Microsoft plans to debut this week a connector framework that gives Web services management vendors including Computer Associates International, Hewlett-Packard and Actional hooks into its Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2000 platform.
At its Professional Developers Conference (PDC), Microsoft is expected to formally unveil its MOM 2000 Connector Framework, a Web services-based framework that CA has used to develop a MOM connector for its Unicenter Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) platform and that Actional has harnessed to create a management pack for its own Web services management platform.
Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates is slated to kick off the company's Professional Developers Conference here Monday with an overview of its latest pre-beta Windows operating system and how it advances the company's .NET platform strategies. The PDC conference includes over 140 sessions that are designed to get developers thinking about building applications that reflect where computing is going.
Since last Monday's column about the spam filtering built into Outlook 2003, I've received e-mail from readers questioning my numbers. So let me reiterate: Yes, Outlook really is keeping the vast majority of spam out of my inbox.
Over the past week, I've continued my (admittedly) unscientific testing. And during that week, Outlook successfully filtered 95 to 98 percent of the mail I received.
The worst Outlook did was the day I received a total of 361 messages. Of those, Outlook flagged 240 as spam. Of the 121 that made it through to my inbox, 18 were spam. Of the 240 that were dropped into the junk mail folder, I found no misfiles, nor have I heard from friends telling me I'm not responding to their e-mail. So, of the 361 messages that Outlook processed that day, 18 (or about 5 percent) were processed incorrectly.
Eric Rudder, senior vice president of servers and tools at Microsoft Corp., is responsible for Microsoft's strategies on both fronts, including the Redmond, Wash., company's outreach to its developer community. Rudder's influence will be apparent at this week's Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles; he's responsible for applying the company's tools strategy to many of the technologies being unveiled at the show, including the upcoming Longhorn operating system; the new Whidbey version of Visual Studio .Net; and Microsoft's new Web services platform, known as Indigo. Rudder spoke with eWEEK Senior Writer Darryl K. Taft in the weeks before the PDC.
Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference taking place in Los Angeles between Oct. 26th-30th is considered one of its most important in close to a decade. PDC will unveil early pre-beta code of its next-generation Windows operating system ("Longhorn"), its Visual Studio developer tools ("Whidbey") and SQL Server ("Yukon").
Together, the early builds represent three of the largest products of the world's largest software company, which revolve around its Windows product, whose own upgrade cycle drives the rest of the technology industry.
When Microsoft slips the covers off Longhorn this week at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles, don't expect to see a polished desktop client ready to deliver intuitive, simplified computing to the masses. After all, Microsoft still has three more years to hone the final fit and finish for its next-generation Windows release. Instead, expect to hear lots about Longhorn's guts. The PDC audience is developers - about 9,000 strong, according to early estimates - and Microsoft is going to play to its attendees.
Microsoft and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) are at loggerheads over competing standards for electronic forms which help automate business processes. On Tuesday, Microsoft released InfoPath, its new XML-based application in Office 2003 allowing users to organise and share data. But the security of its signatures has been called into question on a W3C discussion forum. The W3C recently released the specification for XForms 1.0, which allows the creation of interactive forms to help automate the exchange of corporate data.
Barrett, Ballmer, Fiorina, and Capellas were present and accounted for at Gartner's Fall Symposium, but no McNealy this year. No calling Microsoft a "hairball" or IBM a company that wants to "Hoover your wallet." (If you're not sure what those mean, check my McNealyisms dictionary. Scott's absence at the event was noted by many attendees. What could be more important, at this critical point in time for Sun, than the opportunity to communicate his vision for turning Sun around to 6,000 important (or potential) customers? There are attendees here that allegedly pay $86,000 a year just to be a part of Gartner's most elite group of pampered CIOs and get access to the industry heavyweights.
Microsoft's roadmap to the future includes side trips into casino gambling and sewing-machine design. A high-tech sewing machine Microsoft's Windows CE.Net operating system powers and modern slot machines that run a slimmed-down version of Windows XP were among the products Microsoft cited during a presentation Friday on the its plans for embedded devices--limited-function computing gadgets that range from factory robots to MP3 players.
Scott Horn, director of marketing for Microsoft's embedded group, said during a speech at the company's Silicon Valley campus that the category represents a big and largely untapped market for Microsoft.
Microsoft reported a 28 percent increase in net income in its first quarter, helped in part by its MSN division's first quarterly profit, even as the effects of computer viruses kept the company's salespeople from closing some licensing deals.
The company said yesterday that revenue rose to $8.22 billion, a 6 percent increase over the same quarter last year. Net income reached $2.61 billion, or 24 cents per share, beating analysts' estimates by a penny after adjusting for the effect of changes in the company's stock-compensation plan.