Self

-Service"> More and more of this infrastructure also has to be self-service, Ballmer said, with tools such as SharePoint Team Services already facilitating this. "More and more of what you provide can be infrastructure that IT workers can extend and provision themselves. But whatever is done in this area has to be deeply grounded in policy, so that the IT professional is given management control," he said. Shared Infrastructure Services involves presence, identity, rights management and network access, he said, with Active Directory—the most widely used directory—acting as a building block for its foundation. Microsoft has been very successful with Active Directory, he said. "When we first brought it to market, you were slow to adopt it and sent us back to work on it. It is now the tool for single sign-on—administer your networks and get policy to work for you. It is the tool for smartcard and two-factor authentication," Ballmer said. Microsoft is investing in Active Directory Federation Services and will ship its Windows Server 2003 RC2 in the next 12 months. "Scott McNealy, now my best friend," he quipped, took to the stage recently to demonstrate interoperability between Microsoft and Sun Microsystems Inc. "OK, so I took a little poetic license about our friendship," Ballmer joked. Click here to read more about the technical cooperation between Microsoft and Sun Microsystems. Coming this year is Windows Server 2003 R2, which will bring innovation on the branch, ADS (Automated Deployment Services) and storage fronts, as well as the Compute Cluster Edition with distributed task scheduler. Virtualization capabilities also will be built into the server itself over the next few years, Ballmer said. Microsoft also announced a set of enhancements to Exchange, with Exchange 2003 SP2 (Service Pack 2) and the Messaging and Security Feature Pack for Windows Mobile 5.0, which will enable up-to-date e-mail with direct push, a built-in feature of Exchange that pushes e-mail down to devices wirelessly. The feature pack also will give the ability to control policy on those mobile devices at no additional licensing costs since it is built into Exchange, Ballmer said. Mike Hall, technical product manager for the mobile and embedded group, took to the stage with a new Lenovo ThinkPad tablet, which was just announced Monday. Hall demonstrated how it can be used to manage, configure and erase data on a mobile device. Read more here about the Lenovo Groups ThinkPad X140 tablet. Bringing up the Longhorn desktop and going to his document folder, Hall showed attendees how theyll be able to filter content by author or keyword, and use the zoom feature to get a direct look inside any document. Next Page: Building .Net momentum.