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Agenda

We have organised this year’s AIC event into four main themes: Enterprise Architecture, Infrastructure Architecture, Solution Architecture, and Software plus Services.

Please use this agenda to organise your time at the conference – more information will be added closer to the event.

Agenda Session Overview
Enterprise Infrastructure Solution Software + Services
Day 1
Time Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions Software + Services
08:30 - 09:30 Registration
09:30 - 09:35 Welcome
Matt Deacon, Chief Architectural Advisor, Developer & Platform Group, Microsoft UK
09:35 - 11:05 Keynote
Mark Gilbert, Technical Advisor, Server & Tools, Microsoft Corp
11:05 - 11:30 Coffee break
11:30 - 12:30 Architecture's role in Enterprise Transformation Programs
Iain Mortimer, Chief Architect & Rupert Brown, Principal Architect, Merrill Lynch		 Windows Server: Datacentre ready?
James O'Neill, IT Pro Evangelist, Microsoft Corp		 Building an Enterprise Service Bus with BizTalk Server 2006 & WCF
Charles Young, Principal Consultant, Solidsoft		 SOA Platform for 2015
Jonathan Woodward, CTO, and Darren Hallett, Technical Design Authority, Sungard Vivista
12:30 - 13:30 Lunch
13:30 - 14:30 Gaining Commitment
Martin Sykes, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Corp		 Virtualisation from Server to desktop
Andrew Bennett, Architect, Microsoft UK		 Do Software Factories live up to the promise?
Chris Lowndes, Solutions Architect, Avanade		 Oslo I thought..." - The Oslo Roadmap
Marc Holmes and Mark Bloodworth, Architects, Microsoft UK
14:30 - 14:40 Comfort break
14:40 - 15:40 Maps, Models and Metrics
Mike Lloyd, Managing Director, Carbonflame		 Security Management for Dynamic virtual systems with Server 2008 and System Center
Steve Lamb, IT Pro Evangelist, Microsoft UK		 Making it scale - predictability, stability, and availability in SOA
Alexis Richardson, Director, CohesiveIT		 Where's the Bus?
Simon Thurman, Architect, Darren Jefford, Principal Consultant, Microsoft UK
15:40 - 16:00 Coffee break
16:00 - 17:00 A CIO's perspective on Architecture
Richard Steel, CIO, Newham City Council		 A Claims Based Identity Architecture
Steve Plank, Identity Architect, Microsoft UK		 Tooling to support development of complex distributed applications
Neil Kidd & Richard Erwin, Technical Specialists, Microsoft UK		 Software plus Services - Disruptive IT or tangible sea change?
Joel Jeffery, Technical Director, Valtech
17:00 - 17:10 Comfort break
17:10 - 18:10 The art of hustling & gun slinging within the customer-orientated culture
Roy Sharples, Enterprise Strategy Consultant, Microsoft UK		 The IT Infrastructure I want & why - A Personal Perspective
Ian Race, Technical Architect, Merrill Lynch		 Micro-Presentations for Architects
Simon Thurman, Architect, Microsoft UK		 Data Access in a software plus Services World
Simon Davies, Application Architect, Microsoft UK
18:10 - 20:00 Comfort break
20:00 - 22:00 Dinner
22:10 Close
Day 2
Time Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions Software + Services
09:00 - 09:30 The changing IT Landscape
Matt Deacon, Chief Architectural Advisor, Microsoft UK & Jon Collins, Service Director, Freeform Dynamics
09:30 - 10:30 Building Resilient Web Services
Ben Ravani, General Manager, Global Foundation Services, Microsoft Corp
10:30 - 10:50 Coffee break
10:50 - 11:50 Social Computing at Work: The "Consumerisation" of Enterprise IT
Dave Coplin, Enterprise Strategy Consultant, Microsoft UK		 Whiteboard discussion of WS-Trust and WS-Federation Protocols
Steve Plank, Identity Architect, Microsoft UK		 Unlocking value from SAP with Microsoft Solutions
David Jobling, CTO		 Fast forward to the future of the composite application in the coming years
Andy James, CTO, SolidSoft
11:50 - 12:00 Comfort break
12:00 - 13:00 Enterprise Architecture: Unifying Business and IT
Jonathan German-Morris, IT Management Consultant, Sungard		 The Data aware Enterprise
Andrew Fryer, IT Pro Evangelist, Microsoft UK		 Enterprise Web Integration using .NET 3.5
Ian Robinson, Thoughtworks		 Service-Oriented UIs - Principles and Practice
Michael Barker, Senior Consultant, Valtech
13:00 - 13:50 Lunch
13:50 - 14:50 Standardising SOA
David Sprott
CEO, Everware-CBDI Int. Ltd		 Next Generation Datacenters
Ulrich Homann, Partner Solutions Architect, Microsoft Corp & Ian Erridge, Enterprise Strategy Consultant, Microsoft UK		 Complex Event Processing
John Plumber & Jeff Johnson, TSP Architects, Microsoft UK		 "Net Generation" Users and Experiences
Marc Holmes, Architect, Microsoft UK
14:50 - 15:00 Comfort break
15:00 - 16:00 The Importance of Organisational Portfolio Management
Bob Walker, Technical Solutions Specialist, Microsoft UK		 Intelligent Infrastructure: Delivering an efficient, flexible and responsive data centre.
John Pollard, Architect Director, Unisys		 The Embedded Enterprise
Dave Baker, Architect, Microsoft UK		 User Experience Matters
Simon Thurman, Architect, Microsoft UK, Paul Bishop, Managing Director, Splendid, Ian Worley, Director of User Experience, Flow Interactive
1600 - 16:15 Thank you and prize giving

