WinInsider

A top Microsoft executive is warning PeopleSoft customers that they might want to think about a technology shift now that Oracle's acquisition has been approved.

"Oracle's acquisition of PeopleSoft may be moving forward, but difficult technology decisions lie ahead," Microsoft vice president Bill Veghte wrote Wednesday in the e-mail, which was seen by CNET News.com. "The ongoing challenges of owning and maintaining business applications remain unchanged."

If anyone has a right to complain about buggy Microsoft products, it's Ron Markezich, the software maker's chief information officer. In addition to managing the company's tech gear, Markezich and his department function as a test bed for new Microsoft products. So since taking over as CIO last spring, Markezich has had a busy time of it. First, he moved Microsoft's entire network to Windows XP Service Pack 2. Nowadays, he's in the midst of testing out new versions of SQL Server and Visual Studio.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates was elected Tuesday to serve on the board of directors of prominent investment company Berkshire Hathaway. In doing so, Gates will serve as an advisor to longtime friend and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett. In a statement, Gates said he hoped his years of experience at Microsoft would prove to be of value to Berkshire's shareholders.

"I am delighted and honored to have been asked to serve on the board of this very successful company," Gates said. Gates also serves on the board of Bothell, Wash.-based biotech company Icos.

Microsoft plans to formally launch its revised Channel Builder next Monday. The high-quality matchmaking tool, designed to allow Microsoft ISVs and service partners to collaborate on solutions, has been in pilot testing with 150 partners for several months and is now ready for business, said Vlad Martynov, senior director of ISVs at the Redmond, Wash.-based company.

Plans call for the tool to go live for Gold partners on Dec. 20 and for Certified partners on Jan. 10, according to Microsoft. Registered partners can access the site in view-only mode.

The emerging field of synthetic biology--creating organisms in the lab that act like those found in nature--received a big boost Monday in the form of a $42.5 million grant from the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation. The grant--which will be shared by the University of California at Berkeley, the Institute for OneWorld Health, and Albany, Calif.-based upstart Amyris Biotechnologies--will help refine a process for producing the antimalarial drug artemisinin in the lab with genetically engineered microbes.

Microsoft has started private testing of a service that would offer consumers, on a subscription basis, access to the company's Outlook e-mail and calendaring program along with 2 gigabytes of e-mail storage. Microsoft Office Outlook Live, as the service is being called, would be a paid service that would let consumers use Outlook to manage Hotmail-based e-mail, calendar and contacts information. In the current beta, customers are being given 2GB of mail storage, the ability to send individual messages with up to 20MB of attachments as well as a downloadable version of Outlook.

Microsoft plans on Tuesday to link hands with hardware and services companies in a push to win over IBM's midrange server customers, CNET News.com has learned. The Midrange Alliance Program will see Microsoft join up with Fujitsu, Electronic Data Systems and a half-dozen other companies to try to convince businesses to look at Windows-based alternatives to IBM's iSeries servers, the latest in the AS/400 family.

"We look at the iSeries as having this well-deserved reputation as superintegrated and ultrareliable," Tim O'Brien, a senior product manager at Microsoft, said in an interview. But "the road map that got it there has taken kind of this left turn."

Microsoft officials announced the release of its own desktop search application Monday, hoping to make up Google ground established two months ago. Desktop search joins the recently released beta version of MSN's Web search functionality and is wrapped in the Redmond, Wash., company's beta version of the MSN Toolbar Suite. The beta program is currently available only in English and in the United States. It also includes a pop-up blocker for users with Internet Explorer 5.5 and above, and a password-protected auto form-filler function.

Sandive, a broadband traffic outfit, reported this week that traffic on Microsoft's Xbox Live online game network quadrupled in the wake of the release of Halo 2, the company's blockbuster new Xbox game. Sandive says that Xbox Live network traffic has continued, unabated, since Microsoft first released Halo 2 on November 9. "The jump [in traffic] raises quality-of-service concerns for service providers who are eager to keep high-value customers like gamers from churning away to competitors with a better reputation for optimized broadband experience," a Sandive report noted.

For years, Microsoft has hammered away at the security flaws in its desktop operating system. Now the company is looking to plug another security hole: weak passwords.

People tend to choose easy-to-remember passwords--which means they're easy to crack. Even complex passwords can be stolen. They've moved from a security measure to a security risk, says Microsoft Chair Bill Gates, who for the past year has been publicly urging customers to stop relying on passwords.