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Welcome to the Microsoft Financial Services Newsletter for Developers. At Microsoft, we’re committed to serving the needs of developers and architects in the financial services industry. This newsletter will give you links to the latest resources, tools and technologies to help build fast, scaleable, secure enterprise level solutions in Financial Services.
Letter from the Editor
Greetings and welcome to the Fall edition of the Developers Newsletter for the Financial Services community. This edition is packed full of what we hope will be valuable resources as you work to build enterprise solutions in Financial Services.
Earlier this month the Windows in Financial Services publication announced the Innovation Awards for 2006. These awards recognize the brightest innovations in harnessing the power of Microsoft technology, presented to five Financial Institutions and five Microsoft Partners. Please visit the Web site to see the 2006 winners.
Also earlier this month Microsoft hosted a Business Process and SOA Conference in Redmond, WA. The conference focused on our advances in interoperability and shared our latest technology roadmap as part of an ongoing strategy to equip customers with a “real-world” approach to Service Oriented Architecture. The conference was well attended and focused on some key areas that are important to our Financial Services Customers.
Microsoft’s "real-world” approach to SOA was initiated more than seven years ago with the introduction of the .NET platform that went beyond service orientation to also address capabilities such as federated data identity and user experience across applications, with guidance available on the MSDN Architecture Center. Coupled with a strong focus on interoperability through work with partners and standards bodies (such as the Web Services Interoperability Organization, ACORD, IFX, and SWIFT), Microsoft has additionally worked hard to support Service Oriented approaches in heterogeneous environments. A recent CIO survey by Merrill Lynch, listed Microsoft as the preferred SOA vendor for Web services and SOA software.
The Microsoft Financial Services group is focused on products and technologies and our work with leading solutions, services and hardware partners, on key areas where we believe we can help our customers deliver exceptional value. Those areas include advisor platforms, channel renewal, core banking, enterprise risk management and compliance, insurance value chain, and payments.
Within these scenarios, our software helps companies industry-wide succeed by providing the tools people need to gain new insights, make informed decisions, improve customer services, and improve operations.
This helps make this time super exciting as Microsoft readies the launch of the 2007 Office system, Windows Vista, and the .NET Framework 3.0. This edition of the newsletter is focused on using these new technologies and sharing how customers who have participated in some of the early adopter programs have used the platform to develop some truly amazing solutions.
Enjoy the fall and I hope to see many of you at the upcoming SIBOS, BAI, SOA and SAF events.
Sincerely,
Michael K. Wons, Technology Strategy Director, World-wide Financial Services Group
Mikewons@microsoft.com
Featured Articles
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Microsoft Office has evolved from a suite of personal productivity products to a more comprehensive and integrated system. Building on the familiar tools that many people already know, the 2007 Microsoft Office system includes programs, servers, services, and solutions designed to work together to help address a broad array of business problems.
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Integrated Desktop is a loosely coupled hosting architecture and composite UI that runs on the desktop and is supported by a loosely coupled architecture on the back end. It collapses the number of applications that users must work in.
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Virtual Earth is the mapping technology that powers local.live.com, the latest local search and mapping site from Microsoft. Virtual Earth technology was built by the same team that created MapPoint 2006 and the MapPoint Web service. It is implemented using a mix of both server-side and client-side technologies that include ASP.NET, asynchronous JavaScript, and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). You can build your own application or Web site that uses Virtual Earth mapping technologies by using the Virtual Earth map control, a JavaScript component that provides all the functionality you need to draw maps, search for locations, and get driving directions. In this article, I'll highlight some of the most salient features of the Virtual Earth APIs and show you how to build rich, powerful mapping and local search apps.
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A software factory contains a variety of software assets, including content and tools. Content includes reusable code components, documentation, and reference implementations. Tools include wizards, code generators, and visual designers. Typically, a software factory provides templates and other assets to help a development team quickly start development of new applications. It also continues to assist the developers by providing guidance and automating the prescribed development activities throughout the application development life cycle. The Mobile Client Software Factory provides an integrated set of guidance assets to help architects and developers create line-of-business Windows Mobile applications that interact with back-end systems over a variety of networks.
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SSMA is a complete suite of tools that dramatically cuts the effort, cost, and risk of migrating from Sybase ASE database to SQL Server. SSMA automates almost every aspect of the migration process including assessment, schema and data migration, and business logic conversion. With SSMA, IT organizations now have the freedom to move to SQL Server and take advantage of SQL Server's exceptional security, scalability, developer productivity, and the industry’s lowest total cost of ownership. SSMA for Sybase ASE consists of a client tool that you use to migrate ASE databases to SQL Server, and an extension pack that contains tables and stored procedures to support migration and functions that replace Sybase ASE system function usage in migrated databases.
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The Windows Display Driver Model is a new display driver architecture supported in Windows Vista. This display architecture is an overhaul of the Windows XP - based display architecture and gives users a better-performing, more reliable desktop experience.
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This preview guide highlights architectural underpinnings, the latest enhancements for developers, and code samples to get you started with building custom applications and solutions -- hands-on -- with seven practical projects.
