Tomislav Bronzin [RD&MVP]

Microsoft Innovation Center initiative announced in Armenia!

On the request of the Microsoft Armenia, I delivered session about what are Microsoft Innovation Centers (MIC's) and how they can help ISVs to get technical and business advantage at the USAD RCI Conference on Regional Competitiveness Initiative in Yerevan, Armenia. Session explained how ISV's were helped by MIC in Croatia (http://www.microsoft.com/croatia/msptc/en/about.mspx), who are stakeholders beside the Microsoft and what are steps to found the Center.

If you would like more information about the Microsoft Innovation Center in Varazdin, watch the video here.

KulenDayz Regional Community Conference

 Microsoft Community Osijek together with Microsoft Croatia® with support from INETA are organizing the first regional community conference KulenDayz 2008. Conference is bringing together leading IT Experts from the region with local IT Community and giving them a chance to spend a weekend filled with 18 attractive sessions presented by top speakers and relaxing at  Kopacki Rit Nature Park and enjoying unspoiled nature.

Content:
Sessions in conference are organized in 3 parallel tracks: 
♦ Advanced Development
♦ Databases
♦ System Infrastructure

The idea is to make a conference "a little different", so together with traditional sessions presented in conference halls there will be a number of unplugged Open Space/Chalk & Talk sessions presented at Gazebos in Ethno-Village. In Open Space sessions all participants are invited to co-create the agenda and pick the discussion topics. Chalk & Talk sessions are "unplugged", so without PowerPoint/laptops/beamers but with good-old flipcharts!

As a part of HEROS happen {here} events,  sessions at the KulenDayz 2008 will be mostly technically oriented, level 300+, with highligt on the new products and technologies (Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V, ASP.NET MVC)

The conference schedule is subject to change. New sessions are currently being added to the program. Check back regularly for updates.

KulenDayz 2008 Agenda...
 

Unified Communication METRO Training delivered in Italy!

I just finished my 4th training, so I must be a "veterean" in UC Development :-).

I am starting to collect not just a knoledgebase about UC development (you always find something that is representing Catch 22), but also I am "collecting" the people who are pioniers in the field - first of the kind that will do new generation Unified Communication development!

After Denmark, The Netherlands, Czech Republic and Italy, I hope that I will "bring the good news" to the developers in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Slovenia, Austria, Romania, Bulgaria - by delivering the training in the Microsoft Innovation Center in Varazdin, Croatia http://www.msbtc.net

Unified Communications (UC) Metro Training Content

I was asked by several collegues to provide brief content of Unified Communications (UC) Metro Training and here it is!

Topics covered in the training are:
• Unified Communications (UC): Behind the Scenes with Office Communication Server (OCS) 2007, Office Communicator (OC) 2007 and Exchange 2007
• Driving Contextual Collaboration with Office Communicator 2007
• Building Contextual Collaboration Clients for the Web using the UC AJAX SDK
• Building Asynchronous Contextual Collaboration with Exchange Web Services
• Business Process Communication with the UCMA (UC Managed API)
• Anywhere Information Access with OCS 2007 Speech Server

Visual Studio 2008 Product Comparison

If you are interesting what options are included in each particular version of last Microsoft development tool, Visual Studio 2008, you can find info here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/products/cc149003.aspx

For reference what is new in Visual Studio 2008 go to this URL: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386063.aspx

Microsoft Office Labs - testing field for ideas!

Several Microsoft employees and interns formed a group and decided to publish ideas in form of prototypes and offer them for (free) use to the general public. Of course, the general idea of letting people use this prototypes is to gather some metrics that can help (for example) to decide if some of this ideas, in one form or another, will be used in new version of Office.
If you like these prototypes you can help the team by provide data/feedback, but you can use them even if you do not want to share any data with Microsoft, just be careful – there are prototypes and they are not supported by Microsoft or MS official products!
If you like the idea so much that you want to join this team within the Microsoft – you can do that just read the page regarding the jobs within the group: http://www.officelabs.com/Pages/Jobs.aspx

There are (currently) two very interesting project:
Community Clips – represents collection of "how-to" videos about Microsoft Office products made by ordinary users. It is also interesting because it includes a screen recording application to easily create and share your own videos to help others.
Search Commnads – Are you Office 2003 expert user that have found yourself in a “hot spot” when wanted to find a command in Office 2007? I am! So I tried this Office add-in and it helped me to search for commands in my own words and get the button to do it, instantly. Works with Microsoft Office 2007 - Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

There are several other interesting projects like: SharePointPedia – use Share Point as a some kind of WikiPedia, InkSeine – better Tablet PC interface, Task Market - an online marketplace where businesses can connect.

If you would like to share your comments or ideas with Office Labs team – you can do it online – just sign in for account!

I have just one, small, objection to the whole story: “Hey people, please use Silverlight Streaming instead Flesh supported SoapBox J”, otherwise, good work people!

Photosynth - Create virtual reality from your photos!

A lot of people asked me from where they can download preview. So the answer is - you can not :-(

But, you can download viewer for the Photosynth showcase here: http://labs.live.com/photosynth/installer/sysreq.aspx?collection=sanmarco/index1.sxs&st=coll and try to look at several predefined collections of pictures.

