Microsoft COO: Big Client OS Not Dead Yet
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The death of the mega OS release has been greatly exaggerated, Microsoft's chief operating office said this week.
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Although Microsoft won't announce the release date of the next version of its Exchange Server until next year, users can expect more management tools for existing versions in the meantime.
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Along with Vista and Office 2007 announcements, Microsoft recently gave analysts an update on Longhorn - its next generation of server software. As a part of this update, Microsoft announced plans to deliver an enhanced capability in its systems management products.
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p2pnet.net News:- By the time Microsoft finally un-corrals Longhorn, a significant portion of its potential customer base will be long gone.
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Itâs funny how circumstances can change your perception of whatâs possible. A few months ago, key Microsoft architects were telling me that it would be impossible to decouple the Avalon presentation subsystem from the Longhorn OS.
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This is release 0.3.0 of ReactOS, an open source effort to develop a quality operating system that is compatible with applications and drivers written for the Microsoft Windows NT family of operating systems (NT4, 2000, XP, 2003).   This release holds a few records - it is the most long-awaited release of ReactOS, it is the release which was preceded by 3 Release Candidates instead of usual 2, and at last ReactOS release never had so much changes since the last one.  This release's main feature is the networking ability - it's the first release where it is possible to download and install FireFox and browse the web, get mIRC (or some other irc client) and get to #reactos to chat a bit with developers. Or install command-line Samba-TNG client via the built-in package manager and use it to share files with Windows, Linux and MacOS X (all of them support SMB protocol)  But there are a bunch of changes beneath the "networking" feature: The kernel, drivers, applications, control panel applets, Win32 subsystem, boot loader, etc, etc was changed, improved, bugfixed and hackremoved. For the detailed overview it's advised to read the Changelog.  The compatibility with applications and drivers is also improved. In order to keep track of progress, the reactos.org website now features a ReactOS Compatibility Database. It allows to quickly look up the driver's version or some software which has been tested on various ReactOS releases and see how good it performs.  Thanks a lot to our core developers who are doing a fantastic job and to those people who submit patches for various small and big things - it really helps a lot, even if it is a formatting change!  Aleksey Bragin, ReactOS Project Coordinator http://www.reactos.org/xhtml/en/
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Details are scarce at this point, but the next client OS will have a "fundamental piece of enabling technology," a Microsoft executive said this week, such as a hypervisor or new type of interface.
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As Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 signals the new operating system is nearing its release, Microsoft is still hard at work on the next version of Windows Server, still code-named "Longhorn." The company over the weekend released an August CTP.
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In June, I wrote a short series on Microsoft&#39;s next major operating system release, codenamed Longhorn. I raved about the much-anticipated WinFS file system that was supposed to replace the existing file system with a more robust SQL-based version.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft this week unveiled a partner program for its Office Live hosted service for small businesses, a product Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner predicted will one day be nearly as important to the company as its Windows client OS. Through the program, Microsoft partners get an Office Live software development kit and various training opportunities so they can build new services that will be available to subscribers on the Office Live Marketplace, said Marja Koopmans, director of partner strategy for Office Live at Microsoft. The company unveiled the program at its Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver. Microsoft currently has about 50 third-party products listed on the marketplace, Koopmans said. Currently, an Office Live subscriber has to have purchased one of two subscription-based Office Live offerings to buy an application on the marketplace. However, beginning in January, subscribers to the free version of Office Live also can purchase third-party offerings from the