The Redmond software maker is continuing to beat the developer drum for its information-worker platforms with Office Business Application Services and Line of Business Interoperability capabilities.
Microsoft is making more of its gut Office and SharePoint technologies and services available to third-party application developers.
Microsoft has been beating the developer drum for its SharePoint and Office technologies for months, if not years. But at the TechEd conference here, company officials crystallized some of the concepts they've been evangelizing.
Microsoft's foray into the corporate antivirus desktop space will come in the first half of 2007, company executives said
Monday.
More from Tech Ed
Since February, a group of about 100 beta testers have been looking at Microsoft's new Forefront Client Security product,
but that group will expand significantly in the last quarter of the year, with the introduction of a public beta program,
said Paul Bryan, a director of product management with Microsoft's Security, Access and Solutions division.
The fully supported product will ship by the end of June 2007, he said.
Microsoft wants to prove that it can still walk the talk.
Today, it is introducing Dynamics AX 4.0, the re-baptized and more muscular version of its Axapta ERP product, in the hopes of showing strong growth in the large enterprise market.
The Microsoft Business Solutions division, of which Dynamics AX is a part, is the second-smallest in the software giant's empire. But that also gives it a lot of room to grow, and Microsoft nurtures high hopes for this segment.
"It's a lot easier to grow market share in business solutions than in areas where we already have 90 percent of the market," said Mark Jensen, general manager for Dynamics AX.
Looking to establish more pipelines between its Office 2007 suite of desktop applications and several of its server-based applications, Microsoft on Monday at its TechEd 2006 showed off an early version of a technology that would deeply embed processes and data into Office clients.
Called Line Of Business interoperability for SharePoint Server, the technology permits structured process integration with Office client applications, enables people to update transactional applications from within Office, and to more securely take structured business processes and data offline.
According to leading hardware analysts, AMD's technological lead over market leader Intel will evaporate when Intel ships its Core 2 Duo line of processors later this year. A slew of independent benchmarks pitting Intel's upcoming chips against AMD's best microprocessors might provide AMD with some sobering news. Not only are the Intel chips faster, but they're much cheaper in many cases and suck up less power. AMD has enjoyed a multiyear lead over Intel in such technologies as multicore processors and x64 compatibility. But with the Core 2 Duo, which will ship in variants for notebooks, desktops, and servers, Intel seems to have finally caught up and even surpassed AMD in many meaningful ways (but not, curiously, in x64). I hope that AMD has a few surprises left. We all know what happens when you wake the sleeping giant.
Microsoft is continuing to roll outslowly but surelynew branding that will be part of its overall Windows Vista campaign. On June 9, company officials disclosed the latest name change.
Microsoft has decided to avoid any confusion in the naming scheme for its core developer technology and is renaming it in an effort to better reflect the direction the company is pursuing.
Microsoft is making a move to rename WinFX to the .Net Framework 3.0.
.NET Framework 3.0 consists of the .Net Framework 2.0, WCF (Windows Communication Foundation), WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), WF (Windows Workflow), and InfoCard-now known as WCS (Windows CardSpace) as part of the renaming scheme.
Microsoft went live this week with MSDN Wiki, a new site inviting developers to contribute their own tips and code examples to run alongside Microsoft's official Visual Studio and .Net Framework documentation.
The wiki is the first step in what Microsoft developer division head S. "Soma" Somasegar cast as a broad rethinking of Microsoft's approach to developer documentation.
"We want your feedback about where the project should go next. How important is it that Microsoft provides an official version of the docs that cannot be altered by the community?" Somasegar wrote Thursday in his blog.
Microsoft has made its mark bringing affordable software to customers at the low end of the market. But sometimes the low end and high end meet somewhere in the middle.
The software giant today released to manufacturers the finished, "golden" bits of its Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, a software package that runs high-performance computing applications in parallel.
The news comes as Microsoft prepares for its TechEd show in Boston, where company executives will demonstrate the Computer Cluster Server 2003 during a keynote Sunday night.
Three years ago, former Intel CEO Craig Barrett used his keynote speech at the Intel Developer Forum to show the company's vision of what future laptops will look like.
Called Newport, the notebook design had some cool features, including a small, secondary display on the outside of the case that let users scan their e-mail, access their calendar, and check network connections. The idea was to give users access to information stored on the notebook while the case was closed.
Secondary displays never caught on with laptop makers, largely because of the added software work required to support the interface. But that could be set to change with the introduction of Vista, the next version of Microsoft's Windows operating system.
Two leading research institutions haven issued library cards to Microsoft so the software giant and search up-and-comer can scan their collections.
The University of California and the University of Toronto libraries have agreed to lend their collections of out-of-copyright material held in trust. In concert with the Open Content Alliance, Microsoft will scan and index the materials for use in its Windows Live Book Search, according to a Microsoft statement issued Friday.
Like Google Book Search and Amazon.com's Look Inside feature, Windows Live Book Search is being designed to enable full-text searches of books. The Microsoft project, however, will be built slightly differently than Google Book Search.