Anith Gopal

One of the themes from the UCISA conference this year, from the first keynote on, was the possibility of massive upheaval in the higher education sector in the UK. Tough spending reviews, new ways of doing things and the very imminent possibility of multiple mergers and acquisitions between universities in the UK.

Today Microsoft announced the Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI).  The goal of OGDI is to encourage the publishing and use of public government data.  See the press release here What’s special about OGDI?  OGDI enables government organizations to easily expose data for *programmatic access* vs download.  An OGDI container stores data in Microsoft Windows Azure storage and anyone with a myriad of both Microsoft and non-Microsoft programming skills can access the data.  Flash, PHP, Ruby, Python, C#, Silverlight, maps, have at it! OGDI-based data repositories expose data via the very familiar REST programming model.  At the heart of OGDI is a read-only data service built on Windows Azure.

Once again we have a great lineup for the New England Cloud User Group meeting: 6th Silver-lining Meeting – The New England Cloud User Group Date:  March 11, 2009  (Note: Wednesday) Time: Meet & Greet 6-7 pm Meeting: 7-9 pm NEW LOCATION!!! Microsoft Northeast District: Waltham, MA   Address: 201 Jones Rd., Sixth Floor Waltham, MA 02451 Phone: (781) 487-6400 Fax: (781) 487-6600 Directions:  Microsoft This next meeting ( 03/11/2009 ) brings two companies that provide Infrastructure related products to the cloud. Ed Beauvais, Sr. Product Manager from EMC Corporation will be talking about the new Atmos Cloud Optimized Storage . Nicos Vekiarides, CEO of Twinstrata will be talking about configuring infrastructure using private and public cloud technologies and how to avoid the risks in the design

The February Update of the Azure Services Training Kit has released and is ready for download . Below is a brief overview (taken from the download site ) of what’s included in the latest release