Microsoft touts Scrum tool
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft has built a tool to track the daily progress of Scrum-based software development projects. The eScrum 1.0 project management tool was released this week. It provides "a one-stop place for all Scrum artifacts, such as product backlogs, sprint backlogs, task management, retrospectives, and reports," said Microsoft's S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the company's developer division, in his blog. Intended for users of the company's Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server (TFS) application lifecycle management server, eScrum integrates with TFS Team Explorer, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Project. A Web-based UI is featured. Scrum, as described on the Scrum Web page by Control Chaos, is an agile methodology featuring an iterative process for developing a product or managing work. Potentially shippable functionality is produced at every iteration. Control Chaos was set up by Advanced Development Methods, which offers Scrum implementation and consulting. "Many development teams inside Microsoft are now using the agile methodology for software development and had been looking for a way to track their daily progress. Some of the product units in Developer Division are also using this methodology," Somasegar said. The eScrum 1.0 tool is accessible on Microsoft's Web site.
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Microsoft announced the release of its MSN Desktop Toolbar Suite beta yesterday, including a new desktop search capability aimed at making it faster and easier for Windows computer users to find the information on their local systems.
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Editor&#39;s Summary: At a supercomputing conference, Microsoft announced a new tool kit that will let developers create high-performance computing applications.
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Higgins-project developers are creating a tool equivalent to Windows CardSpace but need Microsoft's go-ahead for certain features.
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A tool to support engineers & managers in the use & execution of the PSP(SM) and TSP(SM); automates metrics collection & analysis. Personal Software Process, PSP, Team Software Process, and TSP are registered service marks of Carnegie Mellon University.   The development team for the Software Process Dashboard Initiative is pleased to announce the availability of version 1.9 of the Process Dashboard.  Version 1.9 includes many significant new features, as described at:  http://processdash.sourceforge.net/news.htm
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Attendees at the Microsoft 2008 Office System Developer Conference this week are leveraging development capabilities in Office System, but cite issues such as getting used to the new ribbon-based Fluent UI in the 2007 Office release.A sampling of attendees at the San Jose, Calif. event revealed mostly satisfaction with Office System. Most were Microsoft business partners developing applications for Microsoft's SharePoint platform for collaboration and business processes."I bought into it. I'm drinking the KoolAid," said Jeff Modzel, technical architect for SunGard Higher Education."Our customers are colleges and universities and their constituents, which are students. Kids very much want collaborative environments for their classes. SharePoint's an easy solution to that problem," Modzel said.He described Office System as an "excellent" development platform, although he noted difficulties in writing an Excel 2007 add-in prior to getting the newly released Visual Studio 2008 platform.The new ribbon-based Fluent UI in the Office package takes some getting used to, Modzel said. "The first handful of times I used it, I did not like it and the more I used it the more I liked it," he said.Consultants at developer OTB Solutions also mentioned issues with the ribbon. The people who hate it the most are the people who are very familiar with the old Office platform, said Dick Federle, consultant at OTB.? But he still likes the feature. "The neat thing about the ribbon is since it?s context-sensitive, you're only seeing what's important for what you're looking at, at the time, said Federle.Another consultant at OTB gave the ribbon a thumbs-up. "It's become familiar. You can use it and extend it," said OTB consultant Jen Glass.OTB has been using SharePoint as an application development platform. "We saw with the new SharePoint platform that it was actually ready for enterprise applications," Federle said. For example, OTB has developed a health insurance claims auditing system that processes more than 1.5 million transactions a month, he said.Developers, though, must adapt to using configuration capabilities in SharePoint rather than resort to coding, Federle said. "There are a lot of capabilities and a lot of problems you can solve with SharePoint through configuration without having to write any code," he said.At FirstBank, the company is currently running Office XP and is looking to migrate to Visual Studio Tools for Office and Office 2007, said Greg Mestas, distributed applications manager at the company.While features such as the ribbon UI in Office 2007 may make things easier for developers, Mestas is not so sure what the benefit is for end users."Most of our people use Word and Excel, and Word and Excel are still Word and Excel," Mestas said. "They've had a lot of the same features release over release. So the biggest benefit for us [in migrating] is staying on a supported platform, to put it bluntly," he said.The bank is starting a pilot project on SharePoint for office automation. "We're trying to get rid of all that paper and all that manual process and create some workflows and InfoPath forms as a replacement," Mestas said.An official at SharePoint applications developer Consejo applauded Microsoft's Open XML document initiative as a benefit for Office application development."Their whole Open XML is proving to be very comforting to most developers because in the old days, when it was binary, that not necessarily ideal," said Virgil Pate, development manager at Consejo.Also, the ribbon UI makes it simpler to modify the user interface, he said. But Microsoft could have done a better job in migrating users to the ribbon, Pate stressed.Recalling his company's experience with SharePoint, Pate said it is easy to get started developing extensions, but support has been slow, he said.Pate expressed caution about the Office Live platform, in which Microsoft offers online versions of software. While calling Office Live a great idea, Pate wondered about its security and reliability. "If they ever start to go down or start to have lag time, it's going to hurt them," he said.Another developer, Marcin Geborik, of developer Computer Plus of Krakow, Poland, cited good experiences in developing for SharePoint but found difficulty in working with Microsoft Office Project Server."As a matter of fact, Project Server's API is just not good," Geborik said.Meanwhile, Microsoft with version 2 of Office Live Small Business this week restructured the offering, providing users with a free domain for the first year as well as a free Web site. After the first year, the domain costs $14.95.?Subscribers get 100 free e-mail accounts each with 2-2.5GB of storage, as well as services such as contact management.Also, Microsoft with its Unified Communications platform plans to bulk it up with instant messaging capabilities that can find persons linked in a workflow chain.
