Microsoft's Server 2003 slogan "Do more with less" must be music to the ears of service providers for whom automation and efficiency is a way of life.
"This is very significant for service providers," Pascal Martin, Microsoft's general manager of platform and application hosting, told ASPnews. "They have large IT infrastructures and complex commercially available services. Microsoft's Server 2003 delivers better management of a larger number of servers."
In short - to use Microsoft's own words - service providers such as managed hosters can service more customers in a less hands-on fashion.
Microsoft will announce the first release candidate for its small business edition of Windows Server 2003 in June, officials said at a meeting here with CRN. Microsoft's Small Business Server 2003, which will incorporate Windows Server 2003, Exchange 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services, is going to be promoted heavily for its ease-of-deployment capabilities and enhanced remote user features, officials said at the Windows Server 2003 launch in San Francisco on Thursday.
Microsoft is using a twist on some old technology -- FM radio waves -- to deliver instant messages, headlines and traffic updates to a new generation of gadgets that will fit on your wrist or keychain.
The software company has big spending plans for its latest family of products, expected to go on sale in months, and some technology experts who have seen early prototypes are impressed.
But Microsoft enters a wireless market crowded with pagers, handheld computers and cellular phones, and it still is signing contracts with companies that will provide information for the devices.
Steve Ballmer had the stage to himself Thursday in San Francisco as he introduced Windows Server 2003, a new version of the company's server operating system that Microsoft's CEO described as "the right product" to help companies stretch their IT budgets.
Q: In the past you've used strong words like "cancer" to describe Linux. There is the un-American comment from a colleague about GPL (General Public License) and open source. Are you backing off from that position and taking more of a technological or business view?
I think there are many parts of the discussion. I do think there are things that people don't understand very well about the new alternative, where it is important for us to help customers understand the issues.
The way things are structured today, from a licensing perspective, in the Linux world nobody will ever commercialize Linux the way the Sun commercialized FreeBSD. For some customers, that can be viewed as advantageous. But customers will never really know who stands behind this product. If the lead developer for this component chooses to do something else with his life, who will carry on the mantle for that? The fact that it will never be commercialized is assured by the GPL. The GPL licensing form does that, as opposed to the open-source license for FreeBSD, where you could say Sun took it and commercialized it and can say that they own it. Nobody can ever do that (with GPL).
A day after Microsoft and NEC Corp. reached the top of the Transaction Processing Performance Council's OLTP benchmark raw performance list, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard smashed that record. The HP/Microsoft/Intel test achieved 658,277 tpmC (transactions per minute on the TPC-C test). That's a 28 percent performance boost over the 514,035 tpmC submitted to the TPC by NEC/Microsoft/Intel on Wednesday. The result is also a 45 percent bump in performance over a 128-processor result run by Fujitsu on Sparc processors and Solaris back in 2001, which was the No. 1 result until Wednesday.
The 64-processor HP Superdome server, the backbone of a $6.4-million configuration, did well on Windows servers' traditional stronghold of price performance as well, registering a price per tpmC of $9.82.
Microsoft is preparing a new test version of its upcoming Office 2003 desktop software, which will delay the final release of the product until later this year.
Microsoft on Thursday confirmed that it is preparing the unexpected Office beta release for debut in June. A company representative said the release is intended to give customers a chance to try out changes made to the software as a result of testing. The release will not be a completely new test version. Instead, Microsoft said it will issue a "refresh" to the existing second beta test release.
The Redmond, Wash.-based software maker said more than 600,000 people are testing the software, more than double the number of testers for any previous version.
Microsoft said on Thursday it would not offer full technical support to customers running Office XP on Linux using intermediary software such as CodeWeavers' CrossOver Office package. CrossOver Office allows Microsoft Office XP's productivity suite--with the exception of Access and Outlook components of the package--to be run on versions of Linux that use the Gnome or KDE desktop software.
Microsoft pulled a security patch for Windows XP systems with Service Pack 1 installed after customers complained that installing the patch slowed their systems down to a crawl. Microsoft is working on a revised patch for Windows XP Service Pack 1 and will re-issue that patch when it has been completed and fully tested, the Redmond, Wash.-based software maker said in a revised version of its security bulletin MS03-013 posted late Wednesday.
"Customers are encouraged to review this security bulletin ... [and] assess whether their particular environments demand that the patch should be applied immediately or whether their particular level of risk permits delaying deployment of the patch until it is revised and the performance problem corrected," the company said.
Microsoft Business Solutions is making Great Plains 7.5 available this week. The new release boasts updated inventory and distribution features, as well as tightened links with other MBS products, including Microsoft CRM, Retail Management System and the Microsoft Business Portal, the company said. Version 7.5 also brings together Microsoft's Dynamics and eEnterprise applications--part of a new product branding strategy disclosed last fall.
An NEC server with 32 of Intel's forthcoming Itanium 2 6M processors and running the Windows Server 2003 has secured the top spot in a widely watched performance measurement. Sun Microsystems refuses to submit TPC-C scores (because they lost big time [losers]).
The system, an NEC Express5800/1320Xc costing $5.9 million is the least expensive of the top 10 on the TPC-C list, displaced a 128-processor Unix server from Fujitsu.
But NEC's victory may not last long: Hewlett-Packard, a co-inventor and key supporter of Itanium, plans to announce its own speed results Thursday at the formal Windows Server 2003 launch in San Francisco, and sources expect it to beat NEC.