WinInsider

Software piracy has begun rising again in India, with nearly 70 percent of the programs used in the country now illegal, a Microsoft official said Tuesday. "It is a matter of great concern for us," Rajiv Kaul, managing director of Microsoft India, said at the launch of a school administration software system in Bangalore, India's technology hub. The software was developed by a local company using Microsoft technology. Kaul said piracy declined two years ago after software associations and Indian authorities made efforts to stop use of illegal software. But the practice has picked up again in recent months, he said.

Microsoft is finally beating Oracle and competing with Unix in the scale-up benchmarking game. NEC, Intel and Microsoft published a new benchmark on the bellwether TPC-C test for database transaction processing scalability late last week. The number two result overall on the TPC-C puts Microsoft's SQL Server and Windows Server 2003 above all Oracle database results. It is the first time that Microsoft has produced a non-clustered database system on the TPC-C that came anywhere near the top results of current Unix systems.

Microsoft Corp. has released the first of what will be several OS-specific guides to securing Windows machines. The guides are a result of the internal work that the company has been doing to improve the security of its products. Much of the content comes directly from lessons learned during the security push Microsoft began last year in which the company's developers pored over lines of code in the Windows product line, looking for security vulnerabilities and other errors.

"Securing Windows 2000 Server" addresses a wide range of topics, from patch management to auditing and intrusion detection to hardening the base server configuration. The guide also includes sections on more in-depth subjects such as securing the domain infrastructure and hardening specific server roles.

The beta version of Microsoft's realtime communications (RTC) server, code-named Greenwich, will be available on Friday, Microsoft Product Unit Manager David Gurle confirmed Tuesday during a meeting with CRN at the Instant Messaging Planet Conference & Expo here.

Yet even as Microsoft prepares to ship its long-awaited RTC server into beta testing, version 2.0 is already in the works, according to Gurle. The next version of Greenwich beyond Windows Server 2003 will offer richer PC-to-PC communications, connected meetings and integration between the phone and PC, as well as video and voice instant messaging over the corporate firewall, he said.

The DVD+RW Alliance announced Monday that Microsoft has become its newest member, and will join the Alliance's Executive and Steering Committee. Microsoft previously committed to supporting the DVD+R and DVD+RW rewriteable DVD format in Longhorn, the next Windows version, last April during the WinHEC 2002 trade show, but company executives told me at the time that Microsoft would support other recordable DVD formats as well, including DVD-R and DVD-RW. It's unclear at this time whether this week's announcement means that Microsoft and its future products will now only natively support DVD+R and DVD+RW.

In an effort to further reduce application compatibility issues for enterprises considering a move to Windows XP and Office XP, Microsoft Corp. has updated some of its tools and created a new desktop deployment portal. Microsoft on Tuesday will announce its new Desktop Center portal as well as its updated Baseline Security Analyzer 1.1, which can be found on the portal. The analyzer scans corporate desktops for missing security updates and service packs and also identifies common system misconfigurations.

Once the scan is complete, the analyzer provides an individual XML security report for each desktop scanned. To perform local or remote scans of Windows systems, the analyzer includes a graphical and command line interface for IT managers.

Hoping to speed the integration of Windows XP into corporate environments, Microsoft on Tuesday will announce updates to a set of tools that helps administrators reduce the time it takes to deploy the operating system by streamlining the process for application compatibility testing. The newly improved tools, most notably the Windows XP Application Compatbility Toolkit (ACT) 2.6 and the Line Security Analyzer, are part of the company's New Desktop Deployment Portal Web site. The Web site is also a place where users can access other tools and resources to evaluate and deploy Windows XP and Office XP. Microsoft will make the Web site-based tools available through a new CD-ROM called the Desktop Deployment Customer Toolkit CD.

Microsoft hopes to ship Greenwich, its realtime communications technology, to beta this week, sources there said. Solution providers that will test the project have been told to expect CDs within a week to 10 days, sources said. A Microsoft spokeswoman would not comment on Greenwich's beta status.

As its name states, this technology will be the basis for realtime communications such as secure instant messaging and is slated to become part of Windows 2003 Server. That major operating system is now expected to ship to manufacturing March 12 , a slight slip from the Feb. 28 RTM Microsoft had expected until last week. But that slight delay should not impact planned general availability in April and the official April 24 Windows 2003 launch, sources said.

Ballmer found a way to capitalize on the soul searching. He used it as an opportunity to streamline management, update company culture, refresh Microsoft's reputation and hone its strategy. "It's like we went through this valley of death," said Jim Allchin, the executive heading the Windows division. "Internally we said, 'Look, we can't do anything about this trial, you know, it is what it is. But what we can do is try to learn from it and we can try to build great products and just drive ahead.' "

Ballmer and Microsoft emerged leaner, wiser and more mature, with a new realization of their leadership potential. While Gates is charged up about new technologies in the coming decade, Ballmer seems energized by his mission to navigate today's choppy market while building a foundation to keep Microsoft growing another 50 years.

Counting viruses is simplistic, but there is evidence that Windows is becoming more resistent, and Linux is becoming more of a target Turning the heat up another notch on a long-simmering debate, the Aberdeen Group has published a study comparing the security of Linux/Unix systems with that of the Microsoft Windows family of products.

"Contrary to popular misperception, Microsoft does not have the worst track record when it comes to security vulnerabilities. Also contrary to popular wisdom, Unix- and Linux-based systems are just as vulnerable to viruses, Trojan horses, and worms," Aberdeen's report states.