Architecture's role in Enterprise Transformation Programs
Day 1 : 11.30-12.30
Iain Mortimer, Chief Architect & Rupert Brown, Principal Architect, Merrill Lynch

 Merrill Lynch has embarked on a 3 year process to transform the way its IT and Operations functions support its institutional and individual client business lines.  Amongst the specific metrics set are availability and throughput targets for the bank's core systems. This talk will cover how these challenges have been addressed by the architecture team and aspects of the proposed solution architectures along with some process and governance mechanisms.

Gaining commitment
Day 1: 13.30-14.30
Martin Sykes, Enterprise Strategy Consultant, Microsoft UK

 Changing the infrastructure, applications and processes for IT in an organisation as large and complex and Microsoft requires effective communication of the overall enterprise architecture strategy. In 2007 Microsoft’s internal EA team created the communications to position a new architecture for internal systems using the software + services concept.
This presentation will cover the process used with MS IT to create 1 page ‘big picture’ communications and how to use them to gain commitment. A  presentation in 2007 titled ‘Make it so’ introduced the ideas which are developed further here. Attendees will takeaway a clear understanding of the process and how it can be applied in their own organisations.

Maps, Models and Metrics
Day 1: 14.40-15.40
Mike Lloyd, Managing Director, Carbonflame

 The role of maps for managing empires is hard to overstate.
All architects (whether in IT or other disciplines) rely on maps, models and metrics to understand their work environment.
What we choose to map, and how we choose to map it, deeply affects how we approach our roles.  There are many ways to map, model and measure the IT domain, but they are typically expensive to create and maintain, easy to get out of date, complicated to understand and, in the final analysis, often of limited real-world value.
This session reviews the main mapping and modelling options in IT, identifies their strengths and weaknesses and looks forward to promising trends that offer simpler, more holistic and more informative ways of representing businesses and IT systems.

A CIO's perspective on Architecture
Day 1: 16.00-17.00
Richard Steel, CIO, Newham City Council

 “Given that most executives are still, if not technophobes, uninterested in technical details, and have very many demands on their time, how can the CIO go about getting the board to sign-up to the organisation’s ICT strategy based on no more than 2 sides of A4?
“...and is 2 sides of A4 sufficient to cover all the key perspectives – community versus corporate, standardised versus liberalised, secure versus flexible, business driven versus business driver...
“This session proposes that an organisation’s ICT strategy can be boiled-down to 10 key principles; but can they? Are they the right ones? And, are they equally comprehensible to the Board, customers and ICT?”

