Microsoft is working on application virtualization technology for the server that is designed to provide administrators the flexibility to quickly deploy infrastructure and
even stream applications on-demand.
The capabilities would be similar to the application virtualization capabilities available in the client side via Microsoft Application Virtualization.
SoftGrid, which Microsoft acquired when it bought Softricity in May 2006, lets users package applications into "containers,"
store them on a server where they can be centrally managed, and then stream those containers to desktops, devices or shared
PCs. It also can be used for on-demand delivery of patches and upgrades.
Mark Hamburg, a key player on Adobe Photoshop, leaves Adobe for Microsoft.The competition between Microsoft and Adobe heated up somre more when Microsoft scored a key hire from its competitor.
Mark Hamburg, who had been chief architect of Adobe Photoshop and who launched the Adobe effort that became Adobe Lightroom, resigned from Adobe after 17 years and is joining Microsoft.
In a blog post April 25, Martin Evening, who follows Adobe, said Hamburg ?joined Adobe in the fall of 1990, not long after Photoshop 1.0 was released and was instrumental in devising many of the "wow" features we have all come to love and rely on daily when we work with Photoshop."
Who's on top in the red-hot unified communications segment? That depends on how you define "top." According to market watcher Infonetics Research, both Cisco Systems Inc. and Microsoft are tops, overall, in the UC space, with Avaya and Nortel also coming on strong. In fact, buyers say that Cisco and Microsoft are their preferred Unified Messaging and Communicator suppliers.
But the struggle is just beginning, Infonetics said, and no single vendor has an ineradicable purchase on UC market leadership.
Advanced developers who want to tell their computer what to do , rather than punch keys or click on icon, may want to check out a "pre-beta" technical preview of Windows Speech Recognition Macros for Vista. The release of the technical preview was announced by the Windows Vista Team Blog on Saturday.
When speech macros are created, the user can speak a word or phrase into the PC's microphone and, if the speech is recognized, an action will be executed.
Silverlight to power live, gavel-to-gavel Web video coverage.Democrats may not know who their presidential candidate will be, but they at least have settled on Microsoft as the official software and HD web content provider for the Democratic National Convention Aug. 25-28 in Denver.
As part of the deal, Microsoft software will be used to support delegate tracking, voting and the management of credentials. During the nomination process, Microsoft technology will support a voting system providing up-to-the-minute delegate vote totals electronically to the Office of the Secretary of the Democratic National Committee.
The software maker in recent months has launched numerous projects that are meant to help reduce its own energy footprint, and the world's. "This is a deliberate effort at our board level," said Rob Bernard, Microsoft's chief environmental strategist, speaking Monday at the Interop tech conference in Las Vegas.
The software maker's efforts to cut its carbon footprint extend from technology to its business practices.
On the tech front, the company's Windows Vista operating system includes energy management features that are superior to those found in the older Windows XP, according to Bernard. Among them: a feature that, after a set period, puts Vista to sleep instead of activating an energy-consuming screen saver.
Microsoft has released beta technologies that allow its network-management software to manage non-Windows environments as
part of the company's strategy to make its software more conducive to managing large datacenters.
Microsoft is releasing beta technology Tuesday for products in its System Center suite that allows the software to natively
manage Linux and Unix environments as well as systems virtualized by VMware's ESX virtualization technology, said Larry Orecklin,
general manager, of System Center marketing. The company unveiled the news at its Microsoft Management Summit, which
is in Las Vegas this week.
An overwhelming
majority of Wall Street analysts see Microsoft preparing shortly to launch a hostile bid for Yahoo at its current price
of $31 per share in cash and stock, a Reuters poll found.
Most Wall Street analysts believe Microsoft now faces a
drawn-out proxy campaign to win its unsolicited takeover of
Yahoo, according to the poll.
By contrast, the general view in February when Microsoft
announced its offer was that Yahoo would agree to a friendly
merger if Microsoft only sweetened its bid. By mid-March a
Reuters poll showed that Wall Street expected Microsoft to buy
Yahoo without raising its price.
Last week, Microsoft's .NET Framework program manager Krzysztof Cwalina announced that his team is working on a new framework for .NET -- Managed Extensibility Framework -- designed to improve compatibility with third-party extensions.
"In the absence of a built-in extensibility framework, our developers who want to enable such extensions often are forced to create custom mechanisms, thus duplication," Cwalina wrote in his blog post announcing the project. "We hope that MEF will both stop such duplication and encourage/enable more extensibility in the Framework and applications built on top of it."
Microsoft spends millions of dollars each year developing security products that it gives to law enforcement agencies, knowing that it may not make any money directly in return. The work is part of the company's efforts to be a good corporate citizen, although there are also some business benefits from the work it does.
The decision to make such investments was never a foregone conclusion. Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, remembers a meeting with Canadian police three years ago when they asked him to spend more money to ramp up the Child Exploitation Tracking System, a software program for hunting down child predators.