WinInsider

Microsoft's back-end servers will be the talk of the Dallas confab that starts Sunday. Expect to hear plenty about "Jupiter," Microsoft's e-business suite that's designed to go head-to-head with IBM WebSphere. And Microsoft execs will be talking up "Yukon," the next rev of SQL Server, as well.. We'll be updating our page all week with reports from Ziff Davis and other sites from around the Web.

AOL Time Warner's settlement with Microsoft on Thursday brings the software giant a powerful ally in extending its digital media technology--part of Microsoft's plan to keep Windows the world's dominant operating system and to expand onto new devices. The deal allows--but does not require--AOL Time Warner to use Microsoft's Windows Media 9 Series software and future versions of the multimedia technology, including its digital rights management (DRM) tool for securing music and video files from piracy.

Despite the open-endedness of the terms, the deal represents an important victory for Microsoft, which has tried for years to overcome reluctance from AOL Time Warner and other media companies to embrace its digital media technology over that of rivals, notably RealNetworks and Apple Computer.

Yukon is slipping, it's just a question of how much. Microsoft Senior Vice President Paul Flessner said Monday morning the company will get a beta of its next-generation database out this summer, indicating what could be a slip from the June time frame other Microsoft executives had promised just weeks ago.

But another Microsoft executive offered a different version of the story. Stan Sorensen, director of SQL Server Product management, later on Monday reiterated the company's previously stated commitment to get a beta, albeit a "private" one, out to some 1,000 users this month.

Microsoft placed the focus squarely on its Windows Server System line of products Monday at it's Tech Ed 2003 conference in Dallas, anchoring the event with the announcement of the availability of release candidate 1 (RC1) of Exchange Server 2003.

"RC1 marks a major milestone in the development of Exchange 2003, the most rigorously tested version of Exchange ever," said Mohsen al-Ghosein, vice president of Exchange Server at Microsoft. "In addition to 100 percent internal deployment at Microsoft, Exchange 2003 has been running in production for select customers and partners in our Joint Development Program (JDP) for over a year. RC1 is a call to action for customers to start testing and planning their deployment of Exchange 2003."

When Microsoft Corp. is faced with a hard problem, it can call on Microsoft Research to help furnish answers. Security remains a hard problem, and Microsoft Research is providing some core technologies to help deliver Microsoft's answer to the issue. In reference to finding answers to the problems around securing the online environment and data overall, Scott Charney, Microsoft's chief trustworthy computing strategist, said, "[Microsoft Research has] a huge role to play."

In an interview with eWEEK at the Microsoft TechEd conference here, Charney said Microsoft Research provided some of the tools the company uses to check the security of code. "And we're working with them on longer-term research . like core things about how the [software] stack works," he said, adding that Microsoft Research also has done some work in the identification space.

Microsoft's plan to bring the Internet to your wristwatch will kick off this week when the company previews gadgets based on its Smart Personal Objects Technology. The software giant, along with watchmakers Citizen Watch, Fossil and Finland's Suunto, on Thursday is expected to show off the new products. More details on pricing and service providers also are expected to be revealed. The companies will start to release the wristwatches in the fall, sources close to Microsoft said.

Smart Personal Objects Technology (SPOT) products are household and personal items--such as refrigerators or portable stereos--that can receive and display information from the Internet beamed over a nationwide FM radio network. With SPOT, for example, your alarm clock could have informed you about Martha Stewart's legal problems after you pushed snooze.

Acknowledging that vendors and IT professionals have to step into the breach to make computing more secure, Microsoft Tuesday launched two new security certifications and again pledged to make software patches easier to apply. Scott Charney, Microsoft's chief security strategist, said Tuesday that he is working to adapt the company's corporate culture to make patch application more uniform and rational.

"Microsoft today has eight different installer technologies. Some patches register with the operating system, some don't. Some patch DLLs, some binary code," he said. "Every patch should have an installer and an uninstaller--a way to back out of the fix gracefully if needed."

Microsoft and VeriSign plan to announce on Tuesday that they will work together to offer secure Web services and enhanced digital rights management. The deal builds on technology in Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 that allows access to data using digital signatures. Digital-signature technology, which uses a variant of the mathematics behind encryption, lets people digitally sign data and verify their identity online. VeriSign, which makes server software that manages such signatures on a large scale, plans to launch a service that will take advantage of the new Windows Server 2003 features.

By working together, Microsoft and VeriSign hope to make authenticated Web services easier to use and more likely to interoperate. "It is that combination that brings (companies) a lot of the benefits," said Nico Popp, vice president of Research and Advanced Products for VeriSign.

Microsoft used its Tech Ed 2003 conference in Dallas Monday to launch release candidate 1 (RC1) of its Exchange Server 2003 messaging server, and its partners quickly ponied up products to support it.

Hewlett-Packard, one of Microsoft's oldest and closest partners, was one of the first out of the gate, proclaiming that its HP ProLiant servers are the platform of choice for Exchange Server 2003. HP said that it can offer customers Exchange 2003 products that have been tested by HP for configuration and performance, adding that its HP OpenView software has Smart Plug-ins for Exchange, providing service-level monitoring of the Exchange infrastructure.

Microsoft has revamped its financial management applications for midsized businesses with new features designed to track project costs. The Redmond, Wash., software maker said Tuesday that it has begun shipping Solomon 5.5, an update to the business application suite that it gained when it acquired Great Plains in 2001. The new programs come out of the Microsoft Business Solutions unit, which focuses on selling business-management applications to small and midsized businesses, competing with SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft and Best Software, among others.