Microsoft Archive

The new Microsoft's Exchange 2003 service pack comes with the so-called "Direct Push" key enhancement being the ability to push new e-mail directly to mobile devices and eliminates the need for Microsoft mail servers to notify remote users of new e-mail via text messages. Other new features includes, new calendar appointments, contacts and task notifications can also be automatically sent out and support for Sender ID.

"Open source advocates are doing what was once unthinkable - giving the thumbs up to a Microsoft source code licensing program. The Free Software Foundation has said new licenses for Microsoft's pseudo open source program, the Shared Source Initiative, appears to satisfy the four requirements defining Free Software." So, what does it mean for you? Update: A description of the changes.

Microsoft is slashing the number of licenses it will use for its Shared Source Initiative from now on, while at the same time radically shortening and simplifying the text of those licenses. The move, which will be announced on Wednesday morning at Oscon, the O'Reilly European Open Source Convention in Amsterdam, will see Microsoft cutting back the more than 10 Shared Source licenses that currently exist to only three template, or core, licenses.

The world's richest man talks about developing new drugs to combat AIDS, open-source software and why Microsoft's still cool after all these years. Gates: "We encourage everyone to develop in our environment. Free software's nothing new... There was an early browser, an early mail program. But as times moved on, it's been the commercial programs that get the support, get the richness."

The Microsoft exec in charge of Office has dismissed last week's tie-up between Sun and Google as allusion rather than substance. "That announcement didn't have anything," Chris Capossela, corporate vice president Information Worker Product Management Group of Microsoft told a crowd of reporters last week. "It had something about a toolbar and Java Runtime, and it alluded to a potential thing some time in the future. OpenOffice isn’t hard to get, just go to their website and download the software."

Microsoft's phase-out of Visual Basic 6 and move to Visual Basic .Net set up an uproar in the ranks of some of Microsoft's most loyal developers. Earlier this year, several thousand developers, including many Microsoft MVPs (Most Valuable Professionals), signed a petition calling for Microsoft to continue to support VB6. However, enhancements in the VB platform stand to bring some of those people back.

Microsoft has not yet launched a paid anti-virus product, but questions about software bundling and unfair competition are already swirling in Europe. Rival Symantec acknowledged late this week that it has responded to a request for information from European Union regulators regarding the state of the security market and Symantec's role in it.

"Based on my experience with Virtual PC I would say that Virtual Server does not seem to have made significant performance improvements over Virtual PC. However, for many IT consolidation projects the performance penalty could be acceptable. Many older IT applications run on slower hardware and are not used heavily, and so Virtual Server will be a perfect fit. However, for your mission critical apps, you will certainly want to stick to 'real' rather than virtual servers."

Industry analysts and open source advocates believe that Microsoft will have no choice but to offer support for OpenDocument when more organisations start following the state of Massachusetts' lead.

Microsoft has rejected porting its Office productivity suite to Linux anytime soon, despite the growing popularity of open source on the desktop. Speaking at the LinuxWorld conference in London on Wednesday, Microsoft's head of platform strategy, Nick McGrath, said that the software maker had no intention of porting Office to any of the Linux desktop distributions.

Motorola plans to enhance the reliability of its emergency services software applications by integrating them on the Microsoft platform, the companies announced Tuesday. However, Motorola in July announced that it would expand its use of Linux beyond high-end products and into midrange items by revising most of its phones to run on Linux.

"Well, they've done it again. In prime-time. With malice aforethought. The duplicitous droogs, the denizens of deep-doodoo, I'm talking about Bill Gates' Microsoft: caught in a bald-faced lie about HD DVD-ROM discs. This is news? Not any more than the fact it's hot in Texas this summer or that Katrina caused a lot of damage. It is, after all, the Microsoft way: dishonesty in all things."

Microsft has released service packs for a number of its productivity applications: OneNote 2003 Service Pack 2, Visio 2003 Service Pack 2, Project 2003 Service Pack 2, Project Server 2003 Service Pack 2, and Office 2003 Service Pack 2. That's a whole lot of Service Pack 2s, and here's for hoping all the links are correct.

As early as May 1995, three months before Netscape initial public offering sparked the dot-com boom, Microsoft executives were worried that the nascent WWW could one day become a significant threat to the Windows franchise. Another memo is also making the rounds. This internal memo, written in 2005, argues that Google threatens Microsoft and the company's crown jewel, Windows.