Buoyed by support from key partners, Microsoft said Monday it has taken its feature pack for consolidating data from Exchange Server 2003 on network attached storage (NAS) devices running Windows Storage Server 2003 to general availability.
Original equipment manufacturers EMC, Dell and HP will be offering the feature pack on their NAS devices. The goal is to help customers boost return on investment by consolidating files and data stored on Exchange Server 2003.
Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer recently called the people at Sun Microsystems "our new partners," referring to the pact in which the companies resolved their legal disputes and vowed to cooperate on a broad range of issues. That may be so, but even with their deal, the two companies remain staunch competitors in some key areas.
Two of them are particularly close to Microsoft's heart, and its wallet: operating systems and productivity software for desktop computers. In those areas, Sun launched a challenge to Microsoft's Windows and Office franchises with the release last year of its Java Desktop System, a Linux-based operating system that comes with Sun's StarOffice productivity suite and other programs.
As if the hundreds of unwanted spam messages I get daily weren't enough, this week, email monitoring firm Message Labs announced that over 80 percent of all email received in the US is spam. That's a huge jump from the last measurement, taken a year ago, when spam accounted for almost 50 percent of all email.
"Twelve months ago we were just about to pass that 50 percent mark. No one thought it could keep up that pace of increase, but it has," said Message Labs marketing VP Brian Czarny. "We could see percentages in the upper 90s [within] a year."
As part of its emphasis on developer and security issues at its annual TechEd conference next week, Microsoft will tutor attendees in the finer points of its Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 2.0 technologies.
WSE is the vehicle via which Microsoft provides annual or biannual updates to its Web-services support. The 2.0 release includes support for Web services specs upon which Microsoft, IBM and BEA have collaborated, as well as support for greater security.
It has been almost a year since Microsoft talked up its planned WSE 2.0 add-on for Visual Studio. Last July, company officials made available a "technology preview" (a k a alpha release) of the WSE 2.0 toolkit.
Pay no attention to that operating system behind the curtain. After raising expectations for Longhorn, the increasingly distant future version of Windows, at recent events, Microsoft is expected to stick to the here and now at next week's TechEd conference.
Running Monday through Friday in San Diego, TechEd is expected to draw a broad mix of developers, information technology administrators and in-the-trenches tech workers--about 11,000 in all--keen to hear about what the software giant can do for them right now.
A federal judge ordered Microsoft yesterday to search a company computer to help explain why Vice President James Allchin told employees in 2000 to eliminate e-mails. Motz told the company to search a legal department computer for any evidence that Microsoft lawyers advised Allchin and others to adopt a policy of scrapping e-mails. A written policy circulated in 1997 by company computer operators advised employees not to save e-mails for more than 30 days "due to legal issues."
Microsoft is lobbying to combine its technical proposal for authenticating e-mail with a competing process, backed by America Online. George Webb, group manager of Microsoft's antispam technology and strategy team, said Friday that it has been working with the people behind SPF, or Sender Policy Framework, a proposed standard for verifying the domain of an e-mail sender and prevent mail forgery. Microsoft wants to combine that system with its own Caller ID for E-mail, which has the same goal with a slightly different approach.
When Microsoft Research chief Rick Rashid looks into his crystal ball, he sees a world where technological advancements in data storage and networked communication will let humans keep track of every aspect of their daily lives.
During a keynote presentation at the WWW Conference here, Rashid outlined the dramatic changes over the last ten years, when Microsoft Research moved from empowering the Internet to newer projects aimed at empowering the individual.
Microsoft is readying a new tool that is designed to connect Microsoft Office applications to back-end enterprise systems. The tool, called the "Information Bridge Framework," or IBF, is on tap to debut at the company's Tech Ed 2004 conference in San Diego next week, sources said. IBF is designed to connect Web services to the Office client with no "extra hops" or intermediate servers required.
IBF is designed to build on top of the XML support that Microsoft already has built into its Office System 2003 applications, such as Word, Excel and Outlook. IBF will allow developers and information-worker users to expose "enterprise business objects" and then pull them right into their familiar Office documents. (Enterprise business objects, in this context, are entities such as "customers" and "purchase orders.")
A raft of updates are expected at next week's Microsoft Tech Ed show in San Diego, including the release of Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 1, Internet Security & Acceleration (ISA) Server 2004 and possibly beta one of Visual Studio 2005.
As of late Thursday, the status of the first beta of the new Visual Studio toolkit, code-named Whidbey, remained day to day. Best-guess estimates from company insiders that it would surface at Tech Ed, as planned, ranged from "likely" to "iffy." A Microsoft spokeswoman declined to comment on the timing of the beta.