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This article discusses the OPC Digital Signing Framework, providing an overview of the package components and supporting services, and examples of signing policy and its implementation.
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Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office system (Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Second Edition Beta, or VSTO 2005 SE Beta for short) is a free add-on to Visual Studio 2005 that empowers developers to build applications targeting the 2007 Office system. Developers can now harness the benefits of the 2007 Office system platform and create Office-based solutions using the professional development environment of Visual Studio 2005.
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Get the support you need to build .NET Framework 3.0 applications using the final released version of Visual Studio 2005. These tools are provided as an early preview of technology being considered for the Orcas release of Visual Studio.
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The most obvious change to XLL-related features in Microsoft Office Excel 2007 is that the worksheet is expanded from 224 to 234 cells, or to be more precise, from 256 columns x 65,536 rows (28 x 216) to 16,384 x 1,048,576 (214 x 220). These new limits overflow the integer types that contain them in the old range and array structures. This change requires new data structures with wider integers to define the size of ranges and arrays.
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Customer Case Studies/Power of the Platform
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Computer Weekly (September 26, 2006). Grid technology has broken out of the scientific and academic communities' labs and entered the enterprise. Global banking group HSBC is a good example of a commercial organization that is wrestling with grid technologies, while harnessing their power for everyday use.
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Mashreqbank, the largest private bank in the United Arab Emirates, ran its core banking applications in a Unisys mainframe computing environment. At the end of the support cycle for this technology, the bank made the strategic decision to replace its mainframe with systems based on open standards.
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Washington State Employees Credit Union (WSECU), founded in 1957, has grown to more than 138,000 member-owners, providing a broad range of financial services. WSECU, like many other financial institutions, is under the regulatory microscope as it relates to the management and protection of personal information. Pending legislation in this area is placing a burden for protecting sensitive information on WSECU, a burden that drives the need to move away from paper-based transactions to those that improve the security and flow of information within its walls.
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Mexico’s Banco Compartamos, S.A. Institución de Banca Múltiple, the leading financial institution in Latin America for granting micro-loans to small independent businesses, has an aggressive goal of increasing its customer base by over 1 million new customers by 2008. Compartamos was recently authorized to become a bank, which means it will need to develop a completely new product and service portfolio. To ease growing pains for its staff and to ensure it remains compliant with federal regulations as it undergoes the transformation, Compartamos must upgrade its current document management solution to a more standardized and automated solution that improves collaboration and enables sensitive information to be protected.
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The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) is one of Australia’s leading financial institutions. CBA provides more than 10 million global customers with integrated financial services such as retail, business and institutional banking, and funds management. Like many large banks, CBA has relied on disparate systems to manage customer accounts.
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PT Asuransi Allianz Utama Indonesia is a subsidiary of global insurer and financial services provider Allianz Group. Established in 1989, it is one of the largest general insurance companies in Indonesia today. Lacking a common access point for customer information, Allianz chose Microsoft Dynamics CRM so that it can deliver more consistent, efficient customer service, shorten the sales cycle, and reduce the complexity of its customer service processes.
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Events
Unwrapped for Financial Services III
The Unwrapped for Financial Services webcast series included both technical and strategic sessions, covering the latest technologies from Microsoft that help enable your solutions for Capital Markets, Banking, and Insurance firms. All the sessions were recorded and are available for download here.
Live From Redmond webcast series
This series of Live Meeting presentations are designed specifically for the community by members of the Microsoft product teams. The presentations are all done by actual team members working on the specific technology, and are a great way to hear from and ask your questions directly to the product team. Visit website. Highlights:
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Live From Redmond: Introducing the Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions
10/19/2006 9:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada) & 10:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)
The second talk in an ongoing series, this webcast will focus on the ASP.NET server side programming experience using the Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions. We will examine clever implementations by the ASP.NET team like automatic service proxy generation, “page methods”, and the handling of user defined types in AJAX.
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Live From Redmond: An in-depth look at the ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions UpdatePanel
10/26/2006 9:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada) & 10:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)
The “UpdatePanel” control stands at the heart of ASP.NET AJAX Server Framework. Come and learn all there is to know about UpdatePanel. This session will cover the recent improvements in the partial rendering realm, writing UpdatePanel compatible controls, adding animation during updates to the DOM via asynchronous post-backs, writing custom controls which incorporate UpdatePanel, the client-side event model for partial rendering, triggers and much more.
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Live From Redmond: Enriching Existing ASP.NET Applications with ASP.NET 2.0 Ajax Extensions
11/2/2006 9:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada) & 10:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)
In this webcast, we explore Microsoft ASP.NET code-named “Atlas,” an exciting new framework for building next-generation Web applications that target modern Web browsers. Learn how “Atlas” uses client script libraries that integrate with and extend ASP.NET 2.0, but can also be used standalone. Join this session to see how quickly you can get started using “Atlas” features to create rich and responsive user experiences and how easy “Atlas” makes it to extend the capabilities of existing ASP.NET applications.
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