What is Photosynth?

Photosynth is an amazing new technology from Microsoft Live Labs that takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space so you can:

• Walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle.
• Seamlessly zoom in or out of a photo whether it's megapixels or gigapixels in size.
• See where pictures were taken in relation to one another.
• Find similar photos to the one you're currently viewing.
• Send a collection - or a particular view of one - to a friend.

Microsoft offers COFEE to law-enforcement agencies

It seems that Microsoft is working not just on security of it's products, but also developing solutions, like COFEE (which stands for: Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor - a prototype "thumb drive") to help forensic all over the world to examine PC's that was possible used in crime.

Original article can be found here: http://www.stuff.co.nz/4507443a28.html

Microsoft does not want Yahoo anymore!

Frankly, I was a little disappointed when Microsoft started a pursuit of Yahoo stocks, because I do not know a single MVP that is using Yahoo, and offering such a high price for something that is not in focus of most of the people that are influencers in their communities was for me questionable.

But Microsoft decided to give up and you can find more info here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/may08/05-03letter.mspx

New Expression Studio 2.0 (Web, Blend, Design, Media & Encoder) available!

Microsoft announced the availability of new Expression Studio 2.

The suite of tools for professional designers includes Expression Web, Expression Blend, Expression Design, Expression Media and Expression Encoder. Expression Studio 2 is coming to market just one year after the last release. New features in Expression Studio 2 include product-wide support for Silverlight and PHP support in Expression Web 2.  This is a huge milestone for Microsoft, our customers and our partners. 

Trainings can be found here: http://www.totaltraining.com/expression2

More info: http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/Purchase.aspx?key=studio

If you would like to develop agains Silverlight 2.0 then you will need Expression Blend 2.5 Preview that can be downloaded here: http://www.microsoft.com/expression/try-it/default.aspx?filter=prerelease

Offical announcement can be found here. http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/may08/05-01Expression2PR.mspx

Delivering MS Unified Communications METRO ISV trainings all-over the Europe ...

Starting tomorrow I will deliver 2-day Unified Communication METRO trainings in Denmark (Vedbaek Microsoft Innovation Center-MIC), then week after that (May 8-9) in The Netherlands (MIC, Barneveld), May 13-14 in Czech Republic (MIC Prag), June 4-5 in Italy (MIC Milan).

Video Interview about MS Unified Communications Platform and Microsoft Innovation Centers

MS Unified Communication is new platform for developing new user experience in new generation web and windows of applications.

This video interview explains how small and medium companies can take advantage from this platform and how Microsoft Innovation Centers can deliver this technology and know-how to ISV's.

You can watch the video by clicking the picture :-) :

cro.mscommunity.net - Launched

http://cro.mscommunity.net is central site for all 8 Croatian User Groups and it is community effort that brought not just announcements, news, blogs, forums, but also wiki and video on-line!

Dobrisa Adamec (Project Leader), Marin Mamic (MS Community Champ) and I were presenting Community and new portal to the press this Friday on the last day of the WinDays 2008 conference.

Go, look, comment and contribute :-)!

More about Press Conference, read here:

http://www.racunalo.com/zanimljivosti/predstavljen-microsoft-community-zajednica-tehnoloskih-profesion.html

WinDays 2008 - I am currently attending one of the bigest conference ...

... in the region - from 20^th till 25^th of April 2008.

Just today (Monday, April 21th) my colleague Dobrisa Adamec (INETA Europe Country Leader for Croatia, and Web Dev Expert) and I delivered 1-day Visual Studio 2008 - What's new, what's old and what's borrowed? training on the pre-conference day.

Tomorrow, I will deliver session about Microsoft Innovation Center in my new role - as a MIC Expert and Consultant - along with new MIC Croatia Manager Marko Drenovacki.

So, if you are thinking that's all folks - you are wrong :-)!

On Wednesday, Dalibor Kukoleca, Dev Lead from MS Redmond, Vedran Kaldi, CITUS Dev Lead and I will be delivering session about development for Unified Communication - Unified Communication - Great platform for developers!

And... that is not all folks!

In Friday morning at 9h I will be at Microsoft Community Party, that will precede the so called Community PnP Sessions.

If you are interested, please come, listen ask questions, discuss .... And enjoy in WinDays 2008 Conference...

Tom

2008 MVP Global Summit - I have been there ...

... and I SURVIVED!
(to paraphrase the sentence from the Microsoft Museum: "I built Microsoft and I survived!")

Four (4) WHOLE days of sessions, events, meetings and PARTIEEEEES!

Of course I cannot tell what we are speaking about (not yet!) but I can tell that Microsoft is preparing great new software, platform and tools for us who are enjoying using it!
Beside my MVP Award (Windows Mobile Architect) I am also Microsoft Regional Director, and I must say thank you to Kevin to provide us opportunity to get attention from the people that are benefiting most from our evengalism – Microsoft people – Product Group Leaders, Architects, Managers etc.
Thank you Kevin!

I will end with picture of Croatian MVP’s with our MVP Lead Anka: