From the birth of Hyper-V to Bill Gates' retirement, 2008 was an eventful year for Microsoft Well, it’s been an exciting year on many different levels. Putting aside the political back-and-forth, the economic recession, global warming, terrorist attacks, and so forth, this has actually been a great year in the tech sector, particularly in the Windows Enterprise world! Some of these items I covered in my columns; others were handled by my colleagues in one way or another. So here are my top 10 most interesting happenings of 2008 in the Windows Enterprise world.10. The return of the command line. Sounds like a trilogy closer for a fantasy series, but in actuality, it’s the popularity of PowerShell and Server Core that pulled the command line back into the spotlight. In the past 15 years, I cannot remember doing so much work from a command-prompt as I’ve done this year, especially with PowerShell being so essential in the Exchange world. Obviously the Linux lovers have been touting the command-line powers they have for many years while Windows admins GUIed their way around the network.[ Read more about the return to the command line. ] 9. The Mojave Experiment: Vista vindication. We can go back and forth about this subject (and we have all year long), but the Mojave Experiment, which was a focus group that included XP users who had heard only negative about Vista (but had never seen it in action) were given the chance to see it without knowing it was Vista — and they liked it! Would you like to know why? Because Vista is awesome. And the nice thing about service packs is that with each passing day, another fix or patch is added — and Vista becomes more awesome. [ Read more about Vista’s vindication. ]8. Mobile devices rule in 2008. The iPhone, the newly released BlackBerry Storm, Mobile 6.1 devices — it’s obvious that the functionality of these mini-machines is what draws your users toward them. However, from the enterprise admin’s perspective, there are security concerns about any device that is so easily stolen. So, devices like the iPhone were considered unsafe for the enterprise until the release of the second model of iPhone, the 3G. [ Read more about mobile myths. ]7. The year of SharePoint. Everywhere I went this year, I kept hearing more and more about SharePoint. At TechEd 2008, Microsoft’s biggest tech conference, it seemed like all the vendors wanted to push that they had books on SharePoint, training about SharePoint, products that work with SharePoint or back up SharePoint … you get the point. Many people are not aware of that there are SharePoint Services (which are free) and there is MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server), which is anything but free. [ Read more about the distinctions between SharePoint and MOSS. ] 6. Speech synthesis success. The push for a more automated approach to things and Unified Messaging with System Attendants had me curious to see what the product map looked like for other speech-oriented products. [ Read more about speech synthesis. ]5. Bill really retires. On June 27, 2008, Bill Gates ended his tenure as a full-time Microsoft employee. We may never be able to think of Microsoft without thinking of Bill Gates. But our children and their children may not think of Bill at all in association with Microsoft. That may be a sideline to his legacy, which will hopefully be a more substantial one in the world of philanthropy. Building Microsoft? Impressive. Saving the world? Now that’s a real legacy. [ Read more about Bill Gates’ legacy. ] 4. System Center solutions expand. You just cannot avoid the System Center buzzword these days. More and more solutions are being re-invented or developed under the System Center heading. The core product line includes tools for performance monitoring (Configuration Manager) data protection (Data Protection Manager), virtual machine management (Virtual Machine Manager), and much more. [ Read more about the System Center family. ] 3. Exchange 2007 SP1: Simply awesome. SP1 was officially released at the end of 2007, but I’m counting it for 2008. I was just reading market research from Gartner that said Microsoft Exchange will have a 70 percent market share in the enterprise e-mail and collaboration segment by 2010. [ I’ve written a bunch of columns about Exchange, but check out this blast from the past of Enterprise Windows. ]2. Windows Azure emerges. The cloud computing craze has everyone, including Microsoft, jumping on the bandwagon. The Windows Azure Services Platform will be used to host the underlying services that developers can use to build new applications that will run in the cloud. The underlying services are very familiar to network admins and include Live Services, .Net Services, SQL Services, SharePoint Services, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services — all residing on Windows Azure, the cloud services operating system. [ Read more about Windows Azure. ]And last but not least …1. The unveiling of Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V. The release of Server 2008 was exciting enough, and I wrote several posts regarding the new technologies from Microsoft’s best and brightest developers. However, it is the release of Microsoft’s hypervisor (Hyper-V) that got a large part of the attention. Competing with veteran VMWare and others who are racing to make a name in the virtualization world, Microsoft has made a valid entry, one that is both functional and affordable. [ A senior director at Sun had some serious questions regarding Hyper-V, and we had direct responses from Microsoft. Read all about it. ]Well, it has been an exciting year. Lots to talk about going into 2009. No doubt next year will prove to be just as interesting. See you then! Software DevelopmentSmall and Medium Business