Symantec filed a lawsuit against Microsoft Thursday, charging that the Redmond, Wash. developer stole data storage technologies from Veritas, now owned by Symantec, and integrated them with its operating systems, including the not-yet-released Vista.
According to papers filed with a federal court in Seattle, Symantec seeks an injunction to stop development of Vista and the next version of Microsoft's server software.
Microsoft denied any wrongdoing. "These claims are unfounded because Microsoft actually purchased intellectual property rights for all relevant technologies from Veritas in 2004," the company said in a statement.
Consumer electronics retailer Best Buy has trained 300 Microsoft Certified Professionals on its way to a goal of 900 MCPs as it ramps up its services capabilities for a major push into small business sales.
The Microsoft Training business unit unveiled the numbers on Thursday to highlight the adoption of its certifications by a major retailer.
Earlier this year, Microsoft?s partner organization called attention to Best Buy?s efforts to play by Microsoft certification rules when the Minneapolis-based company became the first national retailer to attain Gold Certified Partner status.
Microsoft is collaborating with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a division of the Department of Defense, on its Virtual Earth technology.
The NGA wants to use the Virtual Earth technology "to provide geospatial support for humanitarian, peacekeeping and national security efforts," Microsoft said in a statement on Thursday.
In return, the Redmond, Wash., software giant hopes to gain from the organization's established knowledge of geospatial information and geodetics, the math and science of measuring portions of the Earth's topography, magnetic and gravitational variations, and geodynamic phenomenon.
Microsoft added remote-access VPN technology to its growing array of security properties on May 18, snapping up privately held Whale Communications for an undisclosed price.
Company officials described the acquisition as a move to round out Microsoft's ability to provide support for secure access to corporate networks in its ISA Server products.
Whale, based in Rosh Haayin, Israel, specializes in SSL VPN technology, which is used to allow remote access to e-mail, business applications and other databases from a wide variety of devices.
Microsoft has released the first community technology preview of its Expression Web Designer tool targeted for designers producing professional Web sites.
Expression Web Designer, previously codenamed "Quartz," is one of three new design tools, all with the Expression brand but aimed at distinctly different roles in the Web publishing process, coming from Microsoft. The company began the first and second previews for two other Expression-branded design tools three months ago.
Codenamed "Sparkle" and "Acrylic," the two products already in preview are dubbed Expression Interactive Designer and Expression Graphic Designer, respectively.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates today told executives in not so many words that information will bury their businesses if they don't get a handle on it.
To solve the information deluge problem, Microsoft stressed improved search and increased collaboration. A keystone of that vision is Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007.
In a keynote address at the software giant's 10th annual CEO Summit, Gates said that the value for companies is in finding ways to share information. But he said business doesn't have the tools to manage the
information overload.
Microsoft wants PC owners to be ready for Vista.
To that end, the software giant will unveil May 18 a campaign designed to help people ensure their PCs can run the forthcoming operating system.
The effort, which comes ahead of the annual WinHec that in 2006 kicks off in Seattle on May 22, will include the unveiling of a Get Ready Web site, which play host to an application that can assess PCs' readiness for the OS upgrade.
Microsoft will also unveil of a set of minimum PC hardware specifications for systems being upgradedsome of which call for 1GHz processors and 1GB of memory allotments for certain machinespersons familiar with the plan said.
As Microsoft continues to enjoy mostly favorable reviews of its new Windows Media Player 11 jukebox software, analysts say the real boost for the company's latest foray into music is a partnership with MTV Networks.
As expected, Microsoft officially rolled out a test version of Windows Media Player 11 for XP on Wednesday, two days after the free software could be found in a new digital music player and elsewhere on the Net.
WMP 11 is the latest of Microsoft's jukebox players. Built into the beta version of WMP 11, released Wednesday, is Urge, the subscription digital music store launched on the same day by MTV Networks. The partnership was announced last January. On Monday, iRiver released Clix, the company's latest digital music player and the first device to feature WMP 11. This is all part of a larger plan by Microsoft to challenge Apple Computer's iTunes music store and iPod digital music player.
The Redmond software giant is building a community site for hosting projects that are available via Microsoft Shared Source, the GPL and a host of other licensing mechanisms.
Move over, Googleplex. Here comes Microsoft CodePlex.
CodePlex is not the name for a new wing of the ever-expanding Microsoft campus headquarters. Instead, it is Microsoft's newest code-repository site, aimed especially at shared- and open-source programmers.
On May 15, Microsoft went live with the beta version of its CodePlex site. The site, which is coded in C# and is built on top of a hosted version of Microsoft Team Foundation Server platform, includes support for wiki-based team communiction, to RSS feed aggregation, to forums.
Microsoft is recruiting not only Windows Live beta testers, but developers, as well. In order to attract the latter contingent, the company is readying a new Windows Live Dev portal. A preview of the site, http://dev.live.com, will be available the week of May 21, with a final version slated to launch in June, according to company officials.
Microsoft has been slowly but steadily honing its Windows Live developer message for the past several months. At the Microsoft Mix '06 conference, company officials outlined Microsoft's high-level strategy for getting developers to adopt its expanding family of Live application programming interfaces (APIs).