Microsoft, Polycom work on collaboration apps
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Companies to create real-time, rich-media collaboration for Windows Messenger users and later for Office Live Meeting users.
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Microsoft has released a kit to help IT professionals spot compatibility problems between Windows XP Service Pack 2 and other applications, and how to roll out fixes.
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Conferencing and collaboration equipment provider Polycom on Monday announced a series of offerings designed to bring business-quality conferencing features to personal desktops. The products follow up on a collaborative agreement struck with Microsoft earlier this year to develop rich media services.
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Operators and manufacturers to collaborate on next-gen mobile phone platform.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft will participate in a meeting later this month with vendors and organizations that are backing several different identity management systems, an indication thatÂ cooperation between the software giant and its peersÂ is improving. The meeting, part of an initiative called the Concordia Project, strives to improve interoperability between Microsoft's CardSpace and OpenID, two identity management systems, and protocols for identity management supported by an industry trade group, the Liberty Alliance, said Roger Sullivan, president of its management board. Vendors will hear from companies such as General Motors, Boeing, and AOL about how they're trying to integrate various identity management systems into their operations, Sullivan said. "Many of these protocols today are very geek-centric," said Sullivan, who is also vice president of Oracle's identity management section. "They're not very people-friendy." A major issue is how vendors can use different authentication mechanisms in their operations. For example, a financial planning Web site could allow users to forecast how much their retirement fund may be worth in 30 years. Eventually, the user may want to buy a service from the financial planner and migrate that same data to an environment that uses stronger authentication, Sullivan said. This means there would need to be more interoperability between the protocols used by OpenID, CardSpace, and Liberty-enabled applications. "I would more expect that we will have nuanced changes or extensions to existing protocols to enable the interoperability," Sullivan said. The Concordia Project, set up by the Liberty Alliance, hopes to release its first set of open standards by the end of the year, Sullivan said Microsoft said in February at the RSA Conference it wouldÂ integrate CardSpace and OpenID, an open-source standard for logging into Web sites. The work would help mitigate potential security risks, such as so-called "man-in-the-middle" attacks, where a hacker can intercept identity information as it's in transit to a Web site, officials said. NovellÂ is also working with Microsoft on InfoCard Selector, a so-called "digital wallet" for handling identity information. Microsoft's commitment to the Concordia project shows it has realized the importance of interoperability, said Graham Titterington, principal analyst at Ovum. "Microsoft has already come a long way in terms of 12 months ago," Titterington said. "It's not a surprising development as a year ago I think it would have been." The meeting will take place on June 26 at Catalyst 2007, an enterprise IT conference in San Francisco. Â
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Microsoft Corp.  unveiled plans  on Sunday to work with hardware manufacturers to deliver on the  company&#039;s ambitions to use its software to simplify how workers  communicate with one another.
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Microsoft introduced a desktop computer application that aims to seamlessly integrate e-mail, instant messaging, video conferencing, traditional phone service and Internet-based calling.
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Company is developing software to help big media companies integrate social networking and community into their Web sites.
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Responding to government requests for  interoperability, Microsoft Corp.  said on Thursday it  will offer free software that will allow Word, Excel and  PowerPoint to handle documents in rival technology formats.
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Microsoft plans to release in December new software designed to secure instant messaging and other communications within big companies.
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Cisco Systems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. on Monday will announce a collaborative effort designed to bridge a divide between their emerging network access-control architectures.
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(InfoWorld) - Cisco's highly publicized cooperation with Microsoft on unified communications will focus on sharing presence information as well as on voice mail, Web conferencing, and other areas, a Cisco executive said Tuesday. Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer pledged last month to make their companies' technologies work together even as they compete in areas like voice call control. Details of the effort have been scarce, and some critics have called the Webcast promise a mere show of peace between two companies struggling over the lucrative communications and collaboration business. Unified communications is a buzzword for combining all forms of IP communications, making them accessible on a single client or from within applications. Because voice calls, text messaging, videoconferences, and online collaboration can all be controlled by software now, Microsoft is pitted against Cisco and longtime telecommunications vendors in the battle for this market. Rick McConnell, Cisco's executive sponsor of the partnership in the unified communications area, outlined one key objective of the effort in a meeting with reporters on Tuesday. Currently, Cisco federates all the presence and availability information from its unified communications systems and publishes that data to Microsoft's Office Communications Server (OCS), which can then push it to Microsoft clients. Microsoft doesn't reciprocate. The companies are working on making the same kinds of information go from Microsoft's software into Cisco's, said McConnell, who is vice president and general manager of Cisco's Unified Communications Business Unit. The way it is now, if an enterprise uses Cisco's Unified Communications Manager call control software and an employee picks up the phone, a colleague's Microsoft Office Communicator messaging client will show that employee as being on the phone. But if an employee indicated in Office Communicator that she was away from her desk, that information wouldn't show up on a colleague's Cisco IP phone. Making federated presence work both ways will make that possible, McConnell said. Cries for cooperation are rampant among Cisco's customers, according to McConnell. "I'm on the phone with at least one customer per day ... that's asking us about our Microsoft integration roadmap," McConnell said. Cisco's network domination and Microsoft's software role make that inevitable. "We're going to interoperate, frankly, in almost every account that we participate in," he said. "We have a deep interoperability roadmap, we'll deliver against that roadmap, and then the customer gets to pick," McConnell said. Most customers so far have chosen Microsoft for client software and Cisco for call control processing and multimedia conferencing, and he expects that to continue. Senior Cisco and Microsoft leaders in unified communications meet at least quarterly and typically more often, he said. But McConnell didn't mince words when discussing Microsoft as a competitor. The software giant has taken limited steps to share users' presence and availability information because doing so would let users adopt any kind of unified communications client, and Microsoft wants to own all the clients, he said. And Microsoft's forays into call management are weak compared with Cisco's more seasoned offerings, he said. "I think it's going to be some time before Microsoft really gets call control right," McConnell said.
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Web services are becoming increasingly popular for linking software programs. Now, Microsoft and some other big companies are pitching the technology as a way to manage everything from big corporate servers to mobile phones.
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Better all the time WPC Microsoft has used its annual Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) to stress that it's working to solve stubborn compatibility problems between Windows Vista and partner products.â¦
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The beta of Microsoft's new online service reveals some good collaboration features for individuals and small businesses, but there are problems that still need to be ironed out.
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Microsoft Corp. said on Sunday that it  would share the underlying software code for its Office program  as part of its efforts to make governments more confident in  the security and compatibility of the world's largest software  maker's products.
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Cisco Systems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. Monday will announce a collaborative effort designed to bridge a divide between their emerging network access-control architectures.