The software giant wants users to switch to new versions of Windows and Office and indications are that it will succeed, writes John Collins

If you work in a large business you may have found that your IT department has been a little less responsive than normal this week. That's because Microsoft assembled more than 4,750 IT professionals from around the world in Barcelona for its annual Tech-Ed IT Forum event. Irish techies were well represented with almost 50 firms sending representatives.

The event was a chance for managers to meet Microsoft personnel, network with their peers, see technology from Microsoft partner companies, but more importantly get up to speed on new releases.

It's a crucial time for the software giant. Microsoft is ramping up to deliver new versions of its two cash cows - the ubiquitous Windows operating system and the Office suite of productivity tools. Both products were finalised last week and will be made available to business customers later this month and to consumers, in shops and installed on new PCs at the end of January.

Also in the pipeline are significant releases of its Exchange e-mail and messaging platform as well as an overhaul of its management tools for IT staff, now rebranded System Center, which will be released next year.

The challenge, of course, is to get businesses that are happy with their infrastructure to go through the cost and potential pain of an upgrade. At the IT Forum, Microsoft touted the range of tools it has to make that task easier and talked up the benefits that can be achieved, both for users and technology administrators, by moving to Vista and Office 2007.

In a keynote address, Microsoft's senior vice-president for server and tools, Bob Muglia, outlined six key industry trends - the move to multi-core processors, 64-bit software, virtualisation, cheap high performance storage, connectivity and the provision of software as a service - and how Microsoft is supporting them.

Muglia said Microsoft itself had moved entirely to Vista for its clients' PCs and calls to its internal help desk had not increased noticeably. Largely due to its similarities with XP, which is the current version of Windows, users were comfortable with the move and able to be productive straight away.

They can then discover the enhanced features, such as powerful search tools and a user interface that provides live previews of documents without having to open them, at their own pace, said Muglia.

In terms of Office 2007, Muglia said it had moved way beyond personal productivity and was now focused on collaboration with other users, both inside and outside the organisation.

While admitting that it was the "biggest change in the product's user interface for over a decade", Muglia said early users were making the switch easily and discovering features they had not previously realised were in Office.

Underlining Microsoft's decision to dub Office a "system" rather than a humble "suite", a demonstration showed how spreadsheet package Excel can now act as a server and easily pull useful information from corporate databases.

Much was also made of the launch of the Interoperability Vendor Alliance, a Microsoft-led group of hardware and software companies that will work together to ensure products can work more easily with the Microsoft platform.

It was telling that the announcement was made in Europe, where antitrust actions against the software giant were instigated after a complaint from Sun Microsystems that Microsoft was not providing the information it needed to interoperate with its software.

In a sign of the times, Sun is one of the founding 22-members of the Alliance along with other industry heavyweights such as AMD, Novell, Siemens and Software AG.

However, despite the talk of openness during Muglia's keynote address, references to new features jumped between products. For example, he spoke of how the new Forefront server security products not only protected businesses data from attack but also could help with regulatory compliance - so long as the customer is using Microsoft's Exchange Server.

Encouraging customers of your existing products to invest in your new ones to get new features is hardly the stuff of monopoly investigations, but despite the Interoperability Vendor Alliance, Microsoft is always going to ensure that customers get the best results from being wall to wall Microsoft.

"We still believe the Windows is the best solution, but if you choose something else for certain environments, we want to be able to support that," said Muglia.

A big theme of the event was security, an area that Microsoft has struggled with in the past with new product features creating vulnerabilities that enabled hackers to attack PCs and servers.

Stephen Toulouse the executive in Microsoft's Secure Technology Unit, told The Irish Times that a "cultural mindset shift" had taken place at Microsoft around security. Developers now had to think about misuse of new product features as much as their use when writing new software.

"Before we were really focused on implementing the features that customers were asking for and there wasn't always the same thought put into what an attacker could do with it," said Toulouse. "That totally changes your mindset before you write the first line of code."

There was also a strong focus on virtualisation, a capability once only available on top-end mainframe computers but now possible on the commodity servers that Microsoft's products run on.

Typically, businesses have a large number of servers running various applications and parts of their infrastructure but rarely are these machines running at anything like full capacity. By using virtualisation, a number of discreet "virtual machines" can co-exist on the same server, allowing businesses to consolidate the number of servers they need to run. Muglia said "virtualisation would be core" to everything the company did.

Microsoft executives might have been preaching to the converted - attendees were already significant Microsoft users and had invested time and money to make it to Barcelona - but the enthusiastic response that the new products received suggested the company's dominant position is safe for the foreseeable future.