Microsoft has beefed up its Small Business Center, adding a site devoted to security, among other perks.
The Small Business Center is a Web site catering to the needs of companies that often have just a handful of employees and a modest amount of information technology. Microsoft unveiled it last year. The site is currently available in 50 countries.
Among the enhancements announced Thursday is the Security Guidance Center, which offers interactive features that explain various aspects of security and licensing. The site also features quizzes and interactive questionnaires.
Microsoft is set to unveil new Real Time Collaboration plans and technologies, including tools for instant messaging and video conferencing, at a press event on March 8.
Company Chairman Bill Gates will attend a live event in San Francisco, along with Anoop Gupta, Microsoft's vice president of RTC, according to a Microsoft representative in the U.K.
The executives will lay out their strategy for the division and show off new technologies, the representative said. Simultaneous launches will take place in London and other cities, with Gates and Gupta broadcast over a live link, possibly demonstrating Microsoft's new video conferencing tool, the representative suggested.
Amid all the industry-shaking security moves Microsoft unveiled last week, the company also updated its progress on distributing Windows XP Service Pack 2 -- its most far-reaching effort to date to improve the security of the average computer on the Internet.
"We've got 170 million people who did the automatic download and more people who have taken the CDs and installed those very broadly, so that's a very significant amount of updating," Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates said during his RSA Conference keynote last week.
Customers who find themselves reinstalling Windows XP should be ready for a headache: Microsoft will no longer support activating the product over the Internet.
Intended to curtail the stealing and selling of certificates of authenticity, the new security measure will start at the end of this month. At first, it will be limited to the Windows XP software preinstalled on systems shipped by the top 20 PC sellers.
"The main reason is to address piracy in this area," a Microsoft representative said on Thursday. "Microsoft has found various people selling the labels of authenticity that they have copied or have pulled off other PCs."
On Monday, microprocessor giant Intel finally introduced its line of x64-compatible Pentium 4 chips, ushering in an era of mainstream 64-bit computing. The Pentium 4 6xx series chips run at clock speeds of 3.2 GHz to 3.6 GHz, utilize a large 2 MB L2 cache, and offering compatibility with the x64 platform first pioneered by AMD. All that's missing now is an x64-based operating system, and Microsoft is set to release Windows XP Professional x64 Edition within the next several weeks.
European Union (EU) judge Hubert Legal (insert ironic comment here), who is overseeing Microsoft's appeal of the EU antitrust decision, revealed this week that there is little chance the two sides would settle. The comments come just two weeks after EU competition commissioner Neelie Kroes announced that she would take a "hard line" in her stance against the software giant. Microsoft officials have repeatedly expressed their hope that the two sides could reach an agreement and avoid a lengthy legal battle.
In proceedings that could influence whether Microsoft can go ahead with a proposed 2.2 million-square-foot expansion of its Redmond campus, that city's planning department last night explained the company's growth plans to the mayor and seven-member City Council.
Though the public was admitted, no input was solicited at the meeting, which instead was intended to officially inform the city's governing body about the 25-page development agreement and to address members' questions.
"The idea is to respond to their questions get direction on issues they want covered" before a March 15 hearing, said Rob Odle, Redmond's policy planning manager.
Microsoft this month started a blog dedicated to its Windows Server family.
The Windows Server product team appears poised to use the blog as an information clearinghouse for minor product milestones, such as release candidates and other betas, to float trial balloons for potential features, and as a place to gather user input.
Located at http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsserver, the blog's initial entries all deal with the Windows Server 2003 x64 Editions from several product managers.
A Microsoft spokesperson said the blog will eventually include information about Windows Server 2003 "R2," Windows Small Business Server 2003 "R2" and Windows "Longhorn" Server. Later, technical product managers and developers will also post to the blog.
Microsoft and telecommunications gear maker Alcatel have created a development and sales partnership for software that delivers services to TVs over the Internet.
The two companies said Tuesday that they will act as preferred suppliers for services designed around Microsoft's Internet Protocol television (IPTV) software, which telecom operators use to send video and data services to consumers' TVs via set-top boxes.
Alcatel said it will support Microsoft's IPTV software in its network gear for sending video over broadband networks. It will also provide systems integration services for installing IPTV systems and build applications for the Microsoft TV IPTV Edition software.
One year after Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates unveiled Speech Server 2004, Microsoft says it is happy with adoption of its first speech recognition server. Some Microsoft partners who sell the product, however, say it has had a bit of a false start.
When Microsoft proclaimed it would bring speech recognition to the masses, Gary Hannah, president and chief executive officer (CEO) of speech specialist Pronexus, set ambitious goals for his company. He established a separate Speech Server division and "bet a significant part of the farm" on the new Microsoft product.