Microsoft's wireless phone software will debut later this year in the United Kingdom, a spokesman for mobile services company Orange confirmed Friday. Orange, a division of France Telecom, will launch phones with the software before the end of the year in the U.K. and release them in other European countries in the following few months, said spokesman Stuart Jackson. However, sources close to Microsoft's product strategy said the U.K. debut could come as early as this month. Orange has 12.8 million subscribers in the U.K. and 18.6 million in France.
Microsoft's Smartphone 2002 software allows wireless phones to run personal digital assistant applications such calendars and contact lists. Microsoft has been trying to get partners for the software and has reached an agreement with AT&T Wireless to produce a phone using the Smartphone 2002 operating system possibly in mid-2003.
IBM has teamed with Intel and Microsoft to create a new facility where customers can test their applications on IBM xSeries servers, the companies announced Thursday. The new testing center will be located at IBM's Kirkland, Wash., facility, which lies in close proximity to offices of Intel and Microsoft. The vendors will have customers come in to test out how well tasks such as server consolidation can be accomplished on IBM's xSeries Intel-based servers running Microsoft's Windows operating systems. The trio will also bring in independent software vendors (ISVs) to help with the free testing process in the hopes that users will purchase more gear after having a hands-on experience with the technology, said Brian Sanders, manager of IBM eServer xSeries.
Following the release this week of IBM's Lotus Software division's Notes and Domino 6 platform, Microsoft Corp. next week will unveil more of its forthcoming Titanium release at its Microsoft Exchange Conference in Anaheim, Calif. And as Lotus did with Notes and Domino 6, Microsoft officials will tout reductions in the total ownership cost of corporate messaging systems as the primary benefit for upgrading to Titanium, expected to be generally available about the middle of next year.
Titanium will feature support for shadow backups-keeping messages, calendar items and other Exchange data stored locally with periodic server synchronizations-and improved MAPI support for better data compression and fewer bytes of data exchanged between the Outlook client and Exchange Server. Both of these improvements will boost server consolidation, Microsoft officials said. The company expects its own Titanium deployment to reduce the number of Exchange mailbox servers it uses from 110 to around 20.
The government attorney who cut last November's antitrust settlement deal between the Justice Department and Microsoft is stepping down from his post. Assistant Attorney General Charles James, who is responsible for antitrust matters, will leave his position to pursue a job in the private sector, the Justice Department revealed on Thursday. James is best-known for his role in brokering the pending Microsoft settlement with the Justice Department and nine of 18 states. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly has yet to approve the deal. Her ruling on that matter, and on a request by nine other states to impose stiffer sanctions on Microsoft, could come at any time.
Microsoft has two free "feature packs" in the release candidate stage for Systems Management Server 2.0. "The idea behind the feature packs is just to provide ongoing value to existing customers, but also to provide features earlier that will come in SMS 2003," says David Hamilton, director of Microsoft's management business group. The packs are called the SMS 2.0 Software Update Services Feature Pack and the SMS 2.0 Administration Feature Pack. Both should be available later this month, Hamilton says.
The Software Update Services Feature Pack is designed to add new SMS 2003 features and leverage the inventory and software distribution features of SMS 2.0 to bring critical Windows and Microsoft Office updates inside the firewall, determine which machines need the patches and deploy them across the enterprise.
Microsoft is prioritizing its bug fixing efforts based on the pop-up error report windows that appear during setup and application crashes in newer versions of Windows and Office, according to a letter Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sent to customers Wednesday evening. The technology was developed by a small team in the Office group and is formally called Microsoft Error Reporting. Microsoft says it keeps the information anonymous and confidential in a secure database that will not be used to identify users or for marketing purposes.
The error reporting feature allowed Microsoft to address 29 percent of errors involving the operating system and Microsoft and third-party applications running on it in Windows XP Service Pack 1, which shipped last month. Error reporting helped Microsoft identify and eliminate more than half of all Office XP errors with Office XP Service Pack 2, according to Ballmer's letter.
One percent of the bugs in Microsoft's software cause half of all reported errors with 20 percent of bugs responsible for 80 percent of the mistakes, Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said on Wednesday. But Ballmer said Microsoft was arming itself with better information to help develop its software, by building error reporting features into its products.
Engineers use the reports, sent in a short burst over the Internet, to track software bugs and provide a fix, he said. "We've been amazed by the patterns revealed in the error reports that customers are sending us," Ballmer wrote. "About 20 percent of the bugs cause 80 percent of all errors, and -- this is stunning to me -- one percent of bugs cause half of all errors."
Microsoft wants to conquer your living room. Its first salvo is a modified version of Windows XP Professional, called Windows XP Media Center Edition, that runs new PCs designed to let you easily capture, organize, and play back TV shows, DVD movies, music, photos, and other types of digital content.
We put the first system loaded with the new OS--Hewlett-Packard's Media Center PC--through its paces. This sleek black-and-silver machine is packed with audio and video gear. It can record TV shows in the style of a TiVo digital video recorder and play DVDs, games, and music (CDs, MP3 files, or streaming audio). The PC can also download photos directly from your digital camera's flash-storage card and connect to other devices via a fistful of USB 2.0 and FireWire ports.
Integration of disparate systems is set to become the killer app for Web services, stressed Iona CEO Barry Morris, during a keynote presentation at the Web Services Edge conference here on Wednesday. Following the presentation, Morris said Microsoft is the only vendor truly embracing Web services and that other companies are attempting to shoehorn in Web services to sell their own technologies. Morris stressed that Web services can provide the simplified mechanisms for integrating systems that have escaped the industry thus far.
"It's about integration, stupid," Morris exclaimed. "From the very early days of this, what we've been talking about is this thing called Web services integration."
The next update of Windows Media Player might push you to get Windows XP--especially if you'd like the audiophile-quality music and multichannel movie surround sound available only under Microsoft's latest operating system. Windows Media Player 9 Series for Windows XP, due by year's end as a free download, supports new Microsoft encoding for 5.1- and 7.1-channel digital recordings, which Microsoft asserts sound superior to standard stereo CDs. Such recordings aren't widely available now, but music labels may offer special editions--for a price, and with copyright protection. Another new encoding algorithm improves compression on standard stereo WMA files.