I avoid writing about or interacting with enterprise software because I thought they were boring and looked like legacy document systems a decade behind.

Today at Microsoft TechEd Australia 2013, the press was invited to have a hands-on demo of the “Orion” release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 featuring a whole new “Metro”/Modern user interface. While enterprise software is still boring, “Orion” has made me think twice about what enterprise software in the modern day actually looks like.

Over five years ago I wrote about an enterprise desktop app designed by Frog Design utilising the then-new Windows Vista WPF platform which became a hallmark of “sexy” business software for the time. Now five years later, Microsoft has also realised “a salesperson wakes up in the morning and doesn’t look forward in using the CRM system” because it doesn’t look as good as the consumer apps and services people love to use every day.

With the “Orion” release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, Microsoft is Metro-fying/Modern-izing the enterprise software.

The main web browser experience now looks somewhat like a cross between Outlook.com and Outlook 2013 on the desktop. There’s a lot of white-space and big faux-tiles in header dropdowns for section navigation and context switching. There’s even the dreaded uppercase text for headings (from Visual Studio). This is a big change compared to the faux-Ribbon UI theme of the 2012 release.

The most interesting part of the web experience is that not only that it’s fully compatible with all of the A-grade browsers including Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox and Safari, but it is also touch-enabled for not only Internet Explorer but other browsers including Firefox (which today’s demo was solely based on).

Although I do find usability issues with the extreme use of white-space (and the build we played with was quite buggy), the design is a bold step up from applications and services that used to look like “old office” applications to something that even slightly resembles a modern social network, especially if you consider the Yammer integration is front and center.

The Dynamics companion Windows 8, iPhone and Android apps are also new or being refreshed with a more Metro-fied look and feel, to the extent their host platform allows.

The native Windows Store app, although basic in functionality, allows for some business processes to be completely entirely in a Modern app environment that is much more practical for tablets and touch-centric operations for sales and marketers on the go. However, the build we played with was again old and very buggy.

The iPhone app was not shown but the Android app had a Metro-ish look and feel that looked more like a basic website than the more polished Office for Android app.

Granted I don’t think enterprise software is ever going to look as “sexy” as consumer services such as Facebook or Twitter due to their balance of function over form, I think it’s commendable to see Microsoft take a pretty big gamble by changing so much in an industry not known for enthusiastic adoption of change.

“Orion” might be a bit rough around the UI edges when it’s slated to ship in October if the builds we played with are any indication, but it’s clear Metro/Modern is not only a consumer user experience trend for Microsoft but will make its way deep into the enterprise as well.

Within the next 12 to 18 months, the much anticipated and necessary (for latency) Windows Azure Australian datacenters will finally launch in 2014. But even without local availability of the Azure compute and database services, major Australian companies are still pushing forward with their adoption of Azure for their cloud platforms.

Canon Australia, Cash Converters and MYOB announced this morning at Microsoft’s TechEd Australia 2013 their respective Azure cloud-powered services and infrastructure.

The first and most exciting of all, Canon Australia teased a yet-to-be-named personal image management platform built on top of Windows Azure. Myles Lawlor from Canon states that photography is rapidly growing, with 10% of all photographs has been taken in the last 12 months taken on all sorts of devices shared on many social sites.

The platform has three distinct components – uploading, managing and sharing. Users are given the ability to upload, collate and store their entire photo library in a single location using a combination of desktop, HTML5 web and social uploading tools that intelligently trickles all photos of all formats and from any camera at night to minimise bandwidth impact.

Then the photos are presented through a beautiful browser gallery interface. Finally the service not only allows the photos to be shared to Facebook and Flickr, but it’ll also aggregate the feedback and comments received on those photos in a central location.

The service is still in the early beta stage and will be available at a service fee (not ad supported) from canon.com.au/manage in 2014.

Cash Converters, a leading pawnbroking and personal finances company in Australia and the UK is migrating their entire POS/inventory infrastructure for 700+ corporate stores and franchise stores from individual Windows Servers on-premise to a centralised Windows Azure-powered cloud POS system. They estimate they can reduce their $1.5 million budget to roll out the on-premise solution to a $50,000 per year Azure bill for all stores.

Last but not least, MYOB is now providing a cloud hybrid for one of their small business accounting packages, AccountRight, running on the Azure cloud across over 250 Azure servers. They were also able to reveal that during the recent Australian tax time, they were able to instantly double the number of servers to handle the peak load.

