My apologies. We up and moved, but didn't leave a forwarding address. Sorry about that.

Since late October 2012, Microsoft IT employees have been blogging and sharing videos on Microsoft's external website. The new blog is located here.

Here's what has been published since late October.

• Paul Slater did in fact publish part 2 of his blog on application portfolio management, where he provided four recommendations for successful application portfolio management. See here
• I blogged about CIO Tony Scott's favorite internal application that we moved to Windows Azure: our online auction tool. Read here.
• Tobias Klauder blogged abut the Yammer acquisition, and how Microsoft IT used the M&A Playbook to make integration as successful as possible. Read here.
• Peter Loop blogged about Microsoft IT's 2-tier ERP strategy and talked about the strategy of "build to last and build to change." See here.
• Last week, the chief information security officer (CISO) of Microsoft IT blogged about his agenda, and the fact that it's more than dealing with the consumerization of IT. Read here.

CIO Tony Scott is still sharing his perspectives as well. In late October a TechNet Radio interview was published in which Tony discussed some of the short- and long-term benefits of moving to the cloud. Listen here.

Finally, I'll point out that the new location of the Office of the CIO blog is conveniently located near the new home of the Microsoft IT Showcase website, where you can read planning and deployment guidance from Microsoft IT. See here.

Patrick O'Rourke

This is a guest post from Paul Slater, an intellectual property development architect from the Enterprise Strategy team within Microsoft’s Services organization. In part 1, he’ll discuss the background and strategy to Microsoft’s internal line-of-business application portfolio management. In part 2, he’ll discuss important considerations for successful application portfolio management.

Through the Enterprise Strategy program, Microsoft provides enterprise customers with dedicated enterprise architects armed with specific methods, dedicated IP, and access to subject matter experts. The program focuses on business needs, and helps our customers maximize their investment in Microsoft products and services. Our Enterprise Strategy Program architects work closely with Microsoft IT, because we recognize that our own IT organization is a valuable source of information for our customers. As a multinational tech company, providing products and services to many different types of customers, Microsoft is a complex organization, and Microsoft IT addresses many of the business and technology challenges our enterprise customers are encountering. One area of close collaboration has been application portfolio management.

The goal of application portfolio management is pretty simple –to increase the value of the application portfolio over time. But application portfolio management continues to be a challenge for an organization like Microsoft. We were built on the premise that any of us can change the world through software development. In that kind of environment, applications may spring up from anywhere, and may well start life on somebody’s laptop or under somebody’s desk. We want to enable that kind of innovation culture, but how do we do so and still ensure that our risks are kept in check, and our investments generate the most business value?

Microsoft IT has been wrestling with application portfolio management in some shape or form since 1998. At that time, like many large organizations, our focus was the Y2K issue. We needed to know what applications we had, so that we could assess our overall risk, and rewrite or replace problem applications. In the following years Microsoft continued to track all of its internal applications, and by 2005 we had identified and registered many thousands. It was time for a shift in focus towards rationalization, and as a result the Enterprise Architecture application portfolio management team was formed. Since 2005 that team has, through a combination of more effective people, process and technology measures, driven a reduction in application count by more than 50%. During the same period, additional priorities emerged for the team to drive new application portfolio management capabilities. IT optimization plans have included reduction in physical servers through virtualization, storage optimization, and reducing the number of service tickets, and reducing the amount of time it takes for a new application to become stable. Now, as Microsoft IT is moving to the cloud, and towards more real-time enterprise services, an in-depth understanding of the application portfolio is again essential.

While the Microsoft IT team continues to make progress, challenges remain. One challenge is getting and maintaining good data. If Microsoft IT requests too little data, it cannot provide the right level of detail to the business for effective decision making. Requesting too much data leads to unnecessary overhead to the server and application owners in the business, and this may eventually result in a reduction in data quality. This is actually a surprisingly complex challenge, as it deals not only with what data is required, but the process used to obtain it, and the value proposition for collecting it. However, over time, this and other problems are being addressed, and as a result Microsoft is getting a clearer picture of the costs associated with maintaining the application portfolio, and the value associated with that portfolio. These improved capabilities are the path to providing improved IT decision making capabilities and enhancing the value of IT to the business, without impacting the innovation culture we must preserve.

