WinInsider

Microsoft Corporate Vice President Chris Capossela announced a new search product developed in partnership with consulting giant BearingPoint at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference here on July 10.

The product, called SingleView, is built on top of Microsoft's SharePoint 2007 collaboration portal and is already being used by dozens of large enterprise customers, according to Chris Weitz, managing director and global practice leader of search solutions at McLean, Va.-based BearingPoint.

Microsoft is spending another $50 million to pump up sales, marketing, training and other support for its Forefront line of security products, the company announced July 11 at its Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver. It's also expanding eligibility so that more partners can take advantage of the up to 30 percent additional fees that they can receive through its Security Software Advisor program.

Forefront is Microsoft's battering ram when it comes to breaking into the enterprise security market. When the Redmond, Wash. company launched the first pieces of Forefront Dec. 8, analysts such as Gartner's John Pescatore predicted that Microsoft's entrance into the market would not only cause pricing pressure, but would also give industry stalwarts like McAfee and Symantec a swift kick in the pants, innovation-wise.

Microsoft is expected to try to use cut-rate pricing to compete with Salesforce.com and other software-as-a-service players when it finally launches its Dynamics CRM Live service in 2008.

At its Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver on July 10, Microsoft went public with its pricing and packaging for Dynamics CRM Live, a k a Microsoft CRM 4.0, code-named "Titan. Microsoft is planning to release two versions of its Dynamics CRM Live service: Professional and Enterprise.

Microsoft will invest $20 million in several new technologies and initiatives over the next year to help extend its Dynamics partner ecosystem to ensure that partners can meet market demand and increase their growth rates.

"This $20 million investment will be very targeted at training 4,000 technical people within partner organizations and recruiting 1,000 additional specialists for partner organizations," said Barb Edson, director of marketing for Microsoft Dynamics.

"Our top partners each have an average of eight open positions in their organizations, so this is much-needed assistance," Edson said.

Aiming to rally its partners around the reality of hosted software, Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner told them it was a matter of financial life and death.

"We have to change faster internally than the world is changing externally or we will be obsolete," Turner said, as part of his speech, which kicked off Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference here.

While change is hard, Turner said Microsoft's partners need to be ready to offer customers the choice of running software on their own servers or subscribing to hosted services. "It doesn't mean locally based software is going away, but customers want the choice."

Microsoft on Tuesday took the wraps off what it calls version 1 of its new Malware Protection Center Portal. The site offers a malware encyclopedia for investigating threats, downloads of Microsoft's latest antivirus and anti-spyware signatures, listings of the top threats and other tools.In addition, Microsoft has begun publishing a Security Intelligence Report that provides an in-depth look at software vulnerabilities. The effort to create the site comes as part of Microsoft's initiative to make its security division more open and public-facing. In addition, the company is encouraging customers to upload samples of files they think are infected, which could aid in protecting others.

Those still considering whether to make the jump to Windows Vista will have additional help with today's 2.0 release of Microsoft's Vista Hardware Assessment Tool. The application takes inventory of a computer system and makes recommendations if upgrades are required.

Version 2.0 of the Assessment Tool is primarily designed for businesses with a large number of systems networked together. It automatically connects to each PC and acquires the necessary information through Microsoft's WMI protocol, and can handle up to 25,000 systems per domain. The tool also prepares reports displaying how many systems are Vista-ready, and assesses compatibility with Office 2007 as well.

Three of the biggest names in high tech are buddying up to improve the security of IT systems for government agencies.

Microsoft, Cisco Systems and EMC have created service configurations under the Secure Information Sharing Architecture, which is designed to protect and share sensitive government information.

The move is a response to the events of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina as well as the raft of data breaches floating around government agencies and other sectors in the last few years.

Microsoft is stepping up its campaign to get more independent software vendors to integrate Office front-ends with their own business applications.

There already exist a number of these Office-front-ended applications which Microsoft has christened Office Business Applications, or OBAs. Some are commercial applications, like the jointly developed Microsoft-SAP Duet. Others are custom-built proprietary applications, via which a company mashes up Office with its own line-of-business application, for in-house use.

Microsoft has its head in the Internet cloud.

The software maker has been talking for some time about its plans to have a full-fledged platform that lives on its servers, as opposed to a set of discrete services, as is the case today. However, the company has been extremely short on details. During a speech at the Worldwide Partner Conference here Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer didn't quite answer all the questions. But he did promise more news will come sooner rather than later, while also offering a few hints as to where the company is headed. During the presentation, Microsoft also pledged to share more information with partners and developers.