AudioCodes, based in Lod, Israel, is developing a product road map next year that company officials believe will help Microsoft's push into the enterprise voice-over-IP communications space.
Microsoft is considering AudioCodes' VoIP technologies for integration into Microsoft Office Communicator, a client solution that's part of the software giant's Unified Communications product line. The idea is to bring high-definition audio VoIP, branded by AudioCodes as VoIPerfectHD, to the client.
VoIPerfectHD would interface directly into the Microsoft Office Communicator system to provide improved voice quality between Microsoft-based voice customers, said Alan Percy, director of market development at AudioCodes' enterprise business group. Microsoft is one of the vendor's first customers, he said.
Microsoft has introduced a new Windows server component to seamlessly connect Active Directory users to Microsoft-based services and other services residing in the Internet cloud. The new Community Technology Preview release of the Microsoft Services Connector application aims to connect users without compromising corporate security or user identity.
During last week's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, Lynn Ayres, program manager of identity services at Microsoft, described the Microsoft Services Connector as "a services complement . that a business installs on premises with their existing IT infrastructure."
Will solid-state drives thrive on Windows 7? Microsoft is set to address that question at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference this week.
Microsoft will speak to both overall support for solid-state drives and Windows 7 support for Netbooks in Los Angeles at WinHEC 2008, which kicks off Wednesday.
In a conference abstract titled "Windows 7 Enhancements for Solid-State Drives," Microsoft states that "PC systems that have solid-state drives are shipping in increasing volumes" and that it is planning "Windows enhancements that take advantage of the latest updates to standardized command sets, such as ATA."
As competition in the mobile phone market heats up, two companies with flagging momentum are teaming up to try to compete better with the market leaders. Microsoft and LG on Monday said that they plan to work closely together, collaborating on research and development, marketing, applications and services for converged mobile devices.
The announcement came from Seoul, Korea, LG's base, during a trip there by Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO. The collaboration is not a first for the companies. LG has already been making phones that run Windows Mobile. But the agreement could signal a stepped up effort by both companies to try to beat the competition.
Weaknesses in Microsoft's software that make it vulnerable to attacks plunged 33.6 percent during the first half of the year, outpacing an industrywide drop of 4 percent.
The findings were among those being released Monday in Microsoft's semiannual Security Intelligence Report, which tracks threats to software, such as malware, Trojans and viruses.
It was the second six-month period in a row in which the total number of vulnerabilities fell, after peaking during the first half of 2007.
At the same time, though, the report determined that the number of "high-severity" vulnerabilities in industry software had actually increased. Attacks also are becoming more sophisticated.
Microsoft's latest security report shows that the number of new vulnerabilities found in its software was lower in first half of the year than the last half of 2007, with the Windows Vista OS proving more resistant to exploits than XP.
Microsoft reported 77 vulnerabilities from January to June compared to 116 for the last six months of 2007, according to the company's fifth Security Intelligence Report.The decline is in line with the software industry as a whole, which saw a 19 percent decrease in vulnerability disclosures compared to the first half of 2007, Microsoft said. However, those vulnerabilities considered highly severe rose 13 percent.
This week Microsoft gave evidence that it will continue to be a major force for at least the next decade. The company outlined its products and strategies that more fully embrace the "cloud," such as the Azure set of cloud services; Web-based, lighter-weight versions of Microsoft Office applications; and the latest iteration of the Live Mesh middleware. Google may have won the search war, but Microsoft isn't about to cede the global cloud to the search engine giant.
Microsoft's Live Search engine can provide what the company calls "instant answers" to various questions, and the company said on Wednesday it plans to expand the feature in the next month.
Current instant answers show up for some queries for encyclopedia facts, traffic, and horoscopes, according to a blog post from Live Search Product Manager Theo Vachovsky. He then offered a teaser for coming attractions: "Check this blog in a month to find out about other cool new instant answers on Live Search.
Two projects recently revealed by Microsoft are helping government officials figure out which way is up and what was said about it. At GEOINT 2008 this week, Microsoft unveiled its Single View Platform, which allows entities such as government agencies and NGOs like the United Nations to pull together complex information and databases and view them geographically, even if the locations and user interfaces to the data vary. This is handy if you're attempting to coordinate relief efforts across a large swath of territory, or if you're working up emergency-response plans or other services that help your citizens, wherever they may be located.
After two days of new product announcements, Microsoft took a different tact on the third day of its Professional Developers Conference 2008, carting out members of the company research division to show off truly futurist technologies. Microsoft Research lead Rick Rashid showed off advances like the Microsoft Surface software development kit, a new version of the Microsoft Worldwide Telescope, and new hardware sensors that will help regulate and reduce energy consumption in datacenters.
But the hit of the keynote was Boku, a Microsoft Research project aimed at getting kids excited about programming.