Meanwhile the Microsoft IT team is focused on retaining the knowledge it has gathered, and helping our customers learn from our experience. The Microsoft IT leader for application portfolio management program told me, “If we had the advantage of this type of insight when we started, we could have easily cut two or three years off our journey and maybe more.” Now, through the Enterprise Strategy Program, Microsoft is able to take this insight, combine it with hundreds of years of experience in APM from our Enterprise Architects in the field, and share it with our customers in the form of clear actionable methods and frameworks for application portfolio management. The goal of this exercise is to turn application portfolio management from a necessary tactical exercise triggered by events, such as burning platforms, into a highly efficient and strategic activity that adds proven value to the business.

In the second part of this series, I will discuss the key lessons learned, and discuss a high level approach for effective application portfolio management.

Paul Slater

This is a guest post by Patrick O’Rourke, director within the strategy, planning and communications team in Microsoft IT.

For those who read this blog you know that Microsoft IT is in the midst of transforming the company into a real-time enterprise. The vision of real-time enterprise is about increasing the speed of the company’s operations and delivering a better customer experience to millions worldwide, while lowering the cost structure of delivering IT services. Cloud computing is one of the most important tools we’re using to enable a real-time enterprise.

This post updates you on our continued migration of applications to the cloud, with a focus on moving business-critical applications to Windows Azure. As you’ll read below, our approach with several applications is a hybrid solution in which Windows Azure hosts and manages portions of the application, while other application components remain on-premises. If you’re not familiar with our approach of evaluating line-of-business (LOB) applications to migrate to Windows Azure, I recommend first reading this Microsoft IT Showcase article [here].

Core processes for global revenue model move to the cloud

As CIO Tony Scott discussed in this video [here], cloud computing helps accelerate business process and our internal move to digitize our business. There’s no better example than with LOB applications that manage Microsoft accounting journal entries, in other words, financial transactions around the world. Microsoft has subsidiaries in more than 100 countries, and the demand pattern of the legacy applications showed us that every month, one-third of processed transactions occurred in the last three days of the month. The same pattern occurred at the end of fiscal quarters, when month-end and quarter-end entries coincided.

To improve upon this challenge and other application limitations, Microsoft IT decided to create a single application that would unify the accounting transaction business process. The design team’s goals for the application were:

• Unify all business processes
• Support new personas and scenarios
• Improve application performance
• Add scalability
• Start with a hybrid approach and eventually move it all to the cloud

Microsoft IT Showcase recently published an article with details of our experience [download Using Windows Azure to Create a Multi-Platform Application].

The business and technical benefits of this new application compared to the old solution were:

• $22 million USD saved over five years in terms of business operational costs
• $144,000 USD savings per year in engineering operational support costs
• Increased efficiency in the financial close process through broader access using Windows Phone
• Increased reliability due to built-in scalability of Windows Azure
• Easier updates and maintenance

Designing hybrid applications in Windows Azure was a fairly new process for Microsoft IT employees, and my colleagues identified several insights along the way:

• Visual Studio compute emulator for Windows Azure is easy to learn and use
• For cloud services-based components, security of data storage and transmission must be decided upon during the very early stages of the project.
• Monitoring and instrumentation of applications is very important to get operations on-board.
• Designing for Windows Phone mobile devices doesn’t require a significant departure from Windows Azure application code. Mobile application implementation involves a simplified, lightweight UI.
• Security and privacy require special attention when you design for mobile platforms. Data that is stored in the device must be separated and not available to other applications on the device.
• Migrating applications to the cloud doesn’t have to come at the expense of on-premises investment. On-premises solutions can be extended to the cloud in hybrid scenarios.

Microsoft Partner Network moves to thecloud

Just like any other for-profit company, Microsoft uses internal LOB applications to sell and license products and services to customers. And like many other companies, our licensing applications grew more and more complicated over the years as new products and services were introduced and modified.  But perhaps
unlike many other companies, Microsoft conducts a large percentage of its enterprise business through partners.

The Microsoft Partner Network portal (the portal) on www.microsoft.com is the primary resource for Microsoft partners to establish, manage, and grow their partnership with Microsoft. The Partner Velocity Platform is a suite of applications that provide functionality and support for the portal. While Partner Velocity
Platform doesn’t include all portal functionality, it is the core functional component of the portal.

As you can imagine, the existing Partner Velocity Platform was composed of multiple applications that different teams designed and developed to serve different purposes. The Partner Velocity Platform consisted of a large number of applications, all of which had different interfaces, functional designs, and methods for maintenance and support. The existing solution operated primarily as an on-premises solution, and servers within the Microsoft IT corporate network infrastructure hosted all of the components. The Partner Velocity Platform applications were designed to access data and services provided through these components either by using a Windows client or browser-based application.

