WinInsider

As expected, Microsoft Business Solutions' Business Portal is now available. At a public showing in March at Convergence 2003, MBS executives had said the portal would be available in a month. Microsoft said it hopes that partners will deploy the portal to their existing small and midsize customers now using Great Plains and Solomon business applications, and also extend it to tap into external data sources. MBS' Navision applications already have portal capabilities.

Hewlett-Packard, co-inventor of Intel's new Itanium processor line, will begin selling its zx2000 and zx6000 workstations with Microsoft's new Itanium version of Windows in mid-May, the company said Tuesday.

The zx2000 comes with a single 900MHz Itanium 2 with 1.5MB of high-speed cache memory and costs between $3,711 and $5,832. The zx6000 comes with one or two processors, either the 900MHz model or a 1GHz Itanium 2 with 3MB of cache, and has a price range of $6,905 to $15,135.

Both systems will be available for order May 1 and will begin shipping in mid-May, company spokeswoman Jean Shimoguchi said. They use Windows XP 64-Bit Edition Version 2003, which Microsoft released to manufacturers March 28.

AuthenTec, a maker of fingerprint-recognition sensors, announced on Monday that it had signed a deal with Microsoft to integrate software support for biometrics into the Windows operating system.

AuthenTec will create a reference driver that will be the example for other biometric hardware makers to follow in designing their own driver software. In addition, a new application programming interface (API) will allow software to access new hardware features made available through the drivers, said Michael Stephenson, lead product manager for Microsoft's Windows server group.

I note with interest that, in a step that would have seemed impossible just a few years ago, Microsoft has begun marketing the integration strengths of Windows Server 2003. To understand how things have changed in recent years, we need to turn the clock back to early 1995, when the company was prepping the release of Windows 95. Back then, Microsoft found itself under increasing regulatory scrutiny because of the various technologies that it was bundling for free in its new OS. Some competitors and analysts feared that bundling these technologies, such as the TCP/IP networking stack we now all take for granted, would put enterprising third-party developers out of business. But then, the software giant revealed its plans for MSN, which was designed as a proprietary online service, not the Internet gateway it's since become.

Accenture will introduce a set of preconfigured Web services for communications service providers on Tuesday. The suite of services, called Accenture Communications Solutions .NET-connected, will support operations such as customer care, sales, billing, service delivery, and business intelligence. "It's specifically being developed for service providers," said Accenture spokesman Alex Pachetti.

The company worked with Microsoft to bring its two-year-old Accenture Communications Solutions software suite to Microsoft's .Net platform, according to a Microsoft statement. The .Net versions can be linked with Microsoft SQL Server and some Microsoft BizTalk Server connectors, Microsoft said.

Microsoft Corp. on Thursday released a massive set of documents and guidelines meant to help administrators lock down servers running the company's new Windows Server 2003 operating system. Released this week, the new OS is the first major product to come out of the Redmond, Wash., company since the start of its Trustworthy Computing initiative in January 2002. Several Microsoft executives said they see the security and reliability of Windows Server 2003 as a key test of the effort's effectiveness.

A more advanced test version of Windows XP's successor has leaked onto the Web, and analysts say it indicates that Microsoft has stepped up work to deliver the new operating system. The operating system, code-named Longhorn, is expected to debut late next year or early in 2005. But analysts who examined the latest test release, dubbed "Milestone 5," which leaked onto the Web last week, said Microsoft appears to be slightly ahead of schedule.

The new test version is more refined than the one that leaked during the last week of February, said analysts. Now that the company has shipped Windows Server 2003, its new server operating system, Microsoft appears to be rapidly shifting development resources to Longhorn, the next major release of Windows for the desktop.

EMC is joining forces with Microsoft to attack the lower reaches of the network-attached storage market. Next quarter, the storage giant will release a product that combines its Clariion disc array with an Intel-based server and Microsoft's Windows operating system, EMC announced Monday.

The move is a boost to Microsoft's two-year-old effort to crack a way into the storage business. EMC is following industry heavyweights Hewlett-Packard and Dell Computer into the burgeoning Windows-based storage market.

"We are very committed to making sure our technologies are more and more important every year in storage," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told those attending the EMC Technology Summit, which takes place this week at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center here. "We think we are going to win a lot of NAS (network-attached storage) business together."

Now that Windows 2003 has shipped, users are starting to ask about the many add-ons (or "out-of-band components," as Microsoft calls them) that will arrive in the coming months to give the product more varied functionality. The first add-on, Windows SharePoint Services (WSS--formerly SharePoint Team Services) lets users build collaborative Web sites and will release to manufacturing (RTM) this summer alongside Microsoft Office 2003. A free download, WSS was written entirely in ASP .NET and requires Windows 2003. Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server "v2.0," which lets enterprises build intranet portals and stitch together dozens of WSS sites, will ship at the same time, the company tells me. Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 will RTM in late June or early July and will ship later in the summer. Microsoft's (formerly Connectix's) Virtual Server beta should ship any day now, I'm told, with the final release expected late in 2003.

Microsoft is turning its attention to the identity management space. To that end, the software giant is preparing to launch the Microsoft Identity Server, formerly referred to as Microsoft MetaDirectory Services 2003, said Bill Veghte, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Windows Server Group. The Microsoft Identity Server builds off the Active Directory improvements in Windows Server 2003 and gives customers a solution for integrating identity information across directories, databases and files.