AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo intend to collaborate to combat spam, the trio said Monday. The companies plan to hold open discussions on the topic with each other and other industry groups, including law enforcement agencies. The focus will be on protecting customers from spam, preventing spammers from using e-mail services and blocking e-mails coming in from unprotected or open systems.
The companies said they also intend to develop best-of-breed practices in the hope that other industry players adopt the standards. They want to encourage service providers to share resources, such as a database of known spammers and consumer complaints.
Continuing the suspicious trend of major Longhorn builds appearing on the Internet like clockwork, Milestone 5 of Microsoft's next generation Windows release has leaked out of Redmond. The internal alpha build, numbered 4015, is the third Longhorn milestone to end up available for download on newsgroups and IRC channels. After acknowledging previous Longhorn leaks, however, Microsoft claims it is working to find the source.
Longhorn M5 features incremental enhancements over Milestone 4, which leaked out in early March. Microsoft has finally given Longhorn its own boot logo, and has added a new notification screen while logging in. The "Bliss" wallpaper has been updated slightly, along with the Longhorn's Plex visual style.
Microsoft revealed an effort to align with systems management vendors to integrate its SUS (Software Update Services) into their frameworks, with the goal of easing Windows patch management installation and configuration. But analysts said the software giant's motive is jumpstarting stalled adoption of SUS and off-loading security maintenance, as well as upkeep of graying Microsoft products such as Windows 2000 and NT.
Microsoft is targeting IBM/Tivoli, Computer Associates, Hewlett-Packard, and BMC Software as prime candidates to push out Windows Update, Office Update, and a new Microsoft update product due within a year for add-on products, including SQL Server and Exchange Server, said Jeffrey Jones, senior director of marketing at Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft.
I just got the word from our Office 2003 insider, Ditto, of email update about the beta 3 that is coming out from Redmond before the final release to the general public some time in mid-2003.
Thank you for participating in our beta tests of the next generation of Information Worker software, the Microsoft Office System.
As you know, we offer betas in order to get feedback from our customers and partners, and create a better product. The Office System betas have been incredibly successful due to the volume and quality of your responses. With 600,000 copies of the Beta2 being sent out -- more than double the number of beta testers we had with Office XP -- as you would expect, we're also getting more feedback. Additionally, many testers use the Watson automatic reporting tools, which have expedited our communication with customers. Watson is a software utility included with Microsoft Windows that is used to help detect, decode and log errors that are encountered while programs are running.
Several Microsoft partners announced support for the new version of Microsoft's flagship application development environment. Partners such as LogicLibrary Inc., Pittsburgh, announced support for the new platform. More than 50 other independent software vendors also announced support for the new Microsoft development platform.
Artinsoft Inc., San Jose, Costa Rica, announced two new consulting service offerings to help users convert Java-based applications to the Microsoft .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET 2003.
Following Microsoft's April 24 launch of Windows Server 2003 at San Francisco's Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer talked with InformationWeek senior editor-at-large John Foley and senior writer Aaron Ricadela. Here's an excerpt from their discussion.
InformationWeek: You said in your keynote presentation that you weren't sure what to expect in the way of Windows Server 2003 adoption, given the economic climate. But what's your best guess?
Ballmer: We don't do much in the way of forecasting. The thing I wondered about--I know we have a great product, I know it has a lot in it, and I thought, based on the feedback we had from customers, there would be a lot of enthusiasm. The question would be, How much? What would really be the case? There's this general sense when you talk to customers and to journalists and analysts, 'Oh gosh, everybody's sort of in the doldrums.'
Microsoft's new 64-bit SQL Server 2000 will help solution providers better serve midsize businesses as well as enterprise accounts, industry executives said. "This database will give you the headroom you need to grow along with the business," said Mike Mitsch, senior marketing director at NEC Solutions America, Boxborough, Mass. "On the hardware side, for example, with a chip upgrade, you can go from 433,000 to 514,000 transactions per minute. That's 20 percent growth."
Indeed, headroom seemed to be the buzzword Thursday at Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 and 64-bit SQL Server 2000 launch here. Though much of the event's focus centered on high-end data center applications, 64-bit performance will "lift all ships," said Gordon Mangione, corporate vice president of Microsoft's SQL Server team.
Microsoft's new Windows Server 2003 is opening up opportunities in the server landscape, particularly in the high-end area once dominated by Unix machines. With the arrival Thursday of the new server operating system, Windows now works on servers based on Intel's Itanium chip. The symbiosis between the two could carry the operating system into powerful back-end computers it hasn't been able to tackle in the past, and the Windows support could encourage more customers to use Itanium servers.
The software release is giving new life to companies' prospects for the server market. For Intel, it's fueling hopes that Itanium will conquer high-end computing. Hewlett-Packard has a new way to sell high-end computers and a new sales pitch for low-end systems. And Dell Computer, which made the debut of its forthcoming Itanium-based server on Thursday, is looking to accelerate its market share gains.
A federal judge in Los Angeles has handed a stunning court victory to file-swapping services Streamcast Networks and Grokster, dismissing much of the record industry and movie studios' lawsuit against the two companies.
In an almost complete reversal of previous victories for the record labels and movie studios, federal court Judge Stephen Wilson ruled that Streamcast--parent of the Morpheus software--and Grokster were not liable for copyright infringements that took place using their software. The ruling does not directly affect Kazaa, software distributed by Sharman Networks that has also been targeted by the entertainment industry.
The enterprise application software market is poised for growth and the biggest beneficiary may be Microsoft, according to Deutsche Bank Securities. The investment bank has initiated coverage of the sector. However, the firm warned that the market has been showing signs of maturity for the past several years, and growth of most players is likely to remain in the single-digit frame for the next several years.