Microsoft has a new sales pitch for Linux users: Buy our software and stay out of court.
The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant has expanded the indemnity provisions that go with its software licensing agreements to remove a perennial sticking point in sales negotiations: who picks up the tab if a Microsoft customer gets sued because of Microsoft's products.
In older contracts, Microsoft agreed to pay all legal fees for volume license customers who got sued because of Microsoft, but only up to the value of the software they bought. Under the new provision, which took effect March 1, Microsoft removed the liability cap in intellectual property suits and altered other parts of the agreements that potentially expand its liability.
As software releases go, they don't get much bigger than a new version of Microsoft Office. Microsoft's famous application suite isn't just software's 800-pound gorilla, it's King Kong and Godzilla rolled into one. Analysts estimate that Microsoft commands 95 percent of the office application market, despite competitors like Corel WordPerfect Office and Sun StarOffice.
Later this year (no one knows exactly when), Microsoft will unleash its latest version--Office 2003--on an unsuspecting public. There's just one problem: Microsoft has passed the point of diminishing returns on its Office updates, and users are figuring it out. Office 2003, currently in preview form, may not set consumers afire; but businesses may like what they see. Here's a sneak peak.
Microsoft on Monday pointed developers to two security guides to help companies create and use more secure software components after a number of critics took the company to task for common flaws in ActiveX components. ActiveX allows Web site developers to add interactivity by executing software components on a PC. Flaws in the components, however, can be abused by online vandals to take control of a person's computer.
"An ActiveX control can be an extremely insecure way to provide a feature," Microsoft stated on its site. One guide discussed how to design a secure ActiveX component, while another detailed how to use Microsoft's SiteLock security software to make ActiveX more secure.
Microsoft has expanded the job description of its competitive business strategist and appointed a more senior person to the job. The Redmond, Washington, software vendor named company veteran Martin Taylor "platform strategist" as part of its end-of-financial-year staff shuffle, a company spokeswoman said last week.
Taylor succeeds Peter Houston, who as senior director of server strategy had been tasked with driving Microsoft's competitive server business strategy with respect to Linux and other open source products. The job has been expanded from just servers to cover all Windows platforms. Also, Taylor is higher up in Microsoft's hierarchy as a "general manager" of competitive strategy.
Microsoft announced an upgrade to its Small Business Manager software on Monday, adding a host of features and introducing flexible pricing. Small Business Manager 7.5 is the next version up from Small Business Manager 7.0, which was introduced in December last year. The product, first released in November 2001, is aimed at businesses that have outgrown off-the-shelf software packages, but with under US$5 million in revenue and no more than 25 employees.
"We're on a pretty aggressive product release cycle, about every 6 months. We are adding big bulks of functionality each time," said Karen Engel, a Fargo, North Dakota-based group product manager in Microsoft's Business Solutions division.
Company's annual Faculty Summit will highlight e-Learning programs and projects, among fruits from other Microsoft Research teams. At its annual Faculty Summit in Redmond next week, Microsoft will show off the fruits of some of its latest research projects. At the same time, the software kingpin will highlight new programs it is instituting to build its base of academic developers and users. In part, Microsoft is stepping up its academic outreach efforts in order to stave off potential encroachments from the open-source community.
The integration of XML with forms technologies holds strong potential for the enterprise, especially in industries like insurance and health care which make heavy use of forms. The emerging technologies promise significant increases in both efficiency and accuracy, as they allow organizations to capture data directly from forms and feed it into backend databases, where business processes can be applied to it to automate workflow.
Microsoft committed to capturing the nascent market early on and will deliver a core application, dubbed InfoPath, with the Microsoft Office 2003 Professional Enterprise Edition, slated for release this summer. Now Adobe Systems has thrown its hat into the ring, unveiling plans to develop new form design software that will allow users to deploy forms in Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) or in an XML Data Package (XDP) as desired.
When folks think of storage software, often times the first names that come to mind might be Veritas, HP, IBM, or even EMC these days. But Microsoft? Well, it's true. The Redmond, Wash. software giant has been gaining momentum in a niche of the storage software market known as NAS, or network-attached storage.
NAS is hard disk storage that is set up with its own network address rather than being attached to the department computer that is serving applications to a network's workstation users. By moving storage, which more often than not takes up a lot of space, off of the department server and onto the local area network, applications and files can be piped from one location to the next because they are not competing for the same resources.
With a newly designed connection manager, it's now trivial to make a connection to the corporate network or to the Internet. And to secure the connection, WM2k3 adds support for multiple VPNs, 802.1x, IPSec L2TP tunnels, and encryption, using 128-bit SSL and/or 128-bit CAPI. WM2k3 devices have all the necessary protocol support required to connect securely to a company's internal network.
In addition to the simple file access and terminal services support inherent in its device, Microsoft is also introducing key new Server and Services functionality later this year. At its annual TechEd conference in early June, Microsoft distributed a copy of Release Candidate 1 of its upcoming Exchange Server 2003. In just under four hours, I installed a configuration with Windows Server 2003 and Exchange Server 2003 that allowed me to remotely synchronize my Pocket PC device directly from the server without requiring a desktop with ActiveSync loaded.
Microsoft began a testing program on Tuesday for its forthcoming SQL Server database software, code-named Yukon. About 200 customers and partners are taking part, the Redmond, Wash. company said.
The software maker says by the first half of next year it will have a "public beta" for Yukon, where anyone can sign up and test out the database. A final version is slated for the second half of 2004. The Yukon version of SQL Server promises to allow users to create business reports of historical data using Microsoft's Office programs. It also will be designed to work closely with Microsoft's Visual Studio.Net, a development tool.