Microsoft's SharePoint Server is on a billion-dollar quest to potentially become the next must-have technology, offering companies tools for building everything
from collaborative applications to Internet sites and potentially handing Microsoft its next cash cow.
"I have not seen anything like this since the early days of [Lotus] Notes," says Mike Gotta, an analyst with the Burton Group.
In those days, corporate users were enamored with a shiny new technology that seemed to have infinite uses. "The talk [around
SharePoint] is getting strategic now, and people are talking about it as a middleware decision," Gotta says.
Microsoft last week made available its set of IT deployment tools and practices called Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2008. The solution is designed to help IT personnel install Microsoft operating systems and solutions across servers. It helps IT automate desktop installations within an organization.
MDT is the successor to Business Desktop Deployment 2007. MDT has similar functionality to BDD, but it also enables imaging.
"We changed the name from BDD because you can now build images and deploy desktops and servers with the same toolkit and we thought MDT better reflected that functionality," stated Microsoft's official MDT Team Blog concerning the name shift.
It's the language that Microsoft's opponents in Europe claim the company is using as a possible proprietary bypass of HTML. But now, that opposition will have to face the fact that nearly every scintilla of detail about XAML is in the public record.The second bit of news emerging from Microsoft today on the interoperability front comes from its release of complete documentation for its existing 2006 implementation of Extensible Application Markup Language: both the object mapping specification and the vocabulary specification for Windows Presentation Foundation.
Microsoft plans this summer to release the first service pack for phone systems that run its Response Point communications software for small businesses.
Unlike many service packs that provide patches but no new features, Service Pack 1 for Response Point will add new capabilities to the system's voice over Internet Protocol functions, Microsoft said in a statement.
The announcement came during the first day of the company's Small Business Summit 2008, its third such annual event. SP1 will be available as a free download to existing customers of phone systems running Response Point.
One way to make yourself accessible to others is by offering a valuable service that they can't easily turn down. Microsoft hopes it's doing that today by offering users of LinkedIn, Facebook, and three other platforms a way to consolidate their contacts...through Windows Live.
Rarely does a week go by without Microsoft announcing another interoperability initiative; the company has put forth two new ones just this morning. One deals not so much with making some Microsoft product accessible to the outside world as it does with offering a kind of bridge between social media platforms, although it's hard to escape noticing that this bridge runs right through Windows Live Messenger.
Microsoft expects license sales of its Windows Mobile operating system to outpace the overall growth in advanced mobile phones known as smartphones over the next few years, a top company executive said on Monday.
Microsoft entertainment and devices division president Robbie Bach said he expects phones running Windows Mobile to gain market share as the overall smartphone market nearly quadruples in size over the next three to four years to around 400 million handsets.
Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, the world's top software and PC firms, on Thursday announced plans for a new technology center in Taiwan, the world's computer-manufacturing hub.
Companies such as HP and Dell are the world's top sellers of PCs, but most of the actual hardware -- about 80 percent of all laptops -- is made by Taiwan firms including Quanta Computer and Compal Electronics.
"Microsoft and HP solution centers will help advance the technology of our Taiwanese business partners and corporate clients," John Knutsen, global Microsoft technology center director, said at a news conference.
More than charity lies behind Microsoft and Intel's announcement this week that they will donate $20 million to a pair of U.S. colleges in the hope of spurring
advances in parallel, or multicore, programming research, as a Microsoft research scientist readily acknowledged.
"There is a worldwide shortage of people experienced in parallel computing experience, for sure," said Dan Reed, director
of scalable and multicore computing at Microsoft. "One of the collateral reasons is to raise awareness in the academic community,
because that's where the next generation of developers will come from."
While for years, ever-higher clock speeds almost guaranteed that application code would run faster and faster, the rules are
different for the multicore processors of today.
According to numerous reports on the Web, Vista Service Pack 1 and Windows XP SP3 may both be released this week, possibly as soon as Tuesday.
One major source of clues about the Vista SP1 release date is Amazon.com, which has made the next version of Microsoft's new operating system available for presale. Amazon is currently showing it will have Vista SP1 available for sale on March 19, but the descriptive text mentions that the products will be "released on March 18, 2008."
A number of exams that count toward the MCDBA, MCAD and MCSD titles will sail into the sunset in 2009. This according to a Microsoft blog post from Trika Harms zum Spreckel, a member of the marketing team in the Microsoft Learning Group.
Twelve exams make up the unofficial list, according to her post, but explained that the group has yet to finalize the list and make it definitive. "We'll include a notice in the MCP newsletter when it is published and official," she wrote.