To improve upon these and other application limitations, Microsoft IT established several design goals:

• Create more efficient data structures and workflow
• Increase business value
• Increase agility by reducing development and deployment time
• Realign the technology roadmap with business goals
• Develop a unified experience for the partner
• Enable a multi-step, multi-year platform redesign to mitigate partner impact

While the implementation of the next version of Partner Velocity Platform is an ongoing project, my colleagues have already realized several benefits from the migration to Windows Azure:

• A greater share of IT investment is being directed to operations and innovation initiatives from capital expenditures and maintenance.
• Development of new programs has been reduced from hundreds of thousands of dollars to $10,000-$25,000 USD.
• While maintaining a hybrid solution represents both on-premises and Windows Azure costs, the team still anticipates a 72% increase in business enablement and innovation investment, and a 21% reduction in annual maintenance costs. This could result in a net savings of approximately $4.3 million USD during the next
  three years.
•  Upgrades and environment changes occur in a matter of minutes, rather than weeks.
• The team did not experience many of the typical configuration issues that occur during traditional development, even as it added new personnel.

Microsoft IT Showcase recently published an article with details of our experience and best practices [download Migrating the Microsoft Partner Network to Windows Azure].

Let me know if you found this overview useful, as well as the IT Showcase materials. What else would you like to know about our application migrations to the cloud?

 Patrick O’Rourke

This is a guest post by Patrick O’Rourke, director within the strategy, planning and communications team in Microsoft IT.

If you’ve read this blog before then you know that one of the roles of Microsoft IT is to be the first customer of Microsoft’s commercial products and services. Through this program the IT department manages a phased, employee adoption of early versions of Microsoft products and services. We call this “dogfood” in that we’re eating our own dogfood. This program enables the IT department to help Microsoft’s product teams deliver higher quality products and services to customers, both near-term and long-term.

We’re currently “dogfooding” several products and services, but the most interest is with Windows 8 and IE 10 Release Preview. As of mid-July we had more than 30,000 systems and nearly 30,000 employees running Windows 8 and IE10.

I’ll highlight three areas from Microsoft IT experience deploying Windows 8 and IE 10 Release Preview: support, security and user experience.

Support model for early adopters

The Windows 8 Release Preview deployment was fully supported by Microsoft IT through multiple support channels, to include self-help, help desk and an online community. This strategy is important so that Microsoft IT can collect diverse feedback for contribution back to the product group, and to meet the support needs of worldwide employees.

To ensure a smooth transition for Microsoft employees, the Microsoft help desk was regularly updated on the deployment process, they were provided readiness training that contained the key differences between Windows 8/Internet Explorer 10 and previous versions, and they were provided information about the new features and a troubleshooting guide with tips and tricks on how to resolve common issues.

In terms of online community, we adopted a social networking model by creating a channel for support. We created //pointers as a moderated forum that could address the top feedback from employees. The web application is real-time, dynamic and content is searchable. Perhaps more important, it proved to be a valuable collaboration and knowledge sharing tool between IT and employees worldwide.

When reviewing the site traffic to //pointers, we saw that site visits greatly exceeded the number of unique users.  We interpreted this site traffic as positive; the site is sticky and employees are coming back to it. In addition, the volume of recognition badges indicated that, once driven to the community, employees tend to contribute in helping others.

Following are some of the key learnings from //pointers:

• It provides an easy-to-use, friendly interface where users can locate the information that they are looking for and ask questions when they cannot find the answer.
• It’s expandable to accommodate increased volume and support new programs and services.
• It creates and fosters new habits that encourage people to come to the community and become (part of) the community.
• It provides recognition, which in turn increases motivation and personal satisfaction. Badges were one way that we helped drive users back to http://pointers.
• It maintains a high level of responsiveness. In the community space, responsiveness drives credibility for the end user, which increases user participation.

Security

As indicated by press reports, security is a valuable part of Windows 8 deployments. There are many new features that Microsoft IT needed to validate for the enterprise.  I’ll highlight some of the features we deployed.

