Microsoft is working hard to make sure the latest version of its e-mail, calendaring and messaging server, Exchange 12, appeals to both enterprise IT administrators and end users. The first beta of the product, released earlier this month, offers enhanced administrative controls as well as a unified messaging feature that will deliver fax, voice mail, e-mail and speech recognition.

The VOICE newsletter for OS/2 and eComStation has returned. The January issue can be found here, and it contains articles on NVU, DFSee, a report on WarpStock Europe 2005, and much more. "Finally! Some may have thought that the newsletter had gone the way of all flesh. Indeed, the revision has taken a while and we skipped some issues. This step was neccessary to be able to focus on our work, or it would have taken even longer. At this point, I would like to thank all the persons involved, especially Holger Manthey for many ideas, creating images, and his patience."

"There is a curious lack in the Linux community - the number of community-led Linux distributions for commodity mobile phone hardware is zero. As reported two years ago by LinuxDevices, the aim of the Xanadux project is to change that, and this article describes how it's getting on."

The stock shot up like a weed on a sunny spring day. Red Hat shares rose 104 percent, making it the top gainer among 28 public companies based in the region. It highlights an adage of business: performance pays. Red Hat, after bolstering its executive ranks and making other tweaks, has reported solid sales and profit growth. In the most recent quarter, which ended Nov. 30, it beat analysts' expectations for both.

I recently saw a post on Neowin which said that Vista will no longer allow the use of region-free DVD drives for movie playback; I found this strange considering in some nations region-coding DVDs is illegal as it goes against consumer rights. Neowin also links against an MS developers blog, where he talks about MS lacking any region-free drives to test legacy code on, and this may lead to lack of support for those drives. So where does this leave consumers who have region-free drives? Well you'll be able to still use DVD-data discs you just wont be able to play encrypted/region-coded DVDs anymore.

The JNode Project has released version 0.2.2 of their OS. This release offers improvements in the classpath runtime library and numberous GUI improvements; the changelog details the rest of the improvements in this release of JNode.