Enterprise developers looking for a guide to test applications against the new Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) are getting some help from Microsoft. The software giant released a guide detailing the security technologies in the service pack and providing an application testing process to help developers sort through possible disruptions.
To help sort through the update, the latest guidance from Microsoft discusses an application testing process, incompatibility symptoms, mitigation techniques, and deployment scenarios. "It makes no assumption about the size or complexity of the network, and is as relevant to peer-to-peer environments as it is to Active Directory environments," Microsoft said.
Although Microsoft Office generates one-third to one-half of the software giant's revenue each year, Microsoft is concerned about slowing sales of the last two releases, Office 2003 and Office XP. To jumpstart Office revenues, the company is reviving some older, previously abandoned strategies, such as subscription Web services, as it copes with an interim Office release, Office 12. Until recently, Microsoft had planned to launch Office 12 with the desktop version of Longhorn, the often-delayed next major Windows version.
Microsoft is taking care of security business-for some. With the release of Service Pack 2 for Windows XP, Microsoft has taken a significant step toward removing the security holes and insecure configurations that have made Windows such an easy target for malicious hackers and scammers-but only for 10 percent of Windows users.
Microsoft officials say those who want these improvements should upgrade to Windows XP. But there are many companies that have only recently completed their migrations to Windows 2000 and don't have the stomach (or budget) to start a wholesale move to XP.
Microsoft is quietly working on a new initiative, internally code-named Mission Critical Microsoft, to help fight the rising specter of Linux running on enterprise mainframes.
"Mission Critical Microsoft is an internal initiative, but it will probably result in a new program announcement from Microsoft within the next year," Paul Corriveau, group product manager for Windows Servers, told eWEEK.com at the IBM SHARE conference here.
The resulting program will replace Microsoft's existing tech support and maintenance offering in the data center space, according to Corriveau. Microsoft's existing partner program for data center implementations will be impacted, too.
Windows XP SP2 is out. So does this mean we can count on ship dates, instead of slip dates, from here on out? No way.
Microsoft's top brass has become fond of saying that Microsoft's got a lot of innovative new products in the pipeline. But what they haven't admitted is that their pipeline' has been in serious need of some Roto-Rooting for more than a year.
In recent months, whenever Microsoft was running late with a product, officials blamed Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) and/or tougher internal security criteria in general. So now that SP2 is officially out (it was released to manufacturing August 6), can we expect the slip-date blame-game to become a thing of the past? Hardly.
Now that Microsoft has shipped its long-awaited Windows XP Service Pack 2, what's the company planning for an encore?
Next up on the company's security agenda: Porting the pertinent SP2 security fixes to Windows Server 2003 and certain versions of Internet Explorer; introducing new patching technologies, including Windows Update Services and Microsoft Update; and rolling out Microsoft's next-generation "Active Protection" security technologies - starting with behavior-blocking technologies.
As expected, Windows XP Home Edition users started getting the drizzle download of Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) through Automatic Updates on Wednesday, but many readers are reporting incredibly slow-moving or even apparently non-existent downloads. Don't get too excited about receiving SP2 quickly through Automatic Updates, Microsoft warns. At a whopping 30 MB to 80 MB per download, and tens of millions of XP Home customers to satisfy, it's going to take weeks before many of them complete the download and start the install. And then there's XP Professional: Those users will have access to SP2 starting next Wednesday, but again, it will happen over a long time period, and there are many more XP Pro users than there are XP Home users.
Microsoft has been handed a second victory in its Web browser patent battle with Eolas. The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) this week rejected a second set of claims made by Eolas, which claimed that its spurious Web browser patent was being infringed by Microsoft and, potentially, every single company that made a Web browser.
Though details are still scarce, the USPTO rejected all ten claims Eolas made about its Web browser patent in this second "office action," as the agency calls its decision. Microsoft was quick to praise the action. "Today's action is another step in the Patent Office's reconsideration of the Eolas patent," a Microsoft spokesperson said.
A new magazine called Redmond makes its debut in October, but don't look for any stories about Derby Days or the new city hall. The publication is aimed at technology experts who use Microsoft products, and it doesn't even have an office in the software giant's hometown.
"We're calling ourselves Redmond. To people in the IT (information technology) industry, that only means one thing," said Keith Ward, its Maryland-based managing editor.
Microsoft is closing the Redmond-based development studio that made team sports games for its Xbox video-game console, eliminating 76 jobs in the process.
The internal unit, part of the broader Microsoft Game Studios, made football, basketball and hockey games for the Xbox under Microsoft's XSN Sports brand. The affected employees, who were notified of the decision earlier this week, will be helped to find other available Microsoft jobs, the company said.