The U.S. Department of Justice will not pursue complaints about Microsoft's decision to include search functionality
in version 7 of its Internet Explorer browser, despite concerns raised by search competitor Google Inc., the DOJ said in a
court filing.
The DOJ, in a court document released late Friday, said it and other plaintiffs in the U.S. government's antitrust case against
Microsoft have finished their look at the IE search feature, which can default to Microsoft's own MSN Search feature in some
cases.
FrontPage has been a part of Microsoft Office for several versions, but beginning with Office 2007, if you want to do some heavy-duty Web page editing, you will need a whole new, stand-alone product that Microsoft has just begun beta testing.
Microsoft today released the first Community Technology Preview of Microsoft Expression Web Designer, the successor to FrontPage as Microsoft's Web page editor.
FrontPage joined the Microsoft family in 1996 when the company acquired Vermeer Technologies, which developed the HTML editor. Several versions of Office later, FrontPage hasn't been upgraded anywhere near as aggressively as the other Office applications and is simply too old and out of date to be merely revised, said Microsoft. Instead, Microsoft developed a whole new Web editor.
Low-lying Cessna 172s fly in grid patterns over major cities, capturing eagle-eye images of every square foot from just about every direction.
Instead of just the straight-down views that satellites gather, the planes photograph America's varied landscape at a 40-degree angle from a few thousand feet in the air. The images are detailed enough to pick out fire hydrants in Chicago, lilac trees in Rochester and the levees of New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina.
The small company behind all this, Pictometry International, has found plenty of business, notably in the realm of public safety.
Microsoft is readying an addition to its Office Live services line up that will target mobile devices. Code-named Project Bronx, the technology could be released to beta later this month, according to a post on the Neowin.net Web site.
A Neowin poster described Bronx as "an effort within Mobile Information Worker group that aims to bring Microsoft Office experience to all mobile phones using SMS." The poster said that Microsoft was soliciting testers for the technology, which will be part of the company's Office Live initiative.
Microsoft Word 2007 will sport the last-minute addition of a blog post authoring tool when the software rolls into Beta 2 in the next week or two, the Office 2007 development team announced Friday.
The feature will be accessible from Word 2007's File/Publish menu, and will support direct posting of blog entries in Beta 2 to Microsoft's MSN Spaces and SharePoint 2007, Google's Blogger.com, and Community Server, a collaboration platform Microsoft uses for its own MSDN blogs.
According to Joe Friend, a lead program manager on the Word development team, the blog post tool automatically encodes styles such as boldface into HTML, and after some setup, will auto-upload any images added to the blog.
Microsoft on Friday said TechFaith Wireless Communication Technology Ltd., a Chinese mobile phone designer and software maker, has agreed to help develop Windows mobile and media technologies for advanced handsets.
Under the deal, the companies would work together in handset design, application development, sales and marketing and an exchange of talent and technology. The partnership covers development of the Windows Mobile operating system and the Windows Media player for smart phones and entertainment handsets.
The European Union plans to file a second formal charge against Microsoft accusing the U.S. operating system developer of violating a 2004 antitrust ruling, the Agence France-Presse wire service reported Thursday.
Sources have told the AFP that the EU's Competition Commission will soon file a "statement of objections" claiming that Microsoft is charging too much for protocol licenses that the EU has ruled competitors need in order to develop interoperable software.
Microsoft has released the first Community Technology Preview, its fancy term for a beta, of LINQ, a modification to Microsoft's programming languages that allows for direct calls to data sources from within the language, rather than intermediary technologies.
LINQ stands for Language INtegrated Query. It allows for query and set operations, like SQL statements, directly within .NET languages like C# and Visual Basic. This is a fundamental shift in data querying, particularly for Visual Basic, because the standard method for data calls is to use an intermediary object, and that was often in a second language, like SQL or XML.
Microsoft is taking on one of its channel's biggest problems: Increasing the talent pool of qualified tech professionals.
For its next fiscal year starting July 1, the company has earmarked $30 million to underwrite training and certification of new tech specialists for its partner community, said Allison Watson, Microsoft's vice president of for company's worldwide partner and small business group.
It expects this effort, dubbed "Project Athena" to drive 45,000 technical service professionals into the market in the first year, across both a broad set of technologies and also in some specific certification areas, Watson told CRN on Friday afternoon.
The Department of Justice and Microsoft have agreed to a two-year extension of the communications protocol licensing program portion of Microsoft's final antitrust settlement with the government.
The DoJ Friday told U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who presided over the Microsoft trial, the extension is necessary due to Microsoft's difficulty in improving the technical documentation it provides to licensees.
In its filing with the court, the DoJ said the extension request is not a result of any belief that Microsoft has willfully violated the final judgment.