Dmitry Sotnikov

This Wednesday was probably the first day on the (potentially long) path to Adobe Flash decline: the most popular video site out there – YouTube – started offering videos in Flash-less mode for browsers which support HTML 5 and h.264 video codec. This means that today the option is available for Chrome and Safari. Then at some point they will likely add the Ogg codec and support Firefox, or help Firefox get native h.264 codec support. And then IE9 ships and all latest browsers will play videos natively. Flash will no longer be required for video, and why would anyone want it then? The whole story of Flash in retrospect is going to be an interesting one. Adobe had 95-98% penetration in PC market for years and could not expand its adoption beyond video. They tried: kept i... (more)

Details on Quest OnDemand

Ben Riga posted a video recording with a fairly detailed discussion we had at Microsoft PDC about Quest OnDemand (Quest’s Systems Management as a Service offering). One thing I could not help noticing is how the UI of the service itself changed between this shooting in November and the way it looks today. I guess this is a testimony of how SaaS model lets vendors innovate fast. In that d... (more)

Microsoft’s First Step Toward Cloud Computing

Azure Session at Cloud Expo Pundits talking about how Windows 7 is all about Microsoft competing against Apple, recovering with Vista consumer adoption disaster, or getting people off of XP, are missing one other – extremely important – part of the Windows 7 story. Windows 7 and its server counterpart – Windows Server 2008 R2 – are actually the first real step in Microsoft’s Windows Cloud... (more)

Cloud Service for Local SharePoint Insight

Quest Session at Cloud Expo A new (free!) service became publicly available on Quest OnDemand - Quest Site Administrator for SharePoint Reports. This is a great free service which provides some pretty neat reports on your intranet SharePoint environment. You go to the site and it launches a nice Silverlight client. Then all you need to do is provide a URL of your site collection (e.g. ht... (more)

Case-Study on Secure SaaS

Security at Cloud Expo Security and data protection are key concerns for any cloud solution. I truly believe that this is also one aspect that you cannot just improve over time. No matter how agile you are security needs to be there by design. Unfortunately most cloud vendors/SaaS-providers still don’t tell enough about the way they protect customer data – which we know is a bad idea. Fr... (more)