marketplace, Koopmans said. Partners also gain access through online forums to Microsoft Office Live engineers for assistance with building new offerings, Koopmans said. In addition to earning revenue by selling new applications, partners can offer consulting services to build Office Live-based Web sites for small businesses, she added. Beginning in January 2008, Microsoft plans to launch an affiliate program for Office Live that will give them revenue-sharing opportunities with Microsoft, Koopmans said. If partners that sell Office Live-based applications on the marketplace refer a customer to purchase an Office Live subscription, Microsoft will share a percentage of whatever the company earns from that customer with the partner. The company will disclose the specific percentage as the program is closer to launching, she added. Microsoft unveiled Office Live in November 2005, and the company is grooming the product -- which gives small businesses tools for building a Web site as well as Web-based e-mail, instant messaging, collaboration and customer relationship management -- to be one of its top sellers. In his keynote at the partner conference Tuesday, Turner said that the hosted service will eventually become one of Microsoft's most popular products alongside long-time top revenue-earners like the Windows client OS and the Office desktop productivity suite. "We do believe it will reach our top three or four largest deployed applications we have around the world," he said. That's a tall order, but at least one partner who is offering an application for small legal firms on the Office Live Marketplace said he thinks Turner's prediction will come true. "The numbers add up and the demand is there," said Joe McDermott, managing director for Solution Canvas Ltd. in Glasgow, Scotland. He said it's been traditionally difficult for small businesses to find IT products tailored to them, and Office Live meets many of their needs. More importantly, he added, broadband is now ubiquitous and more people accept and use online services such as banking, every day. Small businesses are more comfortable going straight to the Web for an IT infrastructure rather than buying and installing products on site themselves. To improve Office Live, Microsoft in the next two months will enhance the service with more options for subscribers to buy ad words on search engines other than Microsoft's Windows Live Search. Currently, subscribers can use the service's AdManager user interface to buy ad words through AdCenter, Microsoft's paid search platform. Microsoft will extend that ability to other search engines, though it is not ready to disclose which ones yet, Koopmans said. In the same time frame, the company will add the ability to build e-commerce sites in Office Live's tool for building Web sites, she added.
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Targeted mainly at its VAR (Value Added Reseller) channel, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Version 4.0 was released to manufacturing this week.Version 4.0, code-named Titan, will be available in several versions: an on-premises application, a partner or VAR-hosted version plus a version of Dynamics hosted by Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live, the Microsoft-hosted deployment.All versions will share a single code base and the hosted versions use a multi-tenant architecture.Addressing its new upgrade message to its VAR channel, Microsoft officials said Version 4.0 includes an upgraded version of multi-tenant that will support multiple customers per server.Other upgrades include a choice of 25 languages and support for multiple currencies and embedded BI capabilities, including an ad hoc reporting wizard that will allow nontechnical users to create custom reports.Version 4.0 will also integrate with Microsoft?s unified communications platform, Microsoft Office Communications Server, along with its presence and location features.Although Microsoft will offer to host a version on its Live platform, the channel is the backbone of its strategy, according to most industry analysts.Josh Greenbaum, principal analyst at Enterprise Applications Consulting said that the Microsoft channel is so strong in the SMB market that it is the envy of all the other software vendors.?Everyone is trying to steal Microsoft channel partners. If you are an enterprise ISV there is no better and more mature channel than Microsoft,? Greenbaum said.Microsoft and Novell have the two oldest legacy channels in the industry, and Greenbaum called them, ?the nuts and bolts wizards.?In a prepared statement, Microsoft said it relies on its strong network of partner companies to bring technology to customers in the SMB marketplace, claiming over 400,000 partners.Dynamics CRM 4.0 is expected to be available in the first quarter.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft has released a major update to its server operating system, designed to make the product more stable and secure.
