WinInsider

Comcast said Wednesday that it had teamed with Microsoft to offer its small and medium-sized business customers new Internet-based communications services built on the Redmond company's productivity platform.The services include the same Microsoft Communication Services that are now mostly used by larger companies with dedicated IT staffs. Now SMBs can utilize the same e-mail, calendaring, and document sharing.

To celebrate the fifth anniversary of Xbox Live, Microsoft is preparing a system update that will be delivered to users starting December 4 and bring support for downloading full versions of older Xbox titles such as "Halo," "Psychonauts" and "Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge.

"While Microsoft has long offered downloads of arcade games via Xbox Live, this will be the first time it is offering full titles. The company says it is planning to sell a library of titles spanning the most popular genres in gaming. The capability is similar to that offered by Nintendo's Wii, which lets gamers buy and download games made for older Nintendo consoles.

Microsoft announced the availability of Customer Care Framework 2008 today, replacing the 2005 Framework edition.

The latest version adds a hosted application toolkit that should make the incorporation of third-party applications into Microsofts desktop application container, also known as the Microsoft Agent Desktop, easier, according to Vish Thirumurthy, Group Product Manager at Microsoft.

The toolkit is able to crawl the UI of a running application and sort out how to integrate with the Agent. For example, it can monitor the API calls on a Win32 application in order to plug the application into the agent or container requiring less coding, according to Rob Helm, director of research at Directions on Microsoft, an analyst agency.

Microsoft is shipping the latest version of its embedded operating system for non-PC devices. The company formally announced the release of Windows Embedded CE 6.0 Release 2 Wednesday at the Embedded Technology 2007 conference in Yokohama, Japan.

Originally named Windows CE, Microsoft changed the name to the longer moniker when it shipped version 6.0 a year ago. The system is used as the basis for several Microsoft device systems, including Windows Mobile, but development of the core system resides in the Windows Embedded Business, a separate organization, Dan Javnozon, senior product manager with the group, told InternetNews.com.

Microsoft officials are seeing a sharp increase in the number of businesses that are starting to test Windows Vista in their environments, and the software maker is looking to fuel that trend with updated tools that help with the testing and migration planning process.

Among these is Microsoft Deploymentformally known as Business Desktop Deployment 2007which provides detailed guidance and aids large-scale deployment projects. Microsoft Deployment can be used to deploy Windows Vista, Office 2007, Windows Server 2003 and prerelease versions of Windows Server 2008.

Forrester Research has issued a new study in which it predicts that at least one-third of enterprises will begin to deploy Windows Vista enterprise-wide by mid-2008.

Driving Vista adoption will be an increase in applications certified as Vista-compatible and new PC form factors which are "ready to run Vista smoothly and at "price points will make compatible machines more affordable than they are today, the Forrester researchers said in their "How Windows Vista Will Shake Up The State Of The Enterprise Operating System report, released on November 12.

With Office becoming an ever-increasing target for malware writers, Microsoft is offering a tool and guidance to help improve the security of Office 2007 and 2003.

The Office 2007 Security Guide will be posted on Microsoft's TechEd site on Tuesday and formally introduced at the Microsoft TechEd conference this week in Barcelona, Spain. The guide will offer detailed documentation for securing Office 2007 applications to protect against specially written document files with malicious code hidden within them.

Demonstrating it can indeed rename a product with something that sounds pleasing and not so euphemistic, Microsoft took the wraps off its replacement for Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 this morning. It will be called Windows HPC Server 2008, and today, the company taped it out for the second half of next year.In its announcement, the company invoked the phrase "Top 500" as though Windows had any claim to it. This morning's performance rankings from the University of Mannheim were less than stellar, with Compute Cluster Server only taking six slots. So Microsoft this morning emphasized not only the change of name, but a change of tune, gently positing the theory that perhaps the Top 500 test doesn't gauge real-world performance.

Microsoft is joining with an international organization for the vision-impaired to produce a plug-in for Word that's meant to transform text into audio for people with severe reading difficulties.

The company announced Tuesday a collaboration with the Digital Accessible Information SYstem Consortium to create a standards-based plug-in for Word XP, Word 2003, and Word 2007 that will be available early next year.

"The timeline aims to have this ready by mid-March next year," Reed Shaffner, worldwide product manager for Microsoft Word, told InternetNews.com.

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said the company sees growth opportunities in emerging countries and the shift to digital advertising.

At the company's annual shareholder meeting today, Ballmer said Microsoft's sales in "BRIC" countries -- Brazil, Russia, India and China -- will grow to almost $3 billion in fiscal 2008 ending in June from about $1 billion three years ago.

It is still only a small percentage of Microsoft's estimated total revenue of close to $60 billion this year, but the company is working to increase revenue in those countries with new business models and better piracy control measures.