The wait is nearly over for the first service pack for Windows Vista, according to sources close to Microsoft.
Microsoft has said the highly anticipated service pack would be out in the first quarter of this year, but some say it could
be available in the next few weeks, more than a month before the quarter ends on March 31.
A Taiwanese news outlet Wednesday reported in a story that Vista SP1 would be released Feb. 15, but "that date is as good
as any other," said Michael Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft. "For all we know, they could make it available
tomorrow.
In keeping with its ongoing aim to not "break the Web" with major changes to the Internet Explorer rendering engine, Microsoft this week revealed how it will handle its support of Web standards in the next version of the Web browser. IE 8 will sport three different compatibility modes, up from two in IE 7, one of which will more firmly conform to modern Web standards. There's just one problem: This new more rigid standards mode won't be enabled by default because, Microsoft says, enabling it will break compatibility with too much of the existing Web. According to Chris Wilson, an IE platform architect, there are half a billion IE users and "billions" of pages on the Web today that already work in IE 6 and IE 7.
Microsoft is putting more money into an initiative that provides technology and computer training to educators and students around the world -- acknowledging that it also wants to help its own business by getting more of them to use its products.
In Berlin on Wednesday, Bill Gates is expected to announce a five-year, $235.5 million investment in the company's "Partners in Learning" program. The company is expanding the program beyond kindergarten through 12th grade to colleges and universities. Microsoft says the new money will bring its total investment in the program to about $500 million over 10 years.
Microsoft plans to acquire San Jose, Calif.-based Calista Technologies Inc. as part of a larger effort to catch up in a growing area of the corporate technology market.
Calista's specialty is making networks run smoothly for virtualized computer desktops -- situations in which the computing takes place on a remote server, but feels to users as though it is happening on a machine sitting next to their keyboard and screen.
The acquisition is part of a broader attempt by Microsoft to position itself in the market for virtualization, a broad term for a series of technological tricks that let companies use software and hardware in more flexible ways. Other types of virtualization include the ability to run multiple operating systems on a single computer or server.
Windows Server 2008 rounds the corner toward release at the end of next month. And the Microsoft Learning Group, for its part, has been keeping pace with new exams that are slated to be generally available at Prometric testing centers soon after the software hits shelves. According to blog posts from Trika Harms zum Spreckel, a member of the marketing team in the Microsoft Learning Group, MCPs will see a healthy mix of MCTS and MCITP exams in the weeks to come.
Open source data integration vendor Talend has been working with Microsoft to build better interoperability between Talend's
Open Studio product and Microsoft's business software, Talend said Tuesday.
Open Studio is an ETL tool that has been downloaded more than 150,000 times, according to Talend.
The company also makes an on-demand version of the product, and an Integration Suite for use by teams.
In Berlin on Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled a product package aimed at local and regional e-government initiatives, in the midst
of growing government opposition in Europe to proprietary software.
Microsoft's Citizen Service Platform includes applications and templates designed for local and regional governments primarily
in Europe and the United States. It is built on products, including SharePoint, Office Live, and Windows Server.
While Microsoft has been selling software to the public sector for years, it has recently begun focusing on local governments
after discovering that many people interact with their local governments more often than the federal government, said Ralph
Young, vice president of Microsoft's Worldwide Public Sector group.
Microsoft this week is updating a two-year-old toolset meant to smooth the migration for customers switching from Lotus Notes and Domino to its own competing products.
Dubbed the Microsoft Transporter Suite for Lotus Domino, the free package provides tools designed to ease the transition to Exchange Server, Office SharePoint Server and the Office productivity applications suite from IBM Lotus Notes and Domino, according to company statements.
Whereas the Transporter Suite previously enabled systems administrators to migrate as many as tens of thousands of users at a time, the most significant change in the update aims to greatly expand that.
Arguably, we need to be saved from XP. Or at least from the hermitic Luddites that don't want computing to advance past 2001: In a bald PR move, InfoWorld has launched a "Save XP" campaign, aimed ostensibly at convincing Microsoft not to retire its aging previous Windows version this year as planned. So far 30,000 people (read: Gleeful Mac and Linux users) have signed the petition, and while I'm sure at least some of them mean well, the rest need to get a life. Vista is vastly superior to XP and most of its so-called problems are really the fault of lazy third part developers who didn't get their applications and hardware compatible in a timely manner. Keeping XP rolling long would just make this problem even worse.
As a crucial global standards meeting looms next month regarding the future of Microsoft's Office XML-based file formats, the company is going all out to make sure it gets its message out.
On Wednesday, Microsoft held a briefing near its sprawling corporate campus for select members of the international press in a move to present its side of what has devolved into an extremely contentious debate over the standardization of file formats for productivity applications.
On Monday, the group that's been shepherding the formats through the arduous standardization process, made its last major filing to the international standards body that has them under considerations.