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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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After nearly six months of beta testing, Microsoft&#39;s Office Live Communications Server 2005 is ready for prime time. The next iteration of Redmond&#39;s enterprise instant messaging product was released to manufacturers
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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced the public beta availability of Popfly, the company&#39;s mashup creation tool for non-technical users introduced in alpha form in May.During Ballmer&#39;s appearance on Thursday at the&#160;Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, a Microsoft staffer gave a demo of Popfly in which he showed how the tool can be used to create applications for sites like Facebook&#39;s social network and Microsoft&#39;s Windows Live Spaces without the need to write code.Popfly is built on Silverlight, a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering video and interactive applications. Silverlight is Microsoft&#39;s answer to Adobe&#39;s ubiquitous Flash technology.While acknowledging that Adobe has done &quot;a good job in rich media&quot; with Flash, Ballmer nonetheless said there are plenty of opportunities for Microsoft to innovate as Web applications &quot;continue to get richer and richer.&quot;Speaking at the same event on Wednesday,&#160;Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen downplayed Silverlight&#39;s threat to Flash, saying Flash has been around for 10 years, is widely adopted and has a broad ecosystem.Ballmer, who answered questions from conference chair John Battelle and from attendees, said that the clamor over Web-hosted office productivity applications like Google Apps and suites from Zimbra and Zoho as major threats to Microsoft Office is misguided.In the communication and collaboration software space, Microsoft is focused on making its applications accessible in whatever way customers require, and that the issue isn&#39;t a black-and-white opposition between packaged and hosted software.He acknowledged that Microsoft pays attention &quot;to what the other guy is doing&quot; and is receptive to implementing good ideas in its products.As the interest in hosted applications rises, critics have said Microsoft has been slow in responding with a hosted alternative to Microsoft Office, and that it risks missing an opportunity that others are eagerly pursuing.Asked if he was getting impatient with Microsoft&#39;s search and online advertising efforts, where the company lags far behind leader Google, Ballmer said he&#39;s confident his company will continue to improve in the coming years as it focuses on several key areas.For example, Microsoft will continue improving its search engines, because they are key for generating online ad revenues. It will also continue to strengthen its consumer communication services, like webmail and instant messaging.Key as well is having a strong ad platform, which is why&#160;Microsoft spent $6 billion on aQuantive, and a strong ad syndication business, he said. Ad syndication will go through a major transformation in the next five years as the focus shifts from matching ads based on a Web page&#39;s content to based on users&#39; online behavior, he said.Ballmer declined to comment when asked about rumors&#160;Microsoft is buying a stake in Facebook, but he said&#160;the companies&#39; existing online ad partnership&#160;is going very well.He dismissed questions about the consistent speculation that&#160;Microsoft might buy the embattled Yahoo, saying Microsoft is confident in its strategy to at some point generate 25 percent of its revenue from online advertising. &quot;We believe in our independent path. We like what we&#39;re doing,&quot; Ballmer said.Microsoft also released at the event a beta version of the Windows Live Photo Gallery photo management tool that adds publishing support for Yahoo&#39;s Flickr photo-sharing site. As of Thursday, the Microsoft product has a &quot;publish on Flickr&quot; option in addition to its ability to post photos directly to the Windows Live Spaces blogging and social network. The Windows Live Photo Gallery is available on the Windows Live beta page .Microsoft further announced new features for its Live Search for Mobile search engine and launched Live Search 411, a toll-free directory assistance service accessible by calling (800) CALL-411 (800-225-5411).Additionally, Microsoft provided an update on the adoption of&#160;Silverlight, whose 1.0 version was released a month ago. The number of partners in the Microsoft Silverlight Partner Initiative has grown to more than 50 organizations, and more than 40 customers have delivered Silverlight applications.Microsoft also said that Silverlight 1.0 is now available in 10 languages, including simplified and traditional Chinese, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese.
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US software company Microsoft has launched a beta version of its MSN Toolbar Suite, with desktop search functionality that can help users find documents, media files or e-mail messages on their PCs.
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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 on Monday added to an already dizzying array of planned Visual Studio 2005 offerings by unveiling a new version of the toolset for developers who fall between hobbyist and professional levels.
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Microsoft has launched a do-it-yourself kit to help IT professionals assess their software&#39;s compatibility with Windows XP Service Pack 2. Fears among system administrators and IT managers that XP SP2 may
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Microsoft next month plans to distribute an updated beta version of its Visual Studio 2005 development tool that includes the first fruits of the company&#39;s ambitious initiative for team development.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft Corp. released tools to help companies deploy Windows Vista, acknowledging that there are deployment and application-compatibility pains enterprise IT managers face when updating business desktops to the new OS.
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(Article Central) Software giant Microsoft Corp. introduced a beta version of its new MSN Toolbar Suite, with new desktop search functionality that allows users to find almost any type of document, media file
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Microsoft is refreshing the beta release of its Visual Studio 2005 developer tool platform to feature the full range of technologies planned for the companyâs Team System application life cycle management system, Microsoft representatives acknowledged on Friday.