web Outlook based application, which allows all delegates to schedule their interactions on an ordinary browser, with email, calendaring and other outlook features wirelessly accessible even during the keynotes.

This news report was filed from the keynote, which is still going on.

But the sessions will include a lot of niche strands. Mobile is one, and this site will cover all the new developments over the week.