Available Windows Azure Services

Today there was another session on Windows Azure. It was sort of a walkthrough through all the available services on the azure platform, in my last post I gave a general idea on the available services (SharePoint, CRM, Live, .NET and SQL services). Now I can give a little bit more info on the Azure Services.
There are six available service on the Azure Platform

• Access Control Service (identity management)
• Mesh Service
• Service Bus (application integration, with messaging events)
• Workflow Service
• LiveID Service
• SQL Data Service

I found the Acces Control Service, Mesh Service and the Workflow Service the most interesting.

The Access Control Service can be used to delegate your identity management to the cloud. What you can do is to allow users to be identified by their LiveID or by using your own Active Directory, which can save you a lot of work.

The Mesh Service can be used to get more information about the user who has been identified. For example: If a user wants to register for an event, he has to fill in where he lives, his date of birth and all sorts of private info. The mesh service allows you to request this data so a user doesn't have to fill it in. (Of course you should have permission of the user to do this).

The last one, the Workflow service is my personal favourite, you can create a workflow as you usually would do and the publish that workflow to the workflow service! After you published it, it is running in the cloud and can by example process the registration.