The art of hustling & gun slinging within the customer-orientated culture
Day 1: 17.10-18.10
Roy Sharples, Enterprise Strategy Consultant, Microsoft

 This presentation focuses on how to align IT with the business at a strategic and operational level to ensure that eCommerce companies makes the most innovative, effective and efficient  use of their IT resources to be a more competitive online multi-channel retailer. This presentation will give a structured and pragmatic view on how to; Develop an business-smart eCommerce multi-channel strategy & architecture, how to organise with structured layers & domains, guiding with policies, principles, standards & rules, managing with an architecture competency centre, and enabling with an architectural metadata toolset, and supported by real- life case studies.

Social Computing at Work: The "Consumerisation" of Enterprise IT
Day 2: 10.50-11.50
Dave Coplin, Enterprise Strategy Consultant, Microsoft

 With the advent of "Web 2.0" & Social Networking technologies, our usage of technology has entered a new phase. Whilst these technologies could revolutionise the way we live, work and play they also present signficant challenges to our traditional view of Enterprise IT.  Is Social Networking the ultimate collaborative experience or just another consumer technology fad? Through this discussion we aim to find out.

Enterprise Architecture: Unifying Business and IT
Day 2: 12.00-13.00
Jonathan German-Morris, IT Management Consultant, Sungard

 In the presentation we take a non-silo and cross-disciplinary look at Business and Technical toolsets and look at the mindset typical of each area. Enterprise Architecture is presented as a unifying influence which is particularly effective in this middle ground. The support, provided by Enterprise Architecture, for using IT to support Business Strategic Vision is considered. The presentation concludes by showing Enterprise Architecture as an exciting focus area, bringing value to the enterprise, where technology supports and influences business thinking.

Standardizing SOA
Day 2: 13.50-14.50
David Sprott, CEO, Everware-CBDI  Int. Ltd

 There are so many approved or proposed standards in the SOA space that the term standard is almost an oxymoron. There is considerable uncertainty over many of the relevant standards that is of concern to all architects and program managers. To make sense of this complexity we require better definition of the requirements for SOA standards in terms of the support provided to key service architecture principles, policies and patterns. This presentation will introduce a high level framework and roadmap for planning and managing the progressive adoption of standards that links business benefits of standardization in each of the key SOA disciplines of service modeling, service provisioning, data concurrency, orchestration, management and security.  The session will also include a debate and poll on the standards roadmap.

The Importance of Organisational Portfolio Management
Day 2: 15.00-16.00
Technical Solutions Specialist, Microsoft UK

 In this session we will be discussing and reviewing
- the importance of aligning Project and Programme Portfolios to key business goals
- formulating and executing sound business processes
- identifying key metrics for capacity, cost, risk and benefit, priority and dependencies
- how to identify and select the right portfolio
We will also showcase how Microsoft HR use portfolio management to drive the optimum selection of projects

Windows Server: Datacentre ready?
Day 1: 11.30-12.30
James O’Neill, IT Pro Evangelist, Microsoft Corp

 Windows Server 2008 is finally hitting the streets but does this truly mark the point where Windows can power the whole of the datacentre? In this session we’ll explore the evolving datacentre requirements around management, security and energy and how Windows Server 2008 has been designed from server core out to meet these challenges and more. 

Virtualisation from server to desktop
Day 1: 13.30-14.30
Andrew Bennett, Architect, Microsoft UK

 Virtualisation today with in IT organisations is a hot topic for many CIO and CTO's.  What is Microsoft doing to address this subject and where are we going? We will take a look at Microsoft Strategy and take a closer look at Microsoft Application Virtualisation

Security Management for Dynamic virtual systems with Server 2008 and System Center
Day 1: 14.40-15.40
Steve Lamb, IT Pro Evangelist

 The World of leading edge dynamic systems is a scary place for luddites! What are the security implications of running workloads in virtual environments in conjunction with hypervisors? How can you dynamically move workloads across a server farm to ensure sensible utilisation reducing cost and environmental impact? How can we ensure that our businesses make the most of deperimiterised access to information on mobile devices whilst meeting the needs of corporate governance. This session will give you insight into how to take advantage of dynamic environments without being exposed.

