Those who visited the Microsoft campus in Hyderabad on July 13 were rendered speechless by some of the interesting innovations showcased by Microsoft India Development Center and Microsoft Research India as part of TechXchange.

According to the company head honchos, TechXchange will be an annual event from now. This year's event featured close to 50 demos and posters, and seven talks on various topics on computer science.

"As a direct result of the TechXchange, MSR India and MSIDC see collaborations in the fields of software engineering, multilingual systems, mobile networks and applications as well as emerging market technologies," said Srini Koppolu, vice president and managing director, MSIDC.

Koppulu's words were echoed by P Anandan, MD, Microsoft Research India. "We focus on basic and applied research on computer science. Our research is typically long term and exploratory in nature and is independent of product cycles."

Teams led by Koppolu and Anandan joined hands in presenting some eye-catching inventions and research products during the TechXchange. A brief overview of some such products:

Duet

Duet is a software solution from SAP and Microsoft that enables users to easily and quickly interact with SAP business processes and data via Microsoft Office.

Duet enables companies to:

• Increase corporate policy compliance - Duet simplifies employees' ability to interact with business processes for consistent and proper use o corporate policies.
• Improve decision-making - By bringing together business productivity applications and enterprise applications, Duet provides employees and managers with simple and timely access to relevant, contextual business information.
• Save time and money - Duet increases the return on investment of enterprise software implementations by reducing employee training costs and accelerating user adoption.

Live Meeting

This product gives one the power to work in tandem with colleagues, customers and suppliers, no matter where an individual is. For online meetings, trainings and events, Live Meeting is the effective meeting tool that enables one to collaborate either with individuals or groups without leaving one's desk or work station. With the help of Live Meeting, you can kick off a project, brainstorm, edit files, collaborate on white boards and negotiate deals at a fraction of the cost and hassle of travel.

WikiBabel

wikiBabel is a research prototype that has been built using the machine translation system, which provides translation for any page over the web in about 30 different languages instantly using MSR's machine translation system, and lets the users correct any mistranslations in a wiki-ish methodology.

All such corrections by the user are captured in a database in the wikiBabel framework, and all captured user corrections are used for re-training the machine translation system. Such framework may be used for specific communities for creating data collaboratively.

Simultaneous Shared Access Computing

This project allows two people to work simultaneously on the same PC. This is done by splitting the screen and displaying two independent sessions simultaneously. Each session interacts with separate keyboard and mouse. It effectively seems there are two computers in one for a small incremental hardware cost.

Most of these inventions, according to the company head honchos have already being shipped or are being delivered.