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Microsoft Cloud Computing Blogger Roundtable

Today Microsoft announced the cloud offering for Exchange and SharePoint. I was invited to participate into the Microsoft Blogger round table that took place after the announcement as an initiative by Microsoft to establish relationship with the bloggers and thought leaders in the cloud computing area.

The launch event, attended by select customers, partners, bloggers, and the press, included a demo that articulated the seamless ubiquity of the solution – from the cloud to on-premise and vice versa reiterating the client-server-service strategy. Microsoft also iterated their commitment to continue investing massively into the data centers and also emphasized commitment to sustainability.

When asked about the SLA the answer was that the SLA is based on availability, security and privacy, and recovery time in the event of a disaster based on the geography. The SLA is three 9.

Stephen Elop, president of the Microsoft Business Division at Microsoft dismissed the possibility of slow online adoption due to the continued investment into the on-premise products commenting that the customers will still need an on-premise client - some kind of “local processing” - citing Google Chrome (without naming it)

The event was followed by a blogger round table that I participated into. This was an effort by Microsoft to establish relationship with the bloggers and thought leaders in the cloud computing, Enterprise 2.0, and social innovation area. It was an interesting conversation on the topics such as Microsoft embracing the cloud computing culture as an organization, better ways to engage with the bloggers, cloud computing adoption concerns, messaging issues around Microsoft products, SharePoint as a platform on Azure etc.

The discussion was quite open and well moderated by David Spark. Microsoft expressed the desire to better connect with the thought leaders and bloggers in the cloud computing area. Following is a list of some of the bloggers that were at the table:

Jeff Nolan – Enterprise 2.0
Ben Metcalfe – Co-founder of the Data Portability group
Salim Ismael – Headed Yahoo Brickhouse in his previous career
Phil Wainwright – from ZDNet
Geva Perry
Tom Foremski
Adrian Chan
Deb Schultz
Ohad Eder
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