Microsoft is set to unveil its plans for the next version of Microsoft Operations Manager next week. The venue will be the Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas. Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) first appeared in 2000 as a server and application management product that Microsoft released based on technology it bought from NetIQ Corp. The next version of MOM will represent Microsoft's first internal overhaul of the NetIQ technology.
The planned feature set for the next version of MOM should also contain clues about Microsoft's direction on management software. The Microsoft stable of management technologies includes MOM, Systems Management Server, some Windows services and Active Directory technologies.
Microsoft has quietly nixed plans for OfficeLite, a subscription-based version of its Office productivity suite designed for the consumer and education markets, according to company documents examined by CRN.
In a March 3 memo to staff involved in the initiative, Cameron Turner, a Microsoft product manager, said the "OfficeLite effort has been shelved for the [Office] 11 time frame." OfficeLite originally was slated to ship with MSN 9, but that plan also has been "tabled," according to the memo. Turner also said in the memo that the project had taught Microsoft "several important things about creating non-perpetual versions of Office [and] working with MSN."
Microsoft is preparing to sell its stake in struggling Canadian software maker Corel at a loss of more than $100 million. Vector Capital, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm, announced this week that its Vector CC Holdings arm has signed an agreement with Microsoft to buy the company's 22.89 million preferred shares in Corel. The deal will be completed by March 24.
Vector will pay about 56 cents a share, according to the announcement, bringing the total value of the deal to $12.88 million. Microsoft paid $135 million in October 2000 to acquire a 24.6 percent share of Corel, best known for its WordPerfect office applications and graphics software.
Microsoft is leading a stampede to mine one of the software industry's few potential treasure troves: small and midsize businesses. The No. 1 software maker last week said its No. 3 executive, sales czar Orlando Ayala, will head a new $2 billion small and midsize business group. Its target: retailers, manufacturers and real estate firms that increasingly use computers and software for customer data, payroll and accounting.
''We see a broad opportunity for growth in what has been an underserved, fragmented market,'' says Ayala. He predicts Microsoft will glean $10 billion in annual revenue by 2010 from the market. That is equal to about one-third of its fiscal 2002 revenue.
As of Office 2003, Microsoft is lumping its SharePoint technologies - both its SharePoint Portal Server and its recently renamed Windows SharePoint Services - in with the rest of its Office "System" products. SharePoint Portal Server is Microsoft's combined portal, document-management and search server. SPS is at the crux of Microsoft's evolving information-worker/business-intelligence strategies. Forthcoming versions of SPS will be tied tightly to Office 2003, Windows .Net Server 2003 and Microsoft's next-generation "Jupiter" e-business bundle.
By the end of last year, Microsoft claimed it had sold 10 million seats of SharePoint Portal Server since introducing version one of the product in May 2001.
Sometime around this summer, Microsoft will release the 2003 version of its Office productivity suite, with hopes that companies and individuals will find enough value in it to undertake the upgrade. What most impressed me about Office 2003, the Beta 2 release of which we reviewed in this week's issue, is the way that Office embraces XML, and does so-thanks to its support for user-defined XML schema-in an open-ended, user-controlled way.
Most of what sets Office 2003 apart from previous versions relates to the way that Office documents can serve as the front-end pieces to data-rich back-end components, and in every case, the back-end options that Office extends to users are those that carry the Microsoft brand-and per-seat license fee.
With FrontPage 2003, Microsoft is targeting professional Web developers for the first time. In the updated application, now shipping with the second beta of Office 2003, Microsoft integrated some Visual Studio tools and made it easier for developers to design pages viewable from a variety of Web browsers, said Raj Kapoor, FrontPage product manager. FrontPage has been seen primarily as an easy-to-use tool for neophytes who want to construct Web pages.
Microsoft said the new version makes it easier for developers to stick with non-Microsoft tools of choice, such as Macromedia Flash or Adobe PhotoShop.
Hewlett-Packard on Monday bulked up its line of Media Center PCs, adding two new models with more storage capacity and beefier graphics. The new HP PCs run Windows XP Media Center Edition, a hybrid of Microsoft's flagship operating system. In related news, sources said Microsoft is readying a new version of its software, code-named Harmony, for release later this year.
Windows Media Center adds to Windows a second interface for accessing digital media features, such as music, photos and DVD movies. Consumers also can watch and record TV programs to the computer hard drive using digital video recording (DVR) features that are similar to those found in systems from TiVo and other companies.
It is neither small, nor touchy feely, but Microsoft is attempting to finally live up to part of its name as it unveils its latest product - "Corporate Identity 2.0". Beta testing is in its early days but initial reviews are encouraging. The industry gorilla seeks to replace widespread opinion that it is arrogant, unaccountable and monopolistic with a new perception as a softer, gentler giant following a subtle shift in the way it deals with clients and competitors.
Explaining the new feel-good approach at a stakeholder communications conference in Sydney recently, Microsoft's group manager of corporate marketing, Inese Kingsmill, described the company's reputation as a "considerable strategic asset". Although mistakes have been made in the past, Kingsmill says, the company is serious about changing public opinion, led from the front by chief executive Steve Ballmer and founder Bill Gates.
At least that's our opinion after living with the Beta 2 build for a couple of weeks. Anyone who uses only Word and Excel may not want to bother with the upgrade, due in the middle of the year. But Office 2003 looks to have enticements for a range of potential users. One group that will certainly want to upgrade is Tablet PC users. The big change here is that in Word and Excel you can now make ink annotations directly within the document. In the Office XP build for Windows Tablet PC Edition, you had to open a comment box to add an ink note.
Another enticement: Office 2003 will probably also include a new freeform notepad application, called OneNote (discussed in detail below), that accepts typed, spoken, and handwritten notes -- although Microsoft may decide to sell this as a separate application. All PC users (not just Tablet PC adopters) can take advantage of OneNote, and its notebook metaphor could help the organizationally challenged among us.