Microsoft talks Team Systems at TechEd

Microsoft will spotlight Visual Studio Team Systems -- a tools platform designed to help programmers work together more efficiently -- this week at its annual TechEd conference.

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In concert with Microsoft's Solution System, Visual Studio Team Systems offers a series of integration features that provide traceability throughout the development life cycle. The platform can be tailored with business processes and products of partners and corporate users.

Rick LaPlante, director and general manager of Microsoft's enterprise tools group, will talk about how the toolset will let developers inject a presentation layer strategy into the development life cycle.

"The presentation layer is integral to every aspect of the development process," said Mark Driver, research vice president at Gartner. In fact, Gartner predicts that anywhere from 25 percent to nearly 40 percent of overall development time is related to the presentation layer.

In his keynote speech, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will talk about Microsoft's ability to innovate across an application's life cycle, from designing an application to how workers consume the information generated by that application.

"This sounds like Microsoft, once again, going after the hearts and minds of the developers, saying to them, 'Stick with our framework, and all your worries will be over.' If that turns out to be even partially true, then that will be fairly significant," said Dana Gardner, senior analyst at The Yankee Group.

Microsoft will studiously avoid talking about expected capabilities and delivery schedules for the already overhyped Longhorn OS and associated technologies, most of which will not see the light of day until 2006 or 2007.

But the company is expected to make several product announcements at TechEd, including more details about its IMF (Intelligent Message Filter), a spam filter for Exchange 2003. Last year Microsoft said IMF would only be available to customers who bought Software Assurance with Exchange. But some insiders expect Microsoft to offer the add-on to all Exchange 2003 users.

Also expected is the official launch of ISA (Internet Security and Acceleration) Server 2004, an application firewall and Web caching product. ISA Server 2004 is due in July. Partner Celestix Networks is planning to unveil a firewall, VPN, and Web-caching appliance based on ISA Server 2004.

Also on the security front, Microsoft is planning to team with RSA Security and IBM on Web services security specification interoperability. Meanwhile, Shavlik Technologies will announce availability of an agent-based patch management tool, and PKWare will announce toolkits to let developers embed compression and strong security.

Management software vendors AutoProf and Configuresoft will detail new versions of Policy Maker Professional and Enterprise Configuration Manager for Microsoft's Systems Management Server, respectively.

Empirix is expected to unveil Version 7 of its e-Test Suite of monitoring tools. Advanced Systems Concepts plans to announce Version 5.0 of its ActiveBatch cross-platform job scheduling and management application.