A Claims Based Identity Architecture
Day 1: 16.00-17.00
Steve Plank, Identity Architect, Microsoft UK

 Traditionally applications and infrastructures have been on either both, or a combination of discretionary access control, or role based access control. Standards have emerged, such as the set of NIST standards RBAC0 to RBAC3 but these have rarely found roots in organisations.
When one subject (person, application, infrastructure) makes a verifiable set of claims about another subject this is a powerful notion that can be used by legacy and emerging applications. Whether the claims being made are email address, credit limit, roles or group memberships it matters not because they are all claims. Embedding claims in to security tokens that are issued by Security Token Services (STSes) and defining either an infrastructure level trust matrix, or local trust between applications and services gives a flexible and powerful way of thinking about what users are and are not allowed to do.
Further taking this idea and creating software services that abstract away the activities of authentication and authorization makes a claims based identity architecture look inviting. But there are pitfalls and other elements to consider. This session discusses not only the technology, but also the gotchas. As an interactive session, any architect who is looking at how they engineer identity will find this session valuable in steering their thinking.  

The IT Infrastructure I want & why - A Personal Perspective
Day 1: 17.10-18.10
Ian Race, Technical Architect, Merrill Lynch

 Technology moves forward as do people in a virtuous circle. People invent things, sometimes to solve a specific problem sometimes by accident. Other people assemble a collection of inventions to produce new products which then give rise to new questions (such as what can I do with that?) this then prompts different thinking that leads to yet more invention. Some of these inventions fall by the wayside and some are taken up, if only for a while. All of these rely on some form of infrastructure so let us explore some of the possibilities to make life better.

So that's the abstract. I've been quite interested for a while in how we can embed some components to make things easier. As I write this note today I have with me 2 laptops, 2 mobile phones and a blackberry (and mobile phone, blackberry and laptop chargers), two one-time password generators, several memory sticks & DVDs, plus a desk phone and a virtual PC. What I want is to be able do things differently.

Whiteboard Discussion of WS-Trust and WS-Federation Protocols
Day 2: 10.50-11.50
Steve Plank, Identity Architect, Microsoft UK

 This session uses the whiteboard to discuss how the main federation protocols of products such as ADFS and CardSpace are used. It goes in to how tokens are transported and validated, how they are protected and what the exchanges are like between the different parties in a federation "conversation". As it is a whiteboard session, it will be very interactive. You can ask whatever questions you like right in the middle of the flows as we are not bound  by slides.

The Data aware Enterprise
Day 2: 12.00-13.00
Andrew Fryer, IT Pro Evangelist, Microsoft UK

 Smart IT organisations realise that it’s not the infrastructure or the applications that form the technology IP of the organisation but rather the data that flows its veins. The question then is how does one manage this primary asset both at the scale that is needed but still supporting the agility of usage that is required by all classes of stakeholders within the business? In this session we will provide an architectural overview of SQL Server 2008 and describe the features and tools that enable it to scale up and out to support very large databases, enterprise scale reporting systems and data warehouses.

Next Generation Datacenters
Day 2: 13.50-14.50
Ulrich Homann, Partner Solutions, Microsoft Corp & Ian Erridge, Enterprise Strategy Consultant, Microsoft UK

 This session will show you how Microsoft are building the next generation of Model Driven, fully automated 'Smart and Dark' datacenters.  We will describe the architecture for Autonomous Instantiation, Placement, Management and Datacenter and Management Environment Bootstrapping.  We will move beyond the virtualization panacea and show an SML/CML based, Platform Instantiation Agnostic that is scalable and flexible by design.

