Microsoft says it's planning a fall release for the next version of its Web conference service, Office Live Meeting, which will add capabilities including the ability to display live and recorded video during online meetings.
The company is expected to make the announcement Tuesday at its TechEd Conference in Orlando, Fla. It's the third major release of the program since Microsoft's 2003 acquisition of PlaceWare Inc., where the software originated.
Microsoft declined to disclose pricing plans for the new version of Live Meeting. Its competitors include WebEx and IBM's Lotus Web conferencing features.
Microsoft kicked off its 15th annual Microsoft TechEd conference here with a discussion of the company's strategy for "Dynamic IT for the People-Ready Business," as Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the company's server and tools business, put it.
But first, Muglia had to play out the live re-enactment of a scene from the movie "Back to the Future," in which he drove a time machine-enabled DeLorean onstage with the "Doc" character, also known as Christopher Lloyd, from the film.
Microsoft is launching a new program that will give new music artists an opportunity to get discovered by 30 million Zune, MSN, and Xbox users through a program it calls "Ignition."Participants in the offering will receive a month's worth of prominent placement on Zune Marketplace, Zune.net, MSN's entertainment Web site, and Xbox Live Marketplace. The first band to participate is UK based Maximo Park.
However, Microsoft has strict policies about what content it will use. The bands must agree to an exclusive contract with the Redmond company, and promise to provide exclusive content to Microsoft's entertainment properties.
Microsoft has added another "core" product, one that will make Web hosting companies and Web farm administrators happy: Internet Information Services 7.0 is now available as a server core installation on Windows Server 2008.
When Bob Muglia, senior vice president of Server and Tools, made the announcement during the opening keynote of its TechEd conference in Orlando Monday, he received applause from the audience.
Server core represents a new, modular approach by Microsoft with Windows 2008. They allow for installations of only necessary components to fit a specific server role, rather than a large, default installation that takes up much more space.
Security encompasses many aspects of an IT infrastructure, from clients to servers to edge protection to remote protection. It can involve numerous products and technologies spread all over an enterprise, becoming more and more unwieldy over time.
Microsoft has done its part to contribute to security sprawl by releasing no fewer than 10 new security and access products in the last year, under the umbrella designation of the product code-named "Stirling."
To bring all those disparate security elements together and make them manageable from one interface is the goal of the Forefront Server Security Management Console. At its TechEd conference in Orlando Monday, Microsoft announced the beta 2 release of the Stirling management piece.
Microsoft's Beijing-based researchers are analyzing Web surfing patterns to guess computer users' gender, age and other demographic information, a technology the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders worries could be misused by the Chinese government.
As detailed in a paper presented at the May 2007 WWW conference in Banff, Alberta, Microsoft's researchers looked at the Web surfing history for people whose gender and age they knew and applied those data to predict how likely a gender or age group was to visit certain Web sites. The researchers grouped similar Web sites together, assuming people of similar demographic profiles visited similar sites.
Microsoft revealed the official names Monday of the next major upgrades to its Visual Studio software development tools platform and its SQL Server database, which will be called, simply, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008.
The company announced these names during the Microsoft TechEd 2007 conference in Orlando, Fla., which began on Monday. The Visual Studio upgrade had been codenamed "Orcas," while SQL Server has had the "Katmai" code name.
Visual Studio 2008 is due for general release at the end of 2007, said Steve Guggenheimer, general manager of the applications platform at Microsoft.
Microsoft on Friday re-opened MSN Soapbox, the company's competitor to Google's YouTube, after two months of being closed to the public due to copyright concerns. The updated Soapbox now lets anyone view videos without being signed, and includes filtering of content.The filtering technology, provided by Audible Magic, is intended to allow Microsoft to identify when potentially copyrighted material is uploaded to the service. In turn, the company can more easily block access and avoid the lawsuits that are piling up against YouTube from Viacom and others.
Silverlight: One small step for rich Internet application development, one giant step for Microsoft's push into the design and creative professionals market.
Ian Ellison-Taylor, product unit manager for WPF and Silverlight at Microsoft, said the company's trek from a strictly Windows PC focus to a cross-platform, cross-browser tool for delivering rich, graphical user experiences on devices and other platforms was like putting a man on the moon.
"It seemed, just a few years ago, to be this impossible task," Ellison-Taylor said. "And we had so many internal and external detractors all along saying that it would be an incredible task for us to get all the moving parts in place to do something like WPF and Silverlight. But having a little bit of faith, we plowed through it. It was a six-year effort to come out with WPF, and then shortly thereafter the Silverlight part of it.
Microsoft has reached a collaboration deal with Xandros Inc., a distributor of the Linux operating system, containing some similarities to the Redmond company's controversial pact with Novell Inc.
The agreement with Xandros, to be announced Monday, includes a promise by Microsoft to refrain from pursuing patent claims against users of Xandros software.
A similar element in Microsoft's deal with Novell, a larger Linux distributor, caused waves by implying that the open-source program violates Microsoft's patents.