Microsoft finally has gone public with the planned launch dates for two of its Business Division server products.
PerformancePoint Server 2007 Microsofts latest business-intelligence add-on, which is a business-scorecarding product will launch officially on September 19, 2007.
Microsoft released the most recent test version of PerformancePoint Server, Community Technology Preview release 4, the week of August 13. The test build is?? available to any interested parties for download from Microsofts Connect site.
Microsoft has unveiled an application that combines its Silverlight technology with Windows Live Search, code-named "Tafiti." The name means "to search" in Swahili. It integrates the various types of Live Search, and allows users to store and share search results by placing them on "shelves." From there they can be stored or e-mailed or blogged about. Tafiti runs on any browser and platform that Siverlight is compatible with.
In addition to the virtual shelves, the application also includes a carousel to help the user navigate through returned search results, and a tree view where search results are placed on the limbs of a tree and allows for visualization of search results.
Customers of Microsoft's AdCenter are being invited to participate in the company's first foray in the field of context-sensitive, text-only advertising - the product that many say established Google's permanent presence in online services.
Displaying its typical flair for draining all the poetry out of the naming process, Microsoft Content Ads enters the beta process one week from tomorrow, with the promise of opening up formerly premium MSN ad inventory to low-cost clients.
Perhaps the company should have called it "Context Ads." Like AdWords, customers pay a flat fee to begin Content Ads (in this case, $5), and then submit bids for keywords that may appear in MSN Web pages.
This much we know: Skype's two-day outage was triggered after its peer-to-peer network became disrupted following a massive restart of its users' computers as they rebooted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update.
The blitzkrieg of restarts caused a flood of log-in requests, which led to a global bog down in service. In the course of the outage, Skype engineers discovered a software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm that prevented the service from righting itself.
The first commercial release of Office Communications Server 2007 will be unveiled to the public on October 16, Microsoft announced this morning. Along with it will be the Office Communicator client - the company's professional grade on-screen messaging service - as well as the next edition of Live Meeting, whose conferencing features will be upgraded to support OC. The move comes a day after Microsoft publicly made nice with Cisco, which is otherwise one of its principal competitors in the communications space.
Social-networking site Bebo Inc. said Tuesday it will launch a Microsoft-powered instant-messaging program this fall.
The deal signals early, if niche, support for a Microsoft plan to build a business around letting other sites incorporate its Windows Live Web services.
The Bebo-branded IM will have limited compatibility with Microsoft's own services, consistent with a tendency for social-networking sites to build "walled" communities with restrictions on who can contact whom and how elsewhere online. IM services also have tended to operate independently, although those walls have started to come down.
Microsoft moved to lower the price of its Xbox 360 console in Europe on Monday, about two weeks after it made a similar move in the United States and Canada. In EU countries, the price of the high-end console drops by 50 euros to 349.99 euros ($470 USD), while the Core model drops 20 euros to 279.99 euros ($378 USD). In addition, the Xbox 360 Elite will premiere at a price of 449.99 euros on August 24.
The price cuts are intended to fend off stronger than anticipated competition from Nintendo and its Wii, which have been selling at a torrid pace since its release last November.
From the too-good-to-be-true files: Windows Home Server?? is not going to launch on August 27. It sounds like the launch of the product is still on schedule for late September-early October. Long Zheng of istartedsomething.com discovered WHS as listed as "generally available as of August 27. But that date is not what it seems, a Microsoft spokeswoman said. Some distributors outside the U.S. already have begun posting prices for Windows Home Server, starting at $150 per system-builder copy," according to Computerworld.
In a strange public display combining affection and disaffection, Cisco CEO John Chambers and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer appeared jointly before a small crowd of select journalists. Between them, there was no major new revelations to announce, though the companies are attempting to publicly demonstrate that major corporations can decide amicably to collaborate in certain areas and maintain a competitive stance in others.
It's not a bad goal: a strategic peace forged between companies that each maintain their respective interests. It's even better when you realize the companies involved have, in the past, strayed out of bounds with their respective competitive strategies.
Jeff Jones, a director in the Microsoft security group, this week published a comparison of system vulnerabilities in various OSs for the month of July and the results are interesting, if predictable. Vista, by far, is the most secure OS in the sense that it's required the fewest fixes. Windows XP also performed pretty well, but various UNIX OSs and Mac OS X did terribly; Sun Microsystems isn't included in this month's review because Sun has apparently begun hiding its results. On the server side, Windows Server 2003 predictably trumps the Linux competition as well. Jones also compiled year-to-date results and, yeah, they're pretty similar: Windows wins big on both the client and the server. For more information, check out Jones' interesting blog post.