Intelligent Infrastructure: Delivering an efficient, flexible and responsive data centre
Day 2: 15.00-16.00
John Pollard, Architect Director, Unisys

 IT infrastructures are under significant pressure. Data centres are full to capacity, lacking space, power and cooling whilst business is requesting faster implementations, improved service and lower costs. Server virtualisation whilst easing the issues is also creating other problems as it becomes easier and faster to deploy more operating systems. In this session we explore an architecture for a flexible and dynamic infrastructure that enables you to build a truly agile data centre.

Building an Enterprise Service Bus with BizTalk Server 2006 & WCF
Day 1: 11.30-12.30
Charles Young, Principal Consultant, Solidsoft

 This session will focus on BizTalk Server 2006 R2 and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) together, and the ways you can use them to start building service-bus patterns today with a view to the future.  This will illustrate how you can utilise the synergy between WCF and BizTalk in order to build an integrated single fabric that supports a broader set of architectural needs than BizTalk Server alone. Using BizTalk Server and WCF together to build service buses is a great way of preparing for the world of “Oslo” and will discuss how you can build an Enterprise Service Buses with today's technology

Do Software Factories live up to the promise?
Day 1: 13.30-14.30
Chris Lowndes, Solutions Architect, Avanade

 Software Factories and model-driven techniques have been emerging over the past few years as a growing aid to rapid and consistent software architecture and development. However, the gap between the promise of automation as a revolution and the reality of project delivery is wide. This session will illustrate this divide with some battlefield experiences. How are automation techniques affecting project delivery today? Real project architecture and delivery examples will be employed, including use of DSL-based factories and Avanade's own SOA factory offering. A conclusion and discussion will follow on the likely shape of automation in custom development over the next few years.

Making it scale - predictability, stability, and availability in SOA
Day 1: 14.40-15.40
Alexis Richardson, Director, CohesiveIT

 Companies are moving to service architectures but are still struggling with an impedance mismatch between the sheer breadth of web services standards, and the simple need to make things work.  Event based architectures present a set of known, proven integration patterns for delivering enterprise requirements such as scalability.  But there is no low level cross platform standard providing ALL the features needed by an enterprise messaging system.  AMQP aims to resolve this by providing business messaging that interoperates between any pair of systems, via wire level encoding within the network stack.  Our talk will describe this technology and who is backing it - a group of major technology vendors and leading investment banks.  The talk will focus on examples across multiple use cases including .NET WCF and Biztalk.

Tooling to support development of complex distributed applications
Day 1: 16.00-17.00
Neil Kidd & Richard Erwin, Technical Specialists, Microsoft UK

 With software development getting more complex do architects need to take a role in overseeing how a project is run?
With higher customer expectations, more and more moving parts in an application, integration to other service and potentially with members of the delivery team scattered across the globe; Success of a project can depend as much on how it is managed as the technologies used. This session will provide an overview of the tools currently available from Microsoft to help solve this problem. We will also show the direction Microsoft is taking with the next version of these tools and how they integrate into the S+S vision.

Micro-Presentations for Architects
Day 1: 17.10-18.10
Simon Thurman, Architect, Microsoft UK

 A freeform session where the attendees stand up and present.  However there are rules:  Each session should contain 20 slides, and each slide should be delivered in 20 seconds.  To ensure this happens the auto advance feature should be used.  This will be a fun session and needs you!

Unlocking value from SAP with Microsoft Solutions
Day 2: 10.50-11.50
David Jobling, CTO, Avanade
Stef Shoffren, Avanade
Steve Butcher, Avanade

 Many firms have made significant IT and business investments in ERP programmes built on SAP applications and data warehousing. Traditionally Microsoft technology impact has been limited to the platform and database choice (Windows and SQL Server), but in recent months we have seen great opportunity to unlock the full value of these solutions with a range of Microsoft offerings.

Microsoft Business Intelligence, middleware integration and Dynamics AX applications are all increasingly used in conjunction with SAP. And of course, Microsoft office applications from Outlook to Excel can be integrated such that the user rarely needs to leave their normal productivity tools to manipulate ERP data or invoke transactions.

