WinInsider

Microsoft Business Solutions is hitting the streets to convince ISVs it is a friend, not necessarily a foe, in software development. The company is kicking off a U.S. road show starting April 22 in New York City to give ISVs that are partners--and even competitors--two-days worth of information about the company's plans for the small and midsize business market, company executives said. The show moves to San Francisco the following week.

Just months before shipping Great Plains 7.5, Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) has offered a glimpse into its thinking for the next major release of the accounting software. Great Plains Release 8 will incorporate the look and feel of the Outlook Web Access (OWA) client, and on-screen palettes will give way to OWA-like menus, company executives said.

A new "hover-over" toolbar will be customizable by VARs and integrators. A navigation pane will run down the left side of the screen with the middle pane displaying a list view of relevant items. Users can then click on any item and repurpose it. "You can create a sales order right off a customer order without additional navigation," said David Coulombe, MBS group product manager.

Microsoft is out to convince software vendors that they should join 'em, rather than try to beat 'em. Microsoft has kicked off at the start of March a road show designed, ultimately, to get independent software vendors (ISVs) to build into their future products so they embed some or all of Microsoft's underlying software stack. Microsoft is providing attendees with a two-day strategy and product roadmap, emphasizing the Microsoft Business Solutions' small- and mid-size business products.

In April, Microsoft is planning to launch a number of new programs targeted specifically at ISVs. Among these programs is a new initiative called "Empower," which is aimed at bringing new Microsoft ISV partners into the fold.

Mobile phone maker Motorola made news in February when it announced that it would be the first to deliver a cell phone based on Linux. However, those plans have changed dramatically. Just one month after making that announcement, Motorola now says that Linux isn't secure enough to support a market for third-party applications that target the phone. "The phone's operating system must be made secure so that, for example, badly written or malicious code cannot power up the modem and rack up charges on your bill," a Motorola spokesperson wrote recently. So for the foreseeable future, the company will use Java as the delivery vehicle for software on the phone, and Linux will take a back seat. Of course, outside the insular Linux community, no one really cares what software is behind the phone, they just want it to work. And that, incidentally, is a problem faced by Microsoft with its Smartphone initiative as well.

A small team of Microsoft researchers is devising software for an electronic diary that can keep track of a multitude of everyday details in a person's life -- the e-mail sent, the family photographs taken, the phone calls made, the Web pages visited -- in a single database. This personal database could then be searched to find out, say, exactly who was at the wedding 10 years ago, or just where that camping trip was eight summers back.

The software is bound to be superior to standard ways of storing memories -- photographs in a shoebox, for instance -- said Gordon Bell, a senior researcher at Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center in San Francisco.

The new Business Portal from Microsoft Business Solutions will be the foundation of a spate of new employee-facing applications, company executives said Wednesday. The portal software, slated to be generally available next month, will be officially launched here this week at Convergence 2003. The goal is to provide thin-client access to all the important Great Plains and Solomon accounting and business data already residing at customer sites--typically small and midsize companies.

Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates on Wednesday will announce the worldwide launch of .Net Compact Framework, a tool that lets developers bring Microsoft's .Net technology to mobile devices, according to a company executive.

The framework will let developers extend the capabilities of .Net, such as Web services support, to mobile devices, said David Rasmussen, lead product manager for .Net Mobility Developer Platform at Microsoft, in an interview before Gates' opening keynote at the Microsoft Mobile Developer Conference, being held here alongside the CTIA Wireless trade show. The .NET Framework and .NET Compact Framework provide a consistent development model through a single tool set, Visual Studio .Net, so developers can easily extend PC applications to mobile devices, he said.

Hewlett-Packard this week introduced an entry-level server starting at $550 for cost-sensitive, small- to medium-sized businesses. The server is part of the tc2100 series, which costs less than HP's flagship line of ProLiant industry-standard servers. HP says the tc2100 server series is focused on providing simple setup, dependable performance and household-name service and support at a desktop price. The new model is called the tc2120.

The rock-bottom-priced model comes with a 1.8-GHz Intel Celeron processor, 128 MB of RAM and a 40-GB ATA drive. An $800 model sports an Intel Pentium 4 chip at 2.53 GHz, double the RAM and the same hard drive. For $950 total, HP replaces the ATA drive with a 36-GB SCSI drive. Adding an operating system pushes the price higher -- to $1,750 with Windows 2000 Server.

One of the developers of the original Linux core posted a vulnerability notice Monday with details of a flaw that could allow a local user to assume control of a Linux computer. Alan Cox, who worked with LinusTorvalds on the software that spawned the Linux operating system, sent an e-mail message to a mailing list for Linux kernel developers detailing a flaw in a debugging component known as ptrace. The flaw affects the Linux 2.2 and Linux 2.4 kernels.

A self-proclaimed hacker claims to have stolen three unreleased security advisories from a corporate computer and posted them to a public mailing list. The online vandal, who uses the monicker "hack4life," said Wednesday he stole advisories detailing flaws in a common set of Unix code, the Kerberos authentication system and some implementations of encryption for Web sites. He claims to have stolen them from a firm that had been working with the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) Coordination Center, a clearinghouse for security information.

"I am not in any way connected with CERT or any of the vendors involved," he wrote in an e-mail to CNET News.com. He added that he wouldn't give further details of the break-in and that he primarily stole the information for amusement and to show off.