Microsoft is using the back-to-school season as the backdrop for its latest promotion to increase sales of its Office 2007 productivity suite. Beginning today in the US, Canada, and UK, and beginning September 20 in Spain, Italy, and France the company is offering students the chance to purchase Office Ultimate 2007 for $59.95 USD. The promotion runs through April 30, 2008.
Office Ultimate includes nine applications from the suite including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, Publisher, OneNote, Groove, and Infopath. Microsoft had run a pilot program of the offering in Australia which received good results. "We're listening to students who have told us they need Microsoft Office for their studies and want more flexible ways to get the latest version," said Alan Yates, general manager of Worldwide Education at Microsoft. More information on the offering can be found on the Microsoft website.
When it comes to Japan and the Xbox 360, you can't say that Microsoft isn't trying. Microsoft said it is attracting to the platform some of the biggest names in Japanese gaming to produce games in 2007 and beyond during a press event at the Tokyo Game Show on Wednesday.
By any standard, the Xbox 360 has been an abject failure in Japan, the home of both Sony and Nintendo. Even in the PS3's darkest days in the country, it was still outselling Microsoft's console by at least a 2 to 1 margin. But to Microsoft's credit, they're not taking it sitting down.
Microsoft has launched an attack on Google in which it seeks to dissuade businesses from downloading Google Apps.
The attack came in a statement on Monday, the same day Google signed a deal with Capgemini to promote its office-productivity software among businesses.
Capgemini, a global consulting firm, is to offer desktop support and installation services to large corporations running Google Apps Premier Edition, the premium version of Google's Web-based package. Google Apps includes a word processor, calendar and mail functions, and so is a direct rival to Microsoft Office.
Microsoft may be having trouble selling Windows Vista in retail, but its Office line is going like gangbusters, according to market research firm NPD Group. Part of the reason: People who switch from PCs to Macs.
Office 2007 on Windows is selling at roughly double the rate its predecessor, Office 2003, did in its first months after release, NPD analyst Chris Swenson said Wednesday. "Any way you cut it, the first six months, or a similar January-through-July period, or the first week or even the first month [of sales], no matter how you slice it, Office 2007 is selling much better than Office 2003 did," said Swenson.
Microsoft on Wednesday released documentation that details changes it has made to Windows Vista in the upcoming Service Pack 1 in order to accommodate third-party desktop search engines.
The Vista SP1 beta, which will bow in the next few weeks, contains the promised changes. But part of what is needed is documentation on how the changes actually work. The company posted three documents on its site to enable third parties to tie into Vista's desktop search capabilities.
Microsoft agreed to make changes to Vista SP1 in June after search giant Google complained to federal regulators that it was being frozen out of Vista's desktop search capabilities.
Sun Microsystems and Microsoft have significantly expanded their existing relationship in an agreement that makes Sun a Windows Server 2003 OEM that will sell, pre-install and support that server software across its entire server hardware line.
Windows Server 2003 will be available on Sun x64 systems within 90 days, and Sun will also provide other utilities and value-added software offerings to server systems carrying Windows Server, John Fowler, the executive vice president of Sun's Systems Group, said at a media briefing on Sept. 12.
Microsoft has won a patent for a digital-watermarking technology that could be used to protect the rights of content owners even when digital music is distributed without DRM protection.
The technology, called "stealthy audio watermarking," inserts and detects watermarks in audio signals that can identify the content producer, "providing a signature that is embedded in the audio signal and cannot be removed," according to a filing with the U.S. Patent and Trade Organization.
As VMware steps into the virtualization limelight in San Francisco at its VMworld conference Sept. 11, Microsoft is trying to steal some of that thunder by making a number of announcements of its own.
Microsoft, of Redmond, Wash., is announcing that it plans to deliver the first release candidate of Windows Server 2008 later this month.
The first Community Technology Preview of Windows Server Virtualization, code-named Viridian, will be released at the same time, Larry Orecklin, Microsoft's general manager of marketing for System Center, said at a media event Sept. 10.
Microsoft is adding capabilities for RFID and EDI to its BizTalk Server business process management platform as well as making BizTalk friendlier for application developers.
Being released Monday, BizTalk Server 2006 R2 adds a device abstraction layer enabling it to record information from RFID systems. Relevant RFID reads are connected to core supply chain processes or enterprise applications. Business rules can be applied to the data coming from the RFID readers.
"This is the first time that we've shipped any RFID technology from Microsoft," Burley Kawasaki, director in the Microsoft Connected Systems Division, said.
Microsoft's next release of Office for Mac, due in January, will include business features that PC users have taken for granted for years. That will include the ability to set up out-of-office messages, according to a preview in Microsoft's Office for Mac team blog.
"With Entourage 2008, you now have the ability to configure your out-of-office settings," said Andy Ruff, program manager for Entourage, the counterpart of Outlook in the Macintosh version of Microsoft Office.