Microsoft is opening up, not only do they run Community Dialogue sessions, which they may have done for years and I just wasn't aware, but last week Lenn Pryor, Scoble and Co. started the excellent Channel 9 site on MSDN. Check out their 9 Guys Who We Are video on what they are planning to do. Be patient, it looks like their own success is slowing down their systems.
Lenn Pryor writes about what they are trying to do:
Plain and simple, change. Change in how we communicate with each other (customers and company), change in how we are perceived because of our actions not because of our words, change in how we learn from our customers.
Let's see what happens when the rubber hits the road, as when Jon Udell wrote in his Replace and Defend post that Microsoft is trying to replace sound existing standards with their own, and Microsoft's John Montgomery picked it up in his post with the promise: I know why we did much of this, but I'm going to get some input from the various architects to get the full story. That was back in November and I may have overlooked it, but I can't find a detailed responds. My hope is, that Channel 9 will pick up the signal.
For sure they are an inspiration for us here at SDN and we wish them great success.
Through the kind recommendation by Bill Grosso, I got invited to the Microsoft Bay Area Community Dialogue. This months there will be a discussion of current and future data development and infrastructure topics using SQL Server.
Now I am far from being an expert in these things. SAP software is in most cases database agnostic. We have a couple of documents in SDN about how to use SQL Server in an SAP environment, for example fellow SDN Weblogger joel.albert-ajjo/blog Moving SQL Server Databases of Enterprise Portal.
On Monday I will therefore be mainly in a listening mode. Unless, you post some comments about things that you would like to have changed with the next release of the SQL Server (Albert, does anything come to mind?). Please don't request to open source it, ain't gonna happen. But may be they follow the lead of SAP and give the source code to their customers.
