Microsoft to ship Web design, graphics suite by mid-2007
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Microsoft's Expression Studio graphics and web design suite of software is now slated to go on sale by mid-2007.
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(InfoWorld) - Eyeing the rich application design space, Microsoft on Monday is detailing milestones in its Expression design tools platform, including the introduction of Expression Media to manage video files, images, and fonts. The company will announce Expression Studio, a suite of four products. The full suite, however, will not ship until the second quarter of 2007. Expression puts Microsoft more squarely into the same ballpark with Adobe and its rich media tools such as Flash and Flex. Microsoft, like Adobe, also is factoring in the application developers in its pursuit of the Web design space, according to analyst Bola Rotibi, of Ovum. "It's allowing the designers to work in their own environments and developers to work in their own environments but to have a shared context," Rotibi said. With the Expression products, designers build the look of an application. Microsoft's Visual Studio development platform, on the other hand, is for developing the code part of an application, according to Microsoft. Expression Studio, which will be priced at $599 for the full suite, features Expression Media, providing digital asset management and team workflow. Based on the iView MediaPro product acquired by Microsoft, it also features Expression Media Encoder for encoding and deploying video and audio. A first CTP of Expression Media is due early next year. The product will be generally available for $299 in the second quarter of next year, for users who wish to purchase it separate from the full suite. Expression Media helps designers handle what may be thousands of design elements, said Forest Key, director of Web/Client UX Platform Marketing in the Microsoft Developer Division. "With Expression Media, they can create a visual catalog," that includes metadata, Key said. Other components of the suite include: * Expression Web, for building Web sites. Formerly known as Expression Web Designer, it is shipping now for an estimated retail price of $299. FrontPage users can upgrade for $99. A free 60-day trial period is being offered, with downloads available. * Expression Blend, formerly known as Interactive Designer or Sparkle, for delivering interactive experiences on Windows. Blend Beta 1 is available now for download. The general release is scheduled for second-quarter 2007; it is priced at $499. * Expression Design, formerly Graphic Designer or Acrylic, for designing visual elements for Web and Windows experiences. A December Community Technology Preview (CTP) is available. The product ships only as part of the full Expression Studio suite next year. Expression Design was based on the Creature House Expression technology acquired by Microsoft in 2003. The latest versions of Blend and Design feature a new interface for designers. The interface enables, for example, designers to see how a layout looks on different monitors. In addition to Expression Studio, Microsoft on Monday is offering the first CTP of Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere (WPE/E). This technology serves as a cross-platform browser plug-in for rich media, animation and video content based on Windows Media technology. Users can author content for WPE/E with the Expression Media and Design products. WPE/E allows designers and developers to build an experience in the browser that is richer than could be done with just the browser itself, Key said. Featured is the ability to render the XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) file format for rich media capabilities. Microsoft also is launching an online community for designers, featuring forums, video demos, and team blogs.
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Microsoft has previewed &quot;Whitehorse,&quot; a set of visual design tools intended to support the design and validation of Web services-based applications.
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TechWeb - A host of server vendors plan to ship products with the new hypervisor starting at the end of this year and through 2008.
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A major upgrade of HTML is in the works but won't emerge for at least two years.
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Microsoft (Quote, Chart) released a Community Technology Preview of the framework and software development kit for building custom visual designers based on the modeling technology in Visual Studio 2005.
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The tools, part of an upcoming Visual Studio update, are focused on making it easier to create customized Web applications.
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Take a closer look at the four apps -- Expression Web, Expression Design, Expression Media and Expression Blend -- that make up Microsoft's new design suite.
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Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O said on Friday  it will ship the next version of Windows in 2006, but  scaled  back plans to include a new system for finding and storing  information in its flagship operating system.