This presentation will cover the practical benefits Microsoft tools can bring to SAP based organisations, and will include demonstrations of two key technologies. A demonstration of how Microsoft PerformancePoint Analytics can provide advanced analytical functions with a flexible functionality and business intelligence reporting on a Windows Mobile device against SAP data.

Enterprise Web integration using .NET 3.5
Day 2: 12.00-13.00
Ian Robinson, Thoughtworks

 This talk illustrates how web-friendly integration methods helped a large company with over 60 systems solve their more serious integration and process agility issues. Traditional enterprise integration approaches having been tried and found wanting, the company adopted web-based syndication to supply timely events to the systems implementing its key business processes. Faced with an expensive, complex and tightly coupled database integration strategy, the integration team decided to take a consumer-driven approach to identifying the significant interactions between business functions. The team identified the minimum set of business-meaningful interactions necessary to implement a distributed business process, and then surfaced those interactions as first-class citizens of the systems estate in a web-friendly, resource-oriented manner.

The session includes code samples that show how the solution surfaced business interactions as ATOM feeds using the syndication features built into .NET 3.5.

Some of the key advantages of this approach:
- web-based integration approaches require minimal upfront infrastructure investment
- Business-meaningful interactions become first-class citizens of the service estate, rather than being buried inside a database replication strategy or middleware platform
- Interactions with well-defined business semantics drive out the minimum of functionality required to satisfy a business capability
- Consumer expectations imported into a service provider in the form of tests or assertions comprise the contract between the provider and its consumers

Complex Event Processing
Day 2: 13.50-14.50

 Complex Event Processing, or CEP, is a technology for building and managing event-driven information systems which can be applied to extracting and analysing information from any kind of distributed message-based system.
In this session, we will drill into some of the key concepts such as Event Stream Processing & Matching, Business Rules, CEP Architecture and discuss how CEP is going to be an important aspect of the IT landscape.

The Embedded Enterprise
Day 2: 15.00-16.00
John Plumber & Jeff Johnson, TSP Architects, Microsoft UK

 Devices are increasingly being adopted by Enterprises but are we architecting solutions to take full advantage of them or simply bolting them onto the side of existing architectural solutions?  This session discusses the use of devices in the enterprise, common scenarios and architectural consideration that should be taken into account.

SOA Platform for  2015
Day 1: 11.30-12.30
Jonathan Woodward, CTO & Darren Hallett, Technical Design  Authority, Sungard Vivista

 The IT industry is in constant flux, but signs are appearing that it is readying itself for a  tectonic shift, one that will engulf companies that are not ready.
Multiple disruptive technologies are taking centre stage, forcing a change and choice in the way that software is engineering , delivered and consumed.
A key area of IT focus today is in providing business agility to counter this flux and SOA platforms play an ever increasing role in providing this agility from a IT context.
What should the SOA platform of the future look like ?  
Where are we now ? What are the current Trends  ?   What should we start to get ready for ? Where should we invest to counter this shift....

Oslo I thought...” – The Oslo Roadmap
Day 1: 13.30-14.30
Marc Homes & Mark Bloodworth, Architects, Microsoft UK

 Microsoft is making key investments to deliver both world class SOA platform across client, server and cloud and the tools to model that platform, describe it and collaborate between IT and The Business. These investments are known as ‘Oslo’.
Delivering on Oslo will involve orchestration technologies: Biztalk Server and Biztalk Services, development technologies: the next generation (4.0!) of .NET and Visual Studio, and management technologies: System Center.

In this session, Marc Holmes and Mark Bloodworth step through the concepts and technologies, and how they’ll enable IT to deliver on Real World SOA and the Software + Services vision.

Where's the Bus?
Day 1: 14.40-15.40
Simon Thurman, Architect & Darren Jefford, Principal Consultant, Microsoft UK

 Where’s the bus introduces the concept of an Internet Service Bus.  A set of foundational capabilities that can be considered as part of a ubiquitous fabric that distributed applications rely on and which help to enable a completely new breed of applications that are not possible to have today.  We’ll explore areas that include Identity, Connectivity and Workflow, and how the inclusion of these capabilities as part of a fabric can simplify the development of a SOA deployed locally or in the cloud.

