Microsoft offers Architects a view
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First postcard from Microsoft's conference Always be careful what you wish for. I liked Stuart Okin when he was chief security officer for Microsoft UK and thought he did a lot for Microsoft's credibility in this area, but I'm afraid I occasionally laughed at Microsoft for putting a developer type in charge of security, instead of a superannuated spook as everyone else does.â¦
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Microsoft has released tools designed to help enterprises deploy Windows Vista more easily.
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LicenseWise and Windows Vista Hardware Assessment help users navigate Microsoft offerings.
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Design specialists dream up the unexpected to help Microsoft get a foothold in the living room.
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Edward Rothstein ponders Microsoftâs new Vista system from inside the belly of one of its beasts.
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Conference will allow developers to examine, discuss the successor to Windows XP.
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Microsoft plans to introduce a tool to let users access its ERP applications through Office or SharePoint, along with other products, at its Convergence user group conference this week.
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Microsoft unveiled a new product designed to more tightly integrate its back-end Dynamics business applications with its desktop Office suite.
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Microsoft's chief software architect is expected to detail the company's long-term plan for trimming systems administration costs.
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Microsoft on Tuesday is looking to extend visual modeling of applications in its Visual Studio 2005 platform, with an early release of technology to enable developers to author industry-specific modeling tools.
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Ten years after it unveiled its first dream house, Microsoft has a new demonstration home showcasing technology that Microsoft is betting will become commonplace within a few years.
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Microsoft has some serious questions to answer....
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(InfoWorld) - MicrosoftÂ is working on a variety of innovative photo projects, ranging from experiments with its 3D maps offering to massive panoramic photos that users can zoom into for details. Developers who work in the company's research arm showed off the technologies on Tuesday during the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit in Redmond, Washington. HD View is one photo project that definitely has the "wow" factor. The technology allows users to combine hundreds of photos to create one massive picture that users can zoom in on to see clear details. In one example, a panoramic photo of the city of Seattle includes 800 images, each 8 megapixals in size, stitched together to create a 3.6 billion-pixel image. On a computer screen, it looks just like a panoramic photo. So, what's the point of combining so many photos? The massive file includes incredible detail. Michael Cohen, a researcher at Microsoft working on the project, zoomed in to the roof of a building where a clay owl peers around a corner. With the picture zoomed out, a viewer doesn't even see a pin prick in the spot where the owl sits. Another large photo of a mountain in Canada looks like a standard nature snapshot. But Cohen zoomed in to discover that climbers are scaling the rock wall. After finding the first climber, he followed the climbing ropes up to find the second one above him on the wall. When the photo is zoomed out, it's hard to imagine there might be climbers on the wall. Microsoft offers the tool to build HD View photos for free on its Web site. Creating an HD View panorama image, however, isn't for just anyone. Such images are quite large and may require special cameras. Another Microsoft project, unveiled last year and built in collaboration with the University of Washington, collects images of a site such as Rome's Trevi fountain from public photo-sharing Web pages such as Flickr. The Photo Tourism technology combines the photos into a 3D image so users can look at the object from any view. The idea was to take advantage of the potentially billions of images that are online, said Noah Snavely, a researcher at the University of Washington who works on the project with Microsoft researchers. Microsoft also demonstrated at the summit some experiments with Virtual Earth. Eyal Ofek, a Microsoft researcher, demonstrated a 3D map of San Francisco that is made up of 10 million images, including 50,000 aerial photographs as well as pictures taken at street level. All the photos are stitched together so a user can navigate from a bird's-eye view seamlessly down to street level. The view is different from the street view capability in Google Maps, which doesn't combine the street-level pictures with aerial shots. About 800 workers are developing projects at Microsoft Research. Some technologies they develop may become commercial Microsoft products, and others could be sold to other companies. The summit, which ended Tuesday, was an opportunity for Microsoft and its partners in academia to show off some of their projects.
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Microsoft showed off some features of the next version of Project, to the delight of the crowd gathered at the Microsoft Office Project Conference in Seattle.The audience applauded a new timeline view that will become available. Alice Steinglass, senior program manager for Microsoft Office Project, showed how users can cut and paste the timeline into other applications, such as a PowerPoint slide. Once pasted, users can alter individual components of the image, deleting sections and changing the font, for example.That&#39;s one feature that furthers Microsoft&#39;s goal of making Project not only easier to use for project managers but usable by more people in an organization. &quot;At the end of the day, the fundamental thesis here is that we are all project managers because we all manage work,&quot; said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft&#39;s CEO, addressing the audience on Tuesday. &quot;Whether my personal project management system happens to look more like a formal project or a task list that I might keep in something like Excel or Outlook, we need to make sure that we give rich tool sets to people at all levels of the food chain to help them do work management.&quot;A major user interface change to come within Project that Steinglass showed off is the icon ribbon at the top of the screen, similar to the one featured on many other Microsoft programs&#160;such as&#160;Word. Users can click on different tabs at the top and the icons available in the ribbon change. With the click of an icon, users can, for example,&#160;filter for incomplete tasks or group by resource name. These functions currently require several clicks in Project 2007.Future versions of Project will give customers an easier way to customize fields. The current method is complicated and will eventually be replaced with a blank column that users can simply start filling in with any information they want. As soon as they do, a new blank column automatically appears. If a user inputs a dollar figure in the column, the rest of the column automatically configures for dollars.Steinglass also showed off enhancements that will come to Web access to Projects. If a user makes changes to several time frames for completing tasks, the application won&#39;t automatically update the overall schedule, so as not to slow down performance. When a user is done making changes, a Calculate Changes button makes the alterations, highlighting every item that has changed. Users can hit Undo repeatedly to get rid of changes.Microsoft doesn&#39;t even have a name for the next version of Project, so there&#39;s no time frame for when these features will become available. Project 2007 began shipping earlier this year, and some Project 2003 users say they&#39;re waiting for the first Service Pack release before they&#39;ll move to the latest version.Microsoft executives expect that Web access will become important in the future. Practically every user of Project will take advantage of Web access, allowing partners and remote workers access to it from online, said Mike Angiulo, general manager of the Microsoft Project business unit. Ballmer wagered that in five years, about 50 percent of Project customers would use a fully hosted version, with the rest using an on-premise server.Microsoft may also do some work enabling more access to Project from Windows Mobile devices. While there is a need for access to Project from mobile phones, users won&#39;t want the full version, Ballmer said. &quot;What you want to do is say what aspects of the Project experience are people going to want to take on the phone,&quot; he said. For example, people may want to check on the status of a project and input information from their phones, he said.Some existing functions already available let people use their phones to change tasks within Outlook and those changes will be replicated on the Project server, said Angiulo.On Monday, Microsoft said that in two or three weeks it will announce the ship date for Service Pack 1 for Project 2007. When pressed for more details on Tuesday, Angiulo said that it&#39;s on the same schedule as the release date for Office 2007. He added that the final code is being tested, an indication that release is imminent.
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Microsoft is launching a new computer form factor that looks like a coffee table and has touchscreen and auto-sync capability.
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COPENHAGEN -- Offering relief from managing complex, distributed systems, Microsoft Corp. Chief Software Architect Bill Gates took the stage of the IT Forum in Copenhagen Tuesday to introduce a handful of tools and a hatful of promises.
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Software maker heads to LA to show off a host of gadgets that use one or another Microsoft technology to access movies, music and video.