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Adobe Acrobat 7 will be available in December. It will support 3D images and complex electronic forms through an additional product called Adobe Livecycle Designer 7. Mark Wheeler, senior enterprise marketing
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft Corp. is licensing the new UI (user interface) in Office 2007 for free so developers can build applications that look similar to the programs in the suite, the company said Tuesday. Microsoft is licensing both design and functionality of Office 2007's RibbonX UI, as well as offering guidelines for implementing it, through a new program, said Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft general manager for Office Client. Developers and ISVs (independent software vendors) can sign up with Microsoft on the Web and register products that will use the UI. More information about the new licensing program can be found here . Microsoft said it decided to launch the licensing program after being approached by ISV partners that wanted to build applications using Office 2007 as a platform. The RibbonX UI is a completely new interface for Office 2007 that is designed to make common Office features easier to use. According to Numoto, the company has spent hundreds of millions of dollars revamping Office 2007's UI; indeed, it is the suite's most significant new feature. The company wants "qualified developers" to be able to use these investments, but it also wants to protect its proprietary investment from unauthorized use. "The new licensing program enables developers and ISVs to benefit legally from Microsoftâs innovation by using the UI for their own applications," he said. Andrew Brust, chief of new technology for New York consulting firm twentysix New York, said a new formal program for licensing RibbonX makes a lot of sense because the UI is "the result of a significant investment by Microsoft in usability research and UI development," and Microsoft naturally wants to protect that.
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TechWeb - The software will ship this summer. It had been scheduled for February, along with major upgrades of Windows Server and SQL Server.
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Critical bug-fixes ship for Internet Explorer, DirectX, and Windows Media Format technology.
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The upcoming version of the open-source Web browser will fit right in with Windows XP, Vista and Mac OS X. Linux is another matter entirely.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft will ship the next version of Forecaster, its midmarket budgeting and planning application, in early April, the first major release of the software since 2003. The software giant intends to release Forecaster 7.0 to manufacturing on March 28, according to Gregg Gracheck, senior product manager for Microsoft Forecaster. The product will be generally available early next month. Microsoft also plans to talk up the forthcoming release at its Convergence 2007 business applications conference taking place next week in San Diego, he said. Microsoft acquired Forecaster when it purchased applications vendor Great Plains Software in April 2001. Great Plains had bought FRx Software in March 2000. Forecaster and the FRx financial reporting software are housed in a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary FRx Software, which has its base in Denver. Forecaster is aimed at financial professionals like CEOs and budgeting managers at companies employing between 25 and 2,500 staff, which are looking to move beyond budgeting using Excel or Lotus spreadsheets or general ledger systems. "The sweet spot for us is companies with 250 to 500 employees," said Andy Kamlet, director of marketing and sales at FRx Software. Forecaster can help automate many of the manual tasks involved in trying to budget using spreadsheets, he added. Kamlet sees Prophix Software's Prophix and Centage's Budget Maestro as Forecaster's prime competitors. Companies can use Forecaster to access the general ledgers of any vendor's ERP (enterprise resource planning) software such as SAP and Oracle. If they're already using Microsoft's FRx, users can leverage the reporting software's integration with Microsoft's Dynamics ERP applications to integrate general ledger and budget data from Forecaster into reports generated by FRx. With Forecaster 7.0, Microsoft has worked to improve usability and to speed up deployment of the tool. The software has more of the look-and-feel of Microsoft's Office suite of desktop applications in terms of its navigation capabilities, but it's Office 2003, not the latest version Office 2007, which shipped earlier this year. The last major release of Forecaster, version 6.7, appeared in October 2003. "It's not our intention to keep this amount of time between releases," said Gracheck. Like previous releases, although it supports multiple currencies, Forecaster 7.0 is only available in English. Microsoft has yet to see much demand for language localization, Kamlet said. The software costs from $8,500.
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Microsoft is now drawing up plans to deliver its follow-up client operating system by the end of 2009, according to a company executive.
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Microsoft's new development suite for designers became a reality Monday, with the final release of Expression Web, one of Expression Studio's four components. The other three -- Blend, Design and Media -- will follow in Q2 2007.