Microsoft at its Tech Ed conference in San Diego on Tuesday will tout plans to add data encryption to its SQL Server database and seek federal government security certification for the platform as well.
The company also will release to manufacturing a tool that advises on best practices for administering SQL Server databases.
Native data encryption will be featured in SQL Server 2005, which is codenamed "Yukon" and due next year, according to the company. "It's just another layer of protection for customers to secure their data," said Tom Rizzo, director of product management for SQL Server at Microsoft. With the encryption support, a hacker breaking into the system to query data still would need a password or keys to de-encrypt data, Rizzo said. PKI infrastructures are supported by the data encryption function.
Taking aim at security appliance vendors, Microsoft on Monday said that hardware makers will sell its forthcoming Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2004 software preinstalled on hardware appliances.
Hewlett-Packard (HP), Celestix Networks and Network Engines will be the first hardware makers to offer appliances based on ISA Server, a firewall, VPN (virtual private network) and Web cache product, Microsoft announced at its Tech Ed conference in San Diego. The products will compete with appliances sold by CheckPoint Software Technologies, Cisco Systems and others.
Acknowledging that upgrading Access databases has proven to be a major stumbling block to Office 2003 upgrades, Microsoft unveiled at TechEd 2004 here a toolkit designed to head off potential incompatibilities.
The Microsoft Access Conversion Toolkit includes a new scanning tool, a reporting front-end and various e-learning documentation that will streamline Office 2003 deployments, according to the company.
Microsoft lost a battle of semantics against commercial Linux vendor Lindows on Monday, when an appeals court refused to consider the software giant's interpretation of the term "windows."
The Ninth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals denied Microsoft's petition that the jury in the trademark case against Lindows -- a name that bears striking resemblance to the Windows operating system (OS) used in more than 90 percent of the world's PCs -- should only consider the term as it is publicly recognized today.
Steve Ballmer opened Microsoft's annual TechEd conference in San Diego on Monday promoting the need for business and technology people to think aggressively about the untapped potential of information technology. Microsoft's CEO then drilled into the nitty gritty of getting it done, announcing Web services advances and new tools designed to help different kinds of IT professionals collaborate during the lifecycle of Visual Studio applications.
"We have a chance to change the world in a positive way, and I think that's important for us to remember," Ballmer told attendees. "I think the next 10 years will bring more positive change and innovation in our industry than the last 10 years." Anyone who didn't agree about that, Ballmer joked, could "meet me backstage afterwards and I'll have a chat with you."
Microsoft continued to beat the security drum at its Tech Ed 2004 conference by spotlighting technology to bridge Office front-end applications with back-end Web services and demonstrating group application development and testing to be built into Visual Studio Team Edition.
Due out next year, Visual Studio Team Edition encompasses long-promised modeling and proactive testing capabilities. Taking on such established modeling giants as Rational Software, now owned by IBM, the product will enable developers to test the security of their applications in advance, uncovering such situations as buffer overflows before they become a problem, said Prashant Sridharan, Microsoft's lead product manager for Visual Studio.
Microsoft has launched an effort to produce a version of Windows for high-performance computing, a move seen as a direct attack on a Linux stronghold. High-performance computing once required massive, expensive, exotic machines from companies such as Cray, but the field is being remade by the arrival of clusters of low-end machines. While the trend could be considered an opportunity for Microsoft, which has long been the leading operating-system company, Linux has actually become the favored software used on these clusters.
Microsoft agreed to pay Norway's Opera Software $12.75 million to head off a threatened lawsuit over code that made some Web pages on MSN look bad in certain versions of Opera's Web browser, CNET News.com has learned.
Opera disclosed the payment last week in a terse press release that omitted other details, including the name of the settling party and the nature of the dispute.
A Microsoft representative said the company does not comment on rumors.
Infragistics, maker of reusable presentation layer development tools for Microsoft systems and Java, announced Monday the release of a new video and position paper touting the importance of presentation layer development in enterprise applications.
The East Windsor, N.J., company released its information at the Microsoft TechEd 2004 conference here, featuring Mark Driver, a vice president of the Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc. market research firm; Rick LaPlante, director and general manager of enterprise tools at Microsoft; and Dean Guida, chief executive of Infragistics.
Microsoft will spotlight Visual Studio Team Systems -- a tools platform designed to help programmers work together more efficiently -- this week at its annual TechEd conference.
In concert with Microsoft's Solution System, Visual Studio Team Systems offers a series of integration features that provide traceability throughout the development life cycle. The platform can be tailored with business processes and products of partners and corporate users.