Microsoft on Monday formally extended a major deadline for Exchange 5.5 Server support, removing what had been seen as a subtle threat to get users to upgrade more quickly to Exchange Server 2003.
Mainstream support for Exchange 5.5 Server had been scheduled to expire on Dec. 31, 2003. At that point, users would have had to pay for a contract to get Exchange 5.5 support until the extended support program runs out at the end of 2005. Now, Microsoft will offer the first year of extended support, through Dec. 31, 2004, for free.
Microsoft is slashing the price of its forthcoming entry-level Windows Small Business Server 2003 to $599 and will hike the head count limit on both the Standard and Premium editions to 75, Microsoft executives said at the XChange Conference 2003 in Orlando, Fla.
The new, low-end version of Small Business Server will feature Windows Server 2003 and Exchange 2003 only and be priced at $599, roughly half of the $1,499 cost of the current Small Business Server 2000, Allison Watson, vice president of Microsoft's worldwide partner group, told applauding attendees at XChange.
The Web site of embattled software maker The SCO Group Inc. was inaccessible again on Tuesday, fueling reports of another denial of service attack. SCO's main Web site, www.sco.com, was off-line between 4 a.m. GMT and 2 p.m. GMT, according to the Internet monitoring company Netcraft Ltd.
The Lindon, Utah software company has been the target of animosity within the open source community after it sued IBM Corp. for, among other things, misappropriation of SCO's Unix source code for the Linux operating system.
The suit has fanned the flames of passion within the open source software community because it threatens to undermine the growing popularity of Linux, casting doubt on the legal status of the operating system.
The weekend DoS attack followed a similar DoS attack in May and was probably launched by individuals within the open source community, according to Eric Raymond, president of Open Source Initiative.
Running the computer network at a big business is a hard job. It's even harder if your company is the most scrutinized technology business in the world. But it really gets rolling when you're expected to run test versions of software that don't have all their bugs worked out - "eating your own dogfood," in Microsoft parlance.
That's the job of Rick Devenuti, vice president and chief information officer. Devenuti, 45, grew up in Federal Way, the son of a Boeing engineer. He worked his way through the University of Washington selling jewelry at Friedlander's in Southcenter in the evenings and on weekends.
I'm not attacking Microsoft's coding prowess or the sincerity of the Trustworthy Computing initiative. In fact, since the inception of Trustworthy Computing, the code coming from Microsoft has been, for the most part, much better and clearly designed with security in mind. But that isn't enough.
The code that has been passed on from Windows NT to Windows Server 2003 is just too old, too big and too interconnected to ever fully secure. There's only one way the Trustworthy Computing initiative could work, and that's to build a new operating system from the ground up, with no legacy Windows code whatsoever. But that's probably not going to happen.
Bearing gifts of cash, software and computers worth $25 million, Microsoft came to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999, saying it wanted to jointly develop educational technologies. Some scholars expressed more suspicion than gratitude.
AT A celebration to kick off the collaboration, students and faculty members heckled the speakers, insisting the computer company's software wasn't worthy of use or study at MIT. Some took boxes of Microsoft's Office 2000 software and stomped on them. An editorial in the school newspaper wondered: Had the school sold itself out to become the "Microsoft Institute of Technology?"
Despite the drubbing in technology stocks over the past three years -- the recent rally notwithstanding -- and the oft-delayed hopes for a recovery in information technology spending, Microsoft is the sector's one company that has steadily moved ahead, in our view. It wrapped up its fourth quarter of fiscal year 2003 (ended June 30) with a solid 11% growth in revenues and about 10% earnings growth, excluding one-time charges.
Revenues of $8.07 billion were better than our estimate of $7.91 billion. However, operating earnings per share of 23 cents was 1 cent below our estimate of 24 cents, mainly due to higher-than-expected marketing costs for upcoming products. Another drag on operating earnings: Microsoft settled its lawsuit with AOL Time Warner, which resulted in an aftertax charge of 5 cents per share, resulting in reported EPS of 18 cents. Nevertheless, we at S&P increased our fiscal year 2004 operating EPS estimate to $1.10, from $1.06, following this earnings release (like BusinessWeek and BusinessWeek Online, Standard & Poor's is a division of the McGraw-Hill Companies.)
Following the virus and worm devastation wrought by Blaster and SoBig this past week, Microsoft on Friday admitted that it has finally bitten the bullet and committed to automatic security patch updates for its SQL Server database.
Work on automatic security patching began immediately after Slammer struck in late January, bringing the Internet to its knees as it generated billions of attacks on SQL Server installations, Group Product Manager Tom Rizzo told eWEEK. Work on the automatic security patching is ongoing, with no end date yet in sight, he said.
Microsoft is expected to announce on Monday that it will sell a discounted academic version of OneNote, its new application for note-taking and information management.
The version will be available to teachers and students for $49, compared with the standard price of $199, and its release will be accompanied by a marketing campaign focused on college students, a key target market for the new application.
OneNote, one of two new applications included in Office System, Microsoft's newly renamed line of workplace productivity applications, is being positioned as an adjunct to Word's word processing program. OneNote is designed for taking notes and organizing them with information from other sources, such as Web pages. The program automatically saves notes as they're input and offers several options for organizing and browsing notes, which can later be incorporated into final Word documents.
After months of speculation, Microsoft plans to give developers their first hard look at the next version of Windows in October. The Redmond, Wash., company expects to release a "developers preview" of the new operating system, code-named Longhorn, at its professional developers conference in Los Angeles. Although it won't be a full beta, or test, version, Microsoft executives have promised it will be more than just "slideware," software that companies haven't been using and don't know when it will be coming.
The company is expected to hand out a development kit that will give developers their first look at the inner workings of the much-heralded new operating system. Longhorn will usher in a raft of changes from previous versions of Windows.