• Trusted boot helps protect the boot process and is designed to eliminate the possibility for malware to hijack the boot process or hide from antimalware software.
• Microsoft IT is performing a pilot on approximately 1,000 machines to evaluate changes in the way DirectAccess works, including validating virtual smart cards that use a machine’s Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip—a chip that supports BitLocker and, in Windows 8, protects the virtual smart card certificate’s private key.
• Measured boot enables the reporting of machine health in a secure way that is measured by hardware at boot time. Microsoft IT plans to use a remote health attestation like measured boot via a network-based
  custom system health agent to ensure security health of managed Windows 8 DirectAccess systems.
• Microsoft IT needed to make sure that Microsoft BitLocker worked on Windows 8. BitLocker drive encryption can protect data on mobile devices that include a TPM chip. Microsoft IT is also validating a new BitLocker feature called Network Key Protector Unlock that allows BitLocker to automatically unlock a drive when the machine is plugged into the corporate network.

User experience

End user adoption is very important for our “dogfood” deployments so that we have enough employees providing feedback on the software. At the same time, we need to keep these employees productive. Therefore we dedicate significant resources to user experience during our “dogfood” deployments, and Windows 8/IE 10 was no different.

The experience starts with installation. Microsoft IT used IT Easy Installer to streamline the install experience by automating everything for the user to migrate to Windows 8. We cut the install time in half, which included the Office image. I’ll highlight some of the key components of the tool:

• Hardware compliance and guidance scans the employee’s machine and confirms if the system meets the Windows 8 minimum system requirements, provides Microsoft IT recommended configuration for each
  requirement, checks if the system is a Microsoft IT standard hardware, checks if Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is available for provisioning Windows 8 DirectAccess (DA), provides driver coverage information for the standard and non-standard hardware by displaying the missing driver information, and provides Windows experience index scores.
• Software guidance scans the employee’s machine for all installed software (Microsoft products and third party) and provides Windows 8 compatibility guidance for each installed software.
• Line of Business application guidance provides guidance on compatibility status of the business critical and widely used internal line-of-business websites that are tested by Microsoft IT and allows employees to report new applications that can be considered to be tested.
• Data migration solution allows employees to migrate their data and settings, and provides options to migrate during installation (in-place) or migrate to local or network storage provided by Microsoft IT prior to the installation and restore afterwards.
• Install Windows 8 provides integrated installation experience that interfaces with all operating system deployment delivery channels and automatically selects the best delivery channel based on the user’s connectivity profile and location.

[Sept. 4 update: I was asked about tools we used in our Windows 8 deployment. It’s discussed a bit in the IT Showcase materials. For context it’s important to remember that the tools used to deploy Windows 8 Release Preview were for our early deployment (aka, dogfood) phase. In this dogfood phase, we have to be opportunistic to help our early adopters any way we can while we work on setting up our long-term System Center infrastructure, which we’ll use for the company-wide deployment. You can expect to read about this company-wide deployment later this year. But, for the Windows 8 Release Preview to early adopters, we used Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2012 Update 1, and System Center Configuration  Manager in small pockets. MDT is a solution accelerator available for OS and application deployment. It can be used as a stand-alone installer, and there’s a version integrated with System Center 2012 Configuration Manager, which we’ll use to simplify and automate our company-wide Windows 8 Enterprise deployment process.]

A new OS feature, called Windows To Go, allows Windows 8 desktop to boot and run from a USB flash drive. Windows To Go is self-contained on a USB device, and can also take advantage of any devices
made available on the host computer, or across the enterprise network. A Windows To Go workspace works with most host desktop or laptop computer, including tablets and slates.

Microsoft IT provisioned 75 devices with Windows To Go and made them available to senior staff, engineers, and architects. Windows To Go scenarios include providing a managed corporate desktop when the host computers are unmanaged or not domain-joined. This deployment allowed different machines (slate, laptop, and desktop) with different configurations of screen, keyboard, and touch to have a machine-specific experience that was highly transportable between host machines.

Finally, to provide a complete data migration and protection strategy for employees, Microsoft IT used File History. This is a new, built-in feature that protects user files by periodically scanning the computer’s file
system for changes stored in libraries and in the user's Desktop, Favorites, and Contacts folders and copying them to a Microsoft IT-managed network drive configured as their backup storage area. Enterprise customers will be able to customize this solution for their own environment.

You can read more about Microsoft IT deployment of Windows 8 on Microsoft IT Showcase here. Expect to see more posts about line of business application experience and application development with Windows 8 and IE10 on this blog in the coming months.

Last week Microsoft announced that we had reached the release to manufacturing (RTM) milestone of Windows 8 [see here], which means we’ve completed the product development and testing of the product and have started handing off the final code to our OEM partners.

Leave a comment or question, and don’t forget to download Windows 8 Release Preview here.

Patrick O’Rourke

You can listen and download the podcast here.

