Awards Recognize the Best of TechEd 2008 IT Professionals Conference

[Editor’s Note: Unlike past years, this year’s TechEd was split into two events. TechEd Developers 2008 (held June 3–6) focused on the development side of business IT, and TechEd IT Professionals (held June 10–13) centered on content more useful for IT pros and network administrators. We present the TechEd IT Professionals winners in this issue of Windows IT Pro; for the Best of TechEd Developers 2008 awards, see the August issue of SQL Server Magazine.]

The Best of TechEd awards, produced by Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Magazine, recognize innovative products and services offered by Microsoft partners that exhibited at TechEd IT Professionals 2008.

Our judges were Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Magazine editors, who winnowed the 228 submissions to 29 finalists. On site in Orlando, Technical Director Michael Otey, Executive Editor Amy Eisenberg, and Senior Editors Jeff James and Sheila Molnar attended presentations by all the finalists to determine the winners in all 11 categories, including the Breakthrough Product category for the most outstanding product of the show. The judges evaluated the entries according to three criteria: strategic importance to the market, competitive advantage, and value to customers. And, like last year, show attendees voted to determine the winner of the Attendees’ Pick award.

Our Best Messaging Product winner is Azaleos’ OneServer Virtual Edition, a one-stop virtual infrastructure solution for Microsoft Exchange 2007. Some IT pros have been reluctant to virtualize their Exchange servers, but the maturation and stability of virtualization technology—combined with powerful and inexpensive hardware—take away previous reasons for concern. According to Azaleos, a typical Exchange installation requires four physical servers for the three primary server roles. With OneServer Virtual Edition, IT pros can reduce that hardware requirement to two servers and one storage device. Combined with Azaleos OneStop managed services, OneServer Virtual Edition can reduce hardware and power costs, improve system availability, streamline deployment, and offer improved performance for Exchange 2007 installations.

—Jeff James

Best Business Intelligence Product
OfficeWriter

Microsoft Office and Microsoft Excel are two of the most popular business applications available today. So why not leverage those applications to meet your business intelligence (BI) needs? SoftArtisans answered that question with its excellent OfficeWriter application, which does exactly that. OfficeWriter can connect to SQL Server Analysis Services and other databases and deliver fully functional Excel and Word documents over the Web. One really cool feature of OfficeWriter is its ability to preserve all of the original document functionality, such as macros and pivot tables. Want more? OfficeWriter offers bidirectional data updating (a feature that lets end users update data sources through Excel or Word) and supports .NET Framework 2.0. If you’re looking to leverage your existing office applications to meet your BI needs, OfficeWriter might fit the bill.

—Amy Eisenberg

Best SharePoint Product
DocAve Software Platform

SharePoint use is exploding, and administrators tasked with managing it need help. AvePoint’s DocAve Software Platform provides an integrated environment for SharePoint management, disaster recovery, and real-time backup. A discovery tool helps you find SharePoint installations in your enterprise, and a consistent, Web-based management GUI makes managing all the product’s features a snap. You can install DocAve Software Platform as a cohesive system or deploy each module individually. The administration tools make it easy to replicate and administer your content, and a compliance module can help you ensure that your SharePoint infrastructure adheres to compliance and auditing regulations. Finally, user and content migration tools simplify the process of moving people and assets into your Share Point infrastructure.

—Jeff James

Best Hardware, Networking, or Storage Product
Strangeloop WS1000 Web Services Accelerator

Cloud computing and hosted services have been getting a lot of attention lately, a situation that translates into greater demands being placed on Web services. Accelerating the performance of those Web services is the focus of the Strangeloop WS1000 Web Services Accelerator, an appliance that you install between a Web server and the Web applications that are placing demand on that server. The WS1000 uses a combination of hardware and smart software algorithms that can dramatically reduce the load on Web servers and increase the performance of Web services by an order of magnitude. The Strangeloop WS1000’s advanced caching technologies also enable plug-and-play performance optimization without requiring any changes to the Web services application code.

—Michael Otey