As part of its overall services push, Microsoft has been quietly trying to figure out just what it can offer up to large corporations.
The software giant has yet to announce a broad set of "Live" services for enterprises. But the company has said it is working in that area, and it has launched several tests of possible services. CEO Steve Ballmer detailed one of those efforts at a meeting last week with financial analysts.
"We are in test with a service that essentially will help host Exchange and SharePoint and Office Communication Server for large account customers," Ballmer said. He indicated that the company would test the service with three or four customers.
First details about an upcoming Microsoft release, this week, Stephen Chapman published the first report about the next version of Microsoft Office, Office 14 on the AeroXperience forum. (Office 2007 was code-named Office 12; apparently Microsoft is skipping 13 for superstitious reasons.) According to the report--which is pretty general because the product isn't due for more than two years--Office 14 will focus on individual impact (i.e., productivity), communication and collaboration, enterprise content management, business process and business intelligence, the Office platform (i.e., Office for developers), manageability, and security. This information is based on an internal Microsoft presentation that Chapman came across somewhere in his travels and is clearly the real deal. (If you've seen one Microsoft slide deck, you've seen them all.) The only concrete information in the presentation is the schedule: Microsoft expects to ship Office 14 Beta 1 in the first half of 2008, Office 14 Beta 2 in the second half of 2008, and the final version of Office 14 in the first half of 2009.
Microsoft released some non-volume licensing news today. For enterprises trying to make sense of a Q&A posted today, there is little new.
Today's nonannouncement is more PR than substancesome reassurance about the benefits of Software Assurance.
Tip: If Microsoft doesn't use the word "today" or some other time element, there's little or nothing new contained in press releases or Q&As. In this case, the little new:
The MPLA is now available in 11 languages.
Dynamics products are now available through the MPLA.
For all of Microsoft's legal entanglements over the years, its appearance today before the U.S. Supreme Court will be its first -- and the company will have some unlikely allies, including some of its biggest rivals.
The specific issue is whether Microsoft should be required to pay U.S. patent royalties to AT&T on copies of Windows installed and sold outside the United States. But the decision could also have broader implications for the software industry.
"Fundamentally, the case is about the geographic reach of patent laws, and whether the courts in one country will seek to apply their patent laws to activities that take place beyond their borders," Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, said in an interview.
Microsoft announced this week that it is shipping updated tools meant to aid users in evaluating a myriad of software licensing options.
The company said it has enhanced its suite of customer tools by adding more features to the Microsoft Product Licensing Advisor, the Forrester Software Assurance ROI Tool and broadening its Microsoft License Statement to new customers.
"With the release of several key new products, like Windows Vista and the 2007 Office System, we saw an opportunity to enrich our tools even further and make it simpler for people to research, budget and purchase these new products to quickly implement these solutions once their purchasing decisions have been made," said Joe Matz, vice president of Microsoft's worldwide licensing and pricing group, in a statement.
Microsoft announced Monday it is shipping Service Pack 2, or SP2, of SQL Server 2005 -- an update that brings its premier database server current with features in Windows Vista and Office 2007.
The community technology preview, or CTP, of SQL Server 2005 SP2 was released at the company's SQL PASS conference in Seattle last November.
According to Microsoft statements, SP2 provides support for data compression, additional business intelligence capabilities and security updates relating to Common Criteria. It also includes manageability enhancements and the ability to access information in other databases, including Hyperion's Essbase and Oracle.
Hoping to accelerate the adoption of Vista for businesses, Microsoft on Tuesday unveiled tools that will help companies deploy
the new Windows client OS, including software that allows older versions of Windows to run virtually alongside Vista.
The company released six tools designed to help business customers migrate from previous versions of Windows to Vista, which
was widely released on Jan. 30. The tools are the Virtual PC 2007, Microsoft Solution Accelerator for BDD (Business Desktop
Deployment) 2007, the Microsoft ACT 5.0, the Windows Vista Hardware Assessment 1.0, and
two volume activation tools -- Volume Activation Management Tool and Key Management Service for Windows Server 2003.
Microsoft said it moved quickly to remove a banner that appeared on its instant-messaging program for a software
application that falsely hypes security threats on a user's computer.
"We immediately investigated the reports and removed the offending ads, as this is a violation of our ad-serving policy,"
wrote Microsoft spokeswoman Whitney Burk, in an e-mail Tuesday.
Last week, computer security analysts noticed two s for Winfixer -- a self-described security program that also goes by the name ErrorSafe -- on Windows Live Messenger.
Krugle has announced that its code search engine for developers now supports Microsoft's community source site, CodePlex.
Menlo Park, Calif.-based Krugle announced on Feb. 20 that it has added more than 6.5 million lines of code from Microsoft's shared and open-source initiatives to the Krugle index.
The new capability lets Krugle users browse, search and share code from more than 500 projects hosted on the Microsoft CodePlex site.
Developers also will have access to code from Microsoft's Shared Source CLI, a set of development tools, classes and code samples for the .Net Framework.
Alcatel-Lucent's claim that Microsoft owes as much as $4.56 billion for infringing two patents covering the MP3 digital-audio standard is set to be decided by a federal jury in San Diego.
The jury of eight men and one woman began weighing the case Thursday, a day after lawyers made final arguments in the 12-day trial. Alcatel-Lucent accused Microsoft of infringing the patents with its Windows Media Player, including the version in the new Vista Operating System. Microsoft denies the claim.