Microsoft - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• Death of Windows XP SP2 support a security risk

  If your business is still running Service Pack 2 of Windows XP, security problems are lurking around the corner, according to new research from IT services vendor Softchoice stating that almost 80 percent of organizations surveyed risk a security breach if the do not upgrade to SP3.
  Why should SP2 users fear the reaper? Because Microsoft is ending support for SP2 on July 13, a date that was established when Windows XP SP3 was released on April 21, 2008. Paid support and security updates for SP2 will no longer be available, although Microsoft has stated that Windows XP SP2 users will still be allowed to access Microsoft online Knowledge Base articles, FAQs and troubleshooting tools.

• Plunket signs deal with Microsoft

  Plunket has entered into a software and support services partnership with Microsoft New Zealand, under which Microsoft will donate a range of software to Plunket.
  According to a statement from Microsoft announcing the deal, "Microsoft NZ has agreed to supply a complete range of software and applications for 1,500 core users, and another 5,000 volunteers, which will help Plunket better monitor the services it provides to communities nationwide, improving customer service and enhancing the organisation’s data management systems."

• Annual compilation of top IT users

  In the next 12 months, the top projects for CIOs and their teams in the country will be around business continuity/disaster recovery, mobility, virtualisation, business intelligence, e-business and cloud computing/software as a service.
  The CIOs will also focus on upgrades and transformation projects. But, as with most ICT investments this year, upgrades often come down to improving financial returns.

• Asia leads global iPhone growth

  In the past 12 months, Asia has seen a massive increase in Apple iPhone users, the strongest take-up of Apple devices in the world.
  This is according to the April 2010 Metrics Report by mobile advertising network AdMob.

• Windows 7 enterprise use rises as IE falls

  It's no secret that the past few years have been the era of the frozen IT budget. As the global economy went south in 2008, most enterprises went into belt-tightening mode.
  Now a thaw is beginning, according to a new report by research firm Forrester, as tech spending is set to increase and major corporate PC refreshes are scheduled for the next 12 to 18 months that will introduce a new operating system, productivity suite, browser and applications. While this is great news for Windows 7, it opens up a new set of challenges for the Internet Explorer browser.

• Microsoft partners shoot for global success

  Microsoft’s efforts to encourage local entries in its global partner awards have paid dividends, with 29 entries, an increase of 22 over last year.
  As reported by Reseller News last month, the vendor more closely aligned entry dates to promote partner entry in both the local and global awards.

• The business brawl between Microsoft and Google

  In the business battle to rule the enterprise office suite of the future, Microsoft and Google both must overcome significant problems.
  On Google's side, despite the Google Apps price advantage and Google's announcement that 2 million companies are now using Google Apps, various research data still shows Google is losing out in the enterprise. Google Apps adoption not only lags way behind Microsoft but also trails behind OpenOffice and even IBM's Lotus Symphony. Estimated revenue for Google Apps in 2009 is $50 million, a tiny portion of the company's $22 billion war chest.

• Desktop virtualisation: What frustrates IT

  Virtual desktops - once the most rigid, least friendly way to put applications in front of end users - have become a hot topic by promising to deliver the security and easy maintenance that was always desktop virtualisation's strength. The trouble: Desktop virtualisation now comes in so many varieties that even vendors confuse terms referring to the flavours.
  Market leader Citrix Systems, now working hard to expand virtual desktops into roles that the company hasn't traditionally filled, rolled out a version of its Xen Desktop solution last fall that allowed customers to choose any of six major delivery methods.

• SharePoint has its limits

  SharePoint came about as an effort to bring Microsoft Offices usability to tools for electronic collaboration. Jeff Teper, the Microsoft vice president in charge of SharePoint development, says the company saw an opportunity with users who wanted to share their files but didn't need a heavyweight content management system such as EMC's Documentum. SharePoint 2010 integrates Microsoft's PerformancePoint business intelligence tools and its advanced search engine, called Fast, as well as strengthens SharePoint as a development platform.

• Asian enterprises quick to adopt hosted technology

  The economy is now looking up and analysts are researching how small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) across multiple segments survived the tough times and are also investigating the role of technology during the difficult times.
  According to Microsoft's global SME IT and Hosted IT Index 2010, businesses in Asia managed to perform better than their Western counterparts and used IT to improve both business productivity and effectiveness.

• Microsoft launches promo for Internet Explorer 8

  Microsoft New Zealand launches today a competition that offers New Zealanders the opportunity to win daily prizes using Internet Explorer 8 Web Slice.
  Microsoft says the competition is highly interactive and is fronted by a character called Explorer Kev. Kev will tip players off on the best times to enter via updates on Twitter and Facebook, and will randomly give away Prezzy cards to friends and followers.

• Stealth socialism

  An interview with Jaron Lanier, the futurist and virtual reality pioneer:
  CIO: Your book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, challenges the value of crowdsourcing. What's wrong with the hive mind on the Internet?

• Championing Office 2010

  Upgrading to Office 2010 from Office 2007 is a cost- effective step for CIOs to make, according to Microsoft senior product manager Geoff Anderson.
  “From the CIOs point of view we designed the [mobile phone] web apps to be very enterprise friendly. For example, we have engineered for very rich fidelity. So when someone opens an XL spreadsheet in the XL web app, it looks very similar to what it will look like on the PC.”

• New categories for Microsoft Partner Awards

  Microsoft has shifted the date of this year’s partner awards from August to September and added more categories in a bid to create wider industry interest.
  New categories this year are the Partners’ Choice CIO of the Year, honouring a CIO who has a vision for their company’s IT infrastructure, the Business Impact Solution of the Year, rewarding a offering that has achieved cost savings for a business, and the MSN NZ Advertising Partner of the Year, for an outstanding online campaign delivered through the MSN portal.

• How to make Microsoft SharePoint ‘behave’

  With Microsoft SharePoint 2010 due in the first half of this year, the time is now for enterprises to assess the suite's new features for both end-users (blogs and wikis) and IT pros (app management, backup and recovery).
  But there's one big complicating factor: Simply managing existing SharePoint 2007 is more than a handful for IT departments.