Microsoft said Tuesday that it plans to formally integrate enterprise search technology from its $1.2 billion acquisition of Fast Search and Transfer a year ago into its popular SharePoint content management platform.
By comparison, the existing search features in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server have trouble handling repositories with more than 50 million documents, Ovum analyst Madan Sheina wrote last month.
The new FAST Search for SharePoint will also bring "more advanced linguistic capabilities" and "more powerful processing"
of both structured and unstructured content, Microsoft's Andersen said.
Microsoft has launched two enhancements to its security offerings and revealed a strategy shift that could further shake up the competition in the antivirus sector.
The company made the second beta of its Forefront Threat Management Gateway available for download. This follows its release yesterday of Forefront Security for Exchange Server Service Pack 1.
Microsoft announced Beta 2 of TMG in a blog by Bill Jensen, senior product manager for TMG.
The product will focus on Web security and Microsoft is positioning TMG to possibly replace antivirus packages from other vendors in the enterprise.
A new environmental toolset for Microsoft's Dynamics AX enterprise resource management software lets businesses find out the
carbon footprint of various aspects of their operations.
The dashboard has been designed to work with SharePoint, Microsoft's collaboration and portal software. The dashboard's components
also integrate into so-called "role centers" in Dynamics, which are customized views used to manage different kinds of information
for different jobs.
Microsoft's MSN network has teamed with entertainment production company BermanBraun to launch Wonderwall.com, a celebrity-focused Web site that aims to compete with the likes of Eonline.com and TMZ.com.
"Wonderwall offers a clever, thought-provoking, and amusing voice to fans of celebrity and is a great addition to MSN's portfolio of entertainment content," said Rob Bennett, general manager of Network Programming for MSN, in a statement.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told U.S. House Democrats gathered for a retreat Friday that the United States needs to become less dependent on debt and instead has to invest in innovation for the economy to recover.
"America really has to return to growth that's built on innovation and productivity, rather than leverage and private debt," he said at the gathering in Williamsburg, Va.
He attributed much of the current financial crisis to an overreliance on borrowing.
"The hard truth is this, in my opinion," he said, "the private sector of our economy has borrowed too much money, businesses and consumers alike, fueled by a lot of different things, some notion that housing prices would go up forever, that you could borrow money cheaply."
Seattle has an overabundance of rock musicians for a city its size, from pure garage amateurs to club bands to touring stars.
Microsoft employs about 40,000 people in the Seattle area today, and there are legions of ex-Microsofties who stuck around after they left the company. So there's bound to be some overlap between the two groups.
I know several serious and talented musicians who have or had day jobs at the 'Soft, but they tend to downplay the connection--showing up sober to work every day to build or sell software just doesn't play well in rock biographies.
Microsoft is planning a range of new online services aimed at the world's growing population of mobile device users, according the company and published reports.
Microsoft last week set up a Web site that teases a new service called My Phone, which, according to the site, "syncs information between your mobile phone and the Web." My Phone will also let smartphone users back up and restore information to a password-protected Web site, access and update contacts and appointments through an online account, and share photos with family and friends.
Microsoft introduced a little piece of error-repair software called Fix It about two months ago with little fanfare. Though it's flying under the radar now, the tool could become an important part of Microsoft's arsenal going forward, and eventually significantly cut the amount of time it takes to resolve computer problems, without the need to consult byzantine online forums or call tech support. That is, if Microsoft can execute on its vision.
Right now, the idea behind Fix It is to offer automated scripts to repair computer problems Microsoft has documented in its Knowledge Base, a large online repository of product and troubleshooting documentation that users are often prompted to consult after their computers have a problem.
Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer sketched a dire portrait of the world economy on Friday, likening it to market conditions in 1837, 1873, and 1929, each of which involved bank failures, high unemployment, and a depression.
"This is a once-in-a-lifetime economic crisis," Ballmer told a retreat of House Democrats in Williamsburg, Va. "There is a lot of history around that, and frankly if you stop and think about it, 1837, '73, '29, 2008, it's almost exactly a whole lifetime between each of the major economic difficulties that we face.
"
Ballmer said that economic growth in the last 25 years was fueled by innovation, globalization, and debt--and that the current levels of debt were unsustainable.
Microsoft made its Forefront Threat Management Gateway beta 2 version available on Friday, adding antimalware and Secure Sockets Layer inspection but also offering an edge protection service to its latest operating-system platform.
TMG beta 2 is designed to provide a safe Web surfing environment for employees, said Bill Jensen, senior product manager for TMG, which used to be called ISA Server.
Microsoft has added built-in antimalware that detects and blocks infected files from entering the network and a network inspection service, or intrusion prevention, that blocks viruses and other malicious code based on their signature and their behavior, he said.