14 DAY TRIAL // On Monday, Microsoft announced that the company will provide analysis and planning programs as an add-on to its Office solution, a decision aimed to attract corporate customers from specialized business-intelligence providers. The Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, planned for summer 2007, will offer a set of utilities developed to help knowledge workers to make more informed decisions. The entire solution, formerly entitled "Biz Sharp," will contain a server and utilities for analyzing data, creating "scorecards" for measuring corporate health, and planning programs. "End users will access them from Excel, SharePoint portal, or Outlook. Our vision is that business intelligence should apply to nearly everyone," said Lewis Levin, corporate vice president for Office Business Applications.
On Tuesday, Microsoft announced that it plans to release updated and renamed Antigen e-mail security utilities, approximately a year after completing the acquisition of their producer, Sybari. Developed for use by small and large organizations, the Antigen solutions promise to clean e-mail of spam and viruses. They work with Microsoft's Exchange e-mail server application and are part of the company's strategy to become a player in the security software market. "Microsoft is committed to providing a comprehensive and integrated set of products to enable a defense-in-depth strategy. Today's announcement is about us bringing those capabilities to the Exchange environment," said Steve Brown, director of product management in the security, access and solutions division at Microsoft. Starting July 1, Microsoft plans to sell four scanning products: Antigen for Exchange, Antigen for SMTP Gateways, Antigen Spam Manager and the Antigen Messaging Security Suite. Also available will be utilities to manage those scanning solutions: the Antigen Enterprise Manager and Antigen Management Pack for Microsoft Operations Manager.
Same day, the giant made public its investments in a London-based computer networking company and a Dublin developer of mobile phone solutions. Under the agreement, Microsoft is taking a 10 percent equity stake and a seat on the board of directors at Skinkers, a British company that uses peer-to-peer networking to provide information and messages to employees' desktop computers. Vimio, a developer of mobile media distribution solutions, is the other company with which Microsoft plans an alliance. The two are the first European agreements for Microsoft's IP Ventures program, which is designed to place research from its labs within companies that can license and develop the intellectual property.
On Wednesday, comic Demetri Martin has signed with Microsoft and Comedy Central in an agreement that will provide him a presence in primetime, online and more. It looks like Microsoft is planning to make Martin the face of a massive campaign in support of its upcoming Windows Vista operating system, an updated version of Windows scheduled to be released for consumers in January 2006. The campaign will contain 10 episode featuring Martin that will run on Microsoft's portal, MSN, which has been making a big step into original entertainment. Microsoft is a sponsor for Martin's stand-up tour and will buy substantial commercial time for the special as well. Financial terms of the deal could not be determined, but Microsoft refused to comment.
Also on Wednesday, Microsoft released its "Customer Preview Program" for Windows Vista, a testing period in which the giant expects millions users to test the new operating system. "Microsoft today kicked off the Windows Vista Customer Preview Program (CPP), providing the broadest access yet to pre-release test versions of Windows Vista," the company said in a statement. The Redmond giant launched Windows Vista Beta 2 last month to a limited group of testers. Windows Vista Beta 2 Build 5384.4 can be downloaded from here.
"As part of the monthly security bulletin release cycle, Microsoft provides advance notification to our customers on the number of new security updates being released, the products affected, the aggregate maximum severity and information about detection tools relevant to the update. This is intended to help our customers plan for the deployment of these security updates more effectively," is said in a notification published on Thursday on Microsoft's website. "Nine Microsoft Security Bulletins affecting Microsoft Windows. The highest Maximum Severity rating for these is Critical," it is also mentioned. The entire notification can be read here. "The software maker this month plans to update the Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications program so that it only checks in with Microsoft once every two weeks, instead of after each boot-up. By year's end, the tool will stop pinging Microsoft altogether," a company representative said on Friday. Microsoft released WGA in September 2004 and has developed the anti-piracy solution. It now requires software validation before Windows users can download additional Microsoft programs, such as Windows Defender. Validation is not required for security fixes. "We are changing this feature to only check for a new settings file every 14 days. Also, this feature will be disabled when WGA Notifications launches worldwide later this year," the company said in a statement on its Web site. The entire statement can be read here.
