The scanning race has started: Microsoft announced an agreement Friday to scan 25 million pages from the British Library's collection that will eventually be made available on its MSN Book Search site next year.
Around 100,000 books from the British Library's 13 million book collection will be digitized, according to a joint press release.
MSN Book Search, launched earlier this month, is scheduled for a beta release next year.
The agreement comes as Microsoft's competitors, such as Google and Yahoo, are aggressively moving toward compiling online libraries of books amid copyright concerns. The titles to be scanned at the British Library are no longer under copyright restrictions.
In the wake of this week's announcement of Windows Live and Office Live, Microsoft announced the acquisition Thursday of an online service with a technology that dovetails with those plans.
Even as Microsoft moves quickly to augment the online services, some analysts and observers have expressed skepticism that Microsoft?s service offerings are anywhere near ready for prime time.
The newly acquired service is FolderShare, which provides file synchronization and remote access technology to enable users to access information across multiple devices. Financial terms weren't disclosed for the purchase of the service from Austin, Texas-based ByteTaxi Inc., which was founded in 2002.
Microsoft will release the latest version of its Web Service Enhancements tool to the general public Monday, just in time for the launch of Visual Studio 2005.
WSE 3.0 is an add-on to the Visual Studio 2005 platform and .NET Framework 2.0 that allows developers to create secure Web services using the latest industry protocols.
The tool has been in beta since August.
The last update to the tool, WSE 2.0, was in June 2004 as an accompaniment to Visual Studio .NET 2003 and .NET Framework 1.1.
One of the Redmond, Wash., software company's goals is to make it easier for developers to create applications. That mindset has translated over to WSE, as well.
Microsoft has purchased privately held media-streams.com to add Voice over IP capabilities to Office applications and servers.
It's Microsoft's second recent
acquisition in the space and comes as a slew of Internet, communications and software industry players buy or build VoIP offerings.
Zurich, Switzerland-based media-streams.com said its e-phone product turns e-mail into a phone by integrating corporate voice communication into Microsoft Outlook.
The five-year-old firm will be a Microsoft subsidiary, reporting to the Real-Time Collaboration Group under corporate vice president Anoop Gupta.
Is Windows Live just another name for MSN?
Of the eight or so services that Microsoft showed off Tuesday at the launch of Windows Live, its new Web-based consumer tools, the vast majority are reincarnations of products that the company had either released or tested under the MSN brand.
"A lot of the Windows Live services are things that had already been in development by MSN," Directions on Microsoft analyst Matt Rosoff said.
The main Live.com Web page is similar to the Start.com page that has been in testing since earlier this year. Windows Live Mail is a long-planned update to Hotmail designed to make the service more like desktop e-mail software. Other existing products, like Microsoft's MSN Spaces and its OneCare security service, are also joining the Windows Live party.
Microsoft announced a new shared source project on Wednesday that enables multiple browsers to be used as a thin-client interface connecting the Microsoft Business Solutions Portal server and the Solomon ERP system.
Jason Matusow, director of Microsoft's shared source program, announced at the Open Source Business Conference here the project, Business Portal Lite. The code comes from the Microsoft Business Solutions Solomon team, and the portal provides time, expense approval, alerts, and project profitability tracking and reviewing functionality. The advantage to using the Lite solution is that you can access the Microsoft Solomon back end through Safari, Firefox, Mozilla and other non-Windows browsers, said Matusow, who also wrote about the news on his blog.
Veteran Microsoft executive Bob Muglia will fill one of the key holes left by the executive reorganization that Microsoft unveiled in September.
Muglia becomes senior vice president of the company's Server and Tools Business. Muglia takes over what had been the Server and Tools division run by Eric Rudder. Following the launch of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 next week, Rudder will transition into a newly created role working directly for Bill Gates, chairman and chief software architect.
Microsoft on Tuesday unveiled a renewed focus on services delivered over the Internet, as it tries to fend off challenges from Google Inc. and other competitors. The company showed demonstrated a pair of "Live" portals offering application services aimed at small businesses and consumers.
To a large degree, the new initiatives from Microsoft made public here were expected, although the nitty gritty of the details had been tightly secreted away. Microsoft has always seen an opportunity to distribute its services through an online environment, where it is less expensive to do so and cheaper for consumers.
When Microsoft unveils its SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005, and BizTalk Server 2006 products next week, it shouldn't be seen so much as the release of three separate products but as the fruit of constant collaboration
between Microsoft's research team and the product specialists.
The company said that a so-called "technology-transfer team" helped bridge the research and product development functions within Microsoft to make the products a reality.
SQL Server 2005 is a classic example of a product buoyed by Microsoft Research.
A look at some of Microsoft's planned online services:
-Live.com: Part of a broad initiative called Windows Live, this personalized home page that can include personalized news feeds, local weather and a ticking clock in your time zone. Trial version available now at http://www.live.com.
The services under the Windows Live moniker will mostly be free and ad-supported, and are designed to complement functions found on Microsoft's Windows operating system.
Others include:
-Windows Live Mail: A Web-based mail service that has the familiar feel of Microsoft's Outlook e-mail program. Trial version set to launch in a few weeks.