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(InfoWorld) - Itâs not easy being Ben Fathi. As corporate vice president of Microsoftâs Security Technology Unit, Fathi took the place of longtime STU leader Mike Nash in March amid a larger management shake-up just days after Microsoft announced that the shipment date for Vista was slipping yet again. After Nashâs high-profile tenure, Fathiâs charge is more subtle: building what he calls a âtrust ecosystemâ around Vista and its new security features and promoting the companyâs secure development practices. But first he must help get Vista out the door. Fathi sat down to talk with InfoWorld Senior Editor Paul Roberts at the recent Security Standard Conference in Boston about Vistaâs progress, and the world after Vista. InfoWorld: Recently thereâs been some back and forth with Symantec about issues such as Vistaâs Kernel Patch Protection feature for 64-bit systems, as well as some public criticism of Vista code for having security holes. What should enterprise folks make of that? Ben Fathi: First, on the paper Symantec published: We thank them for their input. I think itâs unusual for a partner to go public with a paper like this on a beta product, but they did identify a few issues. To the best of my knowledge, all those were already fixed in more recent beta releases. We love to hear feedback on beta products. Thatâs why weâre in beta. Itâs a test. Weâll fix them as long as they report them to us. As for the kernel patching, we fundamentally believe that the current model of kernel patching is broken and not sustainable. We never recommended it or supported it on any version of our operating systems. As weâve been telling our vendor partners, this is the only chance we have, as 64-bit computing becomes available, to start with a clean architecture and build on top of that. We want to work with you to find ways to extend the kernel functionality by having a clean architecture, APIs, and filters. â¦ instead of patching instructions and data structures in the kernel. In the long term, what we want to do is move a lot of these functionalities to a hypervisor that sits under the kernel to make the kernel even smaller and the trusted computing base even more secure. We still have a window of opportunity here. â¦ and weâre working with two or three vendors in the space to come up with that kind of architecture. One of the other comments thatâs been made is that [Kernel Patch Protection] is anti-trust. That weâll go back in with our own products and get around it. Thatâs absolutely not true. Weâd never do that. IW: You recently patched a beta version of Vista. Is it a bad sign that youâre patching beta Vista? BF: I believe that Vista is significantly more secure than any version of XP or anything else weâve shipped in the past. Just SDL (secure development lifecycle) in general and the process of penetration testing and hardening kernel services. These all created a stronger, defense in depth strategy. What I would say is, Yeah, there will be patches and vulnerabilities as we move forward. What weâre hoping is that by creating these layers of defense, weâre giving customers, especially enterprise customers, a longer time to test and make sure things are not broken. IW: Do you see your job description and responsibilities changing after Vista? BF: There are six different areas that we call âBig Betsâ that have been identified in my division. I will mention two. The first, Application ID, is a way to identify an application that includes an executable, the library it uses, configuration files, registry settings, any patches that are applied to it. So youâll have a cryptographically signed version of the application, and youâll be able to identify that and whitelist or blacklist that. When we talk about a trust ecosystem today, the ability to trust people based on an ID and trust machines based on an ID, we canât do that with applications. If itâs called powerpoint.exe, we go and run it. So having strong IDs based on the application and [making] sure they havenât been tampered with after download is an important investment for us. The second area is isolation. Creating guest operating systems that sit on top of hypervisors allow us to create better isolation mechanisms so that even if malware comes in, it only affects one subset of the machine and not everything else. Weâve done some great work on server hypervisors and server virtualization. We need to extend that to the client. Weâre seeing partners do that already, and so weâre going to invest in that space.
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Microsoft's Windows Server 2008 is slated for widespread availability on March 1, after a gala launch on February 27. But when will it enter widespread usage? A major report released today seems to present an overly rosy picture.
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Microsoft&#39;s decision to axe WinFS from Longhorn provides the company with an opportunity to expand the technology to work with multiple systems.
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Volume-license customers can get their hands on the new Microsoft OS, but everybody else will have to wait till January. In Monkey Bites.
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There is a fascinating article on Groklaw called Searching for Openness in Microsoft's OOXML and Finding Contradictions. One of the most relevant comments in the article is "So, they plan to be the only one in the Linux world that can actually interoperate with Microsoft. How do you think they will achieve that? By sharing? On the contrary, they already market themselves as uniquely interoperable, which means they get to interoperate and you don't, unless you are their paying customer."  There is also the Novell comment, "Only Novell has Microsoftâs endorsement as its partner to drive Linux-Windows interoperability."