Microsoft said Tuesday it would team up with tech giants Intel and Cisco to support work designed to modernize ways to assess learning skills worldwide.
The announcement, made at a forum of educators in London, adds to a host of educational initiatives being sponsored by Microsoft.
A white paper drafted with the project says that current assessment tools are badly in need of an overhaul -- and therefore stymieing efforts at education reform.
"Many previous, well-meaning and well-resourced attempts to reform education have stumbled through an inability to demonstrate improvement on standardized tests designed for last century's education," the paper says.
Microsoft said Tuesday that it has begun early outside testing of some of the server products that will make up the next version of Office.
The software maker did not offer details or say when a test version of the software, code-named Office 14, will be made more broadly available.
"Today Microsoft provided a select group of customers early access to an Alpha version of Office server technologies," the software maker said in a statement. "However, Microsoft is not disclosing information about the timing for a Beta version at this time."
Microsoft has also begun testing for the next version of Exchange, code-named E14.
On Tuesday, Microsoft released version 4.0 of Windows Live Search Mobile, its downloadable search and map app for Windows Mobile 5 and 6, which the company demoed last week at CES.
With this release, Microsoft is finally starting to catch up to other free clients doing mobile voice and text search on other platforms--Google Mobile App, Yahoo Go, and Vlingo among them.
Taking a page from Google's book, perhaps, the new Locate Me feature in Windows Live Search Mobile can work on non-GPS phones to zero in on your approximate location. If that fails, you can easily add your location manually instead.
Though Microsoft released Office 2007 and Windows Vista at the same time, people should not expect the same of Windows 7 and
the next version of Office, code-named Office 14.
Andrew Brust, chief, new technology for Microsoft consulting partner twentysix New York, said he would not be surprised if
Windows 7 were available to business customers in the summer, which in the U.S. refers to June, July, and August.
Brust said he does not have specific insider information about Windows 7's scheduled release. However, the initial positive
response to the Windows 7 beta and the fact that the OS is highly anticipated in the wake of Vista's shortcomings give Microsoft
a strong impetus to get it into customers' hands sooner rather than later.
A concept PGA application showing how IPTV could be used to blend television with Web-based content.
Microsoft said on Monday that its Mediaroom software is being used by a Chinese TV provider to offer Internet Protocol television over a traditional cable network.
The deal, with Guangzhou Digital Media Group marks two first for the company--its first IPTV deal in China as well as the first time its software has been used to power TV over a cable network.
"We had always intended it to go to many different types of operators," said Ben Huang. "Now you are starting to see the fruits of that labor."
Until now, its software had been used by telecommunications firms looking to get into the TV business by offering IPTV.
A rough economy isn't stopping Microsoft from spending in key areas. The software maker on Monday announced a new ad campaign aimed at wresting spending from cash-strapped companies as well as the company's own investment into a start-up focused on multitouch.
In the latter area, Microsoft is part of a $24 million financing round for N-trig, a Kfar Saba, Israel-based company that provides technology for sensing pen and touch input. The size of Microsoft's stake was not disclosed.
N-trig's technology is used in current multitouch computers from companies such as Dell and HP, a category Microsoft hopes to expand by building gesture support directly into Windows 7.
Fault tolerance will become an add-on feature of the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 operating system that can be switched on with little administrative training, according to spokesmen for Microsoft and Marathon Technologies, supplier of the everRun fault-tolerant system. It will become available in the second quarter.
For the highest level of availability, where users experience no interruption even though a component of the underlying system has failed, the price tag will be about $5,000. A lower level of availability, where the system recovers after a noticeable 20-second delay, will cost $2,000.
If you go down the list of what you've been dazzled by so far from CES this week, just how many of those items have any association with the Windows Mobile operating system? Don't think we haven't noticed, either.
The news from the Windows Mobile team at Microsoft isn't what it might have been had Windows Mobile 7 been closer to ready. As it turned out, the much anticipated WM7 was delayed last September, in a move that Microsoft informed its smartphone partners about before anyone else. Supporting phone manufacturers such as HTC with its TouchHD, Sony Ericsson with its Xperia X1, and Samsung with its Omnia, are preparing to settle for Windows Mobile 6.1, while WM7 languishes in what seems on the outside to be an indeterminate netherworld.
The thing is, another Microsoft executive, Todd Peters, told "The New York Times" that Microsoft is the midst of responding to changes in the smart phone market (read: Success of iPhone) by "retooling" and putting Windows Mobile on ... gulp ... fewer devices. Eh? How will that work in Microsoft's favor you ask? "I'd rather have fewer devices and be more focused," Peters said. That way, Microsoft will get "better integration" between the phones and Windows Mobile. Yes, I suppose that is true. Taken the extreme, Microsoft could get the best integration by making the phone themselves. And then they could add the Zune software to it in order to capitalize on that system's digital media prowess and UI navigational niceties. And here's a thought. You could call this thing Zune Mobile.
Microsoft is testing new capabilities for Office Live Workspace, its online adjunct to Microsoft Office, that will make it
a closer rival to online application suites such as Google Docs.
That contrasts with online suites such as Google Docs and Zoho, where the entire process of creating, saving, and editing documents is done from inside a browser.
But Microsoft has been testing a "technical preview" of a Live Workspace update that allows users to create new documents
online, without needing to have Office on their PC. The update includes a task ribbon similar to that in Office that lets
people do "light editing" from inside their browser, including formatting text and tables.