At a time when funding the growth of small and medium businesses is a challenge, Microsoft, Intel and HP formed a consortium to help European SMBs locate money from the European Union.
The group will use Microsoft's European Union Grants Advisor
initiative, which helps small and midsize businesses obtain grants from the
EU, as the basis to stimulate SMB growth in the 25 countries of the EU.
EUGA will help SMBs with the application process should they
wish to apply for grants. Originally tested in Spain, the initiative was
extended to Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and France earlier this year.
The teen convicted of creating a variant of the Blaster worm won't have to pay Microsoft $497,546.55 in restitution. He can instead work it off by doing community service.
Microsoft has agreed to forego the cash and convert the punishment into 225 hours of community service, according to a court document filed late Tuesday. Jeffrey Lee Parson, a 19 year-old from Hopkins, Minnesota, will have to work 75 hours per year over a three-year period with less fortunate members of his community. The work cannot involve computers or the Internet, accordingto the document.
Microsoft is readying the launch of its long-awaited Windows Server 2003 64-bit editions next month at its annual conference for hardware developers.
At an Intel 64-bit Xeon event in San Francisco on Tuesday, Andy Lees, corporate vice president of server and tools business at Microsoft, said the official introduction of the 64-bit extended editions at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference 2005 in Seattle in late April.
Unlike the existing 64-bit version designed for Intel's Itanium, the 64-bit versions coming out this spring will support both existing 32-bit and 64-bit applications and show considerable performance improvements in select applications such as databases. This will enable more customers to integrate existing 32-bit applications and experiment with 64-bit computing on the same platform.
Can Microsoft transform itself from a product-focused company into a solutions-oriented one? Top brass are betting that it can. Microsoft is shifting its entire sales and marketing strategy to focus on vertical markets.
Microsoft is reorienting its own field sales force to sell vertically; encouraging its solution-provider partners to sell vertically; and putting a sizeable chunk of the company's marketing dollars behind vertical campaigns for the rest of this year.
Microsoft has agreed to tag an "N" onto the name of the Windows XP versions without Windows Media Player that it was ordered to offer in Europe.
The European Commission chose the names "Windows XP Home Edition N" and "Windows XP Professional Edition N" after rejecting Microsoft's first choice, "Windows XP Reduced Media Edition," as unappealing.
The commission a year ago ordered Microsoft to ship a stripped-down version of Windows XP as one of the remedies in the European antitrust case against the software maker. By including Windows Media Player in Windows, Microsoft gained an unfair advantage over competing media players, the commission said.
Microsoft's next operating system, code-named Longhorn, will feature a new personal data repository, according to a news report Monday. The service, called Info-cards, would reside on the user's PC and aggregate personal information like names, credit card numbers and mailing addresses, and will allow people to use them when they shop or conduct business online, Microsoft executives said in a Wall Street Journal report.
Users will be able to create unique cards for certain types of transactions, such as one for shopping online and another for filling out an online application. They all use an encrypted format to foil information theft and technology like digital certificates to curb phishing attacks.
Microsoft's application of a mandatory "Security Development Lifecycle" for all its Internet-facing products has "significantly reduced" the numberand severityof security vulnerabilities, according to a white paper released by the software giant.
The 19-page document, titled The Trustworthy Computing Security Development Lifecycle, outlines the "cradle to grave" procedures used for software creation at Microsoft. According to senior executives, the new approach represents a major change in the way that software is designed, developed and tested.
The security experts at Symantec have verified what Windows watchers have known for some time: Microsoft's third-quarter 2004 release of Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) dramatically improved security for XP users and, as a result, the entire Internet. According to Symantec, the August 2004 release of XP SP2 was immediately followed by a dramatic drop-off in the number of PC-based bots, compromised PCs that hackers use to spread malware around the Internet. "The timing of this drop corresponds closely with the availability of Windows XP Service Pack 2," a Symantec report reads. "It's reasonable to assume that this service pack is responsible, along with other mitigation measures, for the decline in identified bot network computers." Amazingly, this drop-off in bots occurred during a time period in which the number of worms and Trojan attacks on Windows machines almost doubled. We all know that XP SP2, like any software product, isn't perfect. But this data suggests that XP SP2 was a highly successful release that was sorely needed.
Microsoft execs have been reticent to talk about changes that Microsoft is making to Windows' core "Fundamentals" pillar with Longhorn. But on Tuesday, a handful of Microsoft's top Windows Longhorn networking officials opened up a bit.
Led by Jawad Khaki, corporate vice president of Microsoft's networking and devices technologies division, the Microsoft Windows execs participated in an hour-long Web chat on the topic of Longhorn Networking. Ironically, the chat, attended by nearly 300 participants at one point, was plagued by constant connectivity problems. Nonetheless, the execs provided answers to a number of high-level Longhorn networking questions.
Microsoft is talking up a number of goodies for server infrastructure customers this month. They include a new version of the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer Tool, new customer guidance on isolating servers and domains for security and a new version of the iSCSI Software Initiator.
Additionally, Microsoft announced licensing and partnering agreements with Symbian, AppSense, Aruba and Bluesocket that should yield future interoperability dividends for customers.
The Exchange Best Practices Analyzer is a tool to help administrators identify and resolve configuration problems in the messaging server. First released in September, Microsoft says there have been 200,000 downloads so far of ExBPA. Version 2.0 brings full support for Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 and adds eight language versions. The download is available here.