Software plus Services - Disruptive IT or tangible sea change?
Day 1: 16.00-17.00
Joel Jeffery, Technical Director, Valtech

 Software plus Services draws together the terms of SaaS, Web 2.0 and SOA under a single umbrella recognising that software cannot be separated from the architectural concerns of how it is delivered, composed and experienced by the consumer. This introduces an interesting set of problems for IT relating to the management, ownership and governance of such a mixed set of IT assets both inside and outside of the organisation. This session examines these trends and discusses offerings from the major players within the industry, illustrated with a case study.

Data Access in a software plus Services World
Day 1: 17.10-18.10
Simon Davies, Application Architect, Microsoft UK

 Software plus services applications consume and combine  data from a variety of sources both within  and outside the firewall  this session looks at some of the challeges that these applications face and looks into some of  the approach that Microsoft is taking in the .Net Framework to address them

Fast forward to the future of the composite application in the coming years
Day 2: 10.50-11.50
Andy James, CTO, Solidsoft

 “In the first changing world we live in today coupled with the surge of technology available both in the home and at work the classic application of ‘yesteryear’ is now becoming a thing of the past. In fact for business to keep pace it must learn from the user experience people take for granted in the home where information, utilities and data capture and use blur into one...Consider the humble TV experience today compared with 10 years ago: we now have the ability to be selective of what we want to watch, when we want to watch it and how we want to watch it. Furthermore we combine this with comprehensive electronic guides about what we watch!

For a business to retain it’s ‘edge’ it must also look to this ‘composite’ way of solving it’s business problems. This session will look at what is happening today and then postulate what the near and not so near term offers....”

Service-Oriented UIs – Principles and Practice
Day 2: 12.00-13.00
Michael Barker, Senior Consultant, Valtech

 In the past couple of years, there has been an explosion in Web 2.0 enabling technologies (Silverlight, AJAX, Flex).  Many websites today are built using a traditional MVC-based frameworks (ASP.NET, Struts, Ruby on Rails) and use rich UI technology to enhance the user experience.  However, with the rich client-side programming environments available now, it is possible to take a different approach.  A Service-Oriented UI (SOUI) moves the conversational state management onto the client-side of the application and accesses data via a set of stateless services (i.e. a service oriented back-end).  SOUIs provide a number of advantages over the server-based MVC approach, including a richer user experience and a decoupling of the technologies used by the client and server side.  This talk will cover some of the key architectural concerns introduced by SOUIs.  In addition, the talk will look at a the practical issues in building suite of real applications using a SOUI approach.

“Net Generation” Users and Experiences
Day 2: 13.50-14.50
Marc Holmes, Architect, Microsoft UK

 Apart from being hard to pin down to a precise definition, Web 2.0 brings implications for any organisation. Some of these present fantastic opportunity, and others present challenges. In this session, Marc Holmes explores some of the prevalent concepts on the web: social networking, long tail effects, mash-ups and the power of the crowd and draws upon real world examples and thinking, and asks questions such as “What is the down side to the Long Tail?” and “How can I avoid my brand being diluted whilst opening my services to social networking platforms?” to consider how an organisation might think and shape to continue to be successful in an emerging collaborative web.

User Experience Matters
Day 2: 15.00-16.00
Simon Thurman, Architect, Microsoft UK, Paul Bishop, Managing Director, Splendid & Ian Worley, Director of User Experience, Flow Interactive

 User experience matters.  We all enjoy using cool devices.  What makes it so pleasurable?  The User Experience.  Whether it’s your iPod, your phone, or your favourite social networking site, it’s the user experience that ultimately determines our level of enjoyment and whether we’ll continue to use it. 

In this session we’ll explore how to deliver the best user experience across the appropriate device and channel

 



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