• How quickly will I be able to move elements of my technology infrastructure to the cloud to address innovation?
• What steps will I need to take to leverage the cloud to my advantage?
• Can I achieve business value through Hybrid IT approaches?
• How do the four personas of the next generation CIO and Hybrid IT work with each other?

Download the trend report by Constellation Research’s principal analyst and CEO Ray Wang. 

This is a guest post by Danielle Fox de Aguilar, director of supplier management in Microsoft IT. Danielle and team manage the worldwide supplier program for Microsoft’s internal IT department, which includes thousands of resources from 300 supplier agencies.

In September 2011, my colleague and Microsoft IT Chief Architect Barry Briggs blogged about how changes in technology are impacting the relationship between IT and its suppliers. This post will take a different look at sourcing, namely the change we’re taking around supplier management strategy during a time of IT transformation.

As a colleague discussed earlier this year [here], Microsoft’s internal IT transformation is focused on increasing the speed we operate as a business and improve the experience we deliver to customers. To accomplish this outcome, we’re mapping IT people and resources to our business processes so that we deliver them faster and enable customers to have a better experience with Microsoft.

Suppliers play an important role in this transformation, and to have successful relationships with these suppliers requires us as an IT organization to change some of our traditional sourcing and supplier management approaches. Let me explain what that looks like.

First, we look for suppliers who provide end-to-end capabilities and service ownership and suppliers who can share both their business process and IT knowledge with us.  These capabilities are more important than ever for Microsoft IT because we’re now organized around end-to-end business processes. Internal IT employees are expanding our view across the company and we want suppliers who can do the same. This transition means suppliers have greater accountability for our success and managing their resources, and it brings combined business process outsourcing (BPO) and IT outsourcing (ITO) opportunities. For Microsoft IT, it means greater value.

Second, we look for suppliers who can provide unique value to Microsoft IT. This value can take many forms. For example, suppliers often have access to talent and technology in markets where we do not. While we deliver IT to a global business and about 40% of our IT employees are outside North America, the global breadth of many of our partners is providing us unique value through speed, agility and access to markets and technologies in many critical areas. A great example of this is the expansion of IT talent in countries like China where we see significant opportunities. 

Third, we’ve developed a Supplier Relationship Management program to help us develop mutually beneficial relationships with critical suppliers. Overall we’re looking to leverage suppliers to drive value and
efficiency, minimize supplier engagement risk and jointly develop capabilities toward delivery excellence and value creation.

A foundational element of the program is our quarterly Performance and Relationship scorecards, which evaluate not only quality and delivery, but also value, risk and the relationship. The scorecards enable rich
conversations with suppliers about trends and comparative rankings. Other critical elements of our Supplier Relationship Management approach include an executive sponsorship program, development of joint processes and strategies, executive business reviews and strategic summits and rewards and recognition.

We tailor our Supplier Relationship Management program to each of our three segments of suppliers; Strategic, Core and Specialty. Suppliers across all three segments are important and are needed for us to be successful.

• Strategic suppliers offer a combination of depth and breadth across business processes, have high business impact and with whom we strive to have longer term and strategic relationships.
• Core suppliers provide critical and foundational services and products, have high impact and have the ability to support deeper relationships.
• Specialty suppliers offer unique skills and capabilities, whether that’s an analyst firm consulting on a project, an analytics firm to help with a big data processing project, or a supplier who knows the ins-and-outs of SAP.

 We’re also looking for ways to increase our partnership beyond the traditional supplier relationship, including joint investment, go-to-market strategies and sharing of best practices. This can range from sharing best practices for IT and business processes to sharing approaches for promote diversity,  employee development, and other topics critical to our leaders. With some of our key suppliers we have taken this partnership to the next level and have engaged in IT executive exchange and job shadowing programs, which allow for longer term opportunities to share deep expertise with each other. 

This approach has helped us with our transition to real-time enterprise. So far we have achieved efficiencies in how we operate, resulting in more than $20 million in cost savings year-to-date and significant supplier-driven process efficiencies. More importantly, we are seeing a great improvement in how we interact with our suppliers, which is positioning us for strong and innovative long-term partnerships which will be critical to future success.

I’m interested to hear your perspectives on supplier strategies and, if appropriate, have an offline discussion. Thank you for your time.

Danielle Fox de Aguilar

In this video Microsoft CIO Tony Scott discusses budgeting, IT talent, data access and operations when moving to the cloud.

Join Microsoft CIO Tony Scott as he shares his insight on the various aspects of the cloud such as benefits, time to market, employee productivity and maintaining or reducing IT cost.