Microsoft announced Tuesday that it is shipping Beta 2 of the first service pack for Exchange Server 2007. With this beta, which is also being called a community technology preview or CTP, Service Pack 1 is now feature complete, according to company officials.
Exchange Server 2007 shipped last December.
Among the new capabilities coming in SP1 is support for Windows Server 2008 -- which is set for official launch on February 27, 2008 -- as well as support for Windows Vista. That means Exchange Server 2007 SP1 will be able to take advantage of Windows Server 2008's support for geographically-dispersed clusters. SP1 will also run Exchange Server 2007's management tools on both Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.
In yet another sign of Windows XP's refusal to quietly slink away and make way for Windows Vista, Microsoft has announced that it is releasing another version of XP Professional because it's run out of product keys.
On a TechNet Blog, Microsoft stated that XP Pro, service pack 2c exists for no reason except to provide a way to get new copies of the OS. SP2c doesn't include any new features or functionality.
Microsoft said that SP2c will be released into the system builder channel in September. "Due to the longevity of Windows XP Professional, it has become necessary to produce more product keys for system builders in order to support the continued availability of Windows XP Professional," states the blog entry.
Microsoft challenged a U.S. government report that says a prototype mobile Internet device may interfere with broadcast television signals and wireless microphones.
A damaged component skewed last month's findings by the Federal Communications Commission's Office of Engineering and Technology, Microsoft wrote in a letter to the FCC Monday.
Microsoft and Google Inc. are part of a group of companies that submitted devices that work with television airwaves known as white spaces, which are unused in several U.S. cities. The companies want the airwaves to offer free Internet access and other applications after broadcasters convert to digital signals in 2009.
Microsoft asked an appeals court to throw out a finding that it must pay a Michigan company $142 million for infringing patents for a way to thwart software piracy.
Microsoft said Thursday a federal court jury in Tyler, Texas, got it wrong in 2006 when it said Microsoft's Office program and Windows XP operating system infringed two patents owned by z4 Technologies Inc. The jury awarded $115 million in damages, increased by the judge because of a finding that Microsoft's infringement was willful.
Microsoft is apparently beginning its long, slow move to more efficient next-generation Xbox 360 consoles. But don't get too excited, as the cooler-running (and quieter) CPUs aren't quite ready yet. Instead, Microsoft is beginning with a new version of the Xbox 360 "premium" console (which is really just called "Xbox 360," compared with the Xbox 360 Core System and Xbox 360 Elite) which adds the HDTV-compatible HDMI A/V port that was previously only found on the high-end Elite. The new versions of the console are being quietly pushed in the market now, with no announcement from Microsoft. This leaves the Core System as the only version without HDMI.
Ford Motor Co. said Thursday that Sync, its in-car communication and entertainment system developed with Microsoft, will cost $395 as an option when it debuts this fall on the Ford Focus, Ford Edge and Lincoln MKX.
Sync, which will be on nine other 2008 Ford models by the end of the year, allows drivers, using either voice recognition or steering wheel controls, to listen to their digital music players and have text messages on their cell phones read aloud.
Consumers provide their own digital players, such as Apple Inc.'s iPod or Microsoft's Zune.
Microsoft is testing out a new personalized homepage for Live.com that integrates separate Windows Live services into a single "dashboard." The site, located at home.live.com, displays new e-mails, blog postings from friends, and links to try out other Windows Live services like OneCare and SkyDrive.
The Redmond company hopes that by unifying its Windows Live services onto a single page, it may convince Hotmail or Spaces users to try other offerings they may not know about. Microsoft has struggled to draw consumers to its new services despite the new branding. Unified homepages are nothing new, as both Google and Yahoo offer similar sites, along with upstarts like Netvibes.
Microsoft has lost a key vote in its quest to develop an alternative to the Open Document Format standard, backed by the open-source community.
The executive committee of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards fell one vote shy of the nine required to approve Microsoft's Open XML standard. It voted 8 to 7 in favor of approval with one abstention, the group announced Thursday.
The vote is a setback in a long-running battle between Microsoft and those who are seeking to dislodge Microsoft's monopoly hold on the desktop with internationally approved standards for office documents. The battle has pitted Microsoft against open-source backers like Sun and IBM, whose rival ODF has gained some support among government users.
Microsoft has submitted two of its Shared Source licenses to the Open Source Initiative for review and approval as open-source licenses: the Microsoft Permissive and Microsoft Community licenses.
The Redmond, Wash., software company did not submit the Microsoft Reference, Microsoft Limited Permissive or the Microsoft Limited Community licenses to the OSI for review.
The move comes more than two weeks after Bill Hilf, Microsoft's general manager of platform strategy, used his keynote address at the annual O'Reilly Open Source Conference in Portland, Ore., to announce its licensing plans.
Windows Live branding has been nothing to write home about. It turns out even the Live codenames have been a source of confusion.
Case in point: Windows Live Folder Share and Windows Live Folders.
Microsoft execs including Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie himself led folks astray a while back by using the LiveDrive codename to refer to a "cloud storage service. In fact, that service was code-named SkyDrive.