No Longhorn at Microsoft's Tech Ed conference

While Microsoft has been beating the Longhorn drum at recent events, at Tech Ed next week the vendor will concentrate on current and soon-to-be-launched products, and will have little to say about the next major Windows release expected in 2006.

Microsoft is shifting the focus back to the here and now at its Tech Ed event in San Diego, in contrast to its Longhorn-themed Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles last year and the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Seattle earlier this month, which also had plenty of sessions on Longhorn.

PDC was over-hyped, said Dave Burke, a senior software developer at LLI Technologies Inc., an engineering and construction company in Pittsburgh. "We have real-world applications that must be written using today's technology. ... Longhorn is essentially a lot of background noise," he said.

And while Microsoft isn't that outspoken, Senior Product Manager Harley Sitner said Tech Ed is much more about what is available now or in the very next version of a software product. "PDC is often about tomorrow and Tech Ed is really about today," he said.

The absence of Longhorn at Tech Ed is a sign that Microsoft is getting back to what matters for its customers and itself, said Joe Wilcox, a senior analyst at Jupiter Research in Washington, D.C.

"Microsoft's hype about Longhorn has served as a major distraction from what's really important: increasing adoption of existing products, particularly Windows XP, and preparing customers for products in late stages of development, such as the 2005 versions of Visual Studio and SQL Server," he said.

Tech Ed is Microsoft's annual U.S. technical education user conference. The event offers more than 700 sessions covering almost the entire spectrum of Microsoft products. The attendees can learn how to use and secure Microsoft products and how to upgrade to the latest versions or migrate from a competing product.

"Tech Ed is the show where we deliver the technology and the tools to customers that they can use to be successful in their jobs," Microsoft's Sitner said. The event is sold out, with more than 11,000 attendees registered, he said. The Tech Ed audience is about half developer and half IT professional, according to Sipner.

Microsoft is also expected to make several product announcements at Tech Ed. Fitting in with the software maker's security focus of the past couple of years is the official launch of Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2004, an application firewall and Web caching product. General availability of ISA Server 2004 is expected in July.

Celestix Networks Inc., a Microsoft partner, is planning to unveil a firewall, VPN (virtual private network) and Web caching appliance based on ISA Server 2004. Research firm Gartner Inc. recently critiqued Microsoft in a research note, saying that a firewall should be an appliance, not a server. The Celestix product appears to address those concerns.

Microsoft is also expected to provide more details about its Intelligent Message Filter (IMF), a spam filter for Exchange 2003. IMF was announced last year and Microsoft said at the time the filter would only be available to customers who bought Software Assurance with their Exchange licenses. However, some insiders expect the Redmond, Washington, vendor to offer the add-on to all Exchange 2003 users.