Microsoft on Monday began shipping Windows Server Update Services, its second-generation technology for patching systems in medium-sized organizations and enterprises.
Attendees at Microsoft TechEd 2005 found a copy of WSUS on their seats during Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's kickoff keynote for the Orlando, Fla. show. Although Ballmer didn't announce the general availability, Gordon Mangione, corporate vice president for the Security Business Unit, later confirmed that WSUS is generally available.
Microsoft on Monday made a big move into the Voice over Internet Protocol market by announcing strategic alliances with AT&T, Amdocs, and Sylantro.
The strategic alliance with AT&T connects AT&T's global IP network with Microsoft's Connected Services Framework. Using Connected Services Framework, AT&T will create new network-based IP services and applications, according to the two companies.
The two companies will also work together to develop an array of network-enabled messaging, collaboration, media, and business applications to expand AT&T's existing IP services line.
Microsoft has made one of its most direct overtures to the open-source software community to date, in the form of an invitation to Michael Tiemann, president of the Open Source Initiative, to begin a "productive conversation."The company has tested various tactics in dealing with open source in general and Linux in particular, characterizing Linux's licence as a "cancer," arguing that open source doesn't guarantee interoperability and that Linux should be distinguished from open source.
"Get the facts", an advertising effort launched in 2003 draws on research from third parties to show that Windows is more secure, reliable and cost-effective than Linux.
Microsoft acknowledged yesterday that hackers booby-trapped its popular MSN Web site in South Korea to try to steal passwords from visitors. The company said it was unclear how many Internet users might have been victimized.
Microsoft said it cleaned the Web site, www.msn.co.kr, and removed the dangerous software code that unknown hackers had added earlier this week. A spokesman, Adam Sohn, said Microsoft was confident its English-language Web sites were not vulnerable to the same type of attack.
Microsoft has drawn some criticism after confirming that it will not make the next version of Internet Explorer available to users of its Windows 2000 operating system.
In a blog posting at the end of last week, a Microsoft employee confirmed that the company would not be releasing IE 7 for Windows 2000, as this would involve a lot of work for an operating system that is in the later stages of its lifecycle.
"It should be no surprise that we do not plan on releasing IE 7 for Windows 2000. One reason is where we are in the Windows 2000 lifecycle. Another is that some of the security work in IE 7 relies on operating system functionality in XP SP2 that is non-trivial to port back to Windows 2000," according to the blog posting.
Microsoft will change the standard document format in the next version of its flagship Office suite -- promising smaller file sizes, improved security and easier sharing of data among different computer programs and systems.
But some analysts warn that the switch won't be entirely painless for people and companies using older varieties of the ubiquitous Microsoft software.
The Redmond company says files in the next versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint will come in a default Microsoft format based on XML, an industry standard that uses an underlying system of tags to identify the different elements and characteristics of a document while remaining invisible to the end user.
European regulators may be powerless to give open-source competitors effective access to Microsoft's server protocols, despite antitrust rulings against the company and the EU's ability to impose massive new fines.
A core sticking point is the licenses' per-seat fees, which make them useless for open-source projects, according to open-source developers.
But where it comes to these crucial licenses, the Commission's hands may be tied. "If the Commission requires Microsoft to make its protocol licensing GPL [General Public License]-compatible, it could jeopardize their entire case," said Jonathan Zuck, president of ACT (the Association for Competitive Technology), which supports Microsoft's side of the case.
Microsoft plans to announce as early as next week that it is ready to ship a Windows 2000 Update Rollup, the final security patch for the 5-year-old operating system.
The Update Rollup, which replaces Windows 2000 SP5, is a cumulative set of hot fixes, security patches and critical updates packaged together for easy deployment.
The Update Rollup will contain all security-related updates produced for Windows 2000 between the time SP4 was released and the date the update ships. It will also feature a small number of important, non-security updates.
Microsoft has agreed to make modest changes to Windows XP in response to criticism from an antitrust compliance committee. In a court filing on Wednesday, the U.S. Justice Department and some states charged that Web-related resources, such as saved HTML files, continued to be denoted by an Internet Explorer icon, even when it was not the default browser. Also, the filing said, disabling Internet Explorer in XP does not automatically delete user-created shortcuts pointing at the application.
Microsoft revealed this week that it will be adding support for "Raw" digital camera images to both Windows XP and Longhorn. XP support will become available in the next few weeks via a free new PowerToy add-on. But Longhorn, due in late 2006, will have much more powerful and integrated Raw support, Microsoft says. Raw digital camera images, sometimes referred to as "digital negatives," are essentially uncompressed and unprocessed pictures that are taken at a camera's native resolution. For professional photographers, of course, these types of images are much more desirable than those formatted in the more common but compressed JPEG formats.