In July, Microsoft announced its intentions to deliver a number of licensing technologies to third-party vendors interesting in deploying Microsoft-like activation and licensing in their products
One of those components, the Software Licensing and Protection Server, is likely to be released to manufacturing on August 31, according to a Microsoft blog entry by a member of the SLP team.
The SLP server will allow third-party software vendors to host their own servers and create software licenses -- machine-based, time-based, user-based and/or feature-based -- for their products.
In its regular progress report for Microsoft's compliance with the terms of its antitrust settlement, the US Justice Dept. stated today that it believes that since the settlement, there's significant evidence of a more competitive market unhindered by the presence or conduct of Microsoft.
Though the entire DOJ filing had not been publicly released by this afternoon, excerpts cited from a press release show the Dept. wrote, "Since the entry of the Final Judgments, there have been a number of developments in the competitive landscape relating to middleware and to PC operating systems generally that suggest that the Final Judgments are accomplishing their stated goal of fostering competitive conditions among middleware products, unimpeded by anticompetitive exclusionary obstacles erected by Microsoft."
The long-running legal battle between Microsoft and Eolas Technologies, which Microsoft was losing, has been settled. The two firms agreed to an undisclosed settlement that resolves the case.
The lawsuit dates back to February 1999, when Eolas, a spin-off from the University of California, filed suit against Microsoft for alleged patent infringement involving plug-in and applet technology. The company accused Microsoft of using its patented technology in Windows 98, Windows 95 and Internet Explorer.
Company officials said on Wednesday that the Windows team plans to deliver a near-public beta of XP SP3 by mid-September.
The final version of XP SP3 is slated to hit some time in the first half of calendar 2008, officials said. (Thats the same date the Softies have been promising officially for a while now. Microsoft wont be any more specific on XP SP3 timing.) Company officials did not release a feature set for XP SP3 on August 29. The only new piece of information available was the public-beta due date.
Probably in response to a few users' bewilderment over the seemingly unrestricted accessibility of what had actually been one of Windows Vista's most requested new security tools, Group Policy Management Console, Microsoft announced today that the act of installing Vista Service Pack 1 will simply delete the tool altogether."
Administrators requested features in Group Policy that simplify policy management," reads a white paper released by Microsoft this afternoon. "To do this, the service pack will uninstall the Group Policy Management Console and GPEdit.msc will edit local Group Policy by default."
Microsoft revealed Aug. 29 that it will not release Windows Server 2008, the successor to Windows Server 2003, on time.
In a posting to the company's TechNet site, a Microsoft spokesman confessed that "Windows Server 2008, which we have been saying would Release to Manufacturing by the end of the calendar year, is now slated to RTM in the first quarter of calendar year 2008."
The blogger quoted Program Manager Alex Hinrichs as saying, "It just needs a little more time to bake."
The delay cannot come as much of a surprise to customers and partners, who have watched the Redmond, Wash., giant stumble out of the gate with new product introductions, most recently Vista.
After weeks of confusion over when the beta of Windows Vista's first service pack will see the light of day, Microsoft finally announced a tentative schedule today. The bad news is that the beta is still a ways off.
In fact, the most that Microsoft will say in trying to pin down the start of beta testing for Vista Service Pack 1 is "in a few weeks." As to when it will be available as final code, the company is saying that the current schedule pegs "release to manufacturing" or RTM as coming in the first quarter of 2008.
Looking to assist developers in building business applications, Microsoft published a second beta version of ADO.Net Entity Framework this week and a community technology preview of tools to work with the framework.
The goal of the ADO.Net Entity Framework is to eliminate the impedance mismatch between data models and languages, saving developers from having to deal with these. An example of such a mismatch is objects and relational stores.
Microsoft announced on Wednesday plans to acquire Parlano, a developer of group chat applications for large corporate customers. The software giant plans to add Chicago-based Parlano's MindAlign group chat functionality as a new feature to several of its products, such as Microsoft Office Communications Server, Microsoft Office Communicator and its instant messaging and VoIP software.
Parlano's technology allows employees, customers, partners and others to chime in on a particular topic via instant messaging, as well as search for past "conversations" on a particular type of topic from previous instant messaging discussions. Terms of the detail were not disclosed. Microsoft expects to close the acquisition during the fourth quarter.
update AutoPatcher, a 4-year-old project to distribute Microsoft patches and other updates to software that runs on Windows, has shut down because of a Microsoft request.
"Today we received an e-mail from Microsoft, requesting the immediate takedown of the download page, which of course means that AutoPatcher is probably history," said project manager Antonis Kaladis in a post Wednesday. "As much as we disagree, we can do very little, and...we took the download page down."