All of the companies above have plans to take advantage of the local Azure datacenters as they become available for lower latency and more geo-redundancy of customer data. As the latency between Australia and the nearest Azure Singapore datacenters hover around 200ms, the customer experience for sub-50ms latency with local datacenters should make quite a big difference for highly services.

If you can look past the irony of a Microsoft competition about connecting people all around the world open only to US residents, you could win a $10,000 United Airlines travel voucher for simply using Skype.

Last month Skype launched a new advertising website called “Stay Together” with a series of intriguing stories based around people using Skype to stay in touch with distant family, relatives or friends.

There’s a particularly interesting one about Lindsay from Alamba who travelled to Australia and unexpectedly became a zoo keeper. After returning to the US, she uses Skype to keep in touch with wombats, kangaroos, koalas and the Aussie zoo owner family who she now considers her extended family.

For the competition, the website is accepting user submissions of their own “Stay Together” stories. There’s over 370 submissions so far and users can read and vote on. Currently the most voted story is a soldier deployed in Iraq who stays in touch with his sister using Skype.

Competition closes soon on July 22, 2013.

I’m a big fan of emojis, especially colored ones. At Microsoft BUILD 2013, the Windows graphics rendering team announced that Microsoft is proposing a practical and efficient addition to the OpenType font standard for multi-colored fonts support which they’ve implemented as a preview in Windows 8.1.

Existing multi-colored font alternatives use rendering font replacements or embedded bitmaps which are not very accurate or efficient. The proposal in a nutshell builds on top of the existing glyph to include multiple layers of glyphs and a RGBA color assigned to each layer.

This way it’s backwards compatible with existing operating systems as the fallback is the font’s glyph, or by user choice to disable colors.

Windows 8.1 will ship with support for colored fonts enabled by default in XAML and HTML/JS apps. DirectX apps and games will have to opt-in to its rendering in code. A new dedicated emoji font, Segoe UI Emoji, uses the new color glyph layers. You can see them in the on-screen touch keyboard.

Microsoft also worked with some third-party font foundaries to prototype what colored versions of their fonts might look like. Of course these fonts aren’t going to start showing up in your office documents, but examples like colored dingbats are really interesting.

Besides just adding a splash of color to interesting fonts like emojis, there is also a practical side effect of allowing app designers and developers to utilise colored fonts as replacement for colored UI icon bitmaps because the font rendering system is extremely efficient and vector scalable for high-DPI displays.

The team hopes to submit the proposal to the ISO standards people for inclusion in the OpenType standard within weeks. I hope we’ll start to some interesting uses of color in fonts in the coming years.

If you’ve installed the Windows 8.1 Preview build 9431 on the Surface or any other touch computer, you might have noticed touch scrolling is really buggy if not completely broken in XAML Windows Store apps such as the official Twitter app or MetroTwit. This is a known bug.

At BUILD 2013 I learned a bug creeped into the WinRT framework and caused any virtualised ListViews with variable sized items (like the tweets in Twitter app) to scroll unpredictably when panned with touch. Fortunately it has been fixed so when Windows 8.1 RTMs it’s all good, but for anyone who downloaded the Preview a patch is not yet certain.

In my opinion, touch scrolling is a pretty essential aspect of the user experience, especially when over 6,000 attendees of BUILD just received two tablets for free and eager to try out the Windows 8.1 Preview. It’s understandable a preview release build has bugs but it’s unfortunate this bug has such a severe impact on a pretty important aspect of the touch experience.

The fix missed the Windows 8.1 Preview day-0 hotfix cycle which were made available yesterday through Windows Update and may even face an uphill battle for future Windows Update patches because it’s not a critical security, data loss or crashing issue.

If you have 8.1 Preview on your tablet and has been suffering scrolling issues, this would be why. I sincerely hope the Windows team can come together to push out a fix as soon as possible.

Update: A hotfix has been released. I recommend all users to install.

Last night at the Moscone Center, many of the 6,000 attendees of Microsoft BUILD 2013 lined up to collect their freebies: a 128GB Surface Pro, Surface Type Cover, a 64GB Acer Iconia W3 and an Acer Bluetooth keyboard dock.

Even though the queue spanned the entire length of the conference hallways, huge props to the logistics team who handled the process extremely well with most attendees collecting the goods within hours.