Orange has added two new Windows Mobile 5.0 products to its line of devices geared toward business users, the company said Thursday.
The SPV C600 smartphone and the SPV M3000 personal digital assistant both operate on Orange's Enhanced Data for GSM Evolution networks, which deliver up to 247 kilobits per second of throughput. The Windows Mobile 5.0 software on both devices allows users to synch e-mail with Microsoft Outlook. The SPV M3000 also includes Wi-Fi, a camera, and a camcorder.
A federal judge in San Jose, Calif., granted Microsoft's motion to stay a countersuit filed by Google in the dispute over the search giant's hiring of Kai-Fu Lee.
According to Chris Scott Graham, an attorney with the law firm Dechert LLP, Judge Ronald Whyte of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California said, "I'm going to put this on hold."
Graham said that, while Google could petition to lift the stay, courts are reluctant to have the same dispute being heard at same time in multiple forums. "Judge Whyte has said in his order that it's appropriate to allow the matter to proceed in Washington before he continues on to address the matter on the merits," he said.
Tighter integration with Microsoft Office and improved customization tools are among the new features in Microsoft CRM 3.0, which the company released to public beta this week.
The beta for the Customer Relations Management package is scheduled to run for the next 60 days, after which if all goes well the product will be released to manufacturing before the end of this year to be ready for general release in the first quarter of 2006, said Brad Wilson, general manager for the product.
The new version includes new marketing automation facilities such as lead list, campaign and response management, Wilson said.
Microsoft has revealed some of the security changes to the upcoming Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Vista--changes that could cause trouble for some Web sites.
One key change is that Explorer will disable SSLv2, an older version of the Secure Sockets Layer protocol. SSL is used to carry out secure Web transactions. In its place, Explorer 7 will continue to support SSLv3 and will enable Transport Layer Security v1, a newer protocol.
The change means that sites currently requiring SSLv2 will need to allow either SSLv3 or TLSv1, Microsoft said on its Internet Explorer Weblog, part of the Microsoft Developer Network.
Hoping to turn the tide on spam zombies, Microsoft has filed suit against entities it said used compromised PCs to send millions of junk e-mail messages.
The company has identified 13 different spamming operations that use such "zombies," it said Thursday. A lawsuit was filed against unnamed defendants in August. Since then Microsoft has tracked down some of the people behind the operations, said Tim Cranton, director of Internet Safety Enforcement Programs at Microsoft in Redmond, Wash.
"We have identified a number of entities in North America that we feel the evidence will show are liable and culpable for the spamming that occurred," Cranton said.
Microsoft on Thursday released to manufacturing its Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 products, previously known by the code names Whidbey and Yukon respectively.
Officials at the Redmond, Wash., company called the RTM of the technology a significant milestone on the road to the launch of Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006.
Microsoft is holding a launch event in San Francisco on Nov. 7 to officially launch these technologies that have long been in the making.
The company will ship Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005, but BizTalk Server 2006 will not ship until next year.
Microsoft revenues were up slightly for its first quarter ended Sept. 30, driven by demand for core platform software such as the Windows OS and SQL Server, as well as growth in PC and server shipments, the company said Thursday.
Microsoft posted revenue of $9.74 billion for its third quarter, up 6 percent from the year-ago quarter, when Microsoft reported revenue of $9.19 billion. Thomson First Call analysts predicted the company would report revenues of $9.78 billion. Operating income, which was $4.05 billion, experienced 16 percent growth over the first quarter of last year, when Microsoft reported operating income of $3.49 billion.
Multicore processors are solidly mainstream these days, with five upcoming multicore designs showcased by their creators on the first day of the Fall Processor Forum. But many software developers are ill-prepared for this era, according to a Microsoft executive.
"I come from the world of software, and we need to talk," said Herb Sutter, a software architect with Microsoft, in his opening remarks to a hardware-heavy audience Wednesday at In-Stat/MDR's Fall Processor Forum. The software development community recognizes that processor makers have been forced into multicore designs in order to deal with the heat problems caused by fast chips, but the community isn't sure that hardware designers understand just how much work they've created for the software industry, he said.
Microsoft and Nokia, archrivals in the mobile phone operating-system space, are partnering on a Unified Threat Management security appliance, sources familiar with the companies' plans said.
According to documents viewed by CRN, the companies plan to offer a UTM appliance that would act as a gateway for secure VPN access to network-based applications from remote locations or mobile devices such as smart phones, according to source familiar with the vendors plans.
For example, the appliance would monitor e-mail, Web and application traffic between a companys internal network and the Internet to detect, block and prevent various security threats, the sources said, adding that the product would support Microsoft and non-Microsoft environments.
Microsoft's MSN Internet search group detailed its new effort to catalog books, academic materials, periodicals and other print resources on Tuesday.
Dubbed as MSN Book Search, the effort is part of the company's push to expand its search capabilities to find more of the information people seek when they come to its site and launch Web queries.
Microsoft officials estimated that users currently find the exact information they are seeking on MSN's search engine only 50 percent of the time, and said that addition of the publications to its index should help the company improve on that figure.