WinInsider

With Apple Computer threatening to push his product aside, longtime Mac developer Arlo Rose has moved his Konfabulator over to Windows. Rose, who once worked at Apple and now heads up a small company called Pixoria, said the new version will be available Monday.

"We're all diehard Macintosh developers here, but we recognize that Windows is the dominant platform," Rose said in a statement. "When you have a great idea, you want more than 2 percent of the global market to have access to it."

Microsoft will give customers advance notice of its monthly security updates in an effort to help them prepare to install related software patches, the company announced Thursday.

Starting this month, Microsoft will publish on its Web site a summary of planned security bulletins three days before they are released in their entirety. The summary will include information on which products are affected by updates, and severity ratings for security problems. The company normally releases security bulletins on the second Tuesday of each month. It previously offered customers who signed up through support personnel advanced notifications, but the information was not published for all customers.

Intel and Microsoft teamed up to create and tackle the PC world. Next up: the digital-entertainment world. The two companies will announce on Thursday a joint marketing campaign for television, print, cinema and online advertising aimed at showing consumers what they can do with their digital entertainment technologies.

The campaign is meant to address one of the key complaints about consumer electronics devices that use digitized content, which is simply that they are harder to figure out how to use. Digitized content, such as audio files and video clips, is more portable and transferable between devices and, in most cases, is of higher quality than analog content.

Microsoft has launched a new entry in its ongoing effort to bring more innovative PC form factors to market-in the somewhat quirky form of a high-end system specialized for project managers.

The Project PC, introduced at the Association for Project Management Awards in London on Tuesday, is an extension of Microsoft's philosophy of customizing PC hardware for specific verticals, the highest-profile examples of which have been the Media Center PC and the Tablet PC. The Project PC can also tap into a growing enterprise demand for smaller form factors, according to industry analysts.

Microsoft's next Office System release is set to ship by the summer of 2006, sources say. Expect new desktop apps, servers and services in the mix.

Microsoft still isn't ready to talk publicly about Office 12, its next major release of its information-worker family of products. But the company is briefing selected partners and customers about the forthcoming family of Office desktop and server products.

According to partner sources who requested anonymity, Microsoft has established an internal Office 12 ship calendar that pegs Office Beta 1 availability for August 29, 2005. Beta 2 is slated for December 5, 2005. The internal release-to-manufacturing target is May 22, 2006. And the target for "street" availability for the Office 12 System is July 17, 2006, the sources said.

The U.K.'s National Health Service has signed a software licensing deal with Microsoft that the NHS says will provide for the development of a user interface specifically designed for the organization while also providing substantial cost savings for the multi-billion pound project, it was announced Wednesday.

The licensing agreement between the NHS and the Redmond, Washington, company, allows health service and Department of Health workers to use Microsoft's desktop and mobile computing software on up to 900,000 computers, up from 500,000 in its previous agreement. Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed.

Microsoft's new Windows XP Media Center 2005 operating system has new features that help a PC compete with consumer electronics devices in the living room, and that turn a PC into a home server capable of feeding audio and video to multiple devices on a wireless network. We tried out a preproduction PC with the new operating system.

All Media Center 2005 PCs have TV-tuner cards carrying one or two discrete tuners. With two tuners, you can simultaneously watch one show and record another (or simultaneously record two shows). Even with a single-tuner card, though, the operating system lets you pause live television.

Microsoft is holding a series of IT administrator-focused Webcasts this week on the transition to 64-bit Windows computing. "The shift to mainstream 64-bit computing is underway, and Microsoft wants to help you gear up for this important milestone in our industry," the company said on its page listing the Webcasts.

Microsoft has 64-bit support for Intel Itanium 2 processors in Windows Server 2003, Windows XP and SQL Server 2000. The company is currently building versions of Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0 that will support the 64-bit extensions to the x86 instruction set.

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer pointed out recently that the company's software has achieved greater market share in China than in the United States. It might have sounded like bragging, but Ballmer was actually highlighting a major source of frustration for Microsoft and other software companies. The situation results from widespread piracy in China. "We didn't adopt the conscious pricing strategy in China to match Linux prices," he said, referring to the popular open-source operating system, available for free. "It's just that's what most people happen to pay us."

Microsoft Business Solutions continues to creep up the software stack. MBS now plans to ship a new version of Axapta, its higher-end ERP offering tailored for life science applications, the company said early Monday.

Axapta 3.0 for Life Sciences is due the first quarter of 2005. Adapted specifically to deal with governmental regulations surrounding pharmaceutical and related industries, it will carry a higher sticker than the core Axapta, although Microsoft is not yet ready to talk price, said Melissa Paulik, MBS' industry product manager for life sciences. The company will add Life Sciences vertical functionality to future Axapta releases typically six months after the core product is updated, Paulik said.