Microsoft's security ambitions don't stop with the consumer. The company also has an eye on the multibillion-dollar enterprise security market.
Now that it's launched the Windows Live OneCare security service for consumers, Microsoft is ramping up its efforts to convince businesses that it is the solution to, not the source of, their security woes. The Redmond, Wash., company last week unveiled Forefront, a single brand that encompasses updated and upcoming security products aimed at businesses.
Lately, the Microsoft departures are looming a lot larger than the hires. Ted Hase, one of the original Xbox team members and co-creator of the Microsoft Media Center is one of the latest veterans to move on.
In the past week, the count of high-profile Microsoft veterans who are either leaving the Redmond software coop has been mounting.
The latest addition to the departure list is Ted Hase, one of the four original Xbox team members and co-creator of the Microsoft Media Center PC concept.
Microsoft is well known for its efforts in fighting software piracy. Yet countless millions of PCs worldwide run Microsoft software
that isn't genuine and is in fact pirated.
Should those users get the same protections that genuine Microsoft users get, for the better good of the
Internet ecosystem as a whole? If one Microsoft executive gets her way that may well happen.
Rebecca Norlander, general manager of the Security Technology Unit at Microsoft, told attendees of the Infosecurity Canada conference here that Windows Defender, Microsoft's anti-spyware product, is one of the most popular downloads in Microsoft's history at more than 28 million.
Software giant Microsoft said it will offer a free tool for Office users to embed Creative Commons copyright options in Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents.
The unsupported tool permits content to be licensed from within the Office suite of applications.
Created in 2001 by Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig,
Creative Commons offers licenses enabling artists to retain a
copyright but restrict distribution, such as whether a work can be
used commercially or modified.
Although the
software company has no plans to include the tool in Office 2007,
Microsoft is monitoring customer interest, according to a spokesperson.
Microsoft is working on a data mapping substrate for its Visual Studio developer tool platform called ADO.Net Entities, which
will provide a data model focused on business terminology, a Microsoft executive said in his blog.
The ADO team's ADO.Net Entities moves the data model up from the physical structure of relational tables to a "data model
that more accurately represents business entities such as 'Customer' or 'Order' that could map to multiple relational tables
and views," said S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft. His blog is frequently a source of insight into what is going on at Microsoft.
Microsoft on Wednesday launched an add-in that would let people protect their creative works by choosing from within Office any of several copyright licenses offered through the nonprofit group Creative Commons.
The new tool, available through Microsoft Office Online and Creative Commons, would make the licenses available through the File drop-down menu in Word, Excel or PowerPoint. The licenses give content creators a variety of options that enable them to retain copyright ownership, yet permit the work to be copied and distributed with certain restrictions.
A Microsoft employee really unloaded on his employer, and not in an anonymous blog, but on the company's own public developers site.
The posting, entitled The World As Best As I Remember It, comes from programmer Philip Su, a Windows programmer for the past five years before moving to the Tablet PC product division.
Su lays blame at the feet of Microsoft management for its confusing and multiple layers of bureaucracy, noting "...the largest software project in mankind's history now threatens to also be the longest."
Microsoft aims to sync its Active Directory with its Live Web-based services to give users single sign on for applications
and services both inside a company network and on the Web.
The plan will be made possible through Windows Live ID, formerly Microsoft's Passport service, though the company has not
set a time line for when the functionality will be available, Michael Stephenson, director of product management for identity
and access at Microsoft, said on Tuesday.
Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie briefly mentioned the plan to allow for federated network identity between Active
Directory and Microsoft's Live online services during a keynote at the Tech Ed conference in Boston last week.
Microsoft is adding a brand-new feature to Windows Vista to allow businesses to load ActiveX controls on systems running without admin privileges.
The new feature, called ActiveX Installer Service, will be fitted into the next public release of Vista to provide a way for enterprises to cope with the UAC security mechanism.
UAC, formerly known as LUA, is enabled by default in Vista to separate Standard User privileges from those that require admin rights to harden the operating system against malware and malicious hacker attacks.
For a long time now, Microsoft has been touting the end of phone tag.
Next week, the company may finally take a step in that direction. For several years, Microsoft has shown demos in which people can choose who contacts them, and when--and through the miracle of software, we are seamlessly connected to those with whom we want to communicate. It's one of the company's favorite technology-of-the-future demos, right up there with the one in which the computer dutifully responds to our every spoken command.