Microsoft Archive

A technology called Photosynth, developed by Microsoft Research in collaboration with University of Washington, has the potential to change the way we look at maps. "Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-Dimensional space."

Microsoft plans next week to charge a nominal fee for Office 2007 Beta 2 downloads, in a move that runs counter to the practice held by most software companies. Consumers who download the 2007 Microsoft Office system Beta 2 will be charged USD 1.50 per download, beginning next Wednesday, a Microsoft spokeswoman said.

Acknowledging the software industry is undergoing a radical transformation, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said Thursday that his company is moving rapidly to create products that can be funded by ads and served up over the Internet. "Software is becoming a service," Ballmer said at the company's financial analyst. "Embracing advertising and subscription-based models and Internet-based delivery across Microsoft's product line is an important part of what we will do."

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 is a far cry from Exchange Server 2003, based on eWEEK Labs' tests of the first public beta of the new messaging platform. Administrators thinking of moving to Exchange Server 2007 should take a hard look at this beta to understand the impact of the platform's many new features. Exchange 2007 Beta 2 became widely available on July 24 and is expected to ship in its final form at the end of 2006 or the beginning of 2007.

Microsoft pledged to 'play fair' on all its future operating systems, including Windows Vista, will abide by self-imposed rules aimed at bolstering choice and competition. The announcement comes just a week after the European regulators slapped the company with a USD 357.3 million fine for noncompliance with a 2004 antitrust ruling.

Microsoft's effort to provide a little privacy for Windows users has instead turned into a very public black eye. There was a near-immediate outcry saying that, without proper safeguards, what was intended as a benefit could turn into a big headache for businesses. The software could make it harder for companies to meet compliance regulations as well as to handle users who forget their password, critics said.

Researchers at Microsoft are working on an ambitious new project to hunt down and neutralize large-scale search engine spammers. The software giant's Cybersecurity and Systems Management Research Group has taken the wraps off Strider Search Defender, an experimental project that automates the discovery of search spammers through non-content analysis.

"Microsoft alerted us this time about seven vulnerabilities of which five were rated critical and two important. There are vulnerabilities in the Server service, the DHCP Client service, Excel and Office that could allow remote code execution."

Microsoft has - finally - announced its version of on-demand CRM software. For more than a year the software giant has nosed around the fact that it's working on customer relationship management as a service, but it wasn't until its annual Worldwide Partner Conference here July 11-13 that Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live made its formal debut.

Microsoft plans to issue patches for 'critical' Windows and Office security problems as part of a regular update scheduled for Tuesday. The software company said in an advisory Thursday that it will issue four bulletins for Windows flaws and three for Office. At least one Windows and one Office problem are deemed 'critical', Microsoft's highest-risk category for security vulnerabilities, according to the advisory.

"It's no secret that WinFS was a great idea without a killer application. Microsoft had to go to great lengths in their demos and evangelism to get people to picture what would be capable with a WinFS application. Microsoft also had problems recruiting for their 'killer app' because those job openings posted on the WinFS blog were actually first posted on the Microsoft website in February and still unfilled in May. iView's Media Pro application is the perfect killer app for WinFS/SQL Server codename 'Katmai'. It relies heavily on a database for it's features."

Office 2007 is running late. Microsoft officials acknowledged on June 29 that the company will not meet the October 2006 business-availability target to which it committed in March of 2006. At that time, Microsoft officials said to expect retail availability of Office 2007 to be some time in January 2007, so as to coincide with the Vista launch. But on June 29, Microsoft revised its schedule. Now Microsoft is promising that Office 2007 will be available to volume licensees "by the end of year 2006", with retail availability in "early 2007". This does not stop MS from pondering about Vista's successor, though.

User are realizing that applications such as business intelligence, specialized workflow systems and even traditional customer relationship management applications will not be necessary in the future as organizations tie into 'people-ready' business solutions, according to Microsoft.

"WinFS has been officially pulled out of Microsoft's road map for products and services - permanently. People all around the web are shocked and complaining. But the thing is: who didn't expect this? Although no one came out and said it directly, no one spoke of WinFS except as a distant memory, it was quite obvious that people didn't buy Microsoft's story of it shipping separately. If people believed, the shock and outrage today would be ten times as big as it was when the LH project was rebooted and WinFS torn out with the strings still hanging. But the question many people are asking these long years later is: what is WinFS anyway? And what's the big deal